Europe and Israel are currently caught up in a global struggle over the legacy of the Enlightenment in the field of tension between religion and politics, which is reflected in regional conflicts. The effects of this struggle over values, world views and narratives on cultural and social development, the questions of origin and the sustainability of societies are significant.

In terms of cultural policy, fundamental issues are at stake wherever questions about the cohesion of society, the demarcation between the “own and the foreign” – i.e. the question of identity of a people, a nation, a religious community – are taken more seriously than the hard-won unbreakability of values such as freedom of opinion, freedom of religion, freedom of research. In some European countries, we are seeing a transition to an illiberal society. Political actors are expressing their contempt for the procedural processes of a deliberative constitutional state. In the political reality of Israel as a Jewish nation state, these tensions come to the fore with enormous force. 

In this context, it seems important to us to consider that one of the late insights of the Enlightenment was that the secularization of value spheres, attitudes and horizons of expectation not only led to the overcoming of religion, but also to the secularization of religious images and content. These serve as narratives, e.g. of national greatness and imperial mission, for the re-mythification of political landscapes. Since the beginning of the 20th century, this development has evolved into a crisis of modernity, in which phases of progression and regression alternate – from the perspective of Enlightenment thinking. There is also a solidification of those forms in which the human mind has always been able to make use of science, philosophy, religion and the arts with the intention of creating identity and integration.

We can see that the problems of modern societies have been intensifying in many places in recent years, especially in the Middle East. 75 years after its foundation, the state of Israel is facing unprecedented challenges and threats that have taken on global dimensions. The intertwining of regional conflicts in global dimensions is particularly evident here. The terrorist will to destroy Israel and Israel’s war against the terrorist regimes of Hamas and Hezbollah radiate across the region into a global media space.

Much is at stake for Israel, ultimately its very existence. The lines of conflict run through an inner-Israeli discourse in which the relationship between state and religion, modernity and tradition and the future of the only democracy in the Middle East are at stake. For Israel, there is also the question of the relationship to the diaspora and, for Jews, the confrontation with the many facets of globally effective anti-Semitism. As a social phenomenon, but above all as a social pathology, this is of depressing permanence.

We want to use the conference to discuss the historical and intellectual background to the developments that articulate a questioning of the modern situation of a liberal, pluralistic and open society that is unbound by tradition. And against this background, we want to take a look at the particular conflict situation in which the state of Israel finds itself in view of the postponed and almost forgotten efforts to achieve a peace process with the Palestinian people and the neighboring Arab states.

The still virulent historical and cultural-philosophical conceptual constellations that underlie both the contrast between traditional and non-traditional societies as well as the concept of multiple modernities will serve as the background for our reflections. Specifically, we mean, for example, the conceptual fields of the individual/ individuality, individuality/ uniqueness/ identity, culture/ culturality/ cultivation, community/ society, freedom/ autonomy, tolerance/ recognition, conversation/ solidarity, reason/ history.