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This chapter discusses the well-documented shift of the religious norm that transformed the Jews into the People of the Book. During the first century BCE, some Jewish scholars and religious leaders promoted the establishment of free secondary schools. A century later, they issued a religious ordinance requiring all Jewish fathers to send their sons from the age of six or seven to primary school to learn to read and study the Torah in Hebrew. With the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish religion permanently lost one of its two pillars (the Temple) and set out on a unique trajectory. Scholars and rabbis, the new religious leaders in the aftermath of the first Jewish–Roman war, replaced temple service and ritual sacrifices with the study of the Torah in the synagogue—the new focal institution of Judaism.

This concluding chapter highlights some puzzles that punctuate Jewish history, from the mass expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492–97 to today. A growing number of scholars have been studying the long-term impact of institutions by illustrating that some contemporary economic patterns have been influenced by institutions that emerged centuries ago. This book contributes to this literature by showing that the transition of the Jews from farming into high-skill occupations has also been the outcome of the availability of contract-enforcement institutions shaped by the unique features of the Jewish religion. Meanwhile, social scientists have always been fascinated by the study of religion and by the influence religious values and norms may have on human behavior. Ultimately, the cultural values and social norms that Judaism fostered two millennia ago shaped the demographic and economic history of the Jewish people through today.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Jews' transition into urban and skilled occupations. This transition was the outcome of a profound transformation of the Jewish religion after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, which shifted the religious leadership within the Jewish community and transformed Judaism from a cult based on ritual sacrifices in the temple to a religion whose main norm required every Jewish man to read and to study the Torah in Hebrew and to send his sons from the age of six or seven to primary school or synagogue to learn to do so. The implementation of this new religious norm during the Talmud era determined three major patterns in Jewish history: the growth and spread of literacy among the predominantly rural Jewish population, a comparative advantage in urban skilled occupations, and the voluntary diaspora of the Jews in search of worldwide opportunities in crafts, trade, commerce, moneylending, banking, finance, and medicine.

Since 2005, a philanthropic organization, PJ Books, has set out to influence American Jews by reaching them in one of their most tender, intimate family moments: parents reading to children. The program uses children's books to influence Jewish families' values and practices. This chapter argues that PJ Library demonstrates the burden that American Jewish institutions place on popular culture to shape their communities. Though staff members deny that PJ Library is engaged in religious activity, the organization does, in fact, use children's books as a tool to shape American Jewish religion. It uses children's books to introduce families to or reinforce their connection with sacred rituals and Jewish customs. More broadly, PJ Library seeks to persuade American Jewish families to make Judaism an important part of their lives and to connect them, one illustrated book at a time, to networks that will help them do so.

This chapter discusses Maimonides' treatment of Christianity. Since Maimonides is the most theological of all the halakhists and the one most interested in the ideas that underlie religious praxis, it also examines how informed he is about the ideas underlying the non-Jewish practices he approves or disapproves of. Maimonides' rulings about Christianity always deal with it in comparison to Islam and to ‘paganism’. Islam and Christianity are, for Maimonides, the two other rival religions his contemporary Jews must still take seriously, just as paganism was the rival religion Jews had to take seriously before the rise of either Christianity or Islam. The question of whether paganism is still present in Christianity or Islam is of great concern to Maimonides when differentiating between these two other religions and their adherents. All paganism, whether involving the worship of a plurality of gods (polytheism) or the use of images in worship (idolatry), is to be combated in every way. But are all non-Jewish religions polytheistic and are all their adherents idolaters? The chapter also looks at the normative implications of Maimonides' treatment of Christianity for Jewish praxis today.

This chapter discusses Josephus's account of the siege of Jerusalem, which includes unique features that cannot be found in his other works, noting that this account expresses definite views on the customs and the religion of the Jews, and on their leader as well. It tries to establish the account' source/s and identify its hidden messages, in order to add to the understanding of Posidonius's attitude toward Jews and Judaism.

This chapter studies Robert Liberles's Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History (1995). Salo Baron became one of the foremost Jewish historians of the twentieth century and one of the pioneers of academic Jewish studies in the United States. Baron's life was that of a scholar, and included in Liberles's work is a fine attempt to sort out the academic politics which served as a background to his appointments and sojourn at the Jewish Institute of Religion and, later, in the Miller chair of Jewish history and institutions at Columbia University. Liberles places this story properly in the context of the transfer of Judaic scholars and their scholarship from Europe to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. He also places proper emphasis on the novelty of Jewish history studied in the context of a non-Jewish institution of higher education. And, further, the author chronicles and analyses Baron's ambitions to be heard and respected by the Jewish community beyond the academy and to influence that community through his more popular writings as well as his leadership of such organizations as the Conference on Jewish Social Studies and the American Jewish Historical Society.

This chapter details the radical transformation of Jewish culture which occurred during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Whereas medieval and Renaissance Italian Jewish intellectual life was essentially Talmudic, the changes of the mid-sixteenth century produced an altogether more rounded, complete, and coherent Jewish culture. Jewish society, indeed Jewish nationhood, as something distinct from Jewish religion, now emerged as much more definite realities than before. As late as the early sixteenth century, some Italian Jewish scholars had adhered to traditional Judaism rather than inhabited a specifically Jewish cultural world. Intellectually, they had immersed themselves in the learning of their non-Jewish contemporaries. From around 1550, by contrast, Jewish scholars lived and worked in a cultural atmosphere increasingly removed from that of their neighbours, even though in close touch and constantly interacting with it. Allegiance to traditional Judaism now fused with a whole package of new elements: a much intensified political and historical awareness; a new involvement in poetry, music, and drama; and an urgent quest to incorporate fragments of western philosophy and science into the emerging corpus of Jewish culture, all welded by a far more potent current of mysticism than had ever pervaded the Jewish world previously.

Chapter Two explores whether anti-Semitism should be defined as racial or religious. Some commentators obscure this distinction by distinguishing between two separate forms of anti-Semitism, which they describe as “racial anti-Semitism” and “religious anti-Semitism.” Others however argue that the phenomenon should be understood as the product of either a particular conception of race or a particular religious worldview. This chapter explores racial and religious conceptions of anti-Semitism from 1870 to the present in light of etymology, usage, and theory and demonstrates that they are differing manifestations of the same phenomenon. Properly understood, anti-Semitism does not target Jews “because” of race or religion but rather to construct a false image of the “Jew” that may be expressed in various terms. The difference between religious and racial anti-Semitism reflects a shift in how perceptions are articulated rather than a difference in the perception itself.

This chapter focuses on Moshe Greenberg, who modeled himself after Yehezkel Kaufmann and elevated biblical discussion above ecclesiastical dogma into the realm of the eternally significant ideas. Greenberg appreciated Kaufmann's role as a Jewish nationalist who emphasized the crucial nature of Jewish religion as defining Jewish ethnicity. He often writes from the double perspective of a university biblical scholar and a practicing Jew—unafraid to speak of God as a contemporary deity. Greenberg's model for how the Hebrew Bible should be read in a Jewish and critical context has influenced both Jewish and non-Jewish scholars. Despite some misgivings, Greenberg's model is compelling, arguing strongly for an image of the Bible as Scripture within Judaism.

This chapter discusses Philo's self-fashioning in the historical writings, which has emerged as highly stylized and complex. Self-consciously playing with different roles, he identifies as an Alexandrian but projects an uprooted image of himself characterized by the distinctly Roman quality of mobility in the Mediterranean. These features of playful estrangement and emphasis on religion make sense in the context of Philo's embassy to Rome. They reflect his current situation under Claudius, which prompts him to inscribe himself into the new imperial ideology. Involved in political negotiations, he directly translates Claudius's new priorities into autobiographical terms, suggesting that the Jewish religion agrees with the Roman emperor. Philo's portrait of Agrippa as a leader concerned with Jewish worship reflects the same political awareness. Meanwhile, by emphasizing religion under Gaius, Philo as a narrator regains some of the power he lost in the political arena.

This epitaph argues that the classical messianic faith of Judaism is dying. Most Orthodox Jews may still adhere to it, but their willingness to grant full rabbinical, institutional, educational, and ritual recognition to people who proclaim the messiahship of a dead rabbi conveys the inescapable message that such a proclamation does not contradict an essential Jewish belief. Mainstream Orthodoxy now appoints heads of rabbinical courts, teachers, and principals who conclude their prayers on the Day of Atonement with the twin affirmations, ‘The Lord is God! May our Master, Teacher, and Rabbi, the King Messiah, live for ever!’ By extending this recognition, Orthodox Jewry has repealed a defining element not only of the messianic faith but of the Jewish religion itself. However, there is still hope that Judaism's criteria for identifying the Messiah can still be rescued from the brink of extinction.

Chapter 7 addresses the discourses by religious groups, including Christian (both Catholic and Protestant), Jewish, and Muslim actors. An important but often neglected part of those debates took place between mainstream actors and religious organizations but also among religious organizations themselves. These debates were embedded within distinct frameworks of institutional and political opportunities, especially concerning the place of religion in society and the importance of religion in understanding national identity that differed greatly among the countries under study. These factors, in turn, influenced the recognition of religious actors as legitimate partners in the public debates as well as the attention paid to their views and the frames used for their understanding (from the French laïcité to the British multiculturalist model). In all cases, however, religious organizations sought to mobilize available resources and take into account discursive opportunities to reach audiences within and outside their respective religious spheres, and to express their views on a variety of issues ranging from radicalism to peaceful coexistence, from inter-religious affairs to national identity, from Islamophobia and anti-Semitism to integration.

This chapter shows how Philo's exposition of Mosaic law is motivated by the apologetic need to counter Apion's slanders and persuade a broader Roman audience of the value of Jewish customs. Confronted with harsh criticism of the Jewish religion, which has immediate political implications for his embassy to Gaius, Philo devotes several treatises to the Decalogue and the special laws, which hardly interested him in his early Alexandrian period. He engages typically Stoic notions, using them not only as general gestures, as he did at the beginning of his career, but accepting the fundamental ethical principles of the school most popular in Rome. Philo also appeals to the realia of Roman feasts and law to explain the Jewish tradition in an understandable way. Ultimately, Philo's philosophical interpretation of Mosaic law offers an enlightened form of ethnicity.

This chapter studies the divergences between Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem on the nature of kabbalah and hasidism and the appropriate methods for exploring their literatures. Guided by his phenomenological approach, Buber ultimately reached the view that hasidism expressed the quintessence of Judaism. Other types of Jewish spirituality, such as kabbalah and apocalypticism, were for him not essential components of the Jewish religion. In principle, Buber was looking for the perennial element in hasidism that could nourish his own religiosity. Scholem's historical and critical considerations, on the other hand, led him to a theological stance that defined most expressions of Jewish mysticism as authentic Jewish phenomena, in line with his pluralistic vision of Judaism. Buber's romantic posture is conspicuously different from Scholem's critical approach; indeed, Scholem himself pointed out that Buber had ignored some of the more distasteful aspects of hasidism, most strikingly its magical components.

The final chapter ends the discussion with the changes and vague points of the converts' position starting from the Age of Enlightenment. The first section focuses on the status of Judaism during the Age of Enlightenment, where terms such as science and reason ran rampant. From here the chapter looks at the two traditions that were combined in the last few years of the 18th century with regards to the anti-rabbinic Christian assessment of the Jewish religion.

This chapter describes Polish attitudes towards Jewish spirituality during the eighteenth century. The chief characteristic of the Polish conception of the Jewish religion, at least as it was captured in writing, was that it was not a specifically Polish construct but was imported from western Europe or had migrated to Poland with the Jews themselves. The official Christian doctrine was formulated in literary works written by clerics, polemic and homiletic literature, pastoral epistles, and synodal legislation. The popular Christian conception of Judaism, which differed substantially from official Church doctrine, was also practically identical in all its components to the popular, stereotypical view of Judaism widespread in the West. This conception was formulated mainly in works written by burghers, who used popular religious stereotypes in their attacks on their economic competitors, the Jews.

This chapter introduces traditional Judaism that can be compatible with the findings of modern research on how the Jewish religion has come to be. Many religious Jews still hold fast to belief in the Torah as the word of God but have come to realize that the whole idea of divine revelation must be understood to mean that, while there is a divine element in the Torah, there is also a human element. It emphasizes the acceptance of the dogma “The Torah is from Heaven,” pointing out that one should understand the meaning of “from” in a more sophisticated manner than is commonly done. The chapter also provides a speedy glance at the religious history of British Jewry. By the start of the twentieth century, Jews were divided on religious lines into Orthodoxy and Reform.

This afterword looks at the contemporary resistance to the Maimonidean reform. Anyone familiar with contemporary Jewish life, especially within Orthodoxy, will see immediately that the Maimonidean reform described in this book has failed to take hold. In addition to the seven specific issues addressed here — the nature of halakhah; distinctions between holy and profane and ritually pure and ritually impure; the character of the Hebrew language; the notion of kavod/shekhinah/created light; the distinction between Jew and non-Jew; and the existence of angels as popularly understood — Maimonides also sought to reform the curriculum of Jewish learning. In each of these areas, he sought to transform the Judaism of his day, and in each of these areas, Judaism continued to develop as if Maimonides had never existed and never written. However, in contrast to the items in this list, there are areas in which Maimonides' influence has been decisive. He succeeded in convincing almost all Jews that the God of Judaism is entirely incorporeal. He also convinced subsequent generations of Jews that the Jewish religion has a firm dogmatic base.