Judaism was a Civilization: Toward the Reconstruction of Ancient Jewish Peoplehood

The study of ancient Judaism faces an identity crisis. Scholars are perplexed by questions concerning how we refer to the people we are studying: Were they an ethnic group, better identified as “Judeans” (S. Mason)? Or should we accept the category of “religion,” and speak properly of “Judaism” and “Jews” (S. Schwartz)? How do we proceed without using categories that are either anachronistic or inaccurate?

Part 1 of this paper demonstrates the inescapability of categorical anachronism. While targeted cases can be made for the elimination certain categories (e.g., Gnosticism, Jewish-Christianity), these arguments still use other categories (e.g., religion, Judaism, Christianity) that could similarly be deemed anachronistic, leaving scholars without any categories to describe any phenomena. Analytic categories are inherently anachronistic, and should be evaluated above all based on utility.

Part 2 of this paper proposes that scholars embrace an obviously anachronistic—but nevertheless utilitarian—term to understand ancient Jewishness: “peoplehood.” Despite its distinctively American conception (N. Pianko), Mordecai Kaplan’s conception of peoplehood was developed as a conscious rejection of more limited (and Protestant) understandings of religion. Kaplan proposed a more nuanced understanding of Jewishness, straddling the same divide (between ethnicity and religion) that confounds scholars of ancient Judaism today. Kaplan’s understanding of peoplehood—land, language, folkways, sanctions, institutions and arts—presents an uncanny (if inexact) articulation of the way scholars of ancient Judaism discern Jewishness in our ancient evidence. This in turn justifies utilizing “peoplehood” as an analytic category for the study of ancient Judaism.