ARTICLES

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Defining Judaism: Accounting
for “Religions” in the Study
of Religion
Michael L. Satlow

Despite the wide scholarly recognition of and dissatisfaction with the

first-order essentialism inherent in the academic study of individual
“religions” or “traditions,” scholars have been far slower to develop
nonessentialist models that take seriously both the plurality of religious
communities that all identify as part of the same religion and the charac-
teristics that allow these communities to see themselves as members of a
single “religion.” This article, building on earlier work by Jacob Neusner
and Jonathan Z. Smith, attempts to develop a polythetic model for Judaism
that has implications not only for the study and teaching of “Judaism”
but more broadly also for how scholars might develop individual “tradi-
tions” as useful second-order categories of analysis.

A S MOST READERS of this journal know, “religion” is a heavily, per-

haps even over, theorized term. What is it, precisely, that scholars of
“religion” study? Is “religion” a natural phenomenon, some universal

Michael L. Satlow is an associate professor in the Program in Judaic Studies and Department of
Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion December 2006, Vol. 74, No. 4, pp. 837–860
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfl003
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
Advance Access publication October 18, 2006
838 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

response to the numinous? Or is it a second-order category created in the

“scholar’s study,” as Jonathan Z. Smith called it, a hypothesis that
accounts for certain aspects of human social relations (1982: xi)? Is it, fol-
lowing Clifford Geertz, a “system” of meaning or, following Robert Orsi,
a network of relationships (Geertz 1973: 87–125; Orsi 2005: 2)? Is it sui
generis, requiring its own unique disciplinary tools, or are existing disci-
plinary approaches more appropriately applied (McCutcheon 1997)?
Not a few departments of religion have tied themselves into knots as they
debated these meta-issues, thus seeking to forge their own identity within
the humanities.

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Yet, perhaps surprisingly, far less theoretical attention has been paid
to individual “religions” or “traditions.” In his definitional essay, “Reli-
gion, Religions, Religious,” even Jonathan Z. Smith problematizes the
term “religions” by using scare quotes but dodges the definitional quan-
daries that the term presents (1998). Although the definitional problem
posed by individual “religions” can be seen as a genus of the larger ques-
tion of the meaning of religion tout court, the importance of this problem
is more concrete and immediate. Much of the field, from individual fac-
ulty hires to the program units at the annual meeting of the American
Academy of Religion, is organized along these lines; most of us are edu-
cated, slotted, and evaluated as scholars of a particular “religion.” I am a
scholar of Judaism (with a research focus in antiquity), but should
I decide, for example, to describe myself instead as a scholar of asceti-
cism, I would do so at considerable professional peril.
As anyone who has stepped into a classroom with the task of teaching
one or more of these “religions” has become immediately and painfully
aware, defining a “religion” is no easy matter. What, after all, is Judaism?
Most academic writing on “Judaism” has tended to avoid this founda-
tional question. As William Scott Green pointed out in an incisive cri-
tique, the articles that deal with “Judaism” in the Encyclopedia of Religion
consistently side-step the critical issue of definition, most frequently slip-
ping into essentialist definitions (1989). In his introductory book
Judaism, Michael Fishbane clearly recognizes the problem of grouping
hundreds if not thousands of religious communities under the rubric of
“Judaism” but then somewhat unhelpfully declares that “the Jews the
world over were and are one people sharing deep bonds . . . . Judaism is
thus the religious expression of the Jewish people from antiquity to the
present day as it has tried to form and live a life of holiness before God”
(1987: 11–12). In his 590-page textbook, Judaism: History, Belief and
Practice, Dan Cohn-Sherbok side-steps the problem entirely: “Who are
the Jews? What do they believe? What do they practice? This volume is
designed to provide a comprehensive picture of Jewish life and thought
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 839

from ancient times to the present” (2003: xi). Louis Jacobs, in his defini-
tional article in Encyclopedia Judaica, locates the essence of Judaism in its
beliefs and norms (1971). To my knowledge, Neusner is one of the few
scholars who has grappled seriously with the definitional problem. I will
discuss his views in more depth below.
This article attempts to wrestle with the definitional problem posed by
“Judaism.” I begin with a short genealogy of the term to disrupt some of
the understandings implicit in its common scholarly use. My contention
there is that the essentialist and normative assumptions in the “first-
order” use of the term have been implicitly smuggled into many scholarly

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second-order definitions of the term. I will then discuss and critique
Neusner’s definition, which attempts to shake free of these first-order
limitations. Building on Neusner’s work, I then suggest and develop a
model with which scholars can use “Judaism” in a useful and meaningful
way. Relying especially on Jonathan Z. Smith’s notion of polythetic clas-
sification, I reject an essentialist definition. Instead, I argue, “Judaism” is
best seen as a family of communities that generally share a common
sense of identity, a discourse transmitted through a more or less bounded
set of authoritative texts and traditional practices. This model has both
specific and more general implications, which I attempt to draw out in
the conclusion, for how scholars can meaningfully teach and discuss
individual “religions.”

JUDAISM: A SHORT GENEALOGY

The first attestation of the word “Judaism” occurs in 2 Maccabees, a
Greek abridgement of a history of the Maccabean revolt that was written
ca. 124 BCE. The Greek term ioudaismos appears first in the prefatory let-
ter attached by the abridger: “[Jason of Cyrene, the author of the history]
has also given an account of the wars with Antiochus Epiphanes and with
his son Eupator, and he has described the apparitions from heaven that
were made for those who were struggling with bravery and honor for iou-
daismos” (2 Macc. 2:21–22). Jason of Cyrene himself, though, appears to
have coined the word. 2 Macc. 8:1 describes how Judah Maccabee gath-
ered those who, in the face of persecution, remained faithful to ioudais-
mos, and at 14:38 he describes a certain man Razis, known as “father of
the Jews,” as having been tried and having risked his life “for ioudais-
mos.” 2 Maccabees understands ioudaismos as the antonym to another
new word, hellenismos, often translated as “Hellenism” (2 Macc. 4:11–13;
Schwartz 2004: 95).
As scholars have noted, in all Jewish sources from antiquity ioudais-
mos means something akin to “Judeaeanness,” a complex distinctive
840 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

identity that intermingled characteristics that we might call “religious”

with those that we would call “ethnic” (Amir 1972; Cohen 1999: 7–8,
105–6). It combined a kin identity, whether actual or fictive, as in the
case of those non-Judeans who “converted” or who otherwise entered the
Judean community, with adherence to a way of life that was authorized
in some fashion by the Law of Moses.
In his recent book Border Lines, Daniel Boyarin has argued that it was
the early Christians who brought “Judaism” as a more strictly religious
category into existence: “[O]ne cannot speak of Judaism as existing
before Christianity but only in part of the process of the invention of

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Christianity. . . . Christianity, in its constitution as a religion, therefore
needed religious difference, needed Judaism to be its other—the religion
that is false” (2004: 11). Although this claim might be exaggerated, it does
highlight the transformation that the term ioudaismos undergoes in non-
Jewish writings of late antiquity. The Church fathers constructed “Judaism”
as an antonym to “Christianity,” as a definable entity that contained an
identifiable essence and stood in relationship to “Christianity.” When the
Church fathers wished to stress continuity with Christianity, they were
more likely to locate this essence in God’s covenant; when they wanted to
sharpen Christian self-identity, they emphasized the Law as the essence
of Judaism. In both cases, however, their construction of “Judaism” was
clearly self-interested, deployed for their own needs of self-identification
and divorced from the lives of real Jews. This understanding seeps into
imperial legislation in late antiquity, which increasingly conceived of the
“religion” of the Jews, most often denoted with the Latin terms “religio”
and “superstitio,” as a voluntary religious system similar to that of the
Christians (Schwartz 2001: 179–202).
Whether Jews themselves accepted this “colonial” understanding of
their own Judaism is not entirely clear. Boyarin claims that by the second
century CE, the Rabbis had created “the rudiments of a full-fledged heresi-
ology” that knows of “historical and genealogical Israelites who are not
‘Israel’ ” (2004: 61). That is, the rabbinic project mirrored that of the
Church fathers, understanding membership in true Israel to be deter-
mined by rules of faith. Yet “[t]he Rabbbis, in the end, reject and refuse
the Christian definition of religion . . . ” (2004: 224). Moreover, at the same
time the Rabbis were more rigidly drawing the lines of Jewish identity (cf.
Cohen 1999: 263–349). Jewish—or at least rabbinic—understandings of
Judaism might flirt with an essence, but they never seem to adopt it.
Only in the Middle Ages do we find the penetration of the concept of
“Judaism” into Hebrew. One of the first, perhaps even the first, attesta-
tion of the Hebrew term for Judaism, yahadut, appears in Abraham
Abulafia’s Book of the Testimony. In it, Abulafia describes his attempts to
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 841

meet with the pope in 1280 to speak “in the name of yahadut” (Idel
1982–83: 6). According to Moshe Idel, by yahadut Abulafia meant the
different permutations of God’s name, knowledge of which would help
to hasten redemption (1982–83: 13–14). Abulafia’s eclectic use of the
term mirrors other medieval Jewish writers, who never seemed to use the
term to denote a complete religious system.
Whether or not Boyarin’s dating of the birth of “Judaism” in late
antiquity is correct, Jewish self-understandings changed in the modern
period. Several factors played a role in this emerging Jewish self-definition.
The enlightenment category of “religion” drew heavily upon prior Christian

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understandings (Asad 1993: 27–54; Smith 1963: 37–50). This definition
of religion emphasized an intrinsic essence located in a system of rational
belief. Western and Central European Jewish thinkers, seeking to under-
stand their “religion” in Enlightenment terms, naturally adopted a similar
notion (cf. Hertzberg 1968: 268–313; Sutcliffe 2003: 165–90, 2000). This,
however, was not a mere intellectual exercise of categorization. The
Jewish need for religious self-definition in secular terms was exacerbated
by the political situation in which they found themselves. Jews were
fighting for civic rights, and at least in the public discourse the primary
obstacle was “Judaism”: Was it a “religion” that was compatible with
civic society (Meyer 1988: 10–61)? Perhaps this issue was nowhere as
starkly presented as in the “Paris Sanhedrin” of 1806–7, at which
Napoleon put to a Jewish assembly twelve questions meant to elicit from
it a commitment to French law and social intercourse (cf. Transactions
1985).
From the perspective of most European Jewish thinkers in the late
eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, the answer was clearly affirma-
tive. Moses Mendelssohn asserted that Judaism’s essence, its universal
morality, was identical to the essence of Christianity—only Judaism,
through its distinctive ceremonial laws, realized this essence more effec-
tively (cf. Arkush 1994; Sorkin 1996). Throughout the nineteenth and
well into the twentieth century, this self-defining articulation of Judaism
as having a distinctive moral essence became increasingly attractive for
western Jews. Leo Baeck entitled his 1905 book Das Wesen des Judentums.
Nineteenth century neo-Orthodox thinkers such as Samson Raphael
Hirsch and ultra-Orthodox thinkers such as Akiba Joseph Schlesinger
both subscribed to essentialist notions of Judaism, even if the former
located that essence in the covenant made at Sinai and the latter, increas-
ingly, in peoplehood (Silber 1992).
The notion of Judaism as a distinctive religious system with an
essence has been remarkably persistent, albeit not unchallenged. As some
Jews in Europe joined the Zionist movement, they began to see “Judaism” as
842 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

a national phenomenon; “Judaism” was the complex of distinctive cus-

toms and practices of the Jewish nation. As Green states, “Although all
who practice and affirm Judaism are Jews, not all Jews affirm(ed) and
practice(d) Judaism. This habit of mind subsumes Judaism under Jewish
social identity and mistakes ethnicity for religion” (Green 1989: 9–10). In
the United States at the beginning and through the middle of the twentieth
century, where despite their repeated attempts at presenting themselves
as Americans of a different religion they were most often seen as a
distinctive ethnic group, Jews began to reconceptualize “Judaism” as a
matter of ethnicity and culture. As Mordechai Kaplan succinctly put it,

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Judaism was a “civilization” (1934). For Kaplan, Jewish laws were “folk-
ways,” part of the culture of the Jews.
Kaplan’s definition, of course, joins “religion” and “culture”; they
are, for him, almost synonymous categories. On a theoretical level, as has
been well observed, “the relation between ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ appears
to be multiple, complex, and contradictory to some extent” (Masuzawa
1998: 70). This is an apt characterization of Jewish life in contemporary
America and Israel, where “Judaism” sometimes anchors and at other
times stands in opposition to constructions of “Jewish culture” (Whitfield
2002). As Cohn-Sherbok’s definition of Judaism illustrates, this popular
blurring of the categories “Judaism” and “Jewish culture”—which in
turn is symptomatic of modern understandings of religion as individual
and subjective (e.g., Judaism is whatever I consider it to be)—has also
crept into the scholarly literature.
This survey is, of course, far too brief and schematic, but it neverthe-
less highlights the fact that all of the understandings of “Judaism” sur-
veyed above are first-order definitions, created by communities for their
own definitional purposes. When early Christians used the term “Judaism,”
they did so to help define themselves—“Judaism,” as they understood it,
was necessary for them to tell the story of Christianity. These Christian
definitions of Judaism ultimately had an impact on Jewish self-
understandings, and to the extent that Jews have understood themselves
as practitioners of “Judaism,” they have primarily adopted a model of a
religious tradition that emerged from the Enlightenment’s adaptation of
a Christian notion. In this respect, Judaism is but one example of a more
general phenomenon, in which the new scholars of “religion” defined
religious communities in their own terms, only to see the members of
those very communities come to see themselves in that way.1

1
This phenomenon has been best documented for the nineteenth-century Western creation of
“Hinduism” out of the Indic religions. Cf. van der Veer (2001) and Flood (1996).
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 843

FROM FIRST ORDER TO SECOND ORDER

The preceding survey brings into focus the very blurriness of the rela-
tionship between the first-order definitions of religion and their use as
second-order, academic, and value-neutral categories of organization.
“Judaism,” without critical reflection, brings with it the basic elements of
its first-order formulation—either the notion of an objective essence and
a normative set of belief and practices, or, following Kaplan’s influential
definition, a messier cultural complex that gives no place to religion,
however defined, per se. Moreover, as has been amply documented, the

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implicit assumption that “Judaism” stands in opposition to Christianity,
a legacy of first-order Christian definitions of Judaism, permeates mod-
ern scholarship. In an extensive review published in 1921, George Foot
Moore argued that beginning in the nineteenth century scholars increas-
ingly presented a Judaism that stood directly opposite Christianity, and
E. P. Sanders (1977: 33–59) has shown that the very understanding of
Judaism that Moore sought to discredit was alive and well through the
1970s.
First-order self-definitions are useful as data; they tell us about a
group’s self-perception. They are, however, far less useful as analytical or
explanatory scholarly categories. First-order definitions of “Judaism” do
not seek to describe a religious phenomenon but to create an “authentic”
community by drawing lines between “orthodox” and “heterodox” man-
ifestations (cf. Boyarin 2004: 22–26). They are inherently normative.
Such definitions might be entirely appropriate for the community that
wishes to define itself, but they are less appropriate for the academic stu-
dent of Judaism who seeks to develop descriptive and analytical models.
Any study of religion must begin, as Jonathan Z. Smith has frequently
insisted, with the development of second-order concepts and definitions.
To my knowledge, Neusner has been one of the few scholars who has
sought to offer a second-order definition of Judaism. For Neusner,
a Judaism is a “religious system” that can best be described through
attention to its ethnos, ethics, and ethos:

[A Judaism] is composed of three elements: a world view, a way of life,

and a social group that, in the here and now, embodies the whole. The
world view explains the life of the group, ordinarily referring to God’s
creation, the revelation of the Torah, the goal and end of the group’s life
in the end of time. The way of life defines what is special about the life of
the group. The social group, in a single place and time, then forms the
living witness and testimony to the system as a whole and finds in the
system ample explanation for its very being. That is a Judaism. (1993: 8,
original emphasis)
844 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

At any given time, according to Neusner, there may be either competing

“Judaisms” or a single dominant one, but each requires investigation in
its own right. Despite this diversity of Judaism, Judaism, more so than
even the Jewish people, has a history: “[W]hile there may be no single,
unitary ‘Jewish history,’ there is a single (but hardly unitary) history of
Judaism. The history of Judaism itself is extraordinarily complex, involving,
as it does, the construction of definitions of ‘Judaism’ capable of both
defining and linking data spread over a long continuum” (Neusner 1975:
218). Indeed, in The Way of the Torah Neusner attempts to describe the
four “periods in the history of Judaisms and the paramount status of one

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Judaism” (1993: 9). That one Judaism, he goes on to explain, is made into
a coherent whole through the single “conception that the Jews are in exile
but have the hope of coming home to their own land, which is the Land
of Israel (also known as Palestine)” (1993: 14). This is the story of the
Five Books of Moses, the Torah, which each Judaism “retells in its own
way and with its distinctive emphases” (1993: 15).
There is much that is attractive about this definition of Judaism. It
starts by taking seriously a community’s first-order definition: “The first
requirement is to find a group of Jews who see themselves as ‘Israel’. . . .
That same group must tell us that it uniquely constitutes ‘Israel,’ not an
Israel . . . ” (Neusner 1993: 7, original emphasis). Neusner’s definition
thus grapples with the critical problem of explaining how a group of
diverse religious communities can all see themselves as “Israel.” That any
adequate description of a Jewish community (“a Judaism,” in Neusner’s
terminology) must take into account its “worldview” (or ethos) and “way
of life” (or ethics) is also undoubtedly correct.
Yet there are also weaknesses with this definition. Neusner’s defini-
tion of Judaism posits (1) a religious system anchored (2) by a worldview
that, in its basic structure, (3) is essential to all “Judaisms” and therefore
(4) can be linked into a single (if complex) history. Ultimately, Neusner
relies on the kind of structuralist model set forth by Geertz, in which a
religion can primarily be seen as a “system of meaning” (1973: 87–125).
This structuralist model has been heavily critiqued. Talal Asad (1993:
27–54) has argued that by focusing on overarching cognitive meanings,
Geertz’s structuralist model ignores issues of power, practice, discourse,
and discipline. Religions, Asad argues, are “products of historically dis-
tinctive disciplines and forces” (1993: 54); they cannot be conceived or
understood outside of social and historical contexts. By conceiving reli-
gion as a “system of meaning,” Geertz pigeonholes it into one specific
and itself historically contingent understanding of “religion.” Other
scholars have preferred understanding religions as cultural repertoires
that agents use “in complex, varying ways on various occasions, shifting
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 845

the cultural framing of a problem in mid-discourse” (Campany 2003:

318; cf. Swidler 2001). In all cases, however, the same critiques can be lev-
eled at Neusner’s emphasis of Judaism’s “worldview.”
Moreover, despite rejecting the essentialism inherent in almost all
first-order definitions of Judaism, Neusner adopts his own essentialism (3).
Essentialism is not an a priori reason to reject Neusner’s definition.
Indeed, as I will argue below, most communities that identify themselves
as Jewish do share a discourse rather than an ethos, whose parameters
can be traced back to the Torah (cf. Lincoln 2005).
Finally, Neusner never quite works out to my satisfaction how either

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the diverse Judaisms or their “paramount status of one Judaism” can have
a history. Contrary to Neusner’s formulation, human communities have
histories whereas abstract, second-order conceptions do not—except, at
times, as histories of ideas. Although “Jewish history” remains a problem-
atic category, the history of large communities of Jews can be told with
more intellectual justification and integrity than can a history of “Juda-
ism,” however non-linear that history might be. More specifically, for
Neusner the link between the four different stages of Judaism is the for-
mation, definition, ascendancy, and weakening of the status of the rab-
binic tradition. This privileging of the rabbinic tradition in this history sits
uneasily with his fuller conceptual model; he is really attempting to tell the
history of Rabbinic Judaism, without fully explaining what this is and how
it relates to “Judaism.” Here again I think that Neusner is correct to iden-
tify the rabbinic tradition as an important component for understanding
Judaism, but he has not succeeded in fitting it into his broader model.
In contrast to Neusner’s loose essentialist model, Jonathan Z. Smith
has suggested a more open, “polythetic” one (1982: 1–18). Using termi-
nology derived from biological classificatory schemes, Smith under-
stands a “monothetic” classificatory model for religion to be equivalent
to the essentialism most frequently used by scholars to classify religion.
Throughout his essay, Smith complains that scholars remain locked
into the monothetic classificatory schemes bequeathed to them from
the first-order definitions. Instead of locating essences, he argues,
scholars should be developing maps of characteristics that may or may
not be shared by the members of a group. Two specific members of a
group might share several of these characteristics, some overlapping
set, or even none at all. This “polythetic” model accounts for a wide
diversity of actual religious manifestations while at the same time
requiring the development of the basic map of characteristics that
underlie a single “religion.” “We need to map the variety of Judaisms,
each of which appears as a shifting cluster of characteristics which vary
over time” (Smith 1982:18).
846 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

In the more than two decades since this essay appeared, there has
been little serious attempt to follow through on Smith’s suggestion. Per-
haps this should not be surprising, for a polythetic classification of Juda-
ism is easier said than done, and while Smith provides some
microexamples of how he might start such a project, the project itself is
daunting. How, in actuality, might a polythetic map of any particular
Judaism appear, and how is it to be related to maps of other “Judaisms”?
In the remainder of this essay, I will argue that Smith and Neusner
help us re-form our notion of “Judaism” and indirectly other “religions.”
If Smith usefully and convincingly advocates for a polythetic classifica-

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tion, it is Neusner who helps to lend specificity to which maps we might
draw. The potential payoff for this new polythetic definition of “Juda-
ism” is an analytical model that helps to account for a diverse group of
religious communities that each sees itself as constituting a single Israel.
A polythetic description of Judaism, I suggest, comprises of three maps
that for heuristic purposes I would label, Israel, discursive tradition, and
practice.
Before expanding on what I mean by these three maps, I should state
at the outset my overarching model. A community’s “Judaism” is not
made by a collection of texts or norms but by historically and socially situ-
ated human beings who engage, filter, and activate their traditions accord-
ing to their local understandings. Here I depart from Neusner: “Judaism”
as such has no history. Jewish communities, of course, do have histories,
but their diverse religious understandings cannot be linked into a coher-
ent narrative of a second-order abstraction.2 Each of the three “maps” is,
first and foremost, an investigation or charting of ways in which specific,
historical Jewish communities choose, highlight, and discard parts of their
received tradition (both textual and behavioral) to build their religious
understandings. This model understands diversity not as deviance from a
norm but as the inevitable result of real historical communities making
sense, in their own settings, of disembodied tradition.
This model, then, calls first for careful study of individual, self-identified
Jewish communities with special attention paid to the questions gener-
ated by my three maps. In what sense, and with what discourses, do com-
munities and the individuals within them understand themselves to be
part of “Israel”? How do they accept or reject their received texts and
their discourses, and how do they use (or not) this tradition to authorize
and inform their beliefs and values? What are their religious practices,

2
As Shaul Magid has helpfully indicated to me, this position should lead to a rethinking of
Gershom Scholem’s understanding of the historical development of mysticism (1941: 7–10).
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 847

and how do they justify and explain them? All of these questions must be
addressed with sensitivity not only to the larger historical contexts of
these Jewish communities but also to the fundamental issues of power
and gender. Only from a large collection of nuanced synchronic studies
framed along these lines can we move to the more conceptual issues of
the maps themselves.
The synchronic (or “lived religion,” or even historical) and concep-
tual approaches complement each other. Focused studies of individual
Jewish communities can create only a myopic picture of the enormous
variety encompassed by the term “Judaism,” whereas the more concep-

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tual mapping that I am suggesting necessarily loses historical nuance. My
discussion below of these three maps remains confined to general con-
ceptual and theoretical issues (illustrated with an occasional historical
example); I can make no attempt here to actually create these maps and
am fully aware that they must be complemented with more fine-grained,
local analyses (cf. Satlow 2006). At the same time, though, I will argue
below that this model has broad implications for the study of religion.

Israel
The starting point of any nonnormative and nonessentialist under-
standing of religion is self-identification. Religious communities expend
a great deal of energy policing their borders, creating standards against
which one can measure authenticity and allow (or disallow) member-
ship. Such normative activity, of course, falls outside of the academic
study of religion. “Israel,” then, first and foremost indicates a mode of
determining the scope of the data: for the academic student of religion,
any Jewish community or individual that self-identifies as “Jewish,” or
part of Israel, “counts” to the same degree as any other.
The mapping occurs on the level of the discursive strategies used by
these communities to establish their religious identity. “Israel,” to use
Benedict Anderson’s felicitous phrase, is an imagined community (1991).3
Jewish communities have tended to shape their identity along a spectrum
delineated by ethnicity and religion (or faith). In so doing, they, like many
other communities, have employed myths of a common historical origin;
ideas of kinship; and belief in a common destiny, as a people covenanted to
God. These discursive strategies are found in the Hebrew Bible (cf. Hendel
2005) and have continued, in various combinations and with different

3
Anderson’s theory of nationalism has not gone unchallenged. Cf. Smith (1998: 131–42). My
thanks to Maud Mandel for this reference.
848 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

emphases—all shaped by the particular historical context of each later

community of readers—well into the present day (cf. Neusner 1989).
The evolution of the Reform movement’s stance on identity illus-
trates this complex negotiation. From its origins in Germany, the Reform
movement was split between those who saw “Judaism” purely as a “reli-
gion,” denuded of any ethnic component, and the majority, who were
generally sympathetic to seeing Judaism as a religion that was compatible
with other ethnic identities but who nevertheless were uncomfortable
abandoning completely the myth of common descent. According to the
1885 Pittsburgh Platform, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation,

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but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to
Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the res-
toration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” The Columbus
Platform (1937), though, softens this language: “Israel has been held
together by the ties of a common history, and above all, by the heritage of
faith.” History is further emphasized in the new Pittsburgh Platform of
1999: “We are Israel, a people aspiring to holiness, singled out through
our ancient covenant and our unique history among the nations to be
witnesses to God’s presence.” The movement’s decision in 1983 to recog-
nize the children of mixed marriages as part of the community of Israel,
assuming that they establish this identity through “appropriate and
timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and
people,” in fact decisively embraces the notion that kinship is an impor-
tant component of their definition of “Israel.”4 This evolution is
undoubtedly to be attributed to the changing understanding of religion,
ethnicity, and race in the United States. Many Jews (exemplified by
Kaplan) naturalized the evolving American understanding of them as an
ethnicity and thus moved away from the understanding of Judaism as a
voluntary faith community.
Issues of gender lie at the intersection of the conceptual understand-
ings of Israel and the normative, or halakhic, requirements of any given
Jewish community. On the one hand, according to traditional Jewish law,
a (nonproselyte) Jew is defined as one born of a Jewish mother. Yet on
the other hand, Jewish women lack the ability to undergo circumcision.
This might seem a minor technical issue, except for the fact that different
Jewish communities have understood circumcision in very different
ways, from being a “sign” of God’s covenant with Israel to actually con-
stituting it. The latter position, of course, leads to the paradox that
women can never be full members of the covenanted community

4
Copies of the platforms can be found, among other places, at http://www.rj.org/policies.shtml.
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 849

although they are essential for the continuity of the Jewish people (Cohen
2005). No Jewish community known to me has gone so far as to declare
women outside of “Israel” simply because they are women, but the struc-
tural ambiguity of the role of women within this community contributes
to a wide variety of issues that relate to a Jewish community’s evaluation
of the proper religious roles for women. Moreover, one consequence of
the Reform movement’s recognition of children of “patrilineal” descent
as Jews is to shift this delicate balance by making Jewish women extrane-
ous for the biological reproduction of Israel.
“Being Jewish” extends far beyond the technical issues of Jewish law

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(halakhah). Communities become “Jewish” first and foremost because they
say they are; they buy into some model or story that links them to past and
present Jews. The National Jewish Population Survey of 2000–2001 reports
that 44% of American Jews are unaffiliated with any Jewish institution and
60% are unaffiliated with a synagogue, but an astonishing 72% (of “the
more Jewishly engaged population” of 4.3 million American Jews of 5.2
total American Jews) think that “US and Israeli Jews share a common des-
tiny.” Curiously, although the figure for this latter question is similar among
Israeli Jews, 70% of Israeli Jews “reported that Jews in Israel and in the
Diaspora were two different peoples” (Goldscheider 2004: 130), pointing to
different issues of Jewish religious identity within the modern state of Israel.
Jews may or may not accept other communities as “Jewish” based on their
own criteria of identity, but the power of these modes of self-identification
for linking one community to others can hardly be understated.

Discursive Tradition
Although first-order descriptions of identity (e.g., “I am a Jew,” “My
religion is Judaism”) constitute a necessary starting point, they have little
analytical or explanatory value. What, if anything, holds these self-identified
individuals and communities into something more coherent? Is being
“Israel” simply a matter of subscribing to a fictive kinship or faith group
or is there some unique “content” to Judaism? Both practitioners and
scholars of Judaism have long identified this distinctive Jewish content as
located either in Jewish “core” values and beliefs (e.g., ethos) or obser-
vance of the mitzvot, a set of biblical and rabbinic norms packaged as
divine “commandments.” Before considering in the next section the role
that the mitzvot play in defining Judaism, I suggest that the focus on
Jewish values is off-target.
The empirical problem is that one would be hard pressed to locate
unique, relatively specific beliefs and values shared by self-identifying
Jewish communities, and all the more so individuals. “Jews believe in one
850 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

God,” for example, works as a general statement only if one does not
interrogate too closely what is meant by “Jews,” “one,” and “God.” Lists
of essential Jewish beliefs, a legacy of Judaism’s genealogy, are almost
always normative and both descriptively and analytically unhelpful.
Rather than sharing specific beliefs, most (but not all) Jewish com-
munities share a tradition, by which I mean not a monolithic set of beliefs
or texts but a discourse. Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of tradition, in this
respect, is useful: “A living tradition then is an historically extended,
socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the
goods which constitute that tradition” (1984: 222).5 Asad has similarly

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referred to a “discursive tradition”: “A tradition consists essentially of
discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form
and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established,
has a history” (1986: 14). In this sense, a “tradition” is an ongoing, evolv-
ing conversation that rests upon a set of shared, if changing, assumptions
articulated primarily in texts that communities find “authoritative,”
however they define that term.
Many, but certainly not all, Jewish communities have located their
tradition in a largely stable (but nevertheless evolving) textual canon.
These communities have taken a wide stance on the degree of authority
to which they give these texts, but they nevertheless have tended to return
to them to authorize their practices and beliefs. The texts, that is, emerge
from and reinforce a distinctive discourse. Local Jewish communities
have drawn selectively from this discourse those elements that best “fit”
into their contemporary sensibilities. Focusing on the discursive options
provided by the texts rather than on specific content brings into relief the
ways in which Jewish communities throughout history have understood
themselves to be “authentically” Jewish while at the same time exhibiting
values and ideas that differ widely from other “authentically” Jewish
communities.
The Jewish, and more specifically rabbinic, textual tradition com-
prises a distinctive discursive tradition. All Jewish texts that have entered
the “canon,” even the Hebrew Bible, in some way engage earlier texts,
authorize them, and derive their authority from them; the Torah, for
example, does a far better job at defining the parameters of a conversa-
tion than it does at articulating norms (Fishbane 1985; Sommer 1999).
This dependence on earlier texts sets parameters, however broad, on the
discourse (Halbertal 1997). Even the Zohar and other kabbalistic works,

5
Although as Stout (2004: 135–9) points out, MacIntyre is inconsistent in his understanding of
“tradition.”
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 851

which to some degree break with traditional myths and ideologies, still
draw upon these earlier texts for their authority (Scholem 1941: 23).
Textual tradition, like a conversation, is not a linear process. It is a
circle rather than a line, containing many points of entry. Although later
texts comment on earlier ones, there is no natural or predictable move-
ment from one to the other. Within any given community, many Jews
will attempt to enter the textual conversation yet few of these writings
will become the bases of future discussions. And there is usually nothing
inherently “better” about those that do succeed. Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus)
is arguably a far more pious book than Ecclesiastes, even being cited as

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Scripture by some Talmudic rabbis, but only Ecclesiastes found its way
into the canon of the Hebrew Bible (Wright 1999). The process by which
a community—and eventually a wide range of communities—accepts a
text as “authoritative” (in some sense) and builds upon it (thus solidify-
ing the authority of the layers of text underneath it) is historically
contingent.
For a text to be an “authoritative” part of the tradition does not nec-
essarily mean to be normative. Moshe Halbertal helpfully differentiates
between three kinds of canons: normative, formative, and exemplary.
Law codes are examples of normative canons. Canonical texts, though,
can also “provide a society or a profession with a shared vocabulary,”
thus helping to form them into a group (Halbertal 1997: 3). Exemplary
canons serve as paradigms, highlighting something for emulation. Jewish
canonical texts come in all three types, although their formative function
tends to eclipse the other two.
The entrance of a text into “the” Jewish canon thus has less to do with
the normative authority thenceforth ascribed to that text than with the
ways in which Jews might read that text. Words such as “conversation”
and “discursive tradition,” with their secularist baggage, can obscure the
deep and meaningful ways in which members of a religious community
engage a text. Paul Griffiths calls this kind of engagement “religious read-
ing” (1999: 22–76). Indeed, one need not agree with Griffiths’s polemic
against modern academic techniques of reading to grasp his central point
that religious readers of religious texts read those texts differently from
other texts; canonical texts are marked for a distinctive kind of reading.
“Conversation” in this sense is not casual; it is the kind of engagement for
which Jews and others have sacrificed their lives.
If these texts do exhibit an astonishing multivocality, there is one
voice that remains absent from the discursive tradition, that of women.
As many scholars have noted, this is a discursive tradition fundamentally
shaped by men (Baskin 2002; Peskowitz and Levitt 1997; cf. Plaskow
1990). The ramifications of the androcentric nature of the tradition are
852 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

by no means obvious. Although clearly these texts authorize, and have

been used to authorize, practices that we would find discriminatory and
even misogynistic, Jewish communities (understood in its most general
sense as shifting and overlapping groups and subgroups of Jews) have
always highlighted those elements of the tradition that suit them. Even
Rabbi Joel Sirkes (Cracow, d. 1640) found the halakhic system flexible
enough to allow him to rule in opposite ways on two similar cases of
adultery (Fram 2002).
Because Jewish religious communities draw on these conceptual
maps differently, this approach thus replaces notions of “Jewish values”

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with those of texts (and their accompanying oral cultures) as the trans-
mitters of conceptual maps. The translation of these texts into values,
beliefs, and norms is neither constant nor predetermined. But this
emphasis on the historically contingent nature of these values, beliefs,
and norms should also not obscure their underlying dependence on and
participation in the same ongoing conversation defined by a bounded
(even if shifting and evolving) textual tradition.

Practice
In Women as Ritual Experts, Susan Sered tells the story of a group of
older, illiterate Kurdistani women who in the weeks before Passover fastid-
iously sorted through the rice that they would use for the holiday (1992:
80–85). Just as they ignored the rabbis urging them to wash their hands
before eating bread, so too they ignored rabbinic insistence that this sorting
was unnecessary. For these women, the behavior itself, passed down from
their mothers, was more important than any textually based norm.
The latest National Jewish Population survey (2000–2001) tells a simi-
lar story. A large percentage of those who identify themselves as Jews
attend a seder on Passover and light the menorah (as they most fre-
quently refer to the hannukiyah) on Hannukah. They frequently do this
with little knowledge of Jewish textual traditions; they are often mystified
by “traditional” interpretations and norms of the ritual. In these exam-
ples, the rituals seem to float independently of text.
According to Haym Soloveitchik, the independent force of ritual
should not be surprising (1994). The authority of normative texts within
Jewish communities has been steadily increasing throughout modernity,
exploding in contemporary America (especially within the Orthodox and
Conservative communities). But this has not always been the case, nor is
it even the case in all Jewish communities. In many Jewish communities,
religious practice has had an uneasy relationship with the texts that sup-
posedly authorize them.
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 853

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the “Myth and Ritual

School” argued that ritual was before myth; myth was created to explain
persistent rituals (cf. Ackerman 1991). Although highly criticized as a
general theory, this approach can help to sensitize us to the importance
of ritual as an independent source of tradition. Many Jewish practices
have survived their first attested explanations; they have persisted (in dif-
fering forms, to be sure) even while the meanings assigned to them have
changed.
I would go further with this observation: the very reason that many
religious practices have persisted is precisely because they are underde-

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termined. That they have no inherent meanings is actually a strength;
they exist in a dynamic intertextual world in which Jews are able link
them to other practices, symbols, and texts to create transient and histor-
ically contingent meanings. Those practices that are less able to bear dif-
ferent meanings have a higher potential for failure. For example, many
Jewish holidays that commemorate specific historical events (e.g., cre-
ation of the Septuagint; cf. Philo 1935, Life of Moses 2: 41–43) failed to
persist, as did those rituals too tightly connected to specific and changing
social assumptions (e.g., the geonic blessing over the bloodied sheet after
a marriage; cf. Langer 1995).
This understanding of some Jewish practices as an independent car-
rier of tradition makes more complex the relationship between them and
the rabbinic texts that transmit these rituals as detailed norms. On the
one hand, Jewish communities typically exhibit a wide range of religious
behaviors that they regard as “Jewish” but which for contemporary rab-
bis are not normative. On the other hand, though, such behaviors, when
not incorporated into traditional texts, rarely persist for long. Those that
do persist are typically naturalized by the rabbis. The Mishnah, for exam-
ple, codified as “oral law” civil legal practices that happened to be com-
mon among second-and third-century Galilean Jews (Lapin 1995), and
according to Ivan Marcus, Jews in the Middle Ages adapted rites of child
initiation from their Christian neighbors, with rabbis eventually co-
opting and authorizing these rites from their own texts (1996).

IMPLICATIONS
This article has attempted to develop an interpretive framework for a
nonessentialist understanding of and approach to “Judaism.” Although
scholars have long recognized and subscribed to many of the compo-
nents of this framework, their combination into a “theory” of Judaism,
I believe, highlights their implications. Few scholars of religion today
would accept, as a premise of their scholarship, that Judaism (or any
854 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

other religion) has an essential core, yet scholars have been slower to rec-
ognize what that implies for their discussions of religious traditions.
To describe a community’s Judaism, then, involves a thick description
of that community’s beliefs and practices within its specific historical
context. This framework suggests a focus on three clusters of questions or
“maps”: Identity (in what ways does the community identify itself as
“Jewish” and why); a discourse transmitted by texts (which texts does the
community accept as authoritative, what level of authority does it ascribe
to them, and how does it read them); and practice (what does the com-
munity do and how does the community ritualize and understand what

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it is doing). Each map needs to be charted with sensitivity to how a com-
munity or individual creates a Judaism from the various resources avail-
able to it, him, or her.
The model developed here, I suggest, is generalizable. The core issue
with which I struggle throughout this essay is the tension inherent in
understanding “a religion” as a unified tradition in light of the diversity
in the thought and practice of actual lived religious communities. This
tension is just as present in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and the score
of other “religions” that we study as it is in Judaism. The academic study
of Christianity continues, in subtle ways, to be plagued by an implicit
essentialism, and scholars have clashed over how to present both Islam
(Asad 1986; Geertz 1968) and Hinduism (Flood 1996) as unified “tradi-
tions” in light of their manifest diversity. Although other scholars are cer-
tainly in a better position than I to gauge the degree to which the model
developed here is helpful for understanding “religions” other than Juda-
ism, it does seem to me that these basic heuristic categories and analytical
strategies can be profitably applied.
Although the precise contours of the concept maps that I have sug-
gested for Judaism might not apply directly to other religions, they may
at least point toward models more useful for them. Many religions wres-
tle with the problem of identity, on both rhetorical and legal levels; not a
few who have called themselves Christians, for example, have killed oth-
ers who have called themselves Christians over precisely this question.
The subtle blending of religion and ethnicity that complicates the case of
Judaism and Jewish identity, often flagged as odd when seen against a
modern western notion of religion that separates these categories, is
hardly unique. Muslim and Hindu identity is equally complex, and
Robert Ford Campany has fruitfully applied notions of an “imagined
community” to the followers of the “Way of Buddha” (2003: 316–17).
Fine-grained, historically contextualized analyses of religious communi-
ties that are sensitive to the discourses and practices that bind them leave
implicit normative judgments to the religious communities themselves.
 Satlow: Accounting for “Religions” in the Study of Religion 855

Finally, if nothing else, this model reinforces our continued need for
critical self-reflection. As a scholar of Judaism, it remains uncomfortably
easy for me to fall back on terms such as “the tradition,” “Judaism says,”
“Jews do,” and “Jewish values are.” Yet the cost of such terms now strikes
me as too high, and although constantly rephrasing and qualifying them
is frequently awkward and difficult, I hope that the effort will help to take
the academic study of religion another small step away from its essential-
ist origins.

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