Figures
Secular Judaism has roots even before the Haskalah. From the time of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) and his “agnostic morality”, came the belief of the human sense of morality through education and family life, not religious morality.
Secular Jewish art and culture flourished between 1870 and the Second World War with 18,000 titles in Yiddish and thousands more in Hebrew and European languages, along with hundreds of plays and theater productions, movies, and other art forms. Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust rank among the creators of these works for their contribution to western culture.
Many prominent Jews have been secular, such as Sigmund Freud, Marc Chagall, Henri Bergson, Heinrich Heine, Albert Einstein, Theodor Herzl, M.Y. Berdichevsky and Hayim Nahman Bialik. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ahad Ha'am contributed to the secular movement with his ideas on Jewish national identity, religion and religious practice. He saw Jewish religious cultural tradition as integral for the education of secular Jews.
Read more about this topic: Jewish Secularism
Famous quotes containing the word figures:
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Families suffered badly under industrialization, but they survived, and the lives of men, women, and children improved. Children, once marginal and exploited figures, have moved to a position of greater protection and respect,... The historic decline in the overall death rates for children is an astonishing social fact, notwithstanding the disgraceful infant mortality figures for the poor and minorities. Like the decline in death from childbirth for women, this is a stunning achievement.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)