Jewry between Tradition and Secularism: Europe and Israel Compared

Are Jews today still the carriers of a single and identical collective identity and do they still constitute a single people? This two-fold question arises when one compares a Hassidi Habad from Brooklyn, a Jewish professor at a secular university in Brussels, a traditional Yemeni Jew still living in Sana'a, a Galilee kibbutznik, or a Russian Jew in Novossibirsk. Is there still today a significant relationship between these individuals who all subscribe to Judaism? The analysis shows that the Jewish identity is multiple and can be explained by considering all variants as surface structures of the three universal deep structures central to the notion of collective identity, namely, collective commitment, perceptions of the collective’s singularity, and positioning vis-a-vis others.