Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities

Introduction to Part 3

145 From the focus on premodern and early modern Jewish communities in parts 1 and 2, in this part I move to an analysis of modern and contemporary Jewish communities , especially the two largest: the United States and Israel. With respect to the analytical focus, we move from comparisons of religious practice to Jewish identities and, in particular, the relationship between religion and ethnicity (or nationality) in those identities. The distinction between the religious and ethnic components of Jewish identity and the discourse on their relationship are modern phenomena. The distinction was made a public issue when Napoleon convoked the Assembly of Jewish Notables to endorse his goal of assimilating the Jews of France into a united French nation. When they declared their French nationality and validated only their practice of Jewish ritual, the assembly recognized a new definition of Jewish identity. Jewishness confined to religion became a widespread form of identity among western and central European Jews in the nineteenth century, and it was challenged in the last decades of that century by nonreligious ethnic or national forms of Jewish identity, especially among Jews in eastern Europe. What had been fused in a takenfor -granted fashion in the traditional Jewish communities was differentiated, and many Jews who continued to adhere to both the religious and the ethnic or national elements of their identity did so in a self-conscious fashion. Before I discuss Jewish identities in the modern era, I would like to consider how religion and ethnicity came to be fused in Jewish identities in antiquity. Attempts by historians of antiquity to trace this fusion have been complicated by debates over the appropriateness of using the terms ethnic group and religion as well as debates over the issue of when it becomes appropriate to use the terms Jew and Judaism. The appropriateness of using the English term ethnic has been acknowledged because it is derived from the Greek ethnos, a term that was widely used in antiquity in ways similar to our classifications of peoples as ethnic or national entities. Max Weber’s definition of an ethnic group, which many sociologists have followed, appears to encompass the understanding of ethnos in antiquity: “those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical types or of customs or both.”1 Thus Herodotus, a Greek author writing in the fifth century B.C.E., presented Greekness as consisting of kinship and common cultural items, including shrines of gods and sacrifices. Similarly, ancient Jewish writers assumed that they had a group identity based on kinship and introduction to part 3 03 Part 3.indd 145 9/20/10 10:25 AM 146 int r o d ucti o n t o p a r t 3 culture, and an outsider who wished to become one of them was required to adopt both their culture and a new kinship relation.2 Unlike ethnic group, no word in antiquity approximates the meaning of our word religion. The peoples of antiquity did not differentiate what we now understand as religion from conceptions of kinship, ancestry, and geography. In my view, though, the absence of a one-to-one correspondence between modern and ancient vocabulary does not prohibit the use of our terms. The use of the term religion is necessary when we acknowledge that ethnicity and religion were fused in antiquity, and its use allows us to trace the development of this fusion in what came to be designated as the Jewish people. The people in antiquity who were known in Hebrew as Yehudim (singular, Yehudi ) and in Greek as Ioudaioi (singular, Ioudaios) constituted an ethnos, a people with an attachment to a specific territory who believed that they had common ancestors and who possessed a number of distinctive cultural characteristics. Shaye Cohen writes that the correct translation of Ioudaios before the middle of the second century B.C.E. is Judean, not Jew. The Judeans inhabited their ancestral land, but in Diaspora settings, where many joined associations or corporations that were ethnic in character, the geographic meaning of Ioudaios became attenuated. Cohen argues that a semantic shift from Judean to Jew is justified from the latter part of the second century B.C.E., when the term Ioudaios came to be applied to people who were not geographic or ethnic Judeans but who had come to believe in the God of the Judeans. A non-Judean could become an Ioudaios by joining the Judeans in worshiping...