Jewish secularism
[5] At the end of the 18th century, communal autonomy was gradually abolished by the rising centralised states of Europe, and with it the authority of rabbis and wardens to criminally sanction transgressors.
With the weakening of Catholic Church, the Jews' traditional role as humiliated witnesses to its truth was no longer a political maxim, and the absolutist rulers pondered how to turn them into useful subjects.
Yet even their arguments were predicated on the concept of divine revelation,[6] aiming to restore the religion to an ancient, "pure" version, before God's commandments were supposedly corrupted by irrational additions.
[citation needed] Eventually, the constraints of emancipation in Central and Western Europe, willing to tolerate the Jews as a Christian-like denomination and rejecting any vestige of corporate autonomy, ensured that modernization and secularisation were expressed in confessionalising Judaism.
[citation needed] The scholars of the "Science of Judaism," who introduced critical academic methods in the study of Jewish history, rebutted traditional interpretation but were rarely interested in alternatives for the secularised, modern crowd.
They even scorned the efforts of religious reform, whether radical or conservative, and many were convinced that Judaism was destined to dissipate; Moritz Steinschneider once commented that they aimed to "duly bury its corpse."
Secularisation processes were slow: Radical enlighteners, preaching civic integration and modernisation, had to contend with a well-entrenched rabbinic leadership which enjoyed little-questioned prestige.
On that "thick" layer of ethnicity, with virtually no alternative high culture to assimilate into, the slow disintegration of community life and exposure to modern notions allowed an adaptation, rather than marginalisation.
Ginsberg greatly valued tradition, regarding it not as a body of divine commandments standing in their own right, but as a set of customs aimed at consolidating the people, which could be adapted or abandoned based on that same consideration (this instrumental view of Jewish law was adopted by many secularist ideologists, and even taught as historically factual).
In Dubnow's work, serving as the basis for all secularist historians, the Jewish people were a "psychological organism", with every individual but "a cell" therein, which was imbued with the primordial instinct to form collective institutions.
As Eastern European Jews were undergoing secularisation and acculturation, in the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and being recognised as a national minority with autonomous rights in the interwar period, Jewish secularism thrived.
Intellectuals, dedicated to a secular cultural revival, enlisted to reinterpret and reformulate the holidays and other aspects of Jewish tradition: New children's songs, for example, served to remove the old religious narratives and impart new ones, centered on the family or the nation.
Not a few Yiddishists, like Bundist ideologue A. Litvak (Khayim Yankl Helfand, 1874–1932)[9]), urged that declaring Yiddish as one's mother tongue was the only measure for determining Jewish nationality.
[citation needed] Among the millions of Eastern Europeans who immigrated to the United States and other western countries, the new Jewish secularism imported from home continued to prosper.
The highly centralised and ideologically-driven Zionist enterprise in the land, allowed its leaders to rapidly disseminate the intellectual products of their philosophers and thinkers, committed to create a new Jewish culture[when?].
