What is “The Jewish People?”

“The Jews” as a collective group do not exist in any real way. Throughout history, Am Yisrael, b’nei Yisrael, or just Yisrael, have been conceptions of a collective under which all people who identify with Judaism exist, but specifically as an ancient mythopoetic self understanding. This is rooted in a belief structure geared towards Jews being individuals who have accepted a particular covenant with God through the Torah, and that not only is each individual who has accepted this covenant responsible for upholding it themselves, they are responsible for the others who have accepted it also upholding it.

This idea of a permanent, non-voluntaristic collectivity of “the Jews” was defined externally, usually if not always in the negative, which differed drastically in time and space. In short, this conception of Jewish collectivity itself is rooted in antisemitism. “The Jews,” therefore, are a product of the anti-Jewish imagination, which has been internalized by Jews as a mode of self-understanding over the course of millennia. Depending upon time and place, “the Jews” as a truly collective entity was created by the force of otherness by the powers around them. This could  have been a theological, biological, or ideological force of otherness based on the practices of those people living in those places, but was always a shifting category based on the needs of the prevailing power at the time. Therefore, not only have those systems of power that defined “the Jews” externally been the primary force behind the category itself, the definitional nature of “the Jews” in those times and places became integral to the ways in which those systems of power defined themselves. 

Contemporary Jewish institutions around the world who purport to speak for “the Jews,” be it any of the alphabet soup orgs such as the AJC, the ADL, UJA, or even the State of Israel, rely upon this conception of “the Jews” within the mind of the non-Jewish world. In doing so, they reify an ancient antisemitic trope of “the Jews” as a collective that works in concert outside of the rest of the societies of the world, across oceans and borders. 

From a more coherent historical perspective:

The Jewish Peoples are ethno-religious groups with shared traditions connecting, in part, to areas in the Land of Israel, or Palestine, as well as to other ancient sites of Israelite and Jewish habitation. Israelites and Judeans lived both under self-rule and as client states in the Land of Israel/Palestine off and on for many centuries in ancient times. Many of the Israelite groups were lost to history during the Assyrian empire’s invasion of the land. However, the Judeans, Levites, and Benjaminites made deals with various empires as they claimed the territory of the Land of Israel/Palestine. Eventually, these groups formed together as purely “Judeans” in the Land of Israel/Palestine. Many with historic ties to the ancient Judeans, like Samaritans, Karaites, gnostics, and Christians, were eventually written out of the religious self-understanding that developed. 

The Judeans moved, sometimes forcibly, sometimes in search of prosperity, to build communities throughout the Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires over the course of millennia. As these communities became deeply embedded in their various locales, the Judeans became Jews. Jews across the world share some aspects of self-understanding through the traditional sources of Torah, Tanakh, and rabbinic literature, and in each place Jews have resided, they have developed their own unique forms of practice, customs, art, food, and languages in concert with their neighbors. Throughout their dwellings around the world, Jews have variously become part of their wider local communities, have welcomed locals to join them as gerim, and have married and had children with non-Jewish people. 

With the arrival of Zionism, and the state of Israel, attempts have been made throughout the Jewish world by 

centralizing forces to erase the variety of Jewish Peoples throughout the world in order to project an image of “Jewish unity” with regard to a nationalist loyalty to the state of Israel. In spite of the many forces at play to undertake this erasure, Jews around the world have maintained their unique forms of Jewish expression, and have continued to develop new forms wherever they have resided.

Today, it is our duty to reach back to the sources of our traditions to seek out who they were built for - a search for who are we in line with the question of who were they.  The core grouping of people that led to the concept of “Jews” are the descendents of the legendary figure of Genesis, Judah. One of Jacob’s sons who travels with the rest of his family to Egypt after Joseph has gained prominence there, has multiple story arcs which speak to his character and development throughout the last ten chapters of Genesis. In Exodus, his offspring, over the course of four hundred years, have become the tribe of Judah, and exist alongside the descendents of his other siblings, who collectively have become “B’nei Yisrael” the children of Israel (that is, Jacob), or “Am Yisrael,” the people of Israel.  Throughout the rest of the Torah, members of the tribe of Judah figure as characters, but moving forward into the Hebrew Bible, the descendants of Judah become the primary characters.

Ten of the Israelite tribes that made up the Biblical Am Yisrael were lost to history through the Assyrian conquering of their territory. It is unclear historically what actually happened, or how many of the people of these tribes fled to Judah/Benjamin and assimilated. What is important to understand is the complete dissolution of any identity tied to these previous tribes, if they existed as such at all. These Israelites were not Jews, so to speak, but were Israelites.

A century and a half later, another empire, the Babylonian, rose to power. A great deal of the later books of the Prophets are about the internal strife within the lands of Judah and Benjamin around how to deal with this empire; many of the prophets chastise their leadership for failing to adequately address the issues raised by the empire’s growth. Ultimately, the Babylonians conquer Judah and Benjamin, and a portion of the population is forcibly removed to Babylonia. The Hebrew Bible’s historical narrative then splits. We read the books of Daniel and Ezekiel, who are in the Babylonian Empire. We read the books of Zechariah, Ezra, and Nehemiah, which record the return of a group of Babylonian-Judeans back to rebuild Jerusalem under the aegis of the Persian Empire, and establish new forms of ritual and practice. We read the book of Esther, which focuses on the Jewish community of Shushan, in Persia. At this point, we now see that there are communities identified as “Jewish” in multiple parts of the Persian Empire, as well as in Egypt. For the first time, here, the Jewish canon refers to someone as Jewish (ish yehudi) as such - both in the book of Esther, and the book of Zechariah. 

The term Yehudim, even, mostly refers to people living outside of the land of Judah throughout the Hebrew Bible. The one time in which the word is used within is in reference to a moment prophesying the Babylonian exile. Further, the Yehudim in this scene are, themselves, imprisoned - signaling the symbolic nature of the reference and the relevance of the Yehudim being primarily as imprisoned witnesses to a prophecy about their impending exile.

In short, the story of the Hebrew Bible is ultimately about the development of the Yehudim from the beginning of time to their patriarch, to their growing into a tribe, then their dispersal and their lives throughout the world, and their partial return to Jerusalem, the seat of the greatest king they had produced. 

From this point, we have reached the reality that “the Jewish people” attained their identity through multiplicity, not through unity. Jews living throughout the ancient empires of the world were equally Jews to those who continued living in the land of Israel/Palestine, and developed their own traditions as to their Jewishness, which spread back and forth throughout the Jewish world. In short, Jewishness was conferred as part of a religious collectivity that transcended place, time, and even form of practice, and also led to great battles amongst the various forms. We need look no further than the story of the Maccabees, and their treatment of fellow Jews who had adopted more Hellenistic forms, to see that these conflicts have been present for millennia. After these internecine conflicts reached their greatest conflagration during the Roman era, leading to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and horrific violence elsewhere, a new form of Jewish collectivity was born in order to help keep these internecine conflicts from reaching such brutal levels.

Religious Jewish collectivity as a covenant people is rooted in the Rabbinic idea that the souls of every Jewish person who would ever exist, those who are born to Jewish parents, and those who choose Judaism as their path, were all present at the moment that God revealed the Torah at Sinai, when the Israelites collectively accepted it. This created a conception of collectivity that was seeded in an individual being bound to God through this moment of covenant that stands outside of time, and is therefore not chosen, but inherited metaphysically. 

The rabbis, of blessed memory, were not comfortable with this idea of the covenantal inheritance being one that the individual did not actually choose themselves. Another rabbinic midrash about the giving of the Torah at Sinai teaches that, in fact, God held Mount Sinai itself over the heads of the Israelites (and, presumably, the souls of all future Jews) and told them that if they did not accept the covenant, they would be buried beneath the mountain.This, according to rabbinic law, was tantamount to coercion by God, and therefore undermined the validity of the covenant. They went on, though, to state that in the time of Esther, after she had saved the Jews of Persia from Haman, they then accepted the covenant of their own free will, which was binding. This teaches us that being a part of “The Jews,” according to Judaism, is voluntary, and any sense in which it is coercive is ultimately illegitimate. 

After the destruction of the Temple, and the split that occurred within the Judean population between Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, the rabbinic project most clearly represented by the Mishna and Talmud, eventually took hold throughout the vast majority of the Jewish communities throughout the world. At the same time, the Karaite approach (which rejected the rabbinic project), separated out as its own Jewish tradition. Certainly other groups, like Samaritans and even the Jews of Ethiopia, built similar projects of their own to maintain continuity of the Biblical tradition in their various ways without adopting the rabbinic project. For the majority of self-identifying Jews, the Babylonian Talmud eventually became the central project, and perhaps even the replacement for a shared homeland, of their identity and practice. Not a code of law, or religious catechism, or even collection of axiomatic wisdom - the Babylonian Talmud is an anthology transmitting long-standing conversations, debates, and quandaries for the adopters of the Jewish covenant, wherever they are, to take part in. It assigns the topics (many and widely varied) and some boundaries (less clear and rarely hard) of the conversation, but the conversation has continued until this day traveling through every time and land that Jews have ever lived in. Many attempts have been made to distill clear codes of law from the conversation of the Talmud, most famously Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon’s Mishneh Torah, and in turn, Rabbi Yosef Karo’s Shulchan Aruch, but over time the conversation only incorporates these attempts at univocalization as individual voices (if loud!) within a cacophony.

As Jewish communities proliferated around the world, they added their own voices to this conversation, often colored by languages, images, and ideas held by the non-Jewish people and cultures around them. In this way, this ongoing conversation has not only maintained Jewish memory and continuity, but has held within it bits and pieces of long-gone cultures from throughout the world, acting as a repository or museum for all of the peoples that have impacted the Jewish conversation. The academic study of Judaism has led to scholars parsing these out, and showing the influence of Roman law, Sasanian culture, Hittite legal codes, Babylonian magic, and endless other influences have been found. This does not lessen the power or uniqueness of Judaism - in fact, it shows how and why it is an important set of worldwide traditions which benefit not only Jews, but the entirety of humanity.

This academic study of Judaism, which began in Germany as wissenschaft des Judentums, uncovered the deeply complex, beautiful, ethical-spiritual tradition handed down from generation to generation of Jews. By applying the tools available to them in their culture post-Emancipation, first Moses Mendelssohn, then Abraham Geiger, sought to re-examine Jewish historical understandings and practices that they inherited and to re-interpret them as a way of more deeply integrating into German society. They both saw Judaism as, primarily, providing an ethical core for its adherents, one which was tied to a deep, spiritual understanding of the Oneness of and Infinitude of God, and the impact of that understanding on one’s own behavior in the world. To various degrees, they both saw the unique contribution of Judaism being an ancient record of peoples wrestling with the most difficult ethical questions, and codifying modes of answering them in myth, liturgy, and ritual practice, as well as philosophy and theology. Mendelssohn’s approach maintained a more stringent view as to the covenant, maintaining a belief in duty to continue performing modes of Jewish practice regardless of their contemporary meaning to the practitioners, whereas Geiger took this a step further, and began the process of what is today known as Jewish Reform. 

Geiger wrote, “whenever fresh, spiritual life awoke; whenever vernal breezes, though even only apparently, passed through the world; when new civilization made its appearance, and streams of the spirit traversed the land with their fertilizing waters, there [the Jew] also knew to draw new life, there he also was intimately bound up with the spirit of the age.”

In this vision of the Jewish role in the world, Geiger put forward the belief in a progressive revelation of truth through Jewish dispersion throughout the world. His beautiful casting of Jewish history, theology, and religion not only took root in Germany, but made its way to the shores of North America, first in the mind of Rabbi David Einhorn, then made popular through the work of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, and Einhorn’s son in law, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler. In working to establish themselves amongst the peoples of the American project, Kohler, Wise, and other allies put forth the first canonical collective statement of Jewish Reform theory in America, a document which to this day colors, shapes, and contours the entirety of Jewish practice here and beyond. The Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 was the culmination of the work started by Geiger and all those who came after him into terse, clear statements of foundational Jewish Reform, which have been accepted, rejected, and debated until this day, framing the next layer of the Jewish conversation for centuries to come. 

Today, the American Council for Judaism leads a return to this text as the foundational core of American Judaism, reaching back to find the source code for our own self-understandings and practices as American Jews. Join us in our quest to create a Judaism for today with deep roots in the sources of our ancestors, and fresh foliage energizing us with the light of today’s shared world.