Judaism

Judaism is a monotheistic religion that emerged among the Israelites in the Eastern Mediterranean (Southern Levant) within the sphere of influence of Mesopotamian River valley and Egyptian civilizations. The Israelites were but one nomadic tribe from the area, so named because they considered themselves to be the descendants of Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. Jacob was the son of Isaac. Isaac was the son of Abraham, who journeyed from the Fertile Crescent to a land his God promised to grant to he and his descendants in perpituity. Abraham is regarded as a founder and patriarch not only by the Jews, but also by Muslims and Christiansl. 

Judaism stems from a collection of stories that explain the origins of the “children of Israel” and the laws that their God commanded them to obey. The stories explain how the Israelites came to settle in Canaan, construct a series of Temple for their one God, and eventually establish a monarchy in the ancient Land of Israel. Over the course of many centuries, Israelite literature, history, and laws were compiled and edited into a series of texts now referred to in secular contexts as the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh), written between the eleventh century BCE and the sixth century BCE (although the stories it contains may be much older). The Hebrew Bible contains three major sections: the Five Books of Moses (Pentateuch) which is the Torah, or Teaching, the Neviʾim, or Prophets, and the Ketuvim, or Writings.

Each of the three main groupings of texts is further subdivided. The Torah contains narratives combined with rules and instructions in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The books of the Neviʾim are categorized among either the Former Prophets—which contain anecdotes about major Hebrew persons and include Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—or the Latter Prophets—which exhort Israel to return to God and are named (because they are either attributed to or contain stories about them) for Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and (together in one book known as “The Book of the Twelve”) the 12 Minor Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi). The last of the three divisions, the Ketuvim, contains poetry (devotional and erotic), theology, and drama in Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs (attributed to King Solomon), Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

An oral tradition emerged alongside the written Bible, sometimes refered to as the Oral Torah. A collection of laws, legal opinions, decisions, and comments upon them is known as the Mishnah. it is less a legal code than it is a report on prevailing law and custom and a digest of legal opinions which invite further study and discussion. Study and discussion of the Mishnah in later centuries was conducted in academies and applied in courts in Palestine and Babylonia. The summary and digest of this scholarly activity is called the Gemara. The Talmud is a compilation of both the Mishnah and Gemara.

While the Hebrew Bible is Judaism’s most sacred text, many of the laws it delineates concern the practice of Temple sacrifice and priestly behavior. When the Roman Emperor Titus sacked Jerusalem in response to a revolt of the Israelites in 70 CE, his armies demolished the Temple of Jerusalem and brought the spoils back to Rome (an event recorded in a relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome). The loss of the Temple resulted in the end of ritual sacrifice and the priesthood. Judaism became a religion based on interpretive discussions and practices that were eventually compiled into the Talmud. Judaism is referred to by some as “rabbinic Judaism,” since centuries of rabbinic interpretation, rather than the Bible, primarily informs Jewish practice.

Jewish law (Halakhah) has been interpreted and re-interpreted over millennia, thus changing over time. Religious Judaism operates cyclically, and the linear way that modern historians view history does not correspond to this Judaic worldview. Historian Yosef Yerushalmi explains that the Rabbis “seem to play with time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will.”  Major holidays, such as the weekly Sabbath or the annual Jewish New Year, provide a rhythm that provides a distinction between the sacred and the mundane.Most Jews who observe the Sabbath regard it as having been instituted as a perpetual covenant (Exodus 31:13-17), as a sign commemorating two events: (1) the day during which God rested after having completed Creation in six days (Exodus 20:8-11), and (2) the Israelites’ deliuverance from Egypt (Deuteronomy 12:5-15). Other festivals revisit other historical events, connecting modern Jews to their ancestry. 

Seven annual Jewish festivals are commanded in Leviticus 23. Four festivals are celebrated in Spring. Passover commemorates the night that the Spirit of the Lord “passed over” the Israelite houses that were covered with blood. It occurs on the 15th day of the Jewish month Nisan. The Feast of Unleavened Bread commemorates the Israelite departure from Egypt before their bread had time to rise. This seven-day festival begins the day after Passover. The Feast of First fruits is an expression of gratitude for the Promised Land and the first fruit of the barley harvest. It is celebrated on the second day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The Feast of Weeks is a celebration of the wheat harvest. It is held fifty days after Passover, so it is also referred to as Pentecost.

Three festivals are celebrated in Fall. The Feast of Trumpets (also known as Rosh Hashana) marks the end of the agricultural year and the commencement of the “sacred season.” It is commemorated with trumpet blasts. The Day of Atonement (also known as Yom Kippur) is the one day of the year that the high priest enters the Holy of Holies to wipe away the preceding year’s accumulation of Israelite sins. The Feast of Tabernacles, or Booths (also known as Sukkot) commemorates the Israelites forty-year sojourn in the wilderness of Israelites.

The Feast of Dedication and Purim, relative latecomers, are not mentioned in Leviticus 23. Dedication is the act of consecrating an altar, temple, church, or other sacred building. The Feast of Dedication, today known as Hanukkah, was once also known as the Feast of the Maccabees. It is observed for eight days, from the 25th of of the Jewish month Kislev (usually occurring in modern December, but occasionally late November). It was instituted in the year 165 B.C. by Judas Maccabeus, his brothers, and the elders of the congregation of Israel in commemoration of the reconsecration of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and especially the reestablishment of the altar of burnt offerings after they had been desecrated during the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes (168 BC). Customary to this festival is the illumination of houses and synagogues and the recitation of Psalm 30:1-12. It is mentioned, parenthetically, in the Gospel of John, 10:19-22. Purim is an early spring rabbinical festival that occurs on the 14th day of Adar (15th day of Adar in walled cities). It commemorates the deliverance of beleaguered Jewry in the Persian Empire under Artaxerxes. Its institution is described in the 9th chapter of the Book of Esther. Pur, in the Persian language, signifies “lot.” The feast of Purim, or lots, is a reference to the time for the genocide of the Jews being determined by Haman through the casting of lots.

A collection of essays about Jewish cultures around the world created by David Biale (Cultures of the Jews: A New History) opens with the phrase, “culture is the practice of everyday life.” Judaism is a way of life that honors the cycle of days, weeks, months, years, and lives.  Shabbat, the Sabbath, serves as the ultimate reminder of the Jewish cycle of time. Based on the idea that on the seventh day of Creation God rested, Shabbat is a marker of sacred time. Religious Jews refrain from all types of work on the Sabbath, and spend the day with their families and communities, praying, listening as portions of the Torah are chanted (readings that are determined by a fixed schedule), and eating sumptuous meals. A noted twentieth-century rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, described the Sabbath as “a cathedral in time.”

Despite the authority of the rabbinic voice in the Talmud, Judaism is not hierarchal. There is not, nor has there ever been, a single authority. Jewish religion is instead embodied by a collection of learned voices, voices which frequently disagree. There is a tendency to conceive of Judaism as an ancient religion that arose in the Levant after God gave the Israelites the Torah, but Rabbinical scholars continued to debate, discuss, and re-conceive ancient laws. Ancient tribal divisions, as well as later sectarian movements (including early Christianity) set a precedent for Jewish cultural diversity. Even the Hebrew Bible was not written exclusively in Hebrew. It includes sections written in Greek and Aramaic. Unity is preserved under the umbrella of the library of sacred texts, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, through the Talmud, and later by various ritual prayer books and mystical tracts. Judaism the religion is distinct from the Jewish people. While not all Jews practice Judaism, all those who do practice Judaism consider themselves Jews. There are Jews without Judaism, but there can be no Judaism without Jews.

While a library and a calendar unite Jews across the world, there are deep cultural and political divisions. Jewish foods, music, literature, language, and interpretive practices vary immensely depending on a community’s ancestry. American Judaism, for example, is divided into movements, or denominations analogous to the denominations of American Christianity. These denominations have committees of rabbis who vote to determine the philosophy and types of observance their communities will profess and uphold. These internal disputes are not only a standard feature of the Jewish denominations, but they are also part of the longstanding tradition of Jewish debate.

For every period of Jewish history, interactions with non-Jews have been essential to forming Jewish culture and identity. The early Israelites made animal sacrifices at the Holy Temple, and were distinct from other Levantine peoples, each of whom worshiped their local gods. The Hebrew Bible describes a Temple in Jerusalem erected by King Solomon probably sometime during the tenth century BCE. The Bible also describes this Temple’s destruction at the hand of the Babylonians 500 years later. Since the fall of the first Temple, Jews scattered throughout the Levant and Mesopotamia, creating competing cultures. Rabbinical scholars realized then that it would be necessary to write down oral interpretations, so they created a blueprint for the future generations who would continue to debate and reinterpret Jewish laws. The best-known rabbinical scholar, Hillel, developed methods for interpreting the Hebrew Bible that were flexible.  Since its inception, Judaism has been subject to community ritual interpretation and context.

A second Temple was constructed a century after the first was destroyed when selected Jews returned to the Land of Israel from Babylonian captivity..In 70 CE, after the Roman siege of Jerusalem, King Herod's magnificent third temple was destroyed, as was the rest of the city. Jews dispersed throughout northern Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. This widespread dispersion of Jews outside of the Land of Israel is called the Diaspora. In the Diaspora, Jewish groups lived in both Muslim-dominated and Christian-dominated areas. Local communities developed distinct traditions, but the differences between those who came from Muslim areas and those who came from Christian areas was more pronounced. Jews who can trace their ancestry back to Central and Eastern European areas are now known as Ashkenazim. Those who come from the Islamic world are now known as Sephardim. Sephardic Jews technically trace their origins back to the Iberian Peninsula, but Jews from the historically Muslim lands of the Middle East (Mizrahi) and North Africa (Maghrebi) have been combined with contemporary Sephardim because they share many of the same customs. These labels did not become widely used until the 1960s when Jews from Islamic lands emigrated into Europe, the United States, and Israel. On a global scale, these distinctions were not relevant until after World War II.

In both Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities, Jews in the Middle Ages had to pay taxes in exchange for communal autonomy. They adopted the vernacular languages of the non-Jews among whom they lived, and also adopted the architectural, musical, culinary, and literary styles of their neighbors. Synagogues in Christian-dominated lands are sometimes drab on the exterior but extremely ornate on the inside. Synagogues in Muslim lands have domes and arches that mimic Islamic architecture. Some examples are the Santa María la Blanca in Toledo, Spain, and the Algiers Grande Synagogue in Algeria.

In Europe, persecution of Jews began soon after Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, crusading mobs massacred Jews throughout Europe. Crusaders blamed Jews for crucifying Jesus, an accusation that was extended to claim that Jews were engaging in the ritual murder of Christian children, a practice known as the blood libel. Jews who lived in Europe were easy and accessible targets for the Crusaders since the Muslims, from whom they hoped to wrest the Holy Lands, were far from home. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jews in Spain were subject to violent forms of anti-Judaism. The Spanish Inquisition forced the conversion to Christianity or the expulsion of the many Jewish residents of the Iberian Peninsula.

Life for Jews in Islamic lands was comparatively tranquil. In areas dominated by Muslims, Jews in the Middle Ages were tolerated as a “dhimmi,” a people of the book. Unlike the Christian world, Jewish people were not the only non-Muslim inhabitants. There were also Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, as well as others. Jews were integrated into the economy and were allowed to practice their religion freely. Jews conducted business with non-Jews in Islamic lands in the Middle Ages. Similarities in art, music, and food traditions provide evidence of Jewish and non-Jewish interaction, but their communal lives remained mostly separate. Jewish dietary laws, or kashrut, required that Jews had their own butchers, bakers, and even wine producers. The weekly Sabbath meant that Jewish merchants and peasants would refrain from work while Christian or Muslim commerce likely continued. Jewish law forbids marriage outside of the religion which further defined boundaries between the Jews and their neighbors. These social boundaries, in some later instances, became physical boundaries, walled ghettos within which Jews were forced to live.

The emancipation of European Jews from ghettos became a benchmark of sorts indicating a nation’s transformation from the medieval to the modern era. Upon the formation of a secular nation, French Jews received civil rights in 1791 and 1792. Other European nations followed France’s lead throughout the 19th century. National communities distanced themselves from old forms of Christianity. They better tolerated Jews, but with some reservations. In Germany, which did not become a unified nation until 1871, Jews were never granted full equality. Rights depended on local municipalities. In some places, Jews were awarded rights only to have them taken away soon after. It is not coincidental that Germany was the birthplace of Reform Judaism. Progressive thinkers sought to transform Judaism from within when they could not stem outsider prejudice against Jews.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) pioneered the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, which advocated many of the same ideas about freedom and equal rights that Jean Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant promoted. Mendelssohn openly discussed the ways that Jews could exist in a multi-religious society. “Adopt the mores and constitution of the country in which you find yourself,” he wrote, “but be steadfast in upholding the religion of your fathers, too.”  In subsequent generations, many Jews, including Karl Marx’s parents, found it much easier to convert to Christianity and live publicly as Christians to better access jobs, purchase property, and enjoy other basic rights.

There was an alternate strategy to overcome the paradox presented by modernity. Inspired by Mendelssohn, Jewish questioners throughout German-speaking lands developed the Reform movement in the early nineteenth century. These reformers believed that their mission was to align Judaism with modern thought. They also promoted the idea that prayers should be chanted in the local language rather than in Hebrew. They encouraged rabbis to look beyond the Talmud and Torah for guidance. Reformers downplayed the idea that the past could dictate a way of life in an increasingly secular and industrial setting. They modeled many of their religious practices after German Christians, encouraging decorum in synagogues, introducing music similar to that heard in churches, and some even wanted to switch the Sabbath to Sunday. They hoped to remain Jews, but highlighted Judaism’s similarity to Christianity.

These efforts offended traditionalists, who reacted with an enhanced degree of conservatism.  Some traditional rabbis had long opposed emancipation, but, in response to the Reformers, a group of adherents to Halakhah codified the new Orthodox movement. They opposed many of the secular cultural forms that Judaism absorbed in the coming decades such as Yiddishism, Zionism, and any other divergence from strict Jewish law. Some insisted that established customs not grounded in Jewish law should be made equal in weight to Halakhah. This explains why some groups continue to dress and speak like their ancestors from a century or more ago.  Ironically, these extreme forms of observance are as much a product of modernity as is the Reform movement that prompted them.

In Eastern Europe, another religious movement called Hasidism developed in parallel with Reform and Orthodoxy. Founded in the eighteenth century by a rabbi and mystic who called himself Israel Baal Shem Tov (circa 1698–1760), Hasidic Judaism grew out of a populist reaction to the elitism of the traditional Talmudic academy. Hasidic Judaism focuses on mystical interpretations of holy texts and the potential for uneducated Jews to experience holiness. The movement spread rapidly across Eastern and Central Europe. Hasidism gave rise to opposition from at least two sides: the traditional rabbinic legal structures that revolved around organized Torah study, and the “enlightened” Jews intent on both escaping the oppressive framework of the traditional Jewish family and integrating into mainstream European society. Despite Hasidic Judaism’s strained history with what came to be known as Orthodoxy, it has become harder to distinguish stringent Orthodox Jews from their Hasidic counterparts. As Reform Judaism gained popularity, the two groups joined forces in support of Halakhah (Jewish law) and in opposition to radical reform. Known for their distinctive dress (beards, fur hats, sidelocks, and caftans for men), Hasidim are among the most visible of Jewish groups.

Amidst political and economic turmoil in Western and Central Europe, nationalism became a rallying cry and pseudo-scientific ideas about race proliferated.  A wave of antisemitism affected Jews within Europe and throughout the world in the European colonies. Jews were attacked as infiltrators and blamed for a wide range of social and economic problems. Accusations and rumors led to riots and pogroms (a Russian word that means to violently destroy, used to describe the riots in Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries that resulted in the rape and murder of Jews and the theft and destruction of their property). Several events from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries proved that Jews were not welcomed as equals. In Russia, violent pogroms and economic instability pushed over two million people to emigrate in the 1880s. The majority fled to North America, and a small fraction of pioneers traveled to Palestine, the site of ancient Judaism’s origins.

Some Jewish leaders, responding to the growing nationalism and antisemitism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, followed Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) who advocated for a type of secular Jewish nationalism, a return to the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. Religious Jews had prayed facing Jerusalem and called for a Messianic return to the Land of Israel since the second Temple was destroyed. But the modern political movement, known as Zionism, united the religious impulse to “return” with secular ideas about constructing a European-style nation for Jews. It is important to note that Zionism was but one form of Jewish nationalism that took hold in the nineteenth century. Some Jews fought for territorial and political autonomy on different parts of the globe, and others fought for cultural autonomy in the nations where they lived. These Diaspora nationalist movements mostly disappeared in 1948 when Israel became an independent state.

“The antisemite creates the Jew,” wrote French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945.   Antisemitism had generated a false image of what a Jew is, making Jews seem like a social danger for most Europeans. After World War I, liberal democracies everywhere appeared to be failing. The idea that Jews were responsible for social and economic crises convinced many to use race and ethnicity as a test to determine who belonged and who ought to be excluded. It was in this climate that the Nazi party was elected to power in 1933. Combining their expansionist vision with spurious theories of racial purity, the Germans quickly gained control of most of central and eastern Europe.

Genocide became an everyday phenomenon. The Nuremburg Laws forced Jews to identify themselves with a badge, and criminalized sexual intimacy between Jews and gentiles. Laws were passed across Europe and the Mediterranean that excluded Jews from certain professions and barred them from attending school. Citizenship was revoked and many people were forced from their homes into overcrowded wards. Inspired by the medieval ghetto, the Nazis went further, killing Jews by restricting food and medicine, packing thousands into spaces fit for far fewer, and, eventually, forbidding Jews to leave at all. Working in collaboration with governments across Europe, Nazi officials enacted a “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question” in early 1942. Jews were forcibly gathered and shipped to local concentration camps and to death camps in Poland and the USSR. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust.

The genocide that overtook Europe's Jews transformed Jewish identity throughout the world. Jews in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Germany, and Austria were reduced to a tiny fraction of their prewar numbers. Even still, Jewish populations survived throughout Europe, including in Russia, the United Kingdom, and France. Western European nations received substantial aid from the American government, and the Jewish populations in those areas relied on American Jewish organizations for help. Hasidism is a mystical Jewish movement focused on song, prayer, and communing with God that arose in the territory of contemporary Western Ukraine in the 18th century and spread throughout Eastern Europe. in Eastern Europe were disproportionately destroyed during the Holocaust, but many sects continue to thrive on almost every continent. In 1948 the United Nations unanimously voted for an independent State of Israel in an area was, at that time, under British administration.

In the immediate aftermath of the war in Eastern Europe, the Soviets continued to downplay the role of race, as they had during the Holocaust. Despite many Jews being devoted Communists, they were again targeted as a suspicious people who could never be entirely trusted. During the Soviet show trials in the 1950s and 1960s, Jews were purged from government ranks and executed in public spaces.  Although Stalin voted for the creation of Israel in 1948, these public show trials served as “a form of public-pedagogy-by-example.” The goal was to exemplify the fact that ethnic Jews did not belong among the Communist ranks and that they were not equal with others. Even in the secular Soviet Union, overt antisemitism persisted during the Cold War decades. Many Jews emerged from behind the iron curtain toward Western Europe, Israel, or the United States.

American Jews in the 1950s followed the patterns of other white ethnic immigrant populations. Many left large cities, focused on education, and joined counter-cultural movements in the late 1960s and 70s. American Jews often stood at the side of the oppressed, figuring prominently in the 1960s civil rights movement. Jews in Islamic lands emigrated from North African and Middle Eastern countries between the late 1940s and late 1960s when pan-Arab nationalism became exclusively Muslim and proscribed participation from others. These Jews immigrated to Israel, Western Europe, and the United States. In France, the Sephardic population from Algeria, Morrocco and Tunisia brought new religious life and diverse customs to a community that was struggling after the trauma of World War II.

In the modern world, Jewish identity can seem scattered, confusing, and boundless. In the United States, Jews thrived in the postwar decades. Several different movements gained popularity: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. In Europe and Israel, inspired by these American movements, a smaller fraction of progressive Jews has formed Liberal and other types of Judaism. From the 1990s to the present, some American Jews have joined in a worldwide trend toward religious extremism.  At the same time, the Reform movement has grown. The traditional separation between men and women has been broken down and women are now integrated into the rabbinate in non-Orthodox circles.

Artist and author Art Spiegelman states, “One thing that’s become questionable to me is the way in which the Holocaust has become a central tenant of Jewishness in the late 20th century... so that people see it as a Jewish problem and not a world problem.”  The omnipresence of Holocaust education within the Jewish community, combined with a sort of alienation from tradition, made the Holocaust into a unifying agent that brought Jews together. In the twenty-first century, young Jews have pushed against the Holocaust as the defining feature of their Jewishness and have sought out alternative ways to express their connections to Judaism. Jewish film, music, and cultural festivals abound, attracting both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. The largest such festival occurs annually in Poland and draws tens of thousands from across the globe The fact that this festival takes place in the country where the greatest number of Jews were massacred during the Holocaust signals a turning away from that dark period as being the benchmark of Jewish identity and a turning toward new forms of Jewish expression.

One popular joke says that Jews believe in “at most” one God. While monotheism is an important feature of Judaism, some of the greatest Rabbis from the Talmud have atheist tendencies, even as they espouse the centrality of Halakhah (Jewish law). Scholar Shaye J.D. Cohen has written, “Jewishness, like most, perhaps all, other identities, is imagined; it has no empirical objective, verifiable reality to which we can point and over which we can exclaim, ‘This is it!’  Jewishness is in the mind.” Lacking any unifying authority, doctrine, or practice, Judaism is consequently highly diverse and cannot be defined by any singular concept. Instead, a set of features such as common texts, a shared history, and the rhythms of Jewish religious life all contribute to an understanding of a religion that is shaped as much by its ancient origins as it is by its variety of contemporary manifestations.