What is Judaism?
We Lack a Language to Describe Historical Jewish, Trans-Geographic, Confederated Polities
Dear Readers,
First of all, I would like to apologize for my long delay. This year has not been an easy-going one for me thus far. It started off on January 1st, when I woke up quite sick, and was more or less bed-bound due to a difficult case of Covid for the entire month. Next, my one-year old daughter caught the flu. This was followed by me developing an ear infection. I then went through a brief period of joy when I found myself pregnant, only to once again hit a physical and emotional roadblock as I suffered a miscarriage. Then, for good measure, I got sick one more time. I hope that with such an extreme first two months of the year, the rest will be smooth sailing.
In other news, I would like to update everyone as to what I am working on. I do not have a conclusive answer yet, and I imagine this line of inquiry will be somewhat of a lifelong project.
Our Understanding of Judaism is Deeply Deficient: How Modern Language and Concepts Obstructs Historical Inquiry
My question is: what is Judaism?
This sounds simple, no? Judaism is a religion. The first monotheistic Abrahamic religion. A persecuted minority for several millennia in both Christian and Muslim-ruled lands. We believe in the Torah, and many also believe Halacha - the laws of Rabbinic Judaism. “White Jews” are from parts of Europe, and we are called “Ashkenazi.” There are also browner Jews who follow slightly different rules, and we call them “Sephardi,” whose customs come from Spain, and some of those are “Mizrahi,” who are Jews of the Middle East and North Africa.
However, this account of Judaism is, at best, deeply incomplete, steeped as it is in the myths of modernity. It uses relatively new conceptual language, like “religion,” or “belief,” that obscures and erases a comprehensive account of our history. Not only does its wording obscure more than it reveals, but its omissions are also glaring. This modern definition of Judaism takes as a given the modern creation and understanding of idigeneity, the nation-state, citizenship, migration, the borders and boundaries that we use to define those preceding phrases, and a whole host of other modern signifiers, creations of Enlightenment, colonial, and postcolonial politics and scholarship. The omissions that are glaring, then, are omissions that, to some degree, we do not yet have the language with which to address. That is to say, by not more fully interrogating what Judaism means, we are also not fully interrogating our modern assumptions about borders, polities, and belonging.
History Academia’s Hyper-Specialization Produces Oversights and Assumptions
Indeed, as even Hannah Arendt pointed out in her introduction to Origins of Totalitarianism, historical scholarship on Judaism is nearly nonexistent. Today’s academia seems to have provided some more investigations into material accounts of our past, but the nature of today’s academic factory is one of the the Marxist account of alienated labor - the worker who only makes a small component of a larger project, and may not even know when the end product is supposed to be. They are specialized to reproduce their own small, siloed component as efficiently and productively as possible.
Today’s historical scholarship, not only in its ideological fervor, but simply in its hyper-specialization that is the response to academic market demands, will produce scholarship with hypothetical titles like, “The Jews of Lisbon: 1250-1255, Textile and Trade.” Or maybe, “The Jews of Lisbon, 1250-1255, Textile and Trade: A Gendered Analysis.” To clarify, these are not real books, as I did not want to purposefully target any historian here, but to anyone who has pursued academic history, such types of titles are commonplace. Now, I do think these types of articles or monographs can contain important reference material. But we are steeped in reference material with little to tie together a cohesive picture, little to question the underlying categories that we are supposedly analyzing and historicizing.
Scholarship in the Right Direction: Analyzing the Modernity of “Religion.”
There are some scholars who do try to breakthrough the conceptual laxity to which Judaism is treated by historians. Of note is Leora Batnitzky, whose book, How Judaism Became a Religion, is a must read on how the concept of “religion” came about. Batnitzky explains how the modern category of “religion” first arose as a product of Protestant exploration and colonialism to describe ritual and practices in foreign lands. When imported back to Europe, Jewish Enlightenment philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn used the new category of “religion” as - if one is being cynical, apologetics, or if one is being optimistic, political activism - an explanation as to why Enlightenment Jews would not simply convert to Christianity if they supported the early Enlightenment ideals of universalism. Batnitzky outlines how, in Western Europe and later, somewhat separately, in Eastern Europe, both Jews and non-Jews alike came to reason their way out of the ancient concept of Judaism as a separate nation residing within nations, as a unique form of polity, and refashion it into a narrative of private faith, to mixed social and political results.
Batnitzky’s book, a true masterpiece for providing much needed conceptual scholarship for Enlightenment and post-Napoleonic European Jewry, is only a start, and should be a guiding light for the future of how historical scholarship addresses Judaism. Her work does not cover the lands we would now call the “Middle East,” nor does it address questions about the structure of pre-Napoleonic Jewry. That is not an indictment of Batnitzky, it is just stating the reality that there is far more ground to cover.
What Was Global Jewish Polity and Governance Prior to the 19th Century?
Going back to the start, let us give some brief political historical background behind the ultimate question of, “What is Judaism,” and what we might now see as the derivative question, “What is a nation,” or “What is a polity?”
Under the Ottoman Empire, for instance, Jews and other religious minorities existed in an organizational structure called millets, where they had some degree of self-governance and autonomy in compliance with the rules of the Sultan, albeit it in a diminished social and political position to their Muslim counterparts, or even other religious minorities. Unfortunately for Jews, we did not have the backing of foreign empires or kingdoms to assure our relative safety and political power, as did the numerous Slavic-speaking and Orthodox Christian-derived minorities who had the protection of Russia, nor other Christians such as the Maronites of Lebanon within the district of Syria, protected by France, nor the general state of Christians even prior to the 18th century due to the Capitulation system with other Christian governments.
Meanwhile, prior to the Napoleonic-era in Western and later Central Europe, we at the very least know that Jews likewise had a form of semi-autonomous governance, living in communities with their own courts, policing, rule of law, contracts, jurisprudential debates, political philosophies, and more. The best analogy I can try to give is that of Native American reservations. Most Native American nations have their own political bodies and have some sort of citizenship beyond that of an American citizenship. Many will also have a faith and associated rituals, but being part of a native nation is not solely a religion, and living on a reservation is not solely a community of co-religionists. Likewise, while American, they are not American alone. Yet for Jews of Europe, while the reservation analogy is helpful in explaining the structure of a polity-within-a-polity, the conditions were far was worse. Jews were not considered to be of the same “nationality” nor entitled to citizenship as were the Christians on whose land their reservations existed, an existence only begrudgingly tolerated when we were deemed useful, while undergoing stringent laws and discipline to ensure our segregation and powerlessness, in conjunction with random sprees of violence and expulsions. Our “reservations” on Christian land, self-governing to some degree, were also at the utter whim of the rulership of such land. The analogy breaks down in that Jews did not get to also be “American” while being “indigenous.” We did not get to be “French” while being “Jewish.” In fact, we did not gain anything akin to the modern political category of “indigeneity.” Instead, we were simply often called “the Hebrew Nation.”
In Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition documents from the 15th century, one can find a plethora of statements such as, “My name is Abraham. I was born in Fez and now live in Lisbon. I am a member of the Catholic faith and the Hebrew nation.” You could not “convert” your way out of your - as our contemporaries might say - your nationality, or your ethnicity.
Furthermore, I did not touch on Jews of the Safavid Empire - the region now largely associated with Iran but also Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, the Caucasus, etc., nor Jews of Russia, as the Jews only entered Russia towards the end of the 18th century, and were heavily restricted to the geographic “Pale of Settlement” and heavily impoverished. My knowledge of the political organization of Jews under the Pale of Settlement is even more lacking than the above examples.
What is Judaism? Breaking Down the Question
With this background, let us go back to trying to break down the question of, “what is Judaism,” into slightly more digestible, albeit still large, components.
(1) What was the political, legal, and social relationship between the different Jewish “reservations” on Christian lands? Such questions can include: what was it like to travel between the Jewish polities on different land, what were the contracts like between separate polities, did they consider themselves to be operating under the common law of Halacha and view themselves as under one government, one “Hebrew Nation?”
(2) What was the relationship between the Jewish “reservations” on Christian lands, and the Ottoman Jewish millet? How would they envision their relationship? What was that material relationship like?
(3) How was the Ottoman Jewish millet modified by location, such as in which district the Jews were residing. For example, did the Jews of Greater Syria (areas that now include Israel and Lebanon) have a different type of political or legal arrangement with the Jews of Anatolia? What was travel like for Jews in the Ottoman Empire between districts? What of land purchases?
(4) As of yet unmentioned due to my own lack of knowledge, what was the relationship further between these polities and the Jews of the Safavid Empire, now a region associated with Iran, or later in history, the Jews of the Pale of Settlement in Russia?
And most importantly,
(5) Can we envision a new and unique political structure to describe this geographically dispersed confederation of Jewish quasi-autonomous polities? In some ways, we can picture the historical polity of Judaism as the inverse of empire: a dispersed political entity whose existence constituted a minority in each geographic region they inhabited, who were powerless over their non-minority neighbors and subject to frequent migrations, but who nevertheless had power within a trans-geographic government of sorts. What would we call this? How can we describe this? It is unique, and introduces a category beyond our defaults: it is not nation, not empire, not city-state, not colony.
To answer these questions, we need more details. Many of our readily available historic reference materials are, unfortunately, slightly too zoomed-in to start analyzing the legal and political relationships between non-geographically adjacent Jewish polities, let alone to use that understanding to challenge our concept of terms like “empire,” “indigenous,” or “nation.”
In an Academic World Ruled by “Theory,” We are Curiously Absent a “Jew Theory;” or, How a Failure to Conceptualize Jewish Political History Allows Left-Wing Antisemitism to Flourish.
Part of why this area is, I believe, so important to study, is not just for the pure intellectual challenge of it - which I admittedly love - but also as a crucial missing piece in the fight against modern antisemitism, which unfortunately is largely coming from the far Left and their ideological alliance with radical Islamism. We live in a world ruled by academic notions of minority “theory.” We have “race theory,” “gender theory,” “queer theory,” and more. We take these “theories” and use them as translating devices, inputing our former scholarship into this translating device and outputting papers with titles like, (again, a hypothetical title), “Queering the Borderlands: an Analysis of Labor and Sexuality.” We have no “Jew theory.” We have no, “Jewing the Borderlands: an Analysis of Migration and Autonomy.”
And to be fair, I am not sure I want anything to bolster the bloated world of “theory” and its algorithmic approach to scholarship. But I do think, for the reality of living in a world imbued with critical theory as a pillar of its ideology, people interpreting such inquiries into a language of “Jew Theory” could be a way to help those who hate us come to understand us in a new light. I am not opposed to investigating what a language of “Jew Theory” would look like so long as we do not do as many self-declared activists of today do, and mistake that lens for the totality of reality, or double down on theory as ideology.
But to be clear, I do not want to envision this project as an offshoot of critical theory. To the contrary. If anything, I want any of the influences of such inquiries on critical theory to be accidental. Instead, I wish to use my inquiries on Jewish historical polity to challenge the dominance of theory in academic scholarship, to show how shaky are its set of foundations, and to reveal the prejudice in how the assumptions of critical theory are made and the how the tools of critical theory are applied. Primarily though, I value historical scholarship that focuses on construction rather than deconstruction.
Historians Do Not Know what they Do Not Know
Let us return to the original question: what is Judaism? The fact that we do not have a good answer has done a disservice not just to Jews, but to the larger state of scholarship. Reading through historical textbooks or monographs, I often find the treatment of Jews to be one-dimensional and intellectual sloppy. A lot of assumptions are taken as given. Historians do not know what they do not know. Moreover, the lack of a language to adequately describe Jewish political history is one that keeps our global analysis of the past stale and presentist.
And to reiterate, this scholarly omission of a comprehensive understanding of the trans-geographic political confederation of Judaism, and its implications for our general understanding of polities and borders, has provided a ripe culture for leftist antisemitism to grow.
I hope to be able to provide some better answers to these questions that I have proposed above. I am focusing my research each day on better understanding a wide swath of history in hopes of contextualizing Judaism, Zionism, and Israel in a manner that few will gain from the current state of humanities or social science academia, let alone from how the classes one takes as an undergraduate or graduate student in this lackluster academic climate feeds into media and other low-paid, high-status cultural drivers, impressing upon millions a false understanding of Judaism and history. I hope that through closely reading a never-ending pile of books and scholarship, I can help distill some of scholarship to the public, piece together the fragments of our past, and help introduce a better language with which to treat Judaism with the wholeness that has been lost to it.
I'm following with interest!
This is incredible. I hadn’t thought of it this way before but I completely agree. I am so excited to follow along and learn more!