Judaism

Adele Reinhartz on the dilemma of the ‘Jew’ or ‘Judean’ debates

Mason is surely correct that ioudaios was a complex term that carried ethnic,
political, cultic, and many other dimensions, even if the jury is still out on the
existence or non-existence of religion in antiquity (see Shaye Cohen, Cynthia
Baker, Seth Schwartz, and Daniel R. Schwartz, who have more nuanced
positions on the matter). But why broaden the referent of Judean from its primary
geographical meaning when there is a perfectly good English word — Jew —
ready to hand? As the Pew Report and many previous surveys and sociological
studies have shown, Jewish identity includes the same elements — including
ethnic, political, cultural, genealogical, and, yes, geographical — that, in
Mason’s view, are conveyed by the Greek terminology. To define Jew solely or
even primarily in religious terms is simply wrong. Further, erasing Jews from
Jewish antiquity, while presumably solving one historical problem, creates
another historical dilemma: how to account for the sudden appearance of Jews
in late antiquity as a fully-formed ethnic and religious group that saw itself —
and was seen by others — as continuous with the ioudaioi of the Greco-Roman
era? Scholars of the Greco-Roman period may not feel called upon to answer
such questions, but the dilemma cannot be ignored.

Adele Reinhartz, ‘The Vanishing Jews of Antiquity’, MRB, 24 June 2014

One thing that has become increasingly clear to me is just how much the socio-religious phenomenon we call ‘Judaism’ was itself a matter of intense debate and negotiation in the first century CE. As Reinhartz goes on to emphasize in her response to Reed, a certain anachronism is perhaps inevitable in historical work, yet I wonder if some approaches don’t risk more distortion than others. In other words, the risks of ‘atomizing’ linguistics, ‘parallelomania’, and anachronistic ‘imposition’ of frameworks are well-known, but I wonder if the shape and scope of certain types of scholarly theses and monographs increases rather than attenuates exposure to these risks.

Annette Yoshiko Reed on atomizing approaches to language

The recent Jew and Judean Forum at Marginalia Review of Books is worth careful consideration for anyone interested in ancient Judaism and Christian Origins. Also, thanks to the editor Timothy Michael Law, you can read the posts here or download them in handy ebook format or pdf.

I found the two paragraphs below by Annette Yoshiko Reed in her contribution “Ioudaios before and after ‘Religion'” particularly helpful.

The focus on word-level translation reflects a longstanding tendency in Biblical Studies to treat the etymologies and histories of specific words as direct windows onto ancient thought — with the first known occurrence of a word in writing too often conflated with the birth of a concept. [See Malcolm Lowe’s essay in the forum.] If such approaches feel natural, even despite their bizarre atomization of language, it is in part because modern scholars of ancient ioudaioi have long delighted in quests for the “origins” or “invention” of concepts now common in the West. Teleology, of course, makes for poor history, and presentism courts anachronism. Yet their enduring power may help to explain the appeal of reducing the meaning of ioudaios to a question of when. To assert a moment before which a word bore a now-familiar meaning, after all, is also to evoke the point after which we might confidently presume what it means to us today.

For the limits of such approaches, we need look no further than to the use of the English term “Jew.” Those who prefer to translate first-century uses of ioudaios as “Judean” argue that “Jew” is a religious affiliation and therefore anachronistic prior to the Christian invention of “religion” in the third or fourth centuries. But this line of reasoning, as Reinhartz notes, presumes that “Jew” denotes a religious affiliation for “us” — an assumption not all English speakers who self-identify as Jews today share, as 2013 Pew polls made dramatically clear. The persistence of multiple meanings can be seen even in the scholarly debate about ioudaioi. If anything, the debate demonstrates how the term “Jew” can seem self-evidently religious to some people from the very same time and culture (and even the same profession and similar education) as others who understand it as self-evidently ethnic, political, cultural, or otherwise not or not just religious. It is not simply that the history of the meaning of ioudaios might be told differently if we chose a different end-point, such as the modern equivalents in Hebrew or Japanese or German. Even the English term “Jew” resists reduction to a single meaning at the end of a single story.