ABSTRACT
Culture is as slippery and broad a notion as Jewishness; their meanings are much contested and subject to a wide variety of frequently very imprecise circumscriptions. The apparent difficulty of scholars in cultural or Jewish studies to concur around definitions becomes even more tangible when the two terms are linked in the nexus Jewish culture, which, in contrast to Judaism, is the topic of this essay. Whereas “Judaism has been located in a set of texts” (Biale 1994: 41) and possesses a strong religious dimension, Jewish culture encompasses both the realm of texts and practices. Judaism is a subsystem of the much larger and more secular concept of Jewish culture.
