Judaism

What it is

The religion and peoplehood of the Jews, founded on a covenant between God and Israel and expressed through Torah — teaching — and the mitzvot, the commandments, traditionally counted as 613.

It is not primarily a system of belief, and this is the most common Western misunderstanding. Judaism has doctrines, but its centre of gravity is practice and belonging: what you do, and whose you are. Being Jewish is a matter of descent or conversion rather than assent, a Jew who believes nothing remains a Jew, and Judaism does not seek converts.

Halakhah — the path, the body of Jewish law — governs prayer, food, Sabbath, business ethics, sexuality, mourning and the rest of ordinary life. Working out what it requires, case by case, is the central intellectual activity of the tradition.

Where it came from

The Tanakh — Torah, Prophets and Writings — reached substantially its present form over centuries in the first millennium BCE.

The decisive transformation came in 70 CE, when Rome destroyed the Second Temple. A religion organised around sacrifice at a single sanctuary, administered by a priesthood, lost both. What replaced it was rabbinic Judaism: authority moved from priests to scholars, sacrifice to prayer, and the Temple to the study house and the home.

That reconstruction produced the tradition's characteristic literature. The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, records legal opinions. The Talmud — the Jerusalem version around 400 and the Babylonian around 500 — records generations of debate about the Mishnah, and it is the Talmud's form that is most revealing.

The Talmud preserves the arguments, including the ones that lost. Minority opinions are recorded alongside the accepted ruling, with the reasoning intact. Discussions run for pages and end unresolved, marked with a term indicating the question stands. A religious tradition that carefully preserves its own rejected positions, for study, is doing something unusual — and the practice of maḥloket, principled disagreement, is treated as a positive good rather than a failure of consensus.

Medieval developments include Maimonides (1138–1204), whose Guide of the Perplexed rationalised Jewish theology through Aristotle and whose legal code remains foundational; the mystical tradition of Kabbalah; and, from eighteenth-century Poland, Hasidism, founded by the Baal Shem Tov, which brought mystical practice and joyful devotion to ordinary Jews against considerable rabbinic opposition.

Modern denominations emerged from the nineteenth-century encounter with emancipation and modernity: Orthodox in its Modern, Haredi and Hasidic forms; Conservative/Masorti; Reform/Progressive; Reconstructionist.

How it is practised

Shabbat, from Friday sunset to Saturday nightfall, with prescribed rest. Kashrut, the dietary laws. Prayer three times daily, ideally with a minyan of ten. The festival cycle — Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Pesach, Shavuot, Purim, Hanukkah. Life-cycle observances.

And study, which is worship. The daily study of Talmud is a religious act in itself, not preparation for one, and the image of two people arguing over a text is closer to the centre of Judaism than any single ritual.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the peoplehood framing is essential and consistently missed. Judaism is not the Jewish version of Christianity with different doctrines; the categories do not line up, and questions like "what do Jews believe about salvation" are often malformed.

We can say the internal diversity is enormous, and that the denominations disagree about matters as basic as who counts as Jewish and whether the law is binding.

We can say the history of persecution is not a footnote to the religion but a condition of it. Expulsions from England in 1290, France repeatedly, Spain in 1492. Blood libels. Ghettoes. Pogroms. And the Shoah, in which six million Jews — around two-thirds of European Jewry — were murdered. Jewish theology after 1945 has had to work in the shadow of that, and much of the most serious modern Jewish thought is a response to it.

We can say the mystical current is genuinely internal and genuinely restricted, and that its extraction into Western occultism is documented under Christian Kabbalah. Kabbalah is not a technique available for general use, and the tradition's own conditions on studying it are not decorative.

We cannot say what the tradition holds on most questions, because it characteristically holds several things and keeps the argument going. That is not indecision; it is the method.

Further reading

• Nicholas de Lange, An Introduction to Judaism (2010).
• The Talmud, in the Steinsaltz or Koren editions with commentary — a page is enough to see how it works.
• Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (1951) — short, and among the best things written about religious time.