The present study examined the content and structure of self-reported motivation for Jewish religious behavior. Initial items were generated from comprehensive and detailed responses to a semi-structured interview and an open-ended questionnaire. Principal component factor analysis with orthogonal rotation was carried out on the responses of a sample of 323 research participants to two parallel sets of the 111 items produced by the above process. The factor structures for each of these sets of items were highly similar to each other and consisted of the following five reliable factors: belief in a divine order, ethnic identity, social activity, family activity, and upbringing. These factors appear to reflect the way religious behavior can contribute to the satisfaction of a number of general human motives. Persons with different religious identities were found to attribute their performance of religious ritual to different motives, providing a partial explanation for the apparent anomaly of the performance of religious ritual by persons who identify themselves as secular.The present study examined the multidimensional nature of motivation for Jewish religious behavior. Interest in the study of the psychology of religion has recently reemerged after an extensive period of neglect (Donelson 1999). Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle (1997) contend that religious motivation is a central area of this field of study. Much theoretical and empirical research on motivation for religious behavior has been stimulated by Allport's (1959) theoretical contention that this motivation can be mainly accounted for by an intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy. The study presented in this article adopted a relatively more empirical approach to examine the dimensionality of motivation for religious behavior. Furthermore, it attempted to develop a multidimensional measure of motivation for religious behavior that could be used to carry out additional investigations in this area.The investigation of motivation for religious behavior presented in this article aimed at arriving at and testing a broad and empirically based conceptualization and measure of religious motivation. It focused on persons who identify themselves as Jews. In Israel, religious identity is usually conceptualized and measured in terms of the following categories: ultra-orthodox, orthodox, traditional, and secular. The ultra-orthodox and orthodox categories correspond to the same categories in use outside Israel. However, the traditional and secular categories do not correspond to the conservative and reform Jewish categories found outside Israel (Deshen 1995 (Liebman and Don-Yehiya 1983;Peres 1995). However, it has been consistently found that even those persons identifying themselves as secular report that they perform a substantial number of rituals (Kedem 1991;Levy, Levinson, and Katz 1993). A measure of motivation for Jewish religious behavior could clarify the apparent anomaly of the performance of religious rituals by persons who identify themselves as secular.The present inves...