Posted on 11/30/2011 8:43:03 AM PST by SeekAndFind
There is no end to the conundrums involved in defining what it means to be a Jew. Must a Jew be someone who believes in the Jewish religion, in the way a Christian believes in Christianity or a Muslim in Islam? That can't be the case, since many devoted Jews are atheists. Is a Jew necessarily someone who acknowledges membership in a Jewish ethnic group, people, or nation? That definition would exclude people who believe in Judaism but feel little kinship with other believers, and it would read out Jews who are anti-Zionist. Should "Jewish" be seen as a cultural identity? If so, it would cover people who are stirred to their souls by Fiddler on the Roof, live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, enjoy Jewish food, appreciate Jewish humor, and believe—like the woman who once told me she was Jewish because she subscribed to the New Republic—that Judaism mandates liberal politics. But there are certainly non-Jews who meet all these criteria and significant numbers of Jews who don't.
Not only is there no satisfactory answer to this puzzle; there is a fundamental reason why not. The people who would come to be called Jews and the faith that would be known as Judaism are ancient in their origins. From their earliest history, Jews attributed those origins to a family founded by biblical patriarchs and guided by divine revelation. For centuries afterwards, Jewish religion, peoplehood, and culture were indistinguishably bound together. The people and faith thus predate by many centuries the emergence of such modern concepts as "religion," "nation," and "culture."
Professor Leora Batnitzky writes about the birth of these modern concepts and their consequences for Jewish thought. In her new book, How Judaism Became a Religion, which grew out of her undergraduate course at Princeton University on Jewish thought and modern society, she argues that modern Jewish thought began at the moment in the late 18th century when Moses Mendelssohn declared Judaism a religion. In doing so, he renounced the type of communal dominance that Jewish authorities had traditionally exercised. He ceded cultural and political authority to the rising secular nation-state.
Batnitzky argues that in the years since Mendelssohn drew the then-unprecedented distinction between Jewish religion and Jewish peoplehood and culture, his idea has run like a scarlet thread, sometimes overt and at other times subterranean, through the discourse and contentions of Jewish thinkers up until our own time. Some of these thinkers assumed the accuracy of Mendelssohn's definition of Jews as co-religionists. Some refined and redefined the notion. Still others rejected it in favor of one or another form of ethnic, political, or cultural Jewishness.
The book uses the combined rubric of religion, nation, and culture as the key to understanding the past two centuries of Jewish thought. This sweeping construct illuminates scholars and their debates, revealing ironies that have heretofore gone largely unnoticed. For example, in the latter half of the 19th century, Samson Raphael Hirsch was the chief Orthodox antagonist of Abraham Geiger, the leader of early German Reform Judaism. The two were poles apart in their understanding of Jewish religion. But Batnitzky's analytical framework helps us see that the two men were in total agreement in believing the Jewish religion had no collective national dimension. Indeed, it was the Orthodox Hirsch who was more radical in this respect, leading his followers out of the official Jewish community in a doctrinally based secessionist movement.
In the same way, Batnitzky points out an irony closer to our own time. Separatist ultra-Orthodox communities in the United States, she notes, reject modernity in principle and claim to have restored a pre-modern synthesis of community and faith. Yet they are able to enjoy the autonomy that is necessary to their separatist communalism only because the U.S. legal system treats them as members of a religion—that newfangled idea—and, therefore, as entitled to expansive First Amendment protections.
It would be too much, perhaps, to expect a framework this broad to account for all of the significant features of modern Jewish thinking. Batnitzky defines "religion" much as the German Protestantism of Mendelssohn's time did—as an inner spiritual experience particular to the individual. If one defines religion in this way, one tends to see manifestations of group identity not as religious but as political. This dichotomy may be appropriate in describing the relationship of Christianity to modern politics and culture, but it leaves unexplored some complexities of modern Jewish thinkers and schools of thought.
For example, Hasidism is discussed in a chapter titled "The Irrelevance of Religion" because Hasidism had its roots in the collective identity of East European Jews. Yet a defining feature of Hasidism was its emphasis on the religious experience of the individual; and Martin Buber, who popularized the movement in the modern West, is quite properly labeled a "religious" thinker. Similarly, the great champions of the analytical study of Talmud, also East Europeans, are called "collectivists" despite their intense, sometimes competitive pursuit of individual insight and innovation. But Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the best known 20th-century exemplar of this analytic school, is called a "religious" thinker—in spite of his famous collectivist teaching that all Jews, religious and secular, are bound by a "covenant of fate."
Batnitzky notes that German Jews, in emphasizing Judaism as a religion and devaluing Jewish culture, showed a marked lack of appreciation for one of cultural Judaism's chief gifts to modern civilization—its sense of humor. The modern arrival of cultural Jewishness and its ironic vision had to wait, she says, for the great secular Yiddish writers of late 19th-century Russia and their satirical treatment of everyday Jewish life. But surely the original propagator of the idea of Jewishness as culture, separate and apart from religion, was the German apostate Heinrich Heine, whose satiric wit helped drive him out of Germany in 1831. That Heine is not mentioned in this fine book is only another sign that modern Jewishness is a house of many mansions—so many that it may be too protean, complex, and multifaceted to be confined within the bounds of even the most ambitious and carefully argued thesis.
-- Lawrence Grossman is the director of publications at the American Jewish Committee.
A genetic link to some religion is superfluous to fact.
Was Christ, for instance, Catholic or Jewish?
Yeah. And what they are devoted to is the Democrat Party, and sometimes the PLO.
ML/NJ
A national religion as opposed to a transnational religion
How about just Middle Eastern or eastern mediterranean?
Judaism is historically the culture and religion of a particular Semitic ethnicity.
Hard to know what is the question here. ‘Judaism’ is a recent, made-up word which means a specific religion.
Isn’t the question: Who is a Jew? The author doesn’t like the right answer, apparently. It is a legal category determined by an ancient culture: Someone born to a Jewish mother or converted according to traditional religious procedure.
Is it? Are Ashkehnazi Jews Semitic in origin? That's doubtful.
Not at all. Ashkehnazi Jews in genetic study after genetic study show that the population originated in the Levant from Semitic people with surprisingly little admixture of any European genetics.
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In an ethnic sense, an Ashkenazi Jew is one whose ancestry can be traced to the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. For roughly a thousand years, the Ashkenazim were a reproductively isolated population in Europe, despite living in many countries, with little inflow or outflow from migration, conversion, or intermarriage with other groups, including other Jews. Human geneticists have identified genetic variations that have high frequencies among Ashkenazi Jews, but not in the general European population. This is true for patrilineal markers (Y-chromosome haplotypes) as well as for matrilineal markers (mitotypes).[10]
^ “New Light on Origins of Ashkenazi in Europe”, New York Times, 14 Jan 2006
Thats highly contestable
A 2010 study by Bray et al(Natl Academy of Sciences), using SNP microarray techniques and linkage analysis, estimated that 35 to 55 percent of the modern Ashkenazi genome may be of European origin, and that European "admixture is considerably higher than previous estimates by studies that used the Y chromosome". In fact, a study also found that with respect to non-Jewish European groups, the population most closely related to Ashkenazi Jews are modern-day Italians. .
Tracing the Ashkehnazi population back to a few hundred families in Italy who it is suggested previously came from the Levant is of arguable accuracy, at the very least. To say there is "some" genetic sililarities to Mid eastern Semitics is not proof of much of anything, IMO.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/science/14gene.html
The researchers, Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa, and colleagues elsewhere, report that just four women, who may have lived 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, are the ancestors of 40 percent of Ashkenazis alive today. The Technion team’s analysis was based on mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element that is separate from the genes held in the cell’s nucleus and that is inherited only through the female line. Because of mutations - the switch of one DNA unit for another - that build up on the mitochondrial DNA, people can be assigned to branches that are defined by which mutations they carry.
In the case of the Ashkenazi population, the researchers found that many branches coalesced to single trees, and so were able to identify the four female ancestors.
Looking at other populations, the Technion team found that some people in Egypt, Arabia and the Levant also carried the set of mutations that defines one of the four women. They argue that all four probably lived originally in the Middle East.
A study by Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona showed five years ago that the men in many Jewish communities around the world bore Y chromosomes that were Middle Eastern in origin. This finding is widely accepted by geneticists, but there is less consensus about the women’s origins.
“Taken as a whole, our results, along with those from previous studies, support the model of a Middle Eastern origin of the AJ population followed by subsequent admixture with host Europeans or populations more similar to European”
Middle Eastern origin. The Ashkenazim originated in the Middle East. They are of Semitic origin with European admixture.
Okay,so half mid eastern, half European genes. So whats your point? "Jewish" is not a blood thing, its a religion where a lot of the coreligionists come from a similar mixed gene pool.More heterogeneously than say the Irish Catholics or Arab Muslims, wouldnt you think?..
I just dont get what the larger point is , but I so get a whiff of that "otherness" argument. Aah, the Jews.
My point is that, as I first stated - Judaism is historically a culture, a religion AND an ethnicity.
Judaism is not JUST a religion. But Judaism IS a religion.
And Ashkenazim are, as I originally stated, of Semitic origin.
Oh, okay. And all of mankind originated from Africa, so we are all Africanners, deep down in our deepest souls.
But there is no denying, based upon reality, that Ashkenazim are a community descended from Semitic people from the Middle East with European admixture.
So why the attempt to deny their Jewish ethnicity and Semitic origin?
For one thing, Ashkenazim are only one community of Jews, and there has been a tendency to conflate all of Judaism with Askenazim. Most Jews in Israel are either Sephardic or mixed gene pool, plus there are a couple hundred thousand African Jews,and tens of thousands of converts.
Out of self defense Jews stopped prosletyzing centuries ago (and prosletyzed heavily before that), but that doesent make it less of a "religion". Are Irish Catholics an ethnicity or a religion or both ? How about Arab Muslims ? .. "
Notwithstanding the inane article posted at top, one can be an agnostic Jew who follows the ethics of the Bible and the Talmuld and its moral teachings. But suggesting that Jewish is nothing more than a collection of ethnic customs, is pretty stupid (not you, the article)
You replied...”Is it? Are Ashkehnazi Jews Semitic in origin? That's doubtful.”
Nowhere did I conflate all of Judaism with the Ashkenazim.
So what made you “doubtful” of what is a reality - that Ashkenazim are of Semitic origin?
Which confirms the Apostle Paul in his persistent contrast of "faith," meaning what Christianity is based on, not your race or ethnicity, those "born after the Spirit," "born again," John 3:3, with Judaism "born after the flesh," Galatians 4:29.
"Born after the flesh" is Paul's way of describing the racial and ethnic based system, Judaism.
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