On the Definition of the Word “Jew”

The most difficult problem I had to navigate in constructing a PhD thesis was overcoming the problem most people, including scholars, have with understanding the definition of the word “Jew” and its ideological corrolary, “Judaism.” People use the word “Jew” in ways that suggest they imagine they know the definition of the word. It calls to mind a common aphorism, “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it.” For me, as a scholar of the very period when Judaism in its modern formulation began to take shape, the realization hit home that the greatest scholars of my generation and the generations preceding me were just as guilty as ordinary people of misunderstanding and misusing the word “Jew.”

How are we going to approach the question of defining this word? Of course, one way would be to look words up in the dictionary. We could check “religion” and then “Jew” or “Judaism.” But dictionaries are ill suited to answer complex issues. How might an anthropologist or a philosopher or a historian go about defining these terms? To grasp the problem, I think it works best to conduct a bit of a thought experiment. Consider Jewish communities and Jews in our own day and in our own environment. How do we know the people we are thinking about are Jews? How would we define the religion that they observe in their places of worship?

Most people who know anything about Jews and Judaism know that in the modern world there are different types of Jews. A person might know, for example, that a Jew is supposed to cover their head while worshiping, and perhaps even know the term kippah or yarmulke for that head covering. But where is the evidence in the Torah (Pentateuch) or the Bible that people needed to cover their heads during worship? And on the other hand, many modern Jews, especially in synagogues of the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, gather and pray bare-headed. Who decides these things and upon what do they make these decisions?

Realizing that while a unanimous standard is probably impossible, nevertheless how would we try to describe the religion which defines Judaism? Things that you will almost certainly hear as soon as the question is asked, 1) A belief in the importance of the Torah, defined as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible; 2) observing certain dietary restrictions such as avoiding pork, shellfish, and mixtures of milk and meat;[1] 3) a common liturgy with elements familiar to any Jew who attends synagogue such as the Amidah (a standard set of benedictions),[2] the Qaddish (also spelled, Kaddish) recited several times in every service);[3] 4) the notion that a quorum of 10 adults is required for communal worship;[4] 5) a common set of holidays including the Sabbath,[5] Rosh haShanah (the Jewish New Year),[6] Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement),[7] Passover;[8] 6) investing the authority to make religious decisions in the person of a rabbi.[9] Note that many indisputably Jewish groups nevertheless do not accept all of even these basic standards.

Modern Jews have recently (in the last half-century or so) been confronted by groups which assert their own special entitlement to classification as the “true” Jews or the “true” Israel. Strangely enough, this is a modern form of one of the oldest challenges to Jewish identity, namely the Christian Church. It was (and doctrinally still is) the claim of the Church that through the agency of Jesus and his apostles, biblical authority has moved to those who have accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The newest challenges have come from some African Americans claiming that they are the true Israel, and the most recent, the claim of some Jews or people claiming to be Jews, that true Judaism must include recognition of Jesus—the so-called Jews for Jesus Movement, and now often termed, “Messianic Jews” or “Messianic Judaism”.

What all these versions of Judaism share is that none of them resemble the religious beliefs, liturgies and behaviors of people living in the time when there was a Temple to the LORD in Jerusalem—with brief interludes according to biblical history, from the era of David until the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.

Many of the points I mentioned above could be the subjects of entire books, so to keep the narrative brief, I’ll have to make some simplifications. Starting with point number 1) above, many of my friends would howl in protest if I tried to claim that ancient versions of Judaism did not revere the Torah. But the plain, simple truth is that the Torah did not even exist as a book until the era of Ezra/Nehemiah (ca 450 BCE, roughtly a thousand years after the time of Moses). The Bible itself recounts the story of how a book of the Torah was “discovered” during the reign of King Josiah.[10] If that book was the larger part of Deuteronomy, as most modern scholars hold, we can say that no one until the time of Josiah was aware of a rule that Jerusalem, and the Temple of Jerusalem alone, was suitable for Israelite sacrifice and worship.

But there is something even more important about the notion that the Torah is the ultimate source of law and custom. No one today, not even the most Orthodox of the ultra-Orthodox, believes that we should follow large parts of its rules. Of course, you’ll want examples.

1)      The Torah demands the death penalty for anyone who violates the Sabbath. Jews throughout the ages have found ways to ignore this clear pronouncement.[11]

2)      The death penalty is also required for all sorts of infractions: adultery, incest, cursing or hitting a parent, idol worship, encouraging heathen belief, the daughter of a priest found liable for prostitution, a woman accused of adultery who cannot pass the required ritual. Deutronomy 13 demands the execution of an entire city if the inhabitants went along with some sort of idolatry. Numbers 1 demands the execution of an Israelite who tries to do the work of a Levite.[12]

3)      The Torah demands polygamous marriage when a married man’s brother dies childless leaving his widow. Rabbinic Judaism has made it all but impossible to honor the Torah’s requirement here.[13]

4)      If a woman is suspected of adultery, the Torah imposes a form of trial by fire.[14]

I could go on like this for a long time. People who devote their lives to religious principles have an uncanny ability to live in an intellectual form of denial. I assure you that if I raised these issues in the context of a get-together of Jews practicing the Orthodox version of Judaism, they would propose numerous explanations for why we are all honoring even these provisions in the Torah. And that, perhaps strangely enough, is the message here. From the perspective of people outside looking in, they are simply in denial, not much different from Mormons hearing that Jesus could not possibly have come to America or Muslims being told that Mohammed never set foot in Jerusalem. But every religious group has a set of principles by which to claim that their views are enshrined (so to speak) in historical fact.

Let’s return to the main point. If you were to describe a modern Jew and the form of worship they invoke when gathered, what would you say? You would notice some physically prominent aspects of dress (again somewhat dependent on the movement within Judaism) such as various forms of head-coverings, scarves with fringes, sacred dressings called “phylacteries” (t’fillin) which would be seen as cubes mounted by leather straps on the head and left arm.[15] Jews from every branch of Judaism gather in places called “synagogues”—interestingly a word which originated in Greek rather than Hebrew. If you ventured into the synagogue, you would see that the service was led by either one of the congregants or perhaps the congregational rabbi or a singer called a hazzan or cantor. The congregation in general would be governed by a rabbi who decides the rituals of the congregation.

You would also see a prayer book called a siddur which provides guides for the various daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rituals. While there are different versions of the siddur for the various movements, much of the content is standardized based on ancient models.[16] I’ve already touched on this above, but to provide just a bit more detail, the service requires a quorum of ten individuals (men for Orthodox congregations, adult men and women for most other movements) without which the communal prayers cannot be recited. The service is built on units which include modules designed to reflect ancient practices. For example, the morning service is called shaharit which means “morning” or “dawn” and was the name given to the morning sacrifice when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. On the Sabbath, there is a service unit called musaf which means “additional” and is designed to reflect the additional Sabbath sacrifice that was offered on that day in Temple times. The afternoon service is labeled minhah which was the grain offering offered in the Temple in the afternoon when it stood. Many modern Jews also meet for a nighttime service called ma’ariv which means “evening” and corresponds to nothing from the Temple era.

The core of each of these modern services is a prayer called the Amidah which means “standing” or Shmoneh Esrei, which means, “the eighteen benedictions.” As you are beginning to sense, the complexities grow and grow because while there are various versions of this prayer for various occasions, in none of them do Jews recite 18 benedictions. The most frequently recited version has 19, the Sabbath service version, just 7.

I think this is sufficient data for me to try to make my point. You now have an idea of how Jews dress, gather, and worship in our own time. Now let’s set the time machine back to the period when the Temple still stood. How recognizable would the people and their religion be to you?

First, while there were synagogues very late in that Temple era, they were not used for prayer. They were essentially schoolhouses. Almost no one in those days could afford to own the sacred texts, so synagogues arose to house sacred texts for communal study. People who wished to approach God understood that there was only one way to do it: a pilgrimmage to God’s home on Earth, the Temple of Jerusalem. A book of the Torah demanded no less.

Who were the authority figures for the Judeans? There was a king—and if you didn’t think the king had power, you might find yourself mounted on a cross.[17] If you needed an explanation of what to offer in the Temple on your pilgrimmage, that was the job of the priests and levites. I suspect some of the merchants who lined the entrances to the Temple would have been happy to oblige as well.

Here is what you would not have seen: rabbis. Now, I know that if you read traditional Jewish texts like the Mishnah (composed about 250 CE) you will find entire generations of rabbis who lived according to the Mishnah while the Temple stood, and for about 200 to 300 years before. But you won’t find any references to those rabbis in texts written before 70CE.

Now, here I must add a complication. Perhaps oddly enough from a Jewish religious perspective, someone could complain that one very famous “rabbi” (so idenitified in the Mishnah) was mentioned in the Christian Bible, namely one Gamliel. There are several aspects to that identification. First, Gamliel is not called a rabbi in the two places he is mentioned, Acts and Acts of the Apostles.[18] He is identified as a Pharisee, sometimes called a “doctor of the law” in modern translations. Second, we must note that both of those sources date from the period after the destruction of the Temple, so once again we lack evidence for a “rabbi” which predates the loss of the Temple. By the way, while Josephus certainly lived while the Temple was in existence, everything Josephus wrote was written after the destruction of the Temple.

Rabbis are not mentioned in any of our major sources which predate the Temple destruction. There are no rabbis in Josephus, Philo, or any of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

What this means is that the religion we know as Judaism is entirely the construct of a theocratic class which did not exist prior to about 200 CE, and which is granted absolutely no authority by any source prior to that date. All the sources, and among them are the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”), Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Christian Bible, the writings of Philo and Josephus, all these sources recognize many types of religious authority: kings, prophets, seers, elders, priests and levites. Nowhere do we find the notion that mere study without the sanctity of these other qualifications grants religious authority.

What these rabbis accomplished in the decades and centuries following 200 CE was nothing short of a revolution. Their rulings abrogated huge portions of the Torah and replaced them with a theology that could only be described as alien to biblical ideology. If a person can’t get to the Temple in Jerusalem, that prayer called the Amidah can serve as a replacement. Can’t offer a sacrifice? Just burn a small amount of the bread dough and that will suffice. Accuse a woman of adultery? Sorry, no one knows how to perform the ritual of the suspected adultress (sotah), so you’ll have to find another way to solve your marital issues. Think someone deserves the death penalty? Well, you’ll have to show that the sin was viewed by two reliable witnesses who warned the person of his liability before he committed the act.

It is probably impossible to convince anyone these days that people who lived in the era of Jesus and Hillel (if indeed he is not a figure of legend) should not be called “Jews.” But it is vital to a proper appreciation of history that we understand that no modern Jew lives their life in anything remotely resembling the ways of life of Jesus and Hillel. Jesus, Hillel, Josephus, Philo, Herod—all these people believed that there was only place where God can be worshipped, the Temple in Jerusalem. They believed that the only proper way to worship God was by presenting offerings in that Temple. They believed that all religious authority was invested in priests and levites, but that the Torah had also granted authority to kings, prophets, and elders. They sought out the opinions of seers and soothsayers. Even a half-century after the the Temple was destroyed, the people who followed a charismatic leader named Simon ben Kosba did so because they believed him to be invested with sacred authority—the notion of a “messiah” which Christians were actively arguing was a unique source of authority. Ben Kosba’s followers nicknamed him “bar Kokhba”, the son of a star which was an allusion to a verse in the book of Numbers.[19] His detractors, by the way, nicknamed him “ben Kozba”, the son of a lie.

And yes, there were the beginnings of communities where a teacher was also granted religious status—the Dead Scrolls mention someone they called the “Teacher of Righteousness.” Perhaps it was from such seeds that rabbinic Judaism emerged a century or two after the Temple was brought down. But we must fully grasp that such teachers could only gain authority once it was no longer possible for all those other authorities to perform their Torah obligated duties. Even priests (“cohanim”) could do nothing without the Temple.

Ultimately, the single most important issue for almost any religious group is the issue of authority. Who gets to make the important decisions? What is the most important differentiation between the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant religious groups? Of course, it was the rejection of Papal authority that the Protestants were protesting. Mormons consider themselves Christians, and many scholars of religion agree that they are. But how many religious leaders of other Christian groups say that if you believe in a book outside the canon of Christianity and accept a prophet not recognized by other Christians, you can’t be considered Christian. In the third century CE, some Jews decided that they would cast their lot with the rabbis, scholars of tradition who seemed to them to have a valid case for wielding authority. Those who did not became Christians or dropped out of historical observation. Many centuries later, a group of Jews frustrated at rabbinic authority created a splinter group called the Karaites. Their name was emblamatic of their theology: only the written the word, the Miqrah, the Hebrew Bible, could be relied upon for religious authority. The books of the rabbis, the Talmud, were declared to be worthless.  Karaites became one of the largest groups of people who placed their authority in the Hebrew Bible. Of course, it turned out that it is impossible to allow everyone to make their own interpretation of the Bible, so the Karaites created their own Code of Practice, Kitāb al-Anwār wal-Marāqib, administered by their own hierarchy of teachers. It remains a matter of some controversy in the modern state of Israel as to whether Karaites should be considered Jews.

So, at long last, let’s return to the original point. In what way can we describe a person from the days of Hillel and Jesus a “Jew”? If those people were Jews, then how can we describe modern people who worship in completely different ways using the same word? My own personal solution to this dilemma is that I try to describe people like Hillel and Jesus as “Judeans.” People who lived in the era of the hegemony of Judah and worshipped in the ways of other Judeans. After the fall of the Temple, those people who followed Jesus became known as Christians. And those people who gave authority to the author of the Mishnah, Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Nasi, I call “rabbinic Jews.”

I am completely cognizant of the impossibility of convincing most modern people that the Judaism that Jesus and Hillel followed cannot possibly be identified with the religion of Maimonides. In the words of the Mishnah itself, quoting one Rabbi Tarfon, הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה. “We may not be able to complete the task, but neither are we free to abstain from it.”[20]

Brief Bibliography

A good bibliography for this topic could easily include hundreds of books and articles. For this brief essay, I will limit my recommendations to a few relatively recent publications which I think are particularly germane and worthwhile.

Adler, Yonatan. The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-historical Reappraisal. United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2022.

Boyarin, Daniel. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. United States: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Cohen, Shaye J. D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. United Kingdom: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, 2006.

Collins, John J. The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul. United States: University of California Press, 2017.

Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. United Kingdom: HarperCollins, 2016.

Goodman, Micah. Maimonides and the Book that Changed Judaism: Secrets of the Guide for the Perplexed. United States: Jewish Publication Society, 2015.

Halivni, David Weiss. The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud. United States: Oxford University Press, 2013.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Levine, Amy-Jill. The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. United States: HarperCollins, 2009.

Lieberman, Saul. Greek in Jewish Palestine: Hellenism in Jewish Palestine. Israel: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1994.

Sacrifice, Cult, and Atonement in Early Judaism and Christianity: Constituents and Critique. United States: SBL Press, 2017.

Saldarini, Anthony J. When Judaism and Christianity Began: Essays in Memory of Anthony J. Saldarini. Belgium: Brill, 2004.

Satlow, Michael L. Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice. United Kingdom: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Schiffman, Lawrence H. From text to tradition: a history of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. United States: Ktav Publishing House, 1991.