Michael L. Satlow
Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006
Typically, we see the nineteenth-century lives of German Jews through the lens of the Holocaust. Their pact with modernity was quixotic, their end tragic; they were never in the end successful in integrating. Yet in their choice to confront modernity head-on, German Jews had little choice. Eastern European Jews had an encounter with modernity that was no less trans-formative, even if their response was different. Judaism as we understand the term today was, by and large, the product of this encounter with modernity. The textual traditions, concepts, and ritual practices, as we have seen, of course have long and convoluted histories. But the way that we call Judaism is distinctly modern, and the place that understanding gives to ideology differentiates it from previous understanding of Jewish life and practice. What ideology gains in terms of coherence and rational justification, though, it also loses in terms of elasticity; it prepares the ground not for a single but diverse Judaism but for multiple Jewish movements, each distinguishing and defining itself against the others. Nineteenth-century Europe thus gave birth not only to Judaism but to the different movements of Judaism as well. Now each Western Jewish movement--whether neo-Orthodox, Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox), Conservative, Hasidic, Reform, or (later) Reconstructionist--would orient and justify itself according to a particular ideology, a legacy that is still very much alive.
(p. 252)
Judaism, I have argued, cannot serve as the subject of a verb; it cannot "do" anything. Judaism neither believes nor prescribes, it does not think or say. Jews, not Judaism, have agency. Judaism cannot, therefore, be seen as posessing some transhistorical essence or single defining characteristic. To talk of the Judaism of a particular historical community makes far more sense than to refer to Judaism writ large.
This refusal to understand Judaism as more than a collection of religious communities that have only a family resemblance to each other should at the same time not obscure the fact that there is a family resemblance between them. If today many people overemphasize, even by implication, the universality of Judaism, others err on the other side by not taking seriously that Jewish communities have almost always seen themselves as part of the same family and have a variety of texts and practices that link them. These characteristics, which are hardly universal across time and space, nevertheless can be charted. One Jewish community might understand its claim to be "authentically" Israel to be rooted in genetics, while another community's claim might be made on the basis of religious faith; both, however share their self-identification as Israel. Although Jewish communities, and the individuals within them, have widely diverse understandings of basic theological concepts, such as God and Torah, the vast majority share the assumption that to be authentic those beliefs must be grounded in "canonical" texts. If texts constitute one form of tradition, a set of practices constitute another. Some rituals have been remarkably persistent (although not always practiced--or practiced regularly--by the majority of a Jewish community), even if interpreted in radically different ways. Judaism constitutes a map of the ways in which real historical communities of Jews have defined themselves and struggles with their tradition.
(p. 289)
It is not helpful for either religious or secular people, Jews or not, to think of religion as pious naivete. If such a stance lessens the humanity of the religious, it also deprives the secular of a rich set of human resources. The stories of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and all other religions are not stories of abstract, childish systems but of human beings wrestling with profoundly human problems. We do not have to accept the answers of a given faith community to find something useful in them, either as individuals or communities. When I, as an individual, confront the "big" questions of life, death, and evil, I want to see what answers are out there--all of them. When I, as a citizen, debate important matters of public policy, I want to hear different perspectives. Just because I am a Jew who rejects the assertion that Christ is the son of God and who consistently votes for "pro-choise" candidates does not mean that I do not want to be challenged by or learn from Catholic bishops insisting on the preciousness of all life. Some of these resources will be more useful to us than others, and some might be simple repellent. But to reject the answers of religious thinkers just because they are religious is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
(p. 294)
