from the enlightenment to the state of israel 437
European Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their
collaborators, wiping out the vast majority of the Jewish populations of
Poland (where three million died), Russia (one million), Romania (just
under half a million), Hungary (200,000) and Greece (70,000), as well
as a large proportion of the Jews of France, Italy, Germany and the
Netherlands.
For the first years after 1945 the lives of those European Jews who
survived the Holocaust were chaotic, with many housed in refugee
camps and unable to return to their homes because of continuing hostil-
ity to Jews even after the defeat of Nazi Germany. There were still nearly
a quarter of a million European Jews categorized as displaced persons in
- Many sought to settle in Palestine but were prevented by the Brit-
ish Mandate authorities, concerned to protect the rights of the indigenous
Arab population until, following endorsement by the United Nations
General Assembly on 29 November 1947 of the recommendation of a
committee that the Mandate should be terminated and Palestine divided
into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, the State of Israel declared its
independence on 14 May 1948, with free immigration for all Jews.
The foundation of the State of Israel was not accomplished without
strong opposition from neighbouring Arab states, and conflict in the
Middle East has continued to focus on this issue down to the present
day. In the immediate aftermath of 1948 Jewish refugees from Iran,
Yemen, Egypt and Morocco flooded into Israel to join both refugees
from the war in Europe and idealistic Jews, often young, from the less
troubled Jewish communities of the United States, South Africa and the
United Kingdom. The Jewish population of Israel has had a continu-
ously shifting profile ever since its foundation, with a major change in
the 1970s as a result of immigration from the Soviet Union by Jews
(often little acquainted with any Jewish heritage) both escaping discrim-
ination and seeking a better life away from Communism, and in more
recent years considerable emigration by native Israelis keen to find a
more peaceful and secure life in the United States and elsewhere.^1
Many Jewish Israelis, including a vocal elite, are defiantly secular,
and it may be questioned to what extent the attitude of such secular
Israelis to their Jewish heritage, which is sometimes for them essentially
a matter only of status within Israeli society in distinguishing them from
Arab Israelis (who themselves nowadays usually prefer to be defined as
Palestinian Israelis), belongs to a history of Judaism, despite (as we shall
see) recent attempts to define the nature of ‘Secular Judaism’. The secular-
ization of Jews within diaspora societies creates different demographic