Israel

Since 1948, the word Israel has been used to identify the Middle Eastern nation-state that bears that name. But for many centuries, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, the word Israel connoted both a political and a spiritual community.

Biblical writers, however, had no difficulty reconciling ethnic identity and religious affiliation: God’s covenant, they believed, was established with the “children of Israel” (that is, the lineal descendants of the patriarch Jacob)—and that contractual bond was thought to be unique and without precedent in history. As a consequence, Jews continued to think of themselves over the centuries as members of a single extended family and. as a faith community held together by a common set of beliefs.

During the modern era, however, Jews found themselves faced with a political dilemma that soon took on religious implications: they could receive citizenship within the now largely secular nation-states of Europe, but only at the expense of their collective historical identity, and by denying all other “political” loyalties. For many Jews, eager to assimilate into modern society and determined to secure civil rights that had been denied them for centuries, the demand that Judaism redefine itself as a religious creed and nothing more seemed a small price to pay for political emancipation.

Orthodox Jews, generally suspicious of secular values and distrustful of the process of acculturation, viewed this new understanding of Jewish identity with alarm. In addition, by the end of the nineteenth century, a very different group of secular dissident Jewish intellectuals—early advocates of Zionism, such as Theodor Herzl—also rebelled, though for completely different reasons, against the notion that Jews had no claim to nationhood and were just another religious denomination among thousands in the world.

Today, many of those who practice Judaism are comfortable with their double identity as members of both a religious and an ethnic community, while at the same time recognizing the inevitable tension between these two perspectives. For those Jews who have chosen to immigrate to Israel and become citizens of a Jewish state, this tension almost disappears, though secular/nationalist and religious values continue to clash with one another in contemporary Israeli society. For those Jews who remain in the Diaspora—a majority of the world’s Jewish population—the need to establish a balance between national and religious self-identification remains a challenge.