How Judaism Became a Religion

Surviving the Holocaust, Jews today have become the most successful ethnoreligious minority within the global scheme of things. They are the elites of its liberal order. Their contribution to modern institutions and thought, in statecraft, economy, science, art, and everything else intellectual, esthetic and ethical, is outstanding, as are the rewards that such excellence merits. And yet the truly astounding fact is that Judaism as ‘faith and way of life’ plays so insignificant a role in their collective lives that a radical rabbi is forced to concede that ‘Judaism, the religion, came to an end some two hundred years ago; that subsequent ‘Judaisms’ (Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Humanistic, and, to some extent even Orthodox) are, in fact, not religions but secularized modifications of Judaism; and that, aside from a relatively small number of sincerely committed believers and practitioners of Halachic Judaism, Jews have in effect, said farewell to Judaism.’ (Jews Without Judaism. By Rabbi Daniel Friedman. Prometheus Books, New York, 2002. Introduction). There are other, similar voices pleading that ‘the Jews should no longer rely on the religion of Judaism for the survival of their identity precisely because if the Jewish identity relies on the obsolete religion of Judaism, sooner or later the Jewish identity will be obsolete.’ (Exodus to Humanims. By David Ibry. Prometheus Books, New York, 1999. Preface.) A recent work on Jewish intellectual history, though it never dwells on the puzzle of ‘Jewishness without Judaism’, provides a very accessible account of Jewish reaction to modernity and of the ideological shift from faith-community to nationhood that was the outcome of this counter. Leora Batnitzky’s How Judaism became a Religion is an enlightening text, orderly, insightful and quite cogent, that is also of immense interest to a Muslim reader.