Judaism is not a religion. Or rather, to be more accurate, Judaism is not a religion in the Western sense of the word, where religion can be separated from other aspects of one’s life.
Judaism is more accurately defined as the indigenous religion of the Jewish people.
In a recent conversation, a friend told me, “I am Canadian, and my religion is Judaism.” While everyone is ultimately free to define their own identities, this does not represent an accurate understanding of Jewishness.
Judaism is not simply a set of beliefs that one can separate from other aspects of one’s identity or lives. Ethiopian Jews understood this, and their Jewishness was all-encompassing.
Life, society, law, religion, and land were all wrapped into one. They did not face the challenges that Jews living in Europe encountered, such as adopting a Westernized, segmented view of religion to be accepted by wider non-Jewish society.
I am a secular Jew, and while God is not a relevant part of my personal Jewish identity, Jewish expression is embedded in my existence and in every action I undertake as a Jew. It cannot be separated from my everyday life.
For Jews to free ourselves from the shackles of mental colonization, we must define our identity through an understanding of who we are, not who the non-Jewish world wants us to be.
The transformation of Jewish identity into religious identity was not rooted in a natural evolution of theology.
Rather, following the Enlightenment, it was designed specifically to align Judaism with Christianity, so that Jews could finally circumvent antisemitism and gain acceptance into European societies.
In 1789, in the French National Assembly, Count Clermont-Tonnerre proclaimed, “Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals...the existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.” This was an attack on Jewish peoplehood and is antithetical to Jewish identity.
To gain acceptance, Jews acquiesced to these non-Jewish demands and began to alter fundamentally how we saw ourselves. The American Reform movement’s 1896 Pittsburgh Platform shed Jewish peoplehood and adopted a Christian idea of religion, stating: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine...” While this platform was ultimately rejected by the Reform Movement in 1937, this idea seeped into the minds of Jews everywhere.
We are also referred to – and worse, refer to ourselves – as a “faith.” Again, this is a Christian idea of religion and a relationship with God. It is based on blind belief.
In terms of Judaism, Maimonides explains that emunah, often translated as “faith,” actually signifies intellectual conviction and deep-rooted confidence based on knowledge and understanding.
These are fundamentally opposing ideas. To speak of the Jewish faith in the Christian hegemonic world is to speak to the Christian context, not the Jewish one.
Along with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, Judaism is classified as a world religion. World religions are transcultural and international systems of belief that have had a major impact on the world.
While it is true that Judaism lies at the center of Western values and has had an enormous impact on the world, it was not exported around the world by Jews themselves but appropriated and exported by Christianity.
Judaism is not like all other world religions
The idea of “world religions” was a way to categorize religions and decentralize Christianity from the study of religion. However, it ultimately used a Christian model of understanding to define it.
On this, scholar of religion Suzanne Owen argues that “While the world religions paradigm was brought in to allow the inclusion of non-Christian religions in education, it has instead remodeled them according to liberal Western Protestant Christian values (akin to what the Church of England promotes), emphasizing theological categories.”
Judaism could be defined as “global” due to the Jewish expulsion from Jerusalem in 136 CE and the development of the Jewish people in the Diaspora. However, despite this, it is neither transcultural nor international.
Jewish culture is still incredibly specific and stems directly from the Land of Israel.
Even the cultures in the Diaspora that emerged are largely geographical iterations of the original culture of the Jewish people.
Even though Jews live in each of the world’s four corners, their focus is always – and has always been – the Land of Israel.
Judaism is the indigenous religion of the Jewish people. Scholars Kenneth Lokensgard and Alejandro Gonzalez describe that “indigenous religions are the ancestral religions of peoples who are native to particular landscapes. Their religions help them achieve the goal of living successfully in those places.
“Thus, indigenous religions vary, just as the places their practitioners inhabit vary. Yet, the many religions practiced by indigenous peoples share common themes. These themes include emphasis upon relationship and place.”
This is a much more accurate description of Judaism, Jews, and our relationship with Eretz Yisrael.
IN THE PURSUIT of Jewish pride, Jews must define their own identities. The journey to do this, however, includes a process whereby Jews must decolonize their minds to reject ideas and paradigms that were either imposed on us by the majority or adopted to more easily navigate their world.
Jews must understand Jewish identity. But crucially, we must see it through a Jewish lens.
Otherwise, we not only continue to betray our past and present, but we also endanger the future of the Jewish people.
It will be impossible for us to survive intact if we do not understand what it means to a Jew, from a Jewish perspective.
We are not simply a religion, and certainly not one understood through the Christian idea of the word.
We are a people. We are indigenous to the Land of Israel. And we express this through the practice of Judaism, our indigenous religion.
The writer is the founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement, an educator, and the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People. His new book is Reclaiming Our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride.