Israeli culture: a revived language and a week set by the Sabbath

How Hebrew became a mother tongue again

Britannica describes Hebrew as a language not spoken since biblical times before its revival, which began in the nineteenth century alongside Zionism. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who founded the Hebrew Language Committee, coined thousands of words from biblical, Talmudic and other sources for things the old language had no name for. The slogan of the campaign was "Yehudi, daber Ivrit", "Jew, speak Hebrew", and schools called ulpanim were opened across the country to teach it to immigrants.

The revival came at the expense of other Jewish languages. Before 1948 many Zionists opposed Yiddish, the historical language of Ashkenazi Jews, and the early state largely banned Yiddish theatre and publications. In the 1950s immigrants were encouraged to take Hebrew surnames, and David Ben-Gurion urged anyone representing the state formally to do so. The government created the Academy of the Hebrew Language in 1953 as the authority on the language and its usage.

Arabic was an official language until 2018, when the Nation State Law gave it a "special status in the state". It is the main language of teaching in Arab schools, where Hebrew is a subject, and is studied in most Jewish schools; signs and transport announcements often carry it. Over 83 languages are spoken in all. Mass immigration made Russian and Amharic common, and French is spoken by around 700,000 people, most of them from France and North Africa. English lost its official status at independence but is taught from primary school.

Who the population is made of

The Central Bureau of Statistics publishes its count on the eve of Independence Day.

"Others" are mainly immigrants who came under the Law of Return or family reunification without being registered as Jews; "Arabs" covers Muslims, Arab Christians and Druze. About 81% of Israel's Jews were born in the country, and the bureau estimates that about 45% of the world's Jews lived in Israel at the end of 2024.

Jewish Israelis come from two broad traditions. Ashkenazi Jews trace their families to central and eastern Europe and Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews to the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. Each has its own chief rabbi, and Britannica records frequent tension between them, rooted in the social and political dominance of the Ashkenazim. Intermarriage between the two runs at over 35%, and more than a quarter of schoolchildren descend from both.

Most of Israel's Arab citizens are Palestinians, and what to call them is itself disputed. Britannica notes that many accept the legal term Israeli Arabs, while others prefer "Palestinians inside" or "Palestinian citizens of Israel". In a 2017 poll, 40% identified as "Arab in Israel" or "Arab citizen of Israel" and 15% as "Palestinian". Smaller communities keep their own institutions: the Druze of Galilee and Mount Carmel, recognised as a separate community since 1957 and conscripted into the army; the Circassians, Sunni Muslims who came from the Caucasus in the 1870s; the Samaritans of Holon and Mount Gerizim, who speak Arabic and pray in an archaic Hebrew; and the Karaites of Ramla.

How religion sets the week and the year

Israel's public life follows the Hebrew calendar, which is aligned with the seasons of the Levant. The official day of rest is Saturday, and every annual public holiday except Independence Day is a Jewish one; much of the regular bus and train service stops for the Sabbath, while shared taxis called sheruts keep running. Friday night dinner is a significant meal in a large share of households.

In 2022 the population was estimated at 73.5% Jewish, 18.1% Muslim, 1.9% Christian and 1.6% Druze. Among Jews, a Pew survey of 2016 found 49% describing themselves as secular, 29% as traditional, 13% as religious and 9% as ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi. Britannica describes religious Jews as a large and articulate group often at odds with a secular sector that wants to keep religious authorities from dominating national life. Marriage and divorce stay with the religious courts of each community.

Jerusalem's Old City, in East Jerusalem, holds sites sacred to three faiths: the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Al-Aqsa compound, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Within the 1949 lines lie Nazareth, the site of the Annunciation, and Tiberias and Safed, two of the four holy cities of Judaism. The Bahá'í Faith has its world centre on Mount Carmel in Haifa, the only religion besides Judaism with its world centre in Israel; the holy places in Haifa and Western Galilee were inscribed by UNESCO in 2008.

What the melting pot was meant to make

In the first years of the state David Ben-Gurion pursued a "melting pot": immigrants from Europe, North Africa and Asia were to be blended with the established population into one Hebrew culture. The army and a unified school system were the two main tools. Critics, chiefly Mizrahi Jews and Holocaust survivors, have said they were made to give up or hide the traditions they brought for the new secular Sabra culture. Society has since become more plural, and many Israelis keep the food, languages and outlooks of their families' countries of origin.

Schooling still sorts by community. The State Education Law of 1953 set up five kinds of school: state secular, state religious, ultra-Orthodox, communal settlement and Arab. Most Arab children attend Arabic-language schools, where the matriculation exam in Bible studies is replaced by one on Muslim, Christian or Druze heritage. In 2020, 68.7% of 12th graders earned the matriculation certificate, the bagrut. Since 2000 the literature curriculum of state secular schools has included Arab Israeli writers.

How Arab citizens keep their own culture

Britannica records little cultural exchange between the Jewish and Arab sections of the population. About 90% of Palestinian Israelis live in 139 towns and villages concentrated in Galilee, the Triangle and the Negev, and the rest in mixed cities such as Haifa, Akko, Lod, Ramla and Jaffa. Arabs of every faith speak Levantine Arabic at home and learn Modern Standard Arabic at school, and many younger people are bilingual in Hebrew.

Most Arab citizens are Sunni Muslims; Arab Christians form a significant minority, particularly in Galilee, and the Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches are the largest denominations. The Bedouin, roughly a tenth of the Arab population, are all Muslim. Each community keeps its own religious courts for marriage, divorce and inheritance. Arab neighbourhoods receive television from neighbouring Arab countries, which makes Arabic popular music widely heard, and the public broadcaster runs an Arabic-language channel, Kan 33. Palestinian Israeli filmmakers have made films about the conflict and their own status, among them Mohammad Bakri's Jenin, Jenin of 2002. Britannica observes that the Jewish character of the state's symbols and the gaps between the communities leave many Arab citizens feeling excluded.

What the kibbutz left behind

The kibbutz, a collective community founded on socialism and Zionism, began with Degania in 1910. It practised joint production and consumption, collective child-rearing and job rotation, and its members played a large part in early settlement and defence. In 2010 there were 270 kibbutzim with 126,000 people, producing 9% of industrial output and 40% of agricultural output; Britannica puts kibbutz members at about 2% of the population and the cooperative moshavim at 3%.

Many have changed beyond their founders' model. Members built careers outside, inequality grew, a generation raised on kibbutzim did not share the founders' drive, and the economic crisis of the 1980s hit them hard, so that many people left. Some kibbutzim have since been privatised, paying members according to their work and closing the communal dining hall, and some have built substantial high-tech and military industries.

What Israelis cook and eat

Israeli food is a fusion. Since the late 1970s it has combined the cooking that immigrants brought, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi and Yemenite, with dishes of the Levant and the wider Mediterranean: falafel, hummus, shakshouka, couscous and za'atar, with olives, chickpeas, dairy, fish and fresh vegetables. Ptitim, known as Israeli couscous, was invented in the 1950s when rice ran short during austerity. Lunch is usually the main meal.

Kashrut shapes the menu without binding everyone. Roughly half of Jewish households say they keep kosher at home, and kosher restaurants were about a quarter of the total in 2015. Pork, forbidden in both Judaism and Islam, is still produced, mostly in Christian areas of the north, where it is often called "white meat".

Where the arts and sport come from

Hebrew literature is the core of the arts. Shmuel Yosef Agnon shared the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966 with Nelly Sachs; the poets Yehuda Amichai, Nathan Alterman, Leah Goldberg and Rachel Bluwstein and the novelists Amos Oz, David Grossman and Etgar Keret are known internationally. In 2016, 89% of the 7,300 books deposited with the National Library were in Hebrew.

Habima, the national theatre, began in Moscow; Britannica dates its founding to 1917 and its move to Palestine to 1931, and the Wikipedia account dates the founding to 1918. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra gives more than 200 concerts a year. Israel has entered the Eurovision Song Contest nearly every year since 1973 and won it four times. The Bauhaus buildings of the White City of Tel Aviv, put up by architects who fled Nazi Germany, were inscribed by UNESCO in 2003, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem holds the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1947.

Popular music mixes Mizrahi and Sephardi styles, Hasidic melodies, Greek music, jazz and rock, and Ofra Haza was among the singers known abroad; the Red Sea Jazz Festival has been held in Eilat every summer since 1987. The press is centred in Tel Aviv, and Freedom House described Israeli media in 2024 as "vibrant and free to criticise government policy". During the war in Gaza Israel closed the local offices of Al Jazeera in May 2024, and Reporters Without Borders reported that Israeli forces had killed more than 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

Football and basketball draw the crowds. Arab states' refusal to compete pushed Israel out of Asian sport after it was excluded from the 1978 Asian Games, and since 1994 its teams have played in Europe. Israel first competed at the Olympics in 1952, and 11 members of its team were killed by Palestinian gunmen at Munich in 1972. Its first Olympic medal came in 1992, and by the Paris Games of 2024, where it won seven, it had won 20; Maccabi Tel Aviv has been European basketball champion six times, and Israel hosted the Paralympic Games of 1968. The Maccabiah Games for Jewish athletes, founded in 1932, are held in Israel every four years. Hiking, the tiyul, is a school ritual, and many young Israelis take several months to a year to travel the world.