KEY QUESTIONS ON BEING JEWISH WHAT AND WHO IS A JEW?

A Jew is a person of Jewish culture who identifies with that culture. Specifically, it is a person who, 1) Has been reared in a Jewish familial/social context (most Jews), or who has consciously incorporated himself or herself into a Jewish community in ways accepted by most Jews (e.g., a convert or someone who joins a Jewish family and comes to identify and be identified primarily with Jews). 2) Considers himself or herself a member of the Jewish people and experiences a basic solidarity with that people. 3) Is considered to be Jewish by a majority of the Jewish people, as well as by a majority of non-Jews. 4) Does not hold beliefs (e.g., Christianity and Islam, but not Buddhism) which partially or fully deny the legitimacy of the Jewish people and of Jewish culture as most Jews understand them. Note: According to rabbinic law (as distinct from biblical law), a Jew is a person whose mother is Jewish or who converts to Judaism in keeping with rabbinic law. This legal definition is a normative ideal of Jewish identity. That ideal does not necessarily match reality. In reality, being Jewish has been about learning Jewish culture in a social context and identifying with it, not about keeping genealogical records or undergoing certain rites of conversion per se. WHO ARE THE JEWS? The Jews are a people (or nation, or ethnic group)a people traditionally called Israelthat originates in the Israelite state of Judah (in Hebrew, Yehuda; in Latin, Judeasee maps, below). The members of the Jewish people have created, maintain, and identify with what they and others recognize as Jewish culture. The Jews are not a religion alone.

Judah

The ancient Mediterranean basin

Detail: Judah (the lighter area) at the time of the Hasmoneans (ca. 100 BCE). Modern Israeli boundaries are in red.

WHAT IS JUDAISM? Judaism is sometimes (mis)understood to be the religion of the Jews, or even the entire culture of the Jews. But this is not accurate. Judaism (a.k.a. rabbinic, normative, or classical Judaism) is a key element of Jewish culture, not its totality. Judaism was largely created by sages or rabbis, a Judean class of scholars in Antiquity (from ca. 150 BCE to 650 CE). In its ideal conception, and as it is practiced traditionally, rabbinic Judaism is an all-encompassing way of life, not a religion in the narrow sense that the term religion is commonly understood in societies that have carved out separate spheres for church and state. In other words, Judaism is not equivalent to Jewish theology, ethical teachings, and ways of worship alone. Rather, it is a comprehensive system of symbols, beliefs, norms, and practices (including 613 mitzvot or commandments), that ideally covers all aspects of Jews existence. Again, Judaism is not the whole of Jewish culture, but as its central element, Judaism makes that culture distinctive and relatively continuous across time and space. As a religious system, Judaism is intended to answer important questions such as: Who are we? Why are we here? What should we do? Where are we going, and why? Still, Judaism has little and is not based on religious dogma per se. The relationship between Judaism and Jews is complex, and is not exclusively a matter of faith (some, like the historian Simon Dubnow and David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the State of Israel, might say it is not a matter of religious faith at all). Though Judaism encompasses the concept of emunah (translatable as belief), Jews are at base a people, not a faith. Judaism is a creation of the people; it is the Jewish people's primary cultural expression. To truly understand the Jews,

therefore, it makes more sense to speak of the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, including Judaism, or to speak about Jewish civilization, than it does to speak of the Jewish religion in isolation or in the conventional, narrow sense. One does not have to be religiously observant, or have a traditional religious mindset, or even to believe in Godto be Jewish, even according to the normative rabbinic definition of belonging to the Jewish people. One does, however, have to identify with Judaism and consider it part of ones cultural heritage in some significant way. (By contrast, one must believe in certain Christian theological propositions to be Christian. Unlike the Jews, Christians do not constitute a single people/ethnic group/nation. Christians are fundamentally a community of religious belief. Jews are not. They are an ethnic community of history and destinya national-cultural community.) WHAT MAKES JEWS JEWISH? Theology, ethical teachings, worship, and religious customs, are not the only dimensions of Jewishness. There are other shared cultural elements that give Jewishness its continuity and coherence despite great differences in the experiences of Jewish sub-groups and individuals across time and space. Jewish solidarity is built largely from individual Jews' favorable perception of these elements. You may call the elements constants or common reference points of all Jewish identities (secular, religious, etc.). These shared elements fit together differently for different Jewish individuals, but the elements still give substance to all Jews' cultural kinship or ethnicityone might say, their peoplehood. The shared elements of Jewish peoplehood and of all Jewish identities are: a) The perception (and the reality) of familial kinship between Jews. (This is NOT the same as race. The Jews are not a race. There are Jews of every color, shape, and genetic provenance.) b) A homeland, the Land of Israel (in Hebrew, Eretz Israel). Most Jews in history have not lived there, but they still perceive it as their collective, historical point of origin, at least as of 70 CE, and/or their historical homeland. The land was the cradle of Israelite and hence Jewish culture. c) A national language, Hebrew. Even if not all Jews speak it, they all still share it as part of their cultural trove (which is not the case with Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino [= Judeo-Spanish], and other such Jewish vernaculars, which only pertain to Jewish sub-groups but not to the Jewish people as a whole.) d) An extensive literary heritage, main parts of which are written in Hebrew, and many parts of which are written in Hebrew characters. This heritage is both religious and secular (though these categories may not actually be very clear-cut in the case of Jews and Judaism), canonical and non-canonical. The central, canonical component of this literary heritage is the group of texts that comprise the Torah (= Teaching), including the books of the Hebrew Bible, and the collection of rabbinic texts known as the Talmud. Modern secular writing by Jews on matters pertaining to their cultural experience (e.g., much of the work of the novelist Cynthia Ozick) comprises a more recent, non-canonical component of that heritage. e) A shared history of (e1) collective life in the land of Israel and (e2) of life among the nations in the Jewish Diaspora. f) A shared memory of that historyin other words, commonly shared ways of selecting things to remember, and of remembering them. e) Recurrent, common challenges that grow out of that shared history, such as grappling with: persecution and loss; insularity and openness to other cultures; the nature of Diaspora existence; particularism and universalism; collective autonomy and subjection; power and powerlessness; tradition and innovation; the relationship between the individual and the collective; the experience of rabbinic Judaism as a way of life; etc., etc.