Separated Siblings

An Evangelical Understanding of Jews and Judaism

John E. Phelan

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467460125
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ecumenismo religioso y cuestiones interconfesionales

In the minds of many American evangelicals today, Judaism exists in two places: the pages of the Bible and the modern nation of Israel. In Separated Siblings, John Phelan offers to fill in the gaps of this limited understanding with the larger story of Judaism, including its long history and key facets of Jewish thought and practice. Phelan shows that Judaism is anything but monolithic or unchanging. Readers may be surprised to learn that contemporary Judaism exists in a multiplicity of forms and continues to evolve, as recent changes in scholarly Jewish perspectives on Jesus and Paul attest.

An evangelical Christian himself, Phelan addresses what other evangelicals are often most curious about, such as Jewish beliefs concerning salvation and eschatology. Nevertheless, Separated Siblings is geared toward understanding rather than Christian apologetics, aiming for an undistorted view of Judaism that is sensitive to the painful history of Christian replacement theology and other forms of anti-Semitism. Readers of this book will emerge with more informed attitudes toward their Jewish brothers and sisters—those in Israel and those across the street.

CHAPTER 1

Introducing Judaism

The LORD said to Abram: “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.

I will make of you a great nation,

And I will bless you:

I will make your name great,

And you shall be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you And curse those who curse you;

And all the families of the earth

Shall bless themselves by you.”

—Genesis 12:1–3

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions! Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is. If you prick us, do we not bleed?

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.”

—John 4:21–22

Who or what is a Jew anyway? This question perplexes many non-Jews and, not surprisingly, some Jews as well. Is Judaism a religion like Christianity and Islam? Is Jewishness a racial or ethnic marker? Are Jews part of a people, citizens of a nation, whether or not they happen to live in the land of Israel? Scripture itself uses various terms to refer to the Jews. According to Rabbi Hayim Donin, “The Bible refers to Abraham as Ibri (Hebrew), probably because he migrated from the other side (east) of the Euphrates River and Ibri means ‘from the other side.’”¹ This is an ethnic identifier. Later in the Genesis narrative, Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, was famously renamed “Israel” after his wrestling match with God (Gen 32:22–32). This was, or at least became, a national identifier, the name of the land and the people. The word “Jew” came from the name for the Southern Kingdom of Israel, named after the one of the sons of Jacob and later ruled by the descendants of David: Judah. It was also the name for the Roman province of Judea. It was this term, Donin suggests, that came to link the people and their faith: “the people are called Jewish, their faith Judaism, their language Hebrew, and their land Israel.”² Judaism, then, has an ethnic, national, and religious character. All three are key to understanding Judaism today.

What Is Judaism?

Classic Judaism developed in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE). The great postwar rabbis developed and consolidated a way of Jewish life that endures to this day. For centuries this rabbinic tradition demonstrated a remarkable consistency. Throughout history there were certainly “apostate” Jews or Jews with different ideas of the precise nature of Judaism. There were Jews who converted to Christianity or Islam. There were Jews who rejected the ways their ancient rabbis had interpreted the Jewish tradition and lived the Jewish life. And there were Jews who did not take their obligations to Torah seriously. But for the vast majority of Jews, whether they lived in Palestine or Babylon, northern Europe or North Africa, it was quite clear what it meant to live and worship as a Jew. And it was no less clear to the Christian and Muslim officials who ruled over them. As my friend Rabbi Yehiel Poupko likes to say, “My grandfather did not have a Jewish identity; he was just Jewish.”

What bound these diverse groups of Jews together? Two key covenants framed Jewish self-understanding in the Bible and well into the modern era. The covenant with Abraham established a people chosen by God to bless and be a blessing. It also promised them the land of Israel as a place to live and serve God. The covenant with Moses called them to a way of life rooted in God’s Torah, God’s teaching or instruction. Throughout the history of the Jewish people, to be a Jew has meant to be a people that lived in accordance with God’s commandments as revealed in Torah. Historically, for most Jews, this Torah has included not only the five books of Moses, but the traditional rabbinic interpretations and applications of this Torah from Sinai. In the aftermath of the twin disasters of the destruction of the temple in 70 CE and the disastrous Bar Kokhba rebellion (132–135 CE), for the next fifteen hundred years, this rabbinic tradition flourished. The ancient rabbis and their heirs enabled the survival of the Jewish people. But in eighteenth-century Europe new movements brought significant changes to Judaism as well as Christianity.

New Challenges

The Enlightenment

The arrival of the Enlightenment, the explosion of “secular” learning, and the rise of the nation-state in Europe heralded these changes. The sixteenth-century Reformation had perforated the “sacred canopy” in Europe. No longer would Europe be connected by a common religious tradition. The Christian church was fragmenting into various denominations and cults. Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed, Baptists, and Mennonites all had different understandings of the nature of Christianity and the way to serve God. These divisions contributed to a vicious war—the Thirty Years’ War—fought early in the seventeenth century. The conflict left Europe weary of sectarian strife and brought with it a call for religious tolerance and freedom of conscience. Then, as now, “religion” was often seen to be the problem. As a result, individual loyalties and identities began to shift. No longer did people find their identity primarily in religion or ethnicity but in being a citizen of one of the emerging nation-states of Europe. Increasingly one was a citizen first and a believer second. While Christianity in both its Roman Catholic and various Protestant forms remained dominant, there were now more and more options for both belief and, increasingly, unbelief.

All of this obviously had a significant impact on the Jews of Europe. Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were increasingly able to participate in the wider society of Europe and the United States. They could, depending on the country, attend university, participate in politics, grow successful businesses, and contribute to the arts and sciences in ways that were closed to them before. Some doors, in some places, still remained closed. One of the great questions in Europe would be the “emancipation” of the Jews. That is, could Jews now be full citizens of their countries, members of European society, active in every aspect of national and cultural life, or were there areas of life forbidden to them? Were the Jews capable of being citizens first and Jews second? Different countries answered these questions in different ways—as we will see.

This meant that for Jews the question of “Jewish identity” was raised, if not for the first time, certainly now in a new way. For centuries, obedience to the strictures of Torah as interpreted by the rabbis had determined the boundaries of the Jewish community. But following the food laws and the Jewish calendar made full integration into the societies of Europe difficult. If Jews remained strictly Torah observant, did this mean their participation in European society was limited? Some Jews reasoned that this was a new era and that there needed to be a reform of the old practices to permit Jews to participate fully in their various societies. If the sacred canopy of Christianity was pierced in the sixteenth century, perhaps one could say the sacred canopy of Judaism was pierced in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century. What did it now mean to be a Jew when following the Jewish law was deemed by some to be optional? And what did it mean to be a Jew when someone like Karl Marx, raised as a Jew, could reject belief in God entirely?

Modern Jews faced agonizing questions: Could the “peculiar” practices of the Jews—the food laws and calendar, the strange rituals, and, in some cases, odd clothing—be laid aside for the sake of participating in European society? Would Jews be accepted into the wider world if the Jewish religion continued to be practiced, even if shorn of some of its more “alien” characteristics? Could the national aspirations of the Jews coexist with the growing nationalism of the various European nation-states? Could the Jews truly be patriotic citizens of Germany or France if they were waiting for the coming messiah? But if these things were all laid aside, what would it mean to be a Jew? And even if they were laid aside, would Europe finally accept them? Tragically, European Jews would find that, whatever they did, their efforts to fit in would be resisted—sometimes violently.

Ongoing Conflicts

In spite of the nineteenth-century process of emancipation, Europeans continued to distrust the Jews. British citizens, for example, could accept that a Baptist or Methodist or Anglican could be a loyal citizen of their country. But, they wondered, could a Jew or, for that matter, a Roman Catholic really be a loyal citizen? Both Jews and Roman Catholics were deemed to have “divided loyalties” (and sometimes still are). They were loyal to another “nation,” the Jewish people in the case of the Jews; the Pope in the case of the Roman Catholics. Could Judaism be just one more “religion” among many? Could Jews put aside their national aspirations and odd sense of “chosenness” and be loyal citizens of Great Britain, France, or Germany? Could Judaism be “just” a religion and not a nation or a people?

Some Jews sought to disconnect Judaism from national aspirations and preserve the “religious” aspects of Judaism without all of its alienating “peculiarities.” They hoped by displaying their national loyalty and patriotism to secure a place in the political, economic, and social worlds of their individual nations. At the same time, by preserving certain elements of their ancestral faith and discarding others, they hoped to preserve their Jewishness. Other Jews, however, thought this was an abandonment of what it meant to be Jewish. As the nineteenth century wore on, even these accommodating strategies failed. The reasons for this failure are not difficult to discover.

The Rise of Racism

For many in Europe and the United States, whatever the Jews thought, Judaism was not merely a nation or religion; it was a race. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, “race” is not the same thing as “ethnicity.” The latter refers to people who share a common language, social and cultural practices, and ancestral and national experiences. Ethnicity is a sociological construct. The developing pseudoscience of “race,” however, sought to classify human beings in the same way zoologists classified animals. It was a biological construct: “Large groups could be identified by skin color and then divided into subspecies by head shape, hair structure, and other quantifiable characteristics. With the chemistry of life still poorly understood, it was thought that the features of each given human subspecies were transmitted through one’s blood.”³

For the “racist” the problem with “others,” whether Jews, Africans, or Asians, was not cultural or even religious but biological. They had “bad blood.” Aristocrats everywhere sneered, “Blood will out,” when evaluating the behavior of their “inferiors.” One could change one’s religion, one’s language, one’s cultural associations, but not one’s “blood.” The brutal effects of “racial science” were seen in the lynching of African Americans in the American South and, ultimately, in Hitler’s death camps. Being a sophisticated, educated, urbane, patriotic German Jew did not matter if you had Jewish “blood.” Throughout much of Europe in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Jews were not permitted to be “merely” a religion among others. They were an “alien” race in the body politic to be marginalized and ultimately eliminated.

Zionism and Secularism

As a result of this ongoing hostility, in the late nineteenth century some Jews began to argue that, given the oppression and insecurity of Jews in Europe, they would be safe only if they had their own land, their own nation, where they could defend themselves effectively. This movement, called Zionism, w...