Personal Details

Role

Name

Affiliation

Principal Investigator

A. Raghuramaraju

Professor, Department of
Philosophy, University of
Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator

BhaskarjitNeog

Assistant Professor, Centre

for Philosophy, Jawaharlal
Nehru University

Content Writer

TomerPersico

Center for Comparative

Religion,
Tel
Aviv
University

Content Reviewer

VibhaChaturvedi /
PragatiSahni

Professor
/
Reader,
Department of Philosophy,
Delhi University

Language Editor

Nikita Nisarga

Freelancer

Description of Module
Subject Name:

Philosophy

Paper Name:

Philosophy of Religion

Module Name/Title:

Judaism

Module ID

Module No.11 of Philosophy of Religion

Prerequisites:

10.11

Objectives:
Key Words:

Judaism, Religion, Monotheism, God, Transcendental, Abraham,

Israel, Law, Jews

Judaism
Judaism is an ancient ethnic monotheistic religion, founded on a covenant of social, ethical
and liturgical laws based on the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) and made
exclusively between the Jewish people and a divine being, which is considered to be the only
god, the creator of the world, and to be fundamentally transcendent and wholly other. It is
on the theological foundations that were established by Judaism, (but not only on these)
Christianity, and later Islam, developed. There are about 15 million Jews in the world today,
living mainly in the State of Israel and the United States.

1. Mythology and History

The Jewish religion is one of the oldest living faiths.It originated in the Land of Israel,
latercalled Canaan, following the consolidation of different groups of Semitic and
Mesopotamian origins, beginning in the second half of the second millennium BCE. These
groups formed an alliance of tribes and considered themselves to be of common patrilineal
origin, having a shared history, thus forming a single nasstion. That nation, the nascent nation
of Israel, was considered to have arrived at a unique covenant with the supreme god, Jehovah.
The covenant constituted a special relationship between the nation of Israel and Jehovah,
promising it prosperity and proliferation on the condition that it would obey Jehovahs divine
commandments and will.
According to the Jewish tradition the father of the nation, Abraham, came from a
polytheistic family originating in the city of Ur, Chaldea (then Sumer, today Iraq). Abraham
is believed to have been the first to realize that there is only one true God and to have
received personal orders from Him to migrate to the Land of Israel. After three generations in
Israel, and due to conditions of drought, Abrahams descendants journeyed south, to Egypt,
where the fertile Nile delta offered a more generous environment.
The tale of the subsequent enslavement of Israelites by ancient Egyptians and their eventual
liberation by the mighty hand of God is one of the most basic and fundamental mytho-ethical
narratives of the common Western monotheistic heritage. Following the ten catastrophic
plagues inflicted by Jehovah upon Egypt in order to persuade the Pharaoh to release them, the
Israelites, led by Moses (an Israelite brought up in the Egyptian royal family), fled to the
desert and began their way to Canaan. Tradition has it that in the desert, near Mount Sinai, the
entire nation witnessed Moses receive the Ten Commandments and the Torah from Jehovah,
and it is there that the covenant between the people of Israel and the supreme god was sealed.
According to tradition the Israelites later continued to Canaan, conquered the land and
instituted a federation made up of twelve tribes, descendants from the twelve sons of
Abrahams grandson, Jacob, whom God had renamed Israel. Near the beginning of the first
millennium BCE, Saul, the first of many kings cameto power by the will of the people and
with divine approval mediated by the prophet Samuel. The second king of Israel, David, rose
to lasting fame and reverence, becoming the model monarch whose ultimate decedents return
to power would become a prominent messianic hope. The existence of the Davidic dynasty is
the first event in Jewish (mythical-)history for which we have concrete archeological
evidence.
Ancient Israel was ruled through a distinct separation of powers: the king wielded political
power, while the religious leadership was in the hands of the priests (cohanim), an assembly
of families descending from Moses brother, Aaron. Only they were allowed to perform ritual
animal and agricultural sacrifices in the main temple. Contrary to other religious systems
around the ancient Mediterranean, in Israel there was no king-priest, and certainly no king
who was ever considered divine.

As an additional feature of ancient Israels religio-political system, Jehovah would

periodically choose an Israelite, usually male but occasionally female, and instruct him or her
to convey His wishes to the people and the king. These were the prophets, who would
sometimes comment on future events, but whose main vocation was to denounce as agents of
the holy spirit that which was deemed immoral or heretical. 1 Apart from upholding the
exceptionality of Jehovahs divinity and condemning the Israelites for their recurring worship
of other deities, the prophets would regularly denounce the sins of the kings and the rich
while giving expression to the voice of the poor and oppressed. Here is an example from the
words of the prophet Amos (8th century BCE):
Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land, saying:
when will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain and the Sabbath be ended
that we may market wheat? Skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating
with dishonest scales, buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals,
selling even the sweepings with the wheat. The Lord has sworn by himself, the Pride
of Jacob: I will never forget anything they have done. Will not the land tremble for
this, and all who live in it mourn? The whole land will rise like the Nile; it will be
stirred up and then sink like the river of Egypt. (Amos, 8: 4-8, New International
translation)
The prophet castigates the wealthy for thinking more of their business than of the holy days in
which no commerce is allowed (the Sabbath, and, at that time but not today, the New Moon).2
These wealthy Israelites sin against God and belittle His commandments, and sin against man
by exploiting and deceiving the poor, by caring more for their wealth than for the latters
wellbeing. Amos invokes Jacobs name in order to emphasize the intimate relationship
between Jehovah and the people of Israel, and promises not to forget the wrongs they have
done, and punish the whole nation for them.
Indeed, punish them He did. In 586 BCE the Babylonian empire crushed the small kingdom
and conquered its capital, Jerusalem, destroying its central temple. King Davids dynastic
descendants lost their power, and a large part of the nation, specifically the economic and
educated elite, was exiled to Babylonia. According to tradition this was retribution from God
brought about by the sins of the people.
Seventy years later, by permission of the then monarch of the Persian Empire Cyrus the
Great, construction of a second temple in Jerusalem began. From then on the Jewish people
would be mostly dependent on the goodwill of their foreign rulers. Indeed, when attempting
to rebel against the Roman Empire five centuries later, this second and last central temple was
destroyed (70 CE), and the Jewish religion would change its face forever.
2. Theology and Practices
It may be claimed that the first century CE saw the birth of two significant religious
traditions: Christianity, which began as a small Jewish sect who believed that Jesus, a
Abraham Joshua Heschel emphasizes the emotional and ethical character of the prophets
relationship with God when he states that [t]he characteristic of the prophets is not the
foreknowledge of the future, but insight into the present pathos of God" Heschel, Abraham
Joshua, TheProphets, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York, 2001 (1962), p. 298
1

The Sabbath, Saturday in English, is considered one of the most fundamental tenets of
Jewish law, and no work is permitted on that day for observant Jews. It is from the structure
of six working days and a seventh rest day that Western civilization, and later the whole
world, inherited the temporal structure of the seven day week cycle.

Galilean Jew, was the promised Messiah; 3 and Rabbinical Judaism, which is the form of
Judaism that developed after the destruction of the second main temple in Jerusalem. The
demolition of the temple forced Judaism to undergo a major rearrangement: from a religion
centered around a single holy place and a single temple, to one dispersed acrossmany
synagogues both within and outside the land of Israel; from sacrificial worship to worship
through prayer, and obedience to ever encompassing interpretations of the divine law; from
obedience to a hereditary, priestly religious elite to guidance by rabbis (learned men charged
with interpreting this law).
It is thus only after the destruction of the second main temple that Judaism as we now know it
began its formation. Firmly basing itself on the Bible, it nevertheless embarked on a new
path, centering on what was then called Oral Torah (contrary to Written Torah, i.e. the
Hebrew Bible), that is interpretation of the divine law. The House of Learning (Beth Midrash)
came into prominence as one of the primary arenas of religious activity, prayer replaced
sacrifice, 4 and the Jewish Diaspora (Galut), i.e. Jewish communities in exile from Israel
(especially in Babylonia) replaced the Land of Israel as the prominent locus of Jewish activity
and thought. From this point in its development we may elaborate on different tenets of the
religion, thus laying the foundations that, taken together, will provide the structure of Jewish
faith.
3. God
For Judaism God is both personal and transcendent. From biblical texts we can deduce that
the ancient belief was that Jehovah is one of many gods (though stronger, and devoted to the
Jewish people). This view is challenged even in the Bible by sources that view Jehovah as the
sole creator of the world and God of all humanity,5 and has lost its place within the Jewish
tradition since the second half of the last millennium BCE in favor of the belief that there is
only one God.
Jehovah created the world ex nihilo by his active volition. This genealogical picture was
inherited by Christianity and Islam from the Jewish tradition, and leads westerners to view
themselves as being thrust into the world by God, not growing from it, alien to it and not at
home in it. Accordingly the world is seen as a passive artifact subject to the will and action of
God, or of His proxy, Man.
Jehovah gives humans freedom of will, so that they may be able to choose to obey His
commandments.6 Since He is not only chronologically and ontologically prior to the world,
but also completely transcendent and other to it, understanding what His commandments are
3

Christianity developed from groups of Jews, later depending primarily on non-Jewish

converts, who believed the Jesus rose from the dead after his crucifixion, ascended to heaven
and would return to redeem the world. In the 4th century CE a process began that would
culminate in the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire as its formal religion.
During the first centuries CE rabbis interpreted the prophet Hoseas words,
(Hosea 14, 2; lit. we shall pay bulls [with] our lips) as meaning that animal sacrifices will
now be replaced by words. See Babylonian Talmud, Yoma, 8, 86; Numbers (Bamidbar)
Rabbah 18, 21.
4

See the book of Jonah for a prophet sent on a universal mission.

This proved catastrophic when the mythical primordial couple, Adam and Eve, chose to
disobey His first commandment and eat from the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. The
punishment was expulsion therefrom and eternal damnation of humanity to a life of hardship.

is neither obvious nor granted. He therefore provided the Jewish people with the Torah, His
divine words of instruction. In addition, God sends his prophets to act as his emissaries and
mediators, choosing them Himself and speaking to them personally.
The assumption of a transcendental source of authority and truth leads to a particular
configuration of culture and thought. It forces one to be in a mode of constant inclination
outward, towards the ever receding horizon. The Truth, one understands, will not be found
within, but above and beyond. Introspection thus has value only if it leads us again to
something other than ourselves. Moreover, the clear border between the lower and upper
worlds and the dialogical character of the relationship between the human and the divine
facilitates the development of a distinct individuality, as there is no assumption of underlying
unity (but of a fundamentally dualistic ontology) and a clear dynamic of intersubjective
relationship.
Furthermore, a religious paradigm which includes a transcendental God accommodates a
binary view of reality that presents clear dichotomies between presumed opposites such as
this world and the next, nature and man, matter and spirit, body and soul, and man and
woman. In order to appropriately obey the transcendental God, we must fully embrace only
one part of each binary couple, seeking divine truth by rejecting the other and yearning, as it
were, up and away from our earthly existence. This last propensity, it must be stated, came to
accentuated execution in Christianity, and is less pronounced in the Jewish tradition, the latter
having a much more positive view of bodily existence and earthly life.
4. Torah
The Torah is considered to be Gods direct words, given to Moses on Mount Sinai. It consists
of the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy)
and tells the tale of the nation of Israels exile (to Egypt) and return to the homeland of Israel.
It begins, however, with the creation of the world by God and presents a mythical history of
the events proceeding from that moment: the creation of the first man and woman (Adam and
Eve), the cataclysmic flood with which God punished humanity, leaving only Noah and his
family alive, followed by the generations leading to the birth of Abraham.
The Torah reveals that God created the world according to a set plan, which the Torah also
delineates. God is good, and would like humanity to follow His moral and ritualistic
instructions. He endowed humanity with free will, with which they can choose to obey or
reject His wishes, thus either abiding righteously by the divine law, or sinning. The purpose
of life is to establish a loving relationship with God; the duty of the Jewish people is to
uniquely manifest such a relationship (based on their exclusive covenant with God), while the
task of the rest of humanity is to witness the Jews example and to learn from it.
The Jewish Bible (Tanakh) is made up of the Torah (or Pentateuch), the books of the
Prophets (Neviim), and Writings (Ketuvim). Together they form both a divinely guided
history and a prophetic-messianic vision for the future, providing Judaism with a
comprehensive, teleological and pointedly linear account of history, from beginning to end.
The Tanakh, including the Torah, written originally in Hebrew, is a compilation of materials
written by different authors from about 1200 BCE up to 170 BCE.
5. The Divine Law
The Halakha, or divine law, stands as the central pillar of traditional Judaism. The basic ethos
of obedience to divine law is presented in the Torah, where Jehovah repeatedly demands
submission and obedience to the commandments He has bequeathed, as the fulfillment of the
people of Israels side of their covenant with him:

I am the Lord your God. [] You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my
decrees. I am the Lord your God. Keep my decrees and laws, for the person who
obeys them will live by them. I am the Lord.7
Elaboration on the laws presented in the Torah bourgeoned dramatically after the destruction
of the second temple, in 70 CE. The Pharisees, a dominant sect vying for control within
Judaism at that time, developed what became known as Oral Torah, while other sects, notably
the Sadducees (mostly of the priestly cast), resisted such interpretations and claimed that no
oral teachings are necessary, since the totality of Gods will appears in the Bible.
Emphasizing the centrality of interpretation of the Law meant that the Jewish religion was
destined to develop as a dialogue between man and God, and not as simple and docile
compliance to a divine and set cosmic order. It facilitated a culture of polemic and discourse,
with no set hierarchy and no single leading religious authority (such as the head of the church,
for example). It was also crucial to the recuperation of Judaism as a living religion after the
destruction of the temple and the need to offer a liturgical alternative to animal sacrifices.
Rabbinical Judaism thus developed from the efforts of the Pharisees. Laying emphasis on
learned elucidation of the divine law it places human effort at the center of the religious life.
Divine word not only can, but must be mediated through human initiative. Shifting the center
of religious gravity from eternal divine decrees to developing human elucidation and
commentary upon them, Rabbinical Judaism as such may be viewed as the progressive
expansion and growth of human interpretation on the divine law, a never-ending dialogue.
Asserting human authority and initiative, it also laid some of the foundations of humanism.
During the first two centuries CE the rabbis sealed the text of the Jewish Bible as we know it
today, proclaiming that the age of prophesy had ended (thus forever securing human
interpretation as the only valid means of deciphering the divine will)8 and then introduced the
Mishnah (lit. that which is studied and also secondary), the primary compilation of
elaborations on the Jewish law (sixty three tractates collected in six orders). The Talmud,
whose purpose was to amplify and further elucidate the Mishnah, was developed during the
subsequent centuries, up to the sixth century CE. It is the Talmud, not the Torah, which
occupies the central place in the study of Jewish law to this day.
The Halakha encompasses virtually every aspect of daily life, and is far from being limited
solely to devotional aspects. In fact, it constitutes a complete, though mostly outdated, body
of law for the functioning of an entire society (in this case, the Jewish people). It presents
Gods will on diverse and varied subjects such as agriculture, waging war, taxation and social
justice, and that through casuistic reasoning. It has little to say, however, about intentionality,
experiences and feelings, and these do not play a significant role in the prescribed and formal
liturgical life of the religious Jew.
Obeying the divine law is the religious Jews prime directive, establishing the axis about
which his spiritual life revolves: the good deed versus the sin or, in personal terms, the
righteous person versus the wicked, evil sinner. Nota bene, this is a different hinge point to
Leviticus 10, 2-5. See also Deuteronomy 10, 12-13: And now, Israel, what does the Lord
your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him,
to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the
Lords commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?
7

Proclaiming prophecy a thing of the past was also useful as part of the effort to discredit the
rising new religion of Christianity (and other sects of course), who claimed prophetic
knowledge.

that found in religious traditions like Buddhism and in a large part of the Hindu religions,
where the awakening from an illusory perception of reality is considered the summumbonum,
thus making the axis of religious life the true view versus the false, or the wise, awakened
person versus the one that is mired in ignorance. Of course, this fundamental difference in
religious paradigm creates in turn different religious attitudes and societies.
6. The Human Person
As with other religious traditions going back as far as the second millennium BCE (e.g.
Hinduism, Zoroastrianism) Judaism lays great emphasis on the condition and function of the
human body. The Halakha is rich with laws concerning purity and defilement, emphasizing
ritualistic cleansing after an encounter with blood, semen or a corpse, and before entering
holy places or reading from the Torah. What is unique to the Jewish tradition is the
conception of the human person as the image or emblem of the Divine Person (Tzelem, lit.
murti).
Owing to this fundamental tenet of the faith a corporal view of the human person was central
to the Jewish tradition long into its development. The well-known binary dichotomy between
body and soul was not embraced until the tenth century CE that is well after the biblical era
and following an entire millennium of the Halakhas development.
Based on the idea that a person is his or her body (and not a separate soul or spirit), the
Halakha stresses the performative worship of the divine: the covenant with God is kept via
actions and words, not through thoughts, beliefs and experiences. Being a religious Jew is
thus less dependent on what one thinks, and more on what one does. It is thus an orthopraxy,
not an orthodoxy, and a religiously-compliant Jew is referred to as observant, not
believing.
Judaism is a universal religion in that it believes it has a universal message, namely that the
faith and historical workings of the Jewish people are at the center of the divine drama, and
thus relevant to all. It is, however, an ethnic religion, confined to the Jewish nation, i.e. those
who are Jewish by birth. 9 Accordingly, the Jewish tradition considers Jews to be more
important to God and central to His designs. Some Jewish schools of thought consider Jews to
be inherently superior to all other peoples. The view of a national, ethnic and even familial
relation between all Jews stems also from the importance of the body, hence heredity, in the
Jewish tradition.
7. The Jewish People
Judaism is distinctive in presenting a religion that is centered upon one specific nation. It
holds that Jews are chosen, loved in a unique way by the one God and maintaining an
intimate relationship with Him. This relationship is based upon a covenant to which the Jews
are collectively obligated, encompassing the Ten Commandments, further rules and
regulations found in the five books of the Torah, and (since the beginning of the Common
Era) a vast corpus of oral teachings, which represent further elaborations and interpretations
of the divine law.
Throughout the biblical period, and certainly in recorded history since the beginning of the
Common Era, Jews have often been disloyal to this covenant, worshiping other deities and/or
not obeying the law. God has therefore repeatedly punished them for such behavior, though to
no great avail. That said, while never more than a few million in numbers and despite being
often subjected to atrocious hardships, the Jewish people have proven remarkably resilient to
9

It is possible to become Jewish through study and formal conversion, but it is not an easy
task, and Jews do not in any way encourage it through missionary activity.

any attempt to collectively convince them to abandon their faith, and since being cast into
exile they have for the last 2000 years, prayed that Jehovah will reconstitute His benevolent
relationship with them.
8. Messianism and Redemption
The transcendental idea facilitates a certain cultural character, one in which the clear
dichotomy between the phenomenal world and the upper, divine spheres is emphasized.
The tension that is generated by this divide is the progenitor of the messianic impetus, either
as an ongoing expectation for the moment when existence will be folded and enveloped back
in the divine absolute, or as the attempt, by human effort, to realize the kingdom of heaven
here on earth by forcing reality to conform to divine ideals. Either way, there is yearning to
bridge the infinite divide between earth and heaven, between now and forever.
The Messiah is literally the anointed one. He is a man, chosen by God to be king of Israel,
and duly anointed with olive oil by the prophet, thus marking him as holy (in the biblical
sense of special, dedicated to God). The longing for the messiah in the Jewish tradition thus
began as the simple wish for the legitimate monarch, a descendant of the house of David, to
renew the rule of his dynasty over the independent kingdom of Israel.
Redemption in the Jewish tradition is thus basically political. Being a religion of a specific
nation, that nations social constitution is what lies at the center of its soteriological
expectations. These expectations, however, are not limited to the restorative aspect (i.e.
reinstating the lost kingdom), but often add a utopian aspiration.10 Thus, in one of the most
famous of his prophecies, Isaiah tells of a time when
The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and
the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. [] They will
neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the
knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.11
The order of nature itself thus becomes transformed in the days of redemption, ushering in a
state of eternal peace between humans and the natural world, as well as intimacy 12 between
humans and God. In contrast to religious traditions such as Christianity or Buddhism,
salvation in Judaism is not a personal, individual event. It is not deliverance from sin,
suffering or rebirth. Rather, it is a national, if not global, utopia.
9. Kabbalah
Kabbalah is the esoteric or mystical part of the Jewish tradition. Developed at the
beginning of the thirteenth century, Kabbalah was one Jewish answer to the rising questions
of an age that was growing more literate, city-oriented and exposed to Hellenistic
philosophy. 13 In very general terms, it is a large and multilayered corpus of literature,

10

For the delineation of messianic prospects into restorative and utopian see Gershom
Scholem, DevarimBeGo (in Hebrew), Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 1990, p. 155-190.
11

Isaiah 11 - 6, 9.
In Hebrew to know means not only to recognize, but to be intimate with.

12

This as part of what is known as The Renaissance of the 12th century, a fruitful period
which gave Europe its first universities, early bureaucracy, the emergence of vernacular
literature, and of course the reacquaintance, through the Islamic world, with Hellenistic
philosophy. On the effect of this era on the Jewish tradition and the development of Kabbalah
13

comprising commentary on canonical Jewish texts, varied interpretations of the Halakha and
customs, as well as practical instructions for various mystical techniques.
Kabbalah holds two principal secrets: the structure and dynamics of the divine worlds, and
the specific connections between the different Halakhic commandments and the rectification
of those worlds. It is thus an esoteric lore meant to position the Jewish man both
metaphysically and normatively. Over the centuries Kabbalah developed into various schools
and underwent diverse transformations, though up to and including the beginning of the
twentieth century these basic pillars of Kabbalah were maintained, and are still maintained in
Ultra-Orthodox Kabbalistic circles. What today is offered as Kabbalah in the western
contemporary spirituality milieu is usually a popularized version of Neo-Kabbalah that is far
from esoteric, and is concerned not with the Halakha and the amendment of the divine worlds,
but with private and inner spiritual transformation.
10. Hasidism
Hasidism is the first modern Jewish religious revival movement, taking shape in 18 th century
Podolia (today in Ukraine). It places emphasis on a personal, devotional and intimate
connection with the divine, and while it bases its mystical worldview on the Kabbalah, it
thrusts it, as it were, through the prism of modernity, thus placing emphasis on inner
individual transformation rather than modification of the upper worlds. As such, similarities
may be found between Hasidism and those religious traditions that aim at personal spiritual
growth or liberation. Moreover, without denying the monotheistic Gods transcendental
status, Hasidism alsoholds an immanent view of the divine, wishing to find the presence of
God in this world, in daily life and action.
11. Modern Judaism
Since the 18th century Judaism has undergone dramatic changes, corresponding to those
brought about by the rise of the naturalistic and empiric paradigms of thought, the formation
of the modern subject and the advance of democratization and secularization of social and
intellectual life. The transformation from a political hierarchy consisting of monarchy,
aristocracy and different religious groups into a matrix of egalitarian and secular citizenship
forced the birth of the Jewish individual. For most living Jews the complementary pillars of
Torah and Halakha, which stood at the center of the Jewish edifice up to that time, would no
longer occupy such a central place, and rabbinical authority would irrevocably lose much of
its power.
Members of the Jewish Enlightenment movement, called Haskalah, took upon themselves
from the middle of the 18th century to update traditional Judaism in terms of moral outlook,
and rationalize it in terms of metaphysics and theology. Some would continue to be observant
Jews, maintaining adherence to the Halakha, but would interpret their religiousness in
rational, formal and moral terms. Others would seek to transform Judaisms religious
character into a cultural project, attempting to secularize its intellectual and social resources.
Yet others, in the 19th century, fashioned new religious paths, such as Reform Judaism, in
whose adherents religious life the Halakha would be assigned a minimal role in favour of the
liberal democratic worldview, or Conservative Judaism, in which the Halakha would remain
prominent, but viewed as being in greater dialogue with the prevailing socio-cultural
conditions than as viewed in Jewish Orthodoxy and Ultra-Orthodoxy.
Jewish Orthodoxy should not be seen as traditional Judaism, unchanged, since it too has
internalized modernity in its own particular way. Since the beginning of the 19th century,
see Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002.

witnessing the early stages of the great changes that would encompass Judaism, these
religious devotees have entrenched themselves within communities made up of the faithful
in their view, seeking to minimize their exposure to novel, modern ways of life and thought.
Their perception of Halakha has become increasingly conservative and non-innovative on the
one hand, and more elaborate and hairsplitting-ly particular on the other.
It is important to note that both the Haskalah and Jewish Orthodoxy share a mutual project,
which is to achieve separation between the religious and secular elements of Jewish identity.
Both confine religion to a specific set time space: the private realm for the members of the
Haskalah, and the closed, removed community of faithful for the Orthodoxy.14 The Jewish
faith, originally a social and national system, has been protestantized, as it were, by western
modernity.
In addition to the aforementioned factions, a large section of the Jewish people has since the
19th century sought to emphasize the national aspect of Judaism, usually at the expanse of the
religious. With the rise of European nationalism, as with the corresponding rise of European
anti-Semitism, a large body of Jews, almost all non-observant, consolidated to establish the
Zionist movement, calling for the creation of a Jewish national state in the Land of Israel, the
very place Jews were exiled from almost two thousand years earlier, and since maintained in
the national conscious through religious prayer and ritual. This is a vision of Judaism as a
secular entity, not a religious one, though based on the Jewish mythical pattern of exile and
return from exile. The state of Israel, founded in 1948 (only a few years after Nazi Germany
massacred around six million Jews during World War II), is a secular democracy.
As with the developments that reconstructed Judaism during the first centuries CE, the
changes that the tradition has undergone over the last few centuries have been nothing short
of dramatic. The formation of the modern individual subject has fractured the religion into
different strands and has transformed each into a different manifestation of modernity, be it
fundamental meticulous piety, liberal egalitarian ethics, or nationalism. Only about 20% of
the Jewish people today are practicing, observant Jews, though a much greater proportion
claim to believe in the monotheistic God, and in the special relationship the Jewish people
share with Him. Belief replacing action, this represents another testimony of the privatization
and internalization that the Jewish religion has experienced in modern times.

14

David Sorotzkin, Orthodoxy and Modern Disciplination: The production of the Jewish
Tradition in Europe in Modern Times (Hebrew), HakibbutzHameuchad, Tel Aviv, 2011