Judaism is Not a Religion

• In Event: Jewish Identities - Interdisciplinary Approaches

Abstract

Surveys that attempt to discover how many Jews there are worldwide, in Israel, in Europe, in Canada and more recently the Pew survey in the United States are plagued by the question of who is a Jew. The answers to this question affect the count of Jews which depends of course on who is included in the definition. The paper shows that this is not a new problem. Judaism fits uneasily into the category of a religion, and was called that only in the 19th Century in response to German Anti-Semitism. The following aspects of Judaism are discussed: (1) Identity – either ethnicity or nationality or both. The conflation of religion, ethnicity and nationality has been a perennial problem in defining Jews who in modern societies have multiple identities. (2)Values and prescriptions aimed at the right way to live, often embedded in value concepts and codified in various texts as well as in oral traditions. (3) Mystical experiences expressed in texts, traditions, legends as well as found in personal experience.(4) Ritual, communal and individual, organizing both the values and the mystical.(5) Cultural orientations and artifacts ranging from the Jewish joke to a menorah.(6) Organizations and communities embodying the five components. To complicate matters, individuals shift their orientations towards Judaism throughout their lifetime. These multi-faceted aspects cause problems for demographers, theologians, religious leaders, politicians, and the State of Israel. Examples will be given from current demographic surveys, including the recent Pew study of American Jews, the Israel government census, and current non-Jewish theological research.

author

• Charles Kadushin, Brandeis University