What is Judaism?

In the beginning, before "Judaism" divides into different kinds and denominations and roams across the face of the earth, is the text: the Hebrew scripture and the story it tells. I use the present tense since the story, in one retelling or another, endures. And I put "Judaism" in quotes because I am not at all sure that the word fits the thing that it names. Judaism: What is it?

I had occasion to ponder this question at some length recently when Index on Censorship commissioned Offence: The Jewish Case as a contribution to their series on free expression and religion. Some people assume that religious sensibilities are the chief obstacle to an open society and they view Judaism in this light. This is not the tack I take in the book.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines Judaism as "the monotheistic religion of the Jews, based on the Old Testament and the Talmud". Almost every element in this definition is problematic. The polysyllabic "monotheistic" strikes me as rather stilted, rather Greek; as though Judaism were an Oxford philosophical society for the advancement of the thesis that the sum total of divine beings is less than two and more than zero. The term "the Old Testament" is certainly not a Jewish name for the Hebrew scripture. Yes, from a Jewish point of view, the text is old, even ancient; but it is not an earlier model of a new and improved product; not "the Old" as distinct from "the New".

I'm not even sure about calling Judaism Judaism: the –ism ending could imply a system of belief. But while some of my best Jewish friends are believers, many are not. The name is not in the Hebrew scripture; nor could it be, for there is no word in classical Hebrew that corresponds to the English word "Judaism". True, the Greek word Ioudaismos, from which it derives, is ancient. It can be found in the second book of Maccabees which, written at least a hundred years before Jesus was born, tells the stirring story of Judah Maccabee and his brothers, "the brave champions of Judaism". But what exactly do they champion?

It might clarify matters if we slightly misspell the English translation of Ioudaismos and say as follows: The Maccabeans were "the brave champions" of Judah-ism (or Judea-ism): they were heroes of the people of Judea, the biblical "land of Judah": national heroes fighting for the Judean way of life. This casts a new light on that troubling suffix. Parallels are perilous but, roughly speaking, the -ism in "Judaism" (more precisely, the –ismos in Ioudaismos) functioned like the -ism in "Hellenism": it indicated a civilisation.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years or so and the Judeans have morphed into the Jews. Wherever the Jews go they carry their culture (their Judaism) on their backs; or rather in their books: their book of books: their bible. They have not so much scattered as proliferated into different kinds and denominations; so that in a sense there is no longer Judaism, in the singular, but many Judaisms: variations on an ancient Hebrew theme.