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This chapter shows that Jewish social life in the 19th century slowly became more sophisticated and less exclusive. Numerous German Jews acquired manners appropriate to polite gentile society and began attending cultural events such as concerts and the theater. Though most Jews continued to socialize mainly with coreligionists, mixed Christian-Jewish formal and informal circles became more common. Jews of the higher classes were admitted to general bourgeois associations, and Jews participated in slowly growing numbers in local government and national politics. Violence against Jews became less common. In the liberal era of the 1850s and 1860s, barriers to Jewish mixing with non-Jews were probably lower than ever before in German history, though separate social circles were still quite noticeable.

Jews have risen to become one of the best-educated and most economically secure ethno-religious groups in the United States. Some of the existing theories explain why American Jews are, or have been, liberal; others help explain variance among American Jews in the degree of their liberalism. This chapter seeks to advance a new approach to explaining the disproportionate liberalism of Jews in America. Specifically, it rejects the standard assumption that American Jews are predisposed by their experience among non-Jews in wider society—whether considered in terms of marginality, minority status, or political interests—to be especially politically liberal. The central argument advanced here is that the pronounced liberalism of American Jews is best understood in terms of dynamics and tensions in their relation to the Jewish community as a religious body politic rather than in their relations with non-Jews or with non-Jewish society.

This chapter discusses the biographies on Ahad Haʼam, along with an in-depth philosophical portrait of the Zionist thinker. The first to appear was Yosef Goldstein's Ahad Haʼam. Yehiel Alfred Gottschalk soon followed suit, and a year later, Steven Zipperstein. Ahad Haʼam is not credited with any breakthroughs or sensational innovations, and he was more adept at negation than at construction. One of the elements missing in all three volumes is an analysis of Ahad Haʼam's attitude toward non-Jews. Throughout his writings, he conveys a sense of estrangement from the gentile world. For Ahad Haʼam, the Arab in Palestine functions as a yardstick for assaying the ethical tenor of the Zionist enterprise—a litmus test of how Jews behave when they are in power. All three authors deal (though not at great length) with the question of Ahad Haʼam's relevance today.

This chapter examines the more traditional adjudication of criminal and administrative cases. It argues that in the field of constitutional and criminal law, whenever the slightest political overtone appears in a case — that is, prisoners of conscience, operations of the police and security services, review of electoral laws and elections, detention of political opponents under seditious acts, etc. — the legal professions find themselves struggling in a generally adverse environment. In areas of public life which are considered eminently ‘political’, regardless of whether people toil under traditional monarchies or revolutionary potentates, executive power has been reluctant to allow any serious review of state power.

According to the first reading, Kabbalah implicitly supports violence. It expresses the most negative views of non-Jews in the history of Judaism by associating them with the realm of pure evil, and it envisions the messianic era as a period in which the non-Jewish world will be destroyed. According to the second reading, medieval Kabbalah certainly has a negative view of non-Jews, but it never advocated physical violence against them. Moreover, the negative portrayals of non-Jews in Kabbalah have not stopped modern students from constructing a universalistic reading of Kabbalah that is inherently peaceful.

According to the first reading, Zionism represents the revival of violent tendencies in Judaism now that Jews once again have a state. In religious Zionism, the endorsement of violence is due to the belief that Jews are chosen, that God promised them the land of Israel, that the messianic period is approaching, and that non-Jews are evil. Secular Zionism does not subscribe to the literal meaning of these premises, but it has translated them into nationalist ideals that have also inspired violence. According to the second reading, the violence of Zionism has been inspired by factors having little to do with Judaism, such as secular nationalism, Jewish fears of Arabs engendered by centuries of persecution, and the desperation of Jews who believed that Zionism represented the only chance for Jews to survive. Furthermore, much of the violence by Zionists has been defensive in nature.

The Epilogue shares personal reflection on the practical ramifications of this study. Most important, if violent and peaceful readings of Judaism are both possible, can Judaism provide Jews with guidance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The argument is made that guidance can indeed be found in the pragmatism of rabbinic Judaism that allowed Jews to survive and thrive for centuries. Pragmatism should encourage Jews to adopt a two-state solution that is in line with the peaceful reading of Judaism. Also shared here are personal, empirical reflections on relationships with non-Jews, Muslims, and Arabs that strengthen the argument for a peaceful understanding of Judaism.

This chapter highlights the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and the outsiders. Jesus began his public ministry around AD 27. He focused on the preaching of the kingdom or the saving rule of God already powerfully present but not yet fully completed. According to the Gospels, Jesus responded not only to the Jews but also to the non-Jews. An example of this is when Jesus helped a desperately ill son of a non-Jewish military officer who was in command of 50 to 100 soldiers. Before healing the son of the centurion by a simple word of command, Jesus used the image of God's eschatological banquet to warn what would happen at the end. Meanwhile, the message of Jesus regarding the kingdom reached beyond the frontiers of racial and religious separations. The end of this chapter concludes that the word of Jesus is for everyone because he loves humankind.

Why should one eat—or avoid—Jewish food? What makes food “Jewish” in the first place? These questions feature prominently not only in rabbinic and other Jewish texts but also in the classical sources of Christianity and Islam. The authors of these influential works disagree over what food to eat and, more fundamentally, over what Jewishness is, but they all agree that the difference between Jews and non-Jews matters. This chapter traces the evolving relationship between Jewish identity and Jewish norms about the food of non-Jews from the Bible through the Middle Ages. It also examines premodern Catholic, Sunni, and Shiʿi norms about Jewish food, demonstrating that ideas about Jewishness play important roles in the construction of Christian and Islamic identity.

This chapter situates Acts of the Apostles historically and examines previous scholarship on Jewish identity and Acts. It argues that Lukan ethnic reasoning—as mediated by the cultural context of Greek cities under Roman rule—sought to create an alternate construal of Jewish and Christian identity. This alternate identity integrated Christian non-Jews into the civic hierarchy. The chapter then surveys the scholarship on Jews and Judaism in Acts and looks at recent developments in interpretation that have emphasized the author's rhetoric rather than “attitude.” It also discusses four texts that highlight the value of ethnic reasoning and, scholar of ancient Christianity, Denise Kimber Buell's discussion of four uses of religious rhetoric in ethnic reasoning. Ultimately, Acts leverages the connection between gods, people, and places in its depiction of Jewish identity. It employs ethnic rhetoric in order to present all Christians as Jews and to privilege Christians as an ideal embodiment of Jewishness for the Roman-era polis.

This chapter assesses how Acts of the Apostles uses the image of Jewishness constructed in Acts 2:5–13 to depict the Jewishness of Christian non-Jews in the Jerusalem council (15:1–21). Comparing the ethnic rhetoric of Acts 15 with ethnic rhetoric of the Salutaris Foundation inscription, it calls attention to wider negotiations of civic identity and within the context of formal public documents like this inscription. The Salutaris Foundation inscription, which contains the stipulations for a donation given by a wealthy citizen of Ephesus, provides a useful comparison with the Jerusalem council narrative in two primary ways. First, the inscription was composed within a decade or two of the likely publication of Acts and therefore offers a glimpse of a contemporaneous use of ethnic rhetoric. Second, a majority of the narrative of Acts takes place in an urban context, including in Ephesus. The Salutaris Foundation thus provides a securely dated and located example of the negotiation of identity within the city, demonstrating who had the power to influence identity claims and how such negotiations took place. Both Acts and the Salutaris Foundation leverage religious ideology in their respective forms of ethnic rhetoric in order to legitimate ethnic change, employing ancestral religious rhetoric, a shared sense of the flexibility of ethnic identity, and the authority of councils in ways that delimit the identity of contested populations and their religious activities.

This concluding chapter summarizes the findings of this book. It argues that Acts of the Apostles' rhetoric of Jewish and Christian identity should be situated within the context of Roman-era cities, in which ethnic, civic, and religious identities were inseparable. Placing Acts within this broader ethnic discourse emphasizes the Jewishness of Christians, even in Acts. When one reads Acts with an eye to the writer's ethnic reasoning, it becomes clear that Luke did not represent Jews as a static group but instead presented Jewish identity in multiple, hybrid, and complex ways that allowed for the identification of Christian non-Jews as Jews. Luke also employs the ethnic, religious, and civic aspects of Jewish identity to privilege those Jews (and non-Jewish Jews) who follow Jesus. If Acts marks all Christians as Jews and Christian communities as Jewish communities, then the concept of “Christian universalism” should be understood as a particular form of “Jewish universalism.” The chapter then reflects on the use of ethnic reasoning and the challenge of anti-Judaism in the interpretation of Acts today.

Public discussion of the Jews faded substantially between 1792 and Napoleon's rise to power at the very end of the decade. The September 1791 legislation removing all legal distinctions between Jews and non Jews, combined with the prior decree of religious freedom in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, made it difficult to speak of “the Jews” as a discrete group. The abolition of the former Jewish corporations at the same time made it difficult for the Jews to register any collective grievances, or indeed to make any collective statements about themselves. No formally recognized rabbis or syndics could speak on their behalf, and any attempt to articulate specifically Jewish concerns risked provoking the accusation that the Jews were still a “nation within a nation.” The leader's particular interest in the Jews prompted their return to prominence in the public imagination.

This chapter examines cases of Jew and non-Jew dialogue in the Bible and in Rabbinic Literature. The foundational element of the Jewish Bible is the dialogue between God and man and between man and man. This element was derived from the relationship of the deity to humankind, specifically to the Children of Israel. The expression of this relationship is not only through verbal revelation but also through human discourse and dialogue with the deity. The account of this dialogue in the Bible came after the Flood.

This chapter reviews the book The Impossible Jew: Identity and Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (2015), by Benjamin Schreier. In The Impossible Jew, Schreier challenges the dominance of a totalizing (historicist/nationalist/anthropologist) context in Jewish studies in America. Rather than asking what is “Jewish” in a text, he wishes to focus on scholars’ and readers’ inclination to conceptualize texts within one of these essentialist categories. He rejects the approach used by scholars to distinguish between the “Jews” and the “non-Jews.” Instead, he offers an alternative that highlights the way (Jewish) literature destabilizes these same categories. The Impossible Jew is thus a reflection on the impossibility of Jewishness as a coherent identity.

This chapter discusses the law of adjudication. The rabbinic tradition presents two divergent positions on the nature of the law of adjudication. The first position, articulated most fully by Maimonides, was that this law was to be imposed upon gentiles by Jews; that is, ideally, Jewish judges would arbitrate Noahide laws for gentiles. The second position, advocated by Nahmanides, holds that non-Jews establish and maintain their own courts separate from Jewish courts, and judge based on the general principles of Noahide law. The chapter then looks at how the rabbis consistently moved Jewish law in the direction of Jewish and non-Jewish equality in matters of civil jurisprudence. The law of adjudication was also used by the rabbis to justify non-Jewish political authority over Jews. Finally, the chapter explores the principle of dina d'malkhuta dina (the law of the land is the law).