Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is not a faith-based religion, but orthoprax, about deed and practice.
Jewish culture covers many aspects, including religion and worldviews, literature, media, and cinema, art and architecture, cuisine and traditional dress, attitudes to gender, marriage, and family, social customs and lifestyles, music and dance.
Throughout history, from the ancient Hellenic diaspora and Judaea to modern-day Israel and the United States, Jewish communities have seen the development of variegated cultural phenomena. Some come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with host populations, and others still from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community. This led to considerably different variations of Jewish culture unique to their abodes. Before the 18th century, religion dominated virtually all aspects of Jewish life and infused culture. Since the advent of secularization, wholly secular Jewish culture emerged likewise.
There has not been a political unity of Jewish society since the united monarchy. Since then Israelite populations were always geographically dispersed so that by the 19th century the Ashkenazi Jews were mainly located in Eastern and Central Europe; the Sephardi Jews were largely spread among various communities that lived in the Mediterranean region; Mizrahi Jews were primarily spread throughout Western Asia; and other populations of Jews lived in Central Asia, Ethiopia, the Caucasus, and India.
Although there was a high degree of communication and traffic between these Jewish communities many Sephardic exiles blended into the Ashkenazi communities which existed in Central Europe following the Spanish Inquisition; many Ashkenazim migrated to the Ottoman Empire, giving rise to the characteristic Syrian-Jewish family name "Ashkenazi"; Iraqi-Jewish traders formed a distinct Jewish community in India; to some degree, many of these Jewish populations were cut off from the cultures which surrounded them by ghettoization, Muslim laws of dhimma, and the traditional discouragement of contact between Jews and members of polytheistic populations by their religious leaders.
Constantin Măciucă writes of the existence of "a differentiated but not isolated Jewish spirit" permeating the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews. This was only intensified as the rise of Romanticism amplified the sense of national identity across Europe generally. Thus, for example, members of the General Jewish Labour Bund in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were generally non-religious, and one of the historical leaders of the Bund was the child of converts to Christianity, though not a practicing or believing Christian himself.
Secularism originated in Europe as series of movements that militated for a new, heretofore unheard-of concept called "secular Judaism". For these reasons, much of what is thought of by English-speakers and, to a lesser extent, by non-English-speaking Europeans as "secular Jewish culture" is, in essence, the Jewish cultural movement that evolved in Central and Eastern Europe, and subsequently brought to North America by immigrants.
The dichotomy between religion and culture doesn't exist. Every religious attribute is filled with culture; every cultural act is filled with religiosity. Synagogues themselves are great centers of Jewish culture. After all, what is life really about? Food, relationships, enrichment so is Jewish life. So many of our traditions inherently contain aspects of culture. Look at the Passover Seder it's essentially great theater. Jewish education and religiosity bereft of culture are not as interesting.
Today very many secular Jews take part in Jewish cultural activities, such as celebrating Jewish holidays as historical and nature festivals, imbued with new content and form, or marking life-cycle events such as birth, bar/bat mitzvah, marriage, and mourning in a secular fashion. They come together to study topics about Jewish culture and its relation to other cultures, in havurot, cultural associations, and secular synagogues, and they participate in public and political action coordinated by secular Jewish movements, such as the former movement to free Soviet Jews, and movements to combat pogroms, discrimination, and religious coercion. Jewish secular humanistic education inculcates universal moral values through classic Jewish and world literature and through organizations for social change that aspire to ideals of justice and charity.
