Is Judaism A Religion, An Ethnicity, Or A Culture?
Is Judaism a religion, an ethnicity, or a culture?
A question that has garnered a lot of interest throughout Jewish history is that of whether Judaism is a religion, an ethnicity, a culture or a mixture of the three. Of course for many Jews and different people there are varying degrees of validity that can be ascribed to each claim. In this essay I will look at each claim individually but first in order to understand which of the three things Judaism actually is we have to clearly define what each of the words mean and in what context they relate to Judaism.
Religion is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods’1. Ethnicity is defined in the same …show more content…
The increased secularisation of Judaism has also meant that people have accepted the usage of the word ‘ethnicity’ to describe themselves. In today’s society there is much less emphasis upon the religious tradition, instead now we begin to see people who may call themselves Jewish due to the way they live their lives through cultural values that have been diluted over the centuries. They may feel an affinity towards some of the traditions but may not fully understand the origins or reasons why they are celebrated. In fact there are a large amount of Jews in Israel who consider themselves to be secularised.
The final claim in this essay is that of Judaism being a culture. Clifford Geertz speaks on the idea of culture in his book “the Interpretations of Culture”:
“In any case, the culture concept to which I adhere has neither multiple referents nor, so far as I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward …show more content…
But the need for mixed marriages would have to be felt by the majority; their mere recognition by law would certainly not suffice.”11
This shows how much the culture itself means to many Jews, in this quote we do not see a direct reference to religious practice but to the things that inherently make someone Jewish. Therefore I think that Herzl is placing much more upon the idea of Judaism as a culture than as anything
A question that has garnered a lot of interest throughout Jewish history is that of whether Judaism is a religion, an ethnicity, a culture or a mixture of the three. Of course for many Jews and different people there are varying degrees of validity that can be ascribed to each claim. In this essay I will look at each claim individually but first in order to understand which of the three things Judaism actually is we have to clearly define what each of the words mean and in what context they relate to Judaism.
Religion is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods’1. Ethnicity is defined in the same …show more content…
The increased secularisation of Judaism has also meant that people have accepted the usage of the word ‘ethnicity’ to describe themselves. In today’s society there is much less emphasis upon the religious tradition, instead now we begin to see people who may call themselves Jewish due to the way they live their lives through cultural values that have been diluted over the centuries. They may feel an affinity towards some of the traditions but may not fully understand the origins or reasons why they are celebrated. In fact there are a large amount of Jews in Israel who consider themselves to be secularised.
The final claim in this essay is that of Judaism being a culture. Clifford Geertz speaks on the idea of culture in his book “the Interpretations of Culture”:
“In any case, the culture concept to which I adhere has neither multiple referents nor, so far as I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward …show more content…
But the need for mixed marriages would have to be felt by the majority; their mere recognition by law would certainly not suffice.”11
This shows how much the culture itself means to many Jews, in this quote we do not see a direct reference to religious practice but to the things that inherently make someone Jewish. Therefore I think that Herzl is placing much more upon the idea of Judaism as a culture than as anything