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103 Judaism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Judaism is one of the oldest monotheistic religions in the world, with a rich history and a diverse set of beliefs and practices. If you're studying Judaism or just interested in learning more about this fascinating religion, you may be looking for essay topics to explore. In this article, we've compiled a list of 103 Judaism essay topic ideas and examples to help inspire your writing.

• The history and origins of Judaism.
• The basic beliefs and practices of Judaism.
• The role of the Torah in Jewish religious life.
• The concept of God in Judaism.
• The importance of prayer and worship in Judaism.
• The significance of the Sabbath in Jewish tradition.
• The role of the synagogue in Jewish community life.
• The differences between Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism.
• The impact of the Holocaust on Jewish identity and culture.
• The role of women in Judaism.
• The concept of tikkun olam in Jewish ethics.
• The Jewish perspective on social justice and human rights.
• The relationship between Judaism and other Abrahamic religions.
• The influence of Jewish philosophy on Western thought.
• The concept of chosenness in Judaism.
• The role of prophecy and prophets in Jewish tradition.
• The concept of the Messiah in Judaism.
• The significance of the land of Israel in Jewish history.
• The history and significance of Jewish holidays, such as Passover, Hanukkah, and Yom Kippur.
• The role of food and dietary laws in Jewish tradition.
• The significance of circumcision in Jewish religious practice.
• The role of music and art in Jewish religious expression.
• The concept of the afterlife in Judaism.
• The role of the rabbi in Jewish religious life.
• The relationship between Judaism and science.
• The influence of Jewish mysticism, such as Kabbalah, on Jewish thought.
• The impact of modernity and secularism on Jewish religious practice.
• The concept of sin and repentance in Judaism.
• The role of storytelling and narrative in Jewish tradition.
• The significance of the Hebrew language in Jewish culture.
• The impact of immigration and diaspora on Jewish identity.
• The relationship between Judaism and Zionism.
• The history and impact of anti-Semitism on Jewish communities.
• The role of education and scholarship in Jewish religious life.
• The significance of the Bar/Bat Mitzvah ceremony in Jewish tradition.
• The impact of technology on Jewish religious practice.
• The relationship between Judaism and environmentalism.
• The role of music and dance in Jewish religious celebrations.
• The impact of the Enlightenment on Jewish thought.
• The significance of the Jewish family in Jewish culture.
• The role of storytelling and folklore in Jewish tradition.
• The concept of justice and righteousness in Judaism.
• The relationship between Judaism and politics.
• The impact of globalization on Jewish communities.
• The significance of the Jewish calendar in Jewish religious life.
• The role of ethics and morality in Jewish tradition.
• The relationship between Judaism and social activism.
• The impact of technology on Jewish religious education.
• The significance of the mikvah in Jewish religious practice.
• The role of music and poetry in Jewish religious expression.
• The concept of sacrifice in Jewish tradition.
• The relationship between Judaism and the arts.
• The impact of the Enlightenment on Jewish religious practice.
• The significance of the Talmud in Jewish religious life.
• The role of women in Jewish religious leadership.
• The relationship between Judaism and psychology.
• The impact of interfaith dialogue on Jewish communities.
• The significance of the Torah in Jewish religious education.
• The role of music and dance in Jewish religious rituals.
• The concept of sin and forgiveness in Judaism.
• The relationship between Judaism and social media.
• The impact of globalization on Jewish religious practice.
• The significance of the Jewish dietary laws in Jewish tradition.
• The role of music and art in Jewish religious celebrations.
• The concept of the afterlife in Jewish tradition.
• The relationship between Judaism and technology.
• The impact of interfaith marriage on Jewish communities.
• The significance of the Jewish home in Jewish religious life.
• The role of music and storytelling in Jewish religious expression.
• The concept of the soul in Jewish tradition.
• The relationship between Judaism and mental health.
• The impact of the internet on Jewish religious practice.
• The significance of the Jewish wedding ceremony in Jewish tradition.
• The role of music and dance in Jewish religious festivals.
• The concept of sin and redemption in Judaism.
• The relationship between Judaism and social justice.
• The impact of social media on Jewish communities.
• The significance of the Jewish family in Jewish religious life.
• The role of music and poetry in Jewish religious rituals.
• The concept of the covenant in Jewish tradition.
• The relationship between Judaism and business ethics.
• The impact of the arts on Jewish religious practice.
• The significance of the Jewish dietary laws in Jewish culture.
• The role of music and dance in Jewish religious ceremonies.
• The relationship between Judaism and mental illness.
• The significance of the Jewish wedding ceremony in Jewish culture.
• The role of music and storytelling in Jewish religious celebrations.
• The impact of social media on Jewish religious practice.
• The significance of the Jewish family in Jewish tradition.
• The role of music and poetry in Jewish religious festivals.
• The impact of the arts on Jewish religious expression.
• The significance of the Jewish dietary laws in Jewish religion.

These essay topics cover a wide range of aspects of Judaism and can be a great starting point for your research and writing. Whether you're interested in exploring the history of Judaism, its religious practices, its ethical teachings, or its impact on modern society, there's sure to be a topic on this list that piques your interest. Happy writing!

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137 Judaism Topics & Essay Examples

🔝 top 10 judaism essay ideas, 🏆 best judaism topic ideas & essay examples, ⭐ interesting topics to write about judaism, 🕍 judaism topics for your essay: how to pick a great one, 📌 simple & easy judaism essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on judaism, ❓ research questions about judaism.

• Judaism Essay: Summary of Judaism, Its Origin and History
• Judaism and Buddhism: Overview and Comparison
• Judaism, Islam and Christianity: Differences and Similarities
• Zoroastrianism and Judaism Comparison
• Judaism and Taoism: Comparison and Contrast
• Abrahamic Religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
• Status of Women in Judaism
• ”The History of God” by Karen Armstrong: An Overview of the History of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism
• Judaism and Christianity: The Key Misconceptions
• Christianity and Judaism Doctrines
• The central beliefs of Judaism The history of Jewish community shows that, Judaism began in the Middle East and later spread to other parts of the world.
• Judaism; The Covenant Between God and Israel However, the New Covenant with the new life in salvation has got its benefits which include perpetual peace, love and joy.”To know God in the present is to experience the life of the age to […]
• Judaism’ Religion: History and Concept Therefore, the daily practice of the laws in the Torah is crucial to the Jewish religion. On the other hand, the Talmud is a compilation of the Mishnah and the Gemara.
• Second Temple Judaism: Scriptures and Stories The period in which Judaism flourished since the return of the Babylonian exiles and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem under Persian auspices is known as Second Temple Judaism.
• The Rise of Christianity Compared to Hellenistic Judaism The link between Christianity and Judaism can be traced back to the second temple of Judaism before the two split in the early years of the Christian movement.
• Miriam and Other Women in Judaism When the pharaoh’s chariots and horse riders went into the sea, God drowned all of them, but Israel was able to step on the dry land.
• The Vision of Messiah in Judaism It is believed that the Judaism of the Second Temple era is the Judaism of the scribes, as opposed to the early Judaism of priests and prophets.
• Rabbinic Judaism Overview Judaism preaches the adequacy of the human mind to the image of God, the consequence of which is the belief in the immortality of the human soul.
• Sacred Tales of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam In addition, all prophets carry the same message, since a miracle is intended to show people the power of the Lord and help them find faith in him. Although some details, such as the amount […]
• Islam and Judaism in Quran Sura 5 “The Table” It allows comparing and contrasting Islam and old Jewish traditions.”The Table” provides the reader with a detailed description of the two religions and highlights the major differences between them in different periods of their existence.
• The Role of the Rabbi in Judaism At the beginning of the 19th century, “the necessity and value of a well-rounded, general education has been recognized”, and the role of the rabbi was substantially revised.
• Judaism in the Middle East In the Middle East, Judaism is synonymous with the state of Israel. The distribution is explained by the unending conflict over between the Palestinians and the Jews over the former Palestine land.
• Judaism: Historical Context and Ffundamental Principles From then came the Exodus, the receipt of the Torah, fulfilling of the Covenant, the conquering of the promised land, Judges, the kingdom and its split in two, the exile in Babylon and the Jews […]
• Judaism as a Monotheistic Religion Judaism is an ethical monotheistic religion and the relation of Abraham to this definition will be explained. This paper has discussed why Judaism is a monotheistic religion and also explained the misconceptions.
• Roman Civilization, Christianity, and Judaism The growth and success of Christianity came from the conversion and patronage of Constantine. The early Christians of Rome were received with contempt and suspicion.
• Judaism: Religious Beliefs Evolution Judaism is the religious beliefs and the way of life of the Jews, that started as the faith of the early Hebrews.
• Judaism, Christianity and Islam as a Single System Starting with the main feature, which is the base for all three religions, which are discussed and that adds to the idea that they are a system, is that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are monotheistic […]
• Christianity and Judaism Comparison Many of the actions of his life are traced back to Old Testament prophecies such as in John 6: 4, 11-14 in which Jesus performs the miracle of multiplying the loaves on the eve of […]
• Wisdom in Judaism and Confucianism Judaism is a religion based on the relationship between God and man and to the Jewish wisdom means having insightful knowledge of the relationship between oneself and God.
• Judaism Religion Through the History According to the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, Moses successfully led the Jewish people from the cruel hands of Pharaoh and was to lead them to the Promised Land. Christianity is an evangelistic […]
• World Religions: Judaism, Shintoism, and Islam Judaism is the religion of the Jews who believe that the world and all the things in it were created by a single divine God to fulfill certain divine meaning and purposes.
• Features of Judaism and Relation to the Christianity In the beginning, this belief in the divinity and messiah-hood of Jesus was all that separated the Jews from the Christians.
• Judaism as an American Religion This is in terms of the social changes and the different perceptions that people are developing in a world that is changing on a day to day basis.
• Judaism in Canaan History God is conceived of as immortal and eternal, the creator of the universe, and the resource of morality. In the Jewish faith the exodus which is the emigration of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan, […]
• Judaism: What Makes Someone Jewish? According to traditional Jewish belief, the God who created the world established a covenant with the Israelites and revealed His laws and commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai in the form of Torah and the […]
• Religions: Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam In the Bhagavad Gita, three yogas, or paths to liberation, are outlined: jnana yoga, which liberates one via knowledge; karma yoga, which liberates one via actions; and bhakti yoga, which liberates one via devotion.
• Judaism as the Oldest Monotheistic Religion Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world. According to Hannabuss, whereas Judaism is connected with the rabbis of the second century, many historians believe that Hillel, a Pharisee, was the real founder.
• Religious Rituals in Judaism and Buddhism This whole process causes the religious follower to learn that the sacred or the spiritual is a vital part of the human world.
• Moses Comparison in Christianity, Judaism and Islam The study is aimed at comparing the way in which the figure of Moses is represented in all three religions, with the further analysis of the three interpretations and the discussion of the study implications […]
• Judaism, Its Religious Beliefs and Prosecution According to the monotheistic religion of the Jews, there is one God in the world Whose Law is to be observed by humanity. In our days, Judaism is considered to be one of the strongest […]
• Judaism: Characteristics of Religion Characteristics Religion Judaism Sources Origin of All Things God is a single creator of the world. That is why, God is discussed as the “cause of all existent things” in the world (Fisher, 2014, p. 278). There is the Creation Story, according to which the world was created during six days, and God decided to […]
• The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam book by Karen Armstrong, is one of the most attractive, readable, and concise books on the emergence of fundamentalism in the three faiths.
• Zoroastrianism Beliefs in Judaism and Christianity Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religious and spiritual teachings in the world which are based on the idea of dualism of two opposite forces of the Good and the Evil and on the concept […]
• Religious Comparisons: Judaism, Christianity and Islam The three “Abrahamic religions” are some of the largest and oldest religious groups in the history of mankind. However, although Christianity is a monotheist religion, God is considered to exist in form of “the Holy […]
• Hinduism and Judaism’ Religions: Practices and Rituals Practices and rituals signify the activities that the followers of a religion are required to engage in. Practices and rituals are the physical manifestations of the activities of religion.
• The Inclusion of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in Politics Christians have changed their belief about the government, and they now want to be involved in the mainstream politics of the countries to help refine the politics that is practiced.
• History of Judaism Religion Judaism was the first religion to introduce monotheism and the existence of a Supreme God. Bottom-line is that they believe in the existence of a strong being.
• Religious Communities Respond to Contemporary Issues; Judaism and Christianity Over the years, the human societies have changed dramatically; from the way they dress, talk and believe. Presbyterians and Methodists have not resolved on where they stand, but there seem to be some division between […]
• Faith and the Future: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Jews can gloat and say that they are the chosen people but this is not a wise decision to make because they will be threatened on all side and in fact since two thousand years […]
• Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Perspectives on God One of the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith is its focus on the holy trinity which is composed of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit each aspect, while separate, […]
• Agnon: Judaism through Metaphors At the start of the story “Agunot”, Agnon employs the styles of symbolism and metaphor that act as a foundation of the ensuing plot.
• Comparing Judaism and Islam Most common to the practices and traditions of the two religions is the “aspects of ritual purity, the practice of fasting, and the presence of dietary laws”.
• Compare and Contrast Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s the Sabbath Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization focuses on the reconstruction of the American-Jewish life that would help the Jewish to change their traditional way of life through incorporations of the modern way of life, philosophy, […]
• The History of Judaism and Hinduism This essay aims at providing a brief history of Judaism as well as Hinduism in an attempt to provide a better understanding of the similarities and differences of the two religions from their places of […]
• Abrahamic Religions: Islam and Judaism According to the Islam religion, the testimony of faith is considered the most important among the five pillars because of the profession.
• Christianity Versus Judaism It is also notable that most of the differences between the two regions are based from the fact that Christianity incorporates the New Testament as part of the holy scriptures of God.

To choose the ideal Judaism-related topic, follow these tips:

• Look for something that piques your interest. This will make the research and the writing process more enjoyable.
• Steer clear of vague or overly specific topics. It would be challenging to cover all the aspects of a general topic. You also won’t have enough things to write about if you pick narrow issues.
• Before you write your essay, be sure you can locate enough information about the subject. Selecting uncommon and poorly studied subjects will prevent you from gathering enough evidence for your essay’s arguments.

Here are possible themes that you can use to look for topics on Judaism:

• Family customs in Judaism. Almost all national customs and traditions of Judaism are, in one way or another, connected with laws and rituals. They regulate all spheres of their life, including family interactions.
• Religious ethics in Judaism. Religious ethics can include matters of Jewish law and non-legal aspects and how Judaism and the Western tradition of ethics intersect.
• Rituals and traditions. The religious customs of Judaism are full of detailed regulations, rules, and rituals. Followers of this religion must keep 613 commandments, 365 of which are prohibitive.
• History of Judaism. Judaism is one of the oldest monotheistic religions. Its central tenet is the strict monotheistic doctrine of God. Judaism can also be defined as a religious, national, and ethical worldview.
• The Similarities Between Christianity and Judaism Rituals
• Subordination of Women to Men in Islam Judaism and Christianity
• The Influence of Judaism on Western Law
• The Substantial and Vital Distinction Between Judaism and Christianity
• The Influence of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism on the Areas Surrounding Arabia
• Understanding the Relation Between Judaism and Christianity
• Understanding Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism
• The Concept of Personhood (Being a Good Person) in Relation to Judaism, Christianity and Islam
• The Relationship Between Judaism and Christianity
• The History and Importance of Sabbath in the Judaism Religion
• The Ways Judaism Gives Depth and Meaning to the Life of the Jewish Community
• The Kingdom of God Genuinely Means – Bible, Christianity, Judaism
• The Holocaust and Its Impact Upon Jews and Judaism in the Twentieth Century
• The Past Present and Ideal Future of Conservative Judaism
• The Importance of Symbols, Artifacts, and Architecture in the Religion of Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism
• The Spreading of Belief and Religion: Judaism
• Understanding Monotheism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
• The Treatment of Christian, Judaism, and Islam Women
• The Concept of Blood Atonement Behind Judaism and Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints
• The Close Relations Between Judaism, Christianity and Islam
• The Significance of The Enlightenment and Modern Judaism
• The Concept of Environment in Judaism, Christianity and Islam
• Women in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam
• The Development of Ideals of Homosexuality in the Four Major Modern Branches of Judaism
• Three Western Religions and Their View on Women: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
• The Function of the Messiah in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
• The Development and Struggles of Judaism Throughout History
• The Holocaust: Anti Judaism Vs. Modern Antisemitism
• Women’s Role Relevant to Western Religious Traditions Such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam
• The Similarities and Differences Between Judaism, Christianity and Islam
• The Impact of Judaism on the Jews and Judaism in the 20th Century
• The Principles of the Jewish Religion and the Judaism as the Main Concept
• The Evolution of Islam Judaism and Christianity
• The Creation in the Sacred Texts of Christianity, Judaism and Islam
• The Intertestamental Period: The Jewish Backgrounds and Interactions of Early Christianity with Judaism
• The Role of Women in Orthodox Judaism
• Zoroastrianism and Its Influence on the Development of Judaism and Christianity
• The Beliefs in the Religions of Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism
• The Different Similarities Between Judaism, Christianity and Islam
• Western Religion Sin in Judaism Christianity and Islam
• The Change in Christianity from Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism
• Ways in Which Judaism, Islam and Christianity Are Connected
• The Traditions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism
• Belief in the Afterlife in Judaism and Christianity
• The Relationship Between the Middle East and Judaism
• The History, Faith, Philosophy and Way of Existence of Judaism
• The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Economics
• The Role of Judaism in Western Culture and Civilization
• The Principle Teachings About Peace in Judaism and Christianity
• How Has Judaism Helped America’s Modern-Day Society?
• What Are Some Similarities Between Judaism and Christianity?
• What Are the Similarities and Differences Between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism?
• Why Did Christianity During Its Rise Appeal to the Romans More Rather Than Judaism?
• How Has Judaism Adapted Its Worship and Rituals to a Time When It Has No Temple?
• Has Hasidism Has Been Essential to the Continuation of Judaism?
• What Should You Know About Judaism?
• How Can Shakespeare’s View on Judaism and Christianity Be Represented Through the Character of His Work?
• What´s Anti Judaism and Antisemitism?
• What Was the Role of the Temple for Ancient Judaism?
• How Judaism and Christianity Diverged?
• Christianity and Judaism: What Do They Have in Common?
• What Does Judaism Mean?
• Judaism, Christianity, Islam: One God?
• How Judaism Promote Imperialism and Argue Against Imperialism?
• Judaism: Who They Are and What They Believe?
• How Christianity and Judaism Are Alike and Different?
• To What Extent Is Jesus’s Attitudes Towards Outcasts a Departure from Judaism?
• How Might Traditional Views Toward Women in Judaism?
• What Beliefs and Practices Does Islam Share with Judaism and Christianity?
• What Are the Basic Beliefs and Practices of Judaism, Christianity?
• How Economics Helped Shape American Judaism?
• How Important Were the Views on Money in Ancient Judaism in Opposition to Rome?
• How Does Judaism Achieve Peace and Inter-Faith Understanding?
• What Are Theological Questions Relevant to the Study of Judaism Raised by the Holocaust?
• How Religious Judaism and Judaism?
• What Does Judaism Mean to You and Me?
• Are Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Male-Chauvinist Institutions?
• What Was the Temple Judaism Period?
• What are the Core Ideas of Judaism?
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130 Judaism Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on judaism, 👍 good judaism research topics & essay examples, ✍️ judaism essay topics for college, 🎓 most interesting judaism research titles, 💡 simple judaism essay ideas, ❓ research questions about judaism.

• Christianity, Islam and Judaism Similarities
• Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Comparative Analysis
• The Positive and Negative Aspects of Judaism
• Judaism and Buddhism: Similarities and Differences
• Afterlife in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
• Comparing of Judaism and Taoism
• Hinduism Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Comparison
• The Role of Women in Judaism The women in such religion as Judaism are given a central and important role that was reflected by God during creation.
• Comparing Judaism and Islam Two major religions in the world captured the imagination of many. It is Judaism and Islam, both springing up from the same region – Palestine.
• Historical Origin of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam The world’s three major religions grew from the same historical rootstock. This paper will focus on the historical heritage of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
• The Sources and Causes of Suffering in Judaism Different religions have a distinct way of perceiving the sources and causes of suffering. In Judaism, the view of sorrow is that it is merely a characteristic of physical existence.
• Theological Challenges Between Judaism and Christianity Judaism originated from the covenantal relationship between the Jews and God. Christianity emerged from Judaism, and both faiths believe that God is the creator of the universe.
• Comparison of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam The principles and stories of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism demonstrate that these religions have many common features that should unite people.
• Judaism and Christianity Comparison Judaism and Christianity grew at the same time, they had the same conditions, which predetermine some common features. But they have a different understanding of the world.
• Women’s Rights from Islamic and Judaism Perspectives The Islamic and Judaism perspectives on women’s rights are often used as a tool to deny women equal rights and perpetuate gender discrimination.
• Judaism’s Impact on Jewish Art and Early Christianity Judaism is the most ancient monotheistic religious observance, it is viewed as a way of life as well as the religion of Jews.
• Second Temple Judaism: Contradictions and Unity The Second Temple Period of the Jewish history is characterized by three major crises the Jewish people struggled.
• Abrahamic Religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the origins and similarities of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
• Sabbat: The Most Valuable Day of the Week in Judaism Sabbat is the most valuable day of the week in Judaism. This day provides individuals with the opportunity to rethink what happened.
• Cultural Similarities and Differences Between Islam and Judaism The paper states that such faiths as Islam and Judaism contain many contradicting factors: from symbolic to gender and sexual equality.
• Bar Mitzvah: The Ritual of Judaism Bar mitzvah is a ritual in Judaism which determines coming of age. This ritual has a special meaning for Jewish people, as it denotes religious upbringing in adolescents.
• Pharisees and Sadducees in Judaism Pharisees and Sadducees believed in the oral law, which has fully maintained most of the changes before or after life exist as people were wicked.
• Conversion of Klemperer to Judaism Klemperer’s diary is one of the most important accounts of German life during the Nazi period. It provides a vivid account of daily life in Nazi Germany.
• “Chosenness” in Judaism Religion In the religion of Judaism, there is a concept of “chosenness” – the belief that Jewish people are chosen to be the only nation worthy of being in a covenant with God.
• Researching of Religion: Judaism One of the advantages of Judaism is the concept of linear time, which rejects the idea of cyclical time and emphasizes the irreversible nature of time.
• Islam, Christianity, and Judaism – Similar or Not? The question of the relationship between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism is one of the most sensitive aspects of interreligious relations in modern society.
• Judaism and Christianity: History and Population A dedicated analysis is needed to determine why Christianity currently has billions of adherents while Judaism remains the religion of just one nation.
• Abraham in the Old Testament and Early Judaism From the biblical story of Abraham, we can glean a lot from his character. Abraham is considered the father of faith because he trusted God to move to a place he never knew about.
• Judaism, Christianity, and Islam The Abrahamic religions are the most popular in the world. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the three most famous of them.
• Egyptian Religion, Judaism, and Taoism: Comparative Analysis The review of the history of the Egyptian religion, Taoism, and Judaism showed that they still have some common elements despite being different in their origins and intentions.
• Sacred Time or Sacred Place in Judaism In terms of role and influence, Sacred time is a more significant factor in determining the importance of Judaism and the impacts of its core tenets on people’s lives.
• Christianity vs. Judaism: A Medieval Conflict This paper aims to compare the history, concepts, and influence of Christianity and Judaism and discuss the Medieval conflict that appeared between them.
• Zionism: The Evolution of Judaism In this paper I will give a definition of Zionism, a brief history of the Jewish people and explain the two stages that the Jews had to go through before they returned to Israel.
• Comparing Islam, Christianity, and Judaism Religions This research paper will compare and contrast Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in terms of origination, foundation, beliefs, rituals, and major prophets.
• Critical Analysis of Judaism From an Interview With a Jew This paper contains a critical analysis of Judaism as established from an interview with a Jew at the at the Beth-el temple in Birmingham Alabama.
• Religions: Zoroastrianism and Judaism The religion Zoroastrianism has been named after the Prophet Zoroaster. He brought religion in the region and is analogous to Mazdaism.
• Judaism, Christianity, Islam as World Religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can be called world religions, which is contrary to specific national religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism have an international character.
• Judaism, Its Tradition and Artifacts Talking about Judaism, practicing Jews mean the Jewish tradition. This paper is dedicated to learning some principles of the Jewish tradition and its artifacts.
• Sabbath in the Judaism Culture This paper answers the questions related to the Sabbath, such as when does it begin and end, the role of food on the Sabbath, prohibited activities in the Sabbath, and others.
• Judaism and Christianity as Revelational Religions The characteristic of Judaism and Christianity as revelational religions is attributed to the German writer and translator Saul Ascher.
• Moses Mendelssohn and Saul Ascher on Judaism Regardless of Mendelssohn’s attempts to build the bridge between Christianity and Judaism, attacks against the latter were a common subject of religious thinking.
• Judaism in Steinheim’s and Luzzatto’s Perceptions Regardless of focusing on different aspects of religion, both Luzzatto and Steinheim shared some similarities in their perception of Judaism.
• Judaism and Christianity: Revelational and Spiritual Perspectives Ascher suggests that Judaism and Christianity may be regarded as revealed religions. Formstecher thinks that Christianity and Judaism can be viewed as forms of spiritual worship.
• Judaism and the Roots of Western Religion
• Sex and Religion According to Judaism
• The Conservative Movement and Judaism
• Christianity and Judaism Development Influenced by Zoroastrianism
• Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Religions Overview
• Women, Judaism and Anti-Semitism
• Comparing Islam and Judaism’s Views on Euthanasia
• The Abrahamic Religions and Judaism
• The Holocaust and Its Impact Upon Jews and Judaism in the Twentieth Century
• Sigmund Freud and Judaism
• Religious Specialists and Ritualism of Judaism
• Jewish Interfaith Marriages and Its Possible Impact on Judaism
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71 Topics on Judaism & Jewish Culture

Judaism is the world’s oldest monotheistic religion that is still popular today. The Torah, the holy scripture of the Jews, is known in Christianity as the Old Testament. The Jews are an ethnoreligious group that includes ethnic Jewish people and converts to Judaism.

If you’re looking for interesting topics in Judaism, you’re in the right place! Here, we’ve collected exciting Judaism essay examples and ideas. In this collection, you’ll find essay topics on the concept of God, Jewish symbols, beliefs, and practices.

📝 Jewish Essay Examples

💡 interesting topics in judaism, 🎓 simple research topics about judaism, ❓ jewish topics & research questions.

• Religion Comparison: Judaism, Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism This essay seeks to establish the similarities and differences between the religions in terms of origin, issue of salvation and creation, and their perception of God.
• Same-Sex Marriage as a Religious Issue Same-sex marriage is viewed as one of the most controversial social issues facing the world today, probably due to the many legal and social factors involved.
• World Religions Studies and Key Concepts Religion can be defined as beliefs and practices that underscore the relationship between people and their God.
• Moses in Christianity, Judaism and Islam The paper at hand aims at investigating the portrayal of Moses in the three Abrahamic traditions as well as pointing to specificities of his life and impact on the development of religions.
• Judaism Concepts The religion Judaism is basically followed by the Jewish people. Their basic principles are personified in the Bible.
• Afterlife in Different World Cultures Most modern religions including atheists do not believe in the existence of an afterlife. Atheists do not believe in a supernatural God.
• Islam in Today’s World This paper describes the true teachings of Islam and doctrines that are followed as well as explaining the pillars of Islamic faith.
• Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism Origins and the Eschatology Each Creates People all over the world engage in worshiping God, the world’s major religions which include Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism share their origins.
• Judaism, Christianity, and Islam This paper examines the characteristics of these faiths and determines that despite their dissimilarities, they have resemblances that are based on their joint background.
• Differences Between Christianity and Judaism
• Judaism’s Perspective on Domestic Violence
• The Death and Mourning Process Found in Judaism
• The Different Similarities Between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
• The Core Ethical Teachings of Judaism
• Cultural Heritage Assessment in Relation to Health Cultural heritage plays a critical role in determining a person’s health care needs and the process of receiving medical care.
• Judaism During the Renaissance and Reformation
• Jesus vs. Judaism: Comparison of the Golden Rule
• Attitudes Towards the Human Body in Judaism
• Jewish Interfaith Marriages and Its Possible Impact on Judaism
• Reform of Judaism in the 19th Century
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• Judaism and Catholicism’s Impact on the Moral System
• The Development and Struggles of Judaism Throughout History
• The Basis for Proper Gender Relations Among Jews and in Judaism
• The Changes That Came With the Reforms of Judaism in the 19th Century
• Exodus and the Relationship Between Christianity and Judaism
• Sexuality and Gender Within the Religions of Judaism and Christianity
• Animal Welfare and Judaism: Teachings on Protecting Animals and Nature
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• How Christianity and Judaism Are Alike and Different?
• Are Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Male-Chauvinist Institutions?
• How Economics Helped Shape American Judaism?
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• How Does Judaism Achieve Peace and Inter-Faith Understanding?

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• > Journals
• > AJS Review
• > Volume 42 Issue 2
• > Jewish History beyond the Jewish People

Article contents

Mistake i: a time i mistook a non-jew for a jew, mistake ii: a time i mistook a jew for a jew, the practices of jewish history, the jewish people in american jewish history, the ahistorical subjects of jewish history, the historical practices of jewishness: conjunctive, contingent, and critical constructive paths, a litany of misgivings, jewish history beyond the jewish people.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2018

This article proposes a new set of critical historical practices, with the aim of constructing Jewishness into an interpretive historical mode. Jewish history is most commonly understood as the history of the Jewish people and its territories. In setting this as the foundation of Jewish history, scholars have allowed empirical evaluation of the Jewishness of a person or place to precede analysis. Two basic approaches, clearly foundational and tied to personalist and nationalist conceptions of Jewishness, have guided the field of Jewish history: the conjunctive and contingent. A third method—termed here a critical constructive approach—offers a nonfoundational vision for freeing Jewishness and Jewish history from tests of individual, group, or nationalist verifiability and, instead, reconceiving Jewishness as a structuring mode that can affect how a broad range of subjects have operated within history.

We scholars rarely start our essays by divulging our mistakes, unless we can repurpose a blunder for an argument. So, reader, beware.

In the spring of 2011, I received conditional acceptance from a journal for an article entitled “Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond.” Footnote 1 The article's central claim was that even as Jews moved away from cities after World War II, they continued to organize their political lives around fundamentally urban concerns. I had delivered sections of the article, which was the seed of a book project, as conference papers and talks over the past few years. One of the characters I discussed—really, a rather pivotal one—was a man named George Schermer.

I first encountered Schermer in the Jewish Community Council of Detroit archives. He had moved to Detroit from Chicago in the mid-1940s, settling in the second-settlement Jewish neighborhood there, and became director of the city's Interracial Committee. Then, in the early 1950s, the city's mayor, empowered by white conservative interests, went on the attack against Schermer and the Interracial Committee. He accused Schermer of turning the city's office into a front for communist sympathizers, damning allegations as Detroit prepared to host the House Un-American Activities Committee for a round of hearings. Schermer denied the charge, but nonetheless felt compelled to resign, leaving the mayor with a final report excoriating city officials for turning a blind eye to the rampant racism in its housing market. Schermer relocated to Philadelphia, where he continued his interracial and housing work. There, much as he had in Detroit, Schermer moved into a recognizably Jewish and liberal neighborhood, Mount Airy. Footnote 2

When I wrote about Schermer in the article, I described him as Jewish. He chose to live in Jewish spaces, traveled in Jewish circles, corresponded frequently with Jewish leaders, and worked closely with Jewish organizations. Even more important for my purposes, his midcentury political trajectory followed an arc similar to that of other politically involved Jewish urban dwellers in my research. He was not a communist, though a non-Jewish conservative mayor could plausibly suggest he was. Rather he was a liberal who perceived some of the fundamental contradictions in advocating for civil rights without simultaneously confronting how the system of private property stratified society.

The conditions for the article's acceptance were straightforward and included instructions that I pay more attention to describing the individuals whose names appeared throughout the article. Reviewing the manuscript with this in mind, I paused when I landed on Schermer, whom I had summarily described as Jewish. As I contemplated what else I might say about him as an individual, I had to consider a different, more elemental question: How did I know he was actually Jewish, beyond the assumptions I had drawn from archival material? I quickly found his obituary in the New York Times and scanned it in vain for the smoking gun I needed. Footnote 3 As doubt crept into my mind, I recalled having read somewhere that he was born in Iowa. (As it turned out, this was not the case.) I started to worry. I found a second obituary and learned that one of his daughters, Judith (her name tilted the balance slightly—perhaps he was Jewish?), lived in Philadelphia, and with that information, I was able to find her email address and send her the following message:

Dear Ms. Schermer,

I'm on faculty at Temple University in the History Department. I'm writing … about Jewish urban flight from Detroit and have come across your father's name in the context of his work with the Mayor's Interracial Committee. I hope this is not awkward for me to ask, but I'm curious if your father was Jewish.

A month later, I received this reply:

To answer your main question—no, our family is not Jewish although my Dad worked with many Jewish organizations in his job as Executive Director of the Phila. Commission on Human Relations and also as one of the founders of the W. Mt. Airy Neighbors. He was not born in Iowa but in Minnesota where he grew up on a farm. This won't help your research on Jewish leaders, I'm afraid. His ancestry was Dutch, and Schermer is both a Dutch and a Jewish name. Footnote 4

There I had it plainly: George Schermer was not Jewish. Now what? Schermer suddenly stood beyond the Jewish framework I had set for my historical study. Still, I could not shake the feeling that in my effort to pursue a verifiable truth—testimony straight from his kin—I had chosen an interpretively empty path. When I had allowed myself to name Schermer as a Jewish man, I had crafted a meaningful analytical framework about Jewish liberalism—how it parted company with leftist economic thought and provided succor for a new vision grounded in fairness and negative rights, not justice or equality.

A small part of me wondered if I might still employ Jewishness not as a personal descriptor for Schermer or as a way to claim his membership within an entire people, but rather as a mode of historical analysis. As such, I would place Schermer within Jewish history, regardless of his Dutch, Minnesota, agrarian, non-Jewish roots. Setting that thought aside, I dutifully minimized the once-central role he had played in the article and finessed the argument so it worked without calling him Jewish. I sent the revisions back to the editor, and, with them, I returned Schermer to his non-Jewish status.

In the fall of 2015, I wrote a scholarly article about the historical development of donor-advised funds. The article served to fill a gap in the history of philanthropy by explaining how the formation of a new financial housing for philanthropic funds in the late 1960s and early 1970s mapped onto larger shifts in private and public governance in midcentury America. In my research, I had discovered that a man named Norman Sugarman was one of the central architects of the donor-advised fund. He was a tax lawyer who had spent his early career working for the Bureau of Internal Revenue (renamed the Internal Revenue Service in 1953) in Washington, DC, until he returned to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. There, he joined a private firm, where he built his practice around charitable tax law. Among his clients were the Jewish Federation of Cleveland and, eventually, the national Council of Jewish Federations. Sugarman was Jewish. Footnote 5

An editor at the Forward saw the scholarly piece and invited me to write a condensed and accessible version of it for the paper. The Forward is one of the few newspapers with a serious philanthropy beat, and I was eager to give its readers an overview of the history of donor-advised funds and, also, some sense of why I thought that history mattered. I wrote the article, though I did not write the headline: “How Norman Sugarman Became the $50B Godfather of Charitable Funds.” Headlines are often clickbait; the article was far less flashy. I led with the 1969 Tax Reform Act, and then explained in the second paragraph: “More than $50 billion in charitable assets now course through our country's economy via Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) as a result of changes wrought by the act, its interpretation, and its application. In no small part due to the acumen and persistence of a mid-century Jewish tax lawyer, those dollars function quite differently from other charitable resources.” Footnote 6 The rest of the article explained how Sugarman interpreted various lacunae in the law to support his creation of charitable funds that retained many of the features of private foundations, yet received the favorable tax treatment and other benefits afforded to public charities.

On a Friday afternoon, when the article appeared in press, I received an email from the senior tax policy counsel for the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA, a successor of the Council of Jewish Federations). I had spoken to him twice before and met him once, very briefly, in person. The email's subject was “Forward Piece,” and its content was brief: “Where do I begin? Can we talk?” I sent him my cell phone number, and he called almost immediately. He began by saying he disagreed with my perspective on donor-advised funds and felt I failed to recognize how crucial they were to philanthropic work within and beyond the Jewish federation system. His measured criticism quickly gave way to fury. As his voice rose, he told me that only an antisemite would scrutinize a financial maneuver while highlighting the specifically Jewish historical context in which it occurred. The article had been published on the eve of the General Assembly, a large annual meeting hosted by the JFNA, and he said Jewish leaders would soundly condemn me for turning my critique of the aggregation of philanthropic capital in public charitable funds into a discussion of Jewish capital practices. I tried to persuade the tax attorney that Sugarman's Jewishness mattered to his social location and helped explain his motivation to protect private capital and endow it with state sanction and subsidy. I made little headway with my defense and finally extricated myself from the call, shaken by the experience.

Still, the conversation got me thinking: Could I have told the story of Sugarman and the critical role he played in shifting the practices of philanthropy without analyzing it through a Jewish frame? And, alternatively, if Sugarman had not been Jewish, but had worked on crafting this same financial structure that rested between the state and the private realm, would it still have been analytically meaningful to consider him within a Jewish framework?

I have thought often about these experiences over the last few years, as I have continued my own research and writing in Jewish history. Like most Jewish historians, I was trained to understand Jewish history as the history of the Jewish people and its movement through space. Thus, whether explicit or not, the first act of Jewish history is that of identification: of an individual, a group, a text, an object, an idea, or a piece of land. The foundational question, in other words, is not historical, but rather, categorical: Who, at any point in time and space in the world, is a Jew, and, thus, what words, ideas, spaces, or things are Jewish ones?

To be certain, scholars of modern Jewry have contemplated the question of who is Jewish as a historical subject matter, asking how Jews at various points in time self-identified, determined boundary lines, and were identified by others, and how all of these pursuits changed over time. The most recent contribution to this genre is Cynthia Baker's Jew , a suggestive and broad study of the word “Jew” that resembles the negative formulation of a similar mode of inquiry in David Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism . Both scholars share an interest in how the idea of the Jew or Judaism, throughout much of history, reflected non-Jewish “labor,” as Nirenberg writes, and was not “owned,” in Baker's parlance, by Jews themselves, but instead assigned and elaborated by non-Jews. Moving across wide swaths of time and experience, they advance Jews or Judaism as thought modes that structured the rise of Christianity and Western thought. Footnote 7

The insights of Baker, Nirenberg, and a handful of other scholars who share their interests have helped organize and systemize the small body of historical research on the changing identification of Jewishness. Shaye Cohen's The Beginnings of Jewishness , and, closer to my own period of study, Susan Glenn's article “In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity” alert scholars to how Jews and non-Jews participated in identifying the boundary between Jewish and not, and what work that boundary did at different moments in time, not only for Jewish group definition but also for broad social, political, and economic structures. Footnote 8 In a similar vein, a new textbook entitled Judaisms: A Twenty-First-Century Introduction to Jews and Jewish Identities sets its task explicitly to understand the process of Jewish identification, explaining, “One of the best ways to approach the question that lies at the core of this book—what does it mean to be a Jew?—is to look at the ways Jews express their Jewishness,” as well as “in relation to expressions of Judaism that precede the present day.” Footnote 9 Baker and Nirenberg would add that Jewish identification does not hinge only on how Jews express their Jewishness, but also on how outsiders name it. When read in light of Baker and Nirenberg, scholarship seeking to explore the historical process of Jewish identification must grapple with the interrelationship between the idea of the Jew or Judaism and the lived experiences of Jews or Judaisms. That is, even if we accept that much of the meaning of Jews or Judaism has been launched from the outside world, to paraphrase Naomi Seidman's critical response to Baker's book, we still orient our historical practice toward documenting the gap between the real Jew or Judaism and the outside contortion of it, and, thus, continue to pursue a categorical question. Footnote 10

Jewish history may do more or different or better work if it sets aside the categorical impulse and instead turns toward a methodological one: How do we determine whom and what we study as the subjects of Jewish history? To answer this question, those of us within the profession must reflect on our historical practices and think systematically about the kinds of claims we make and those we wish to make when we assign Jewishness to our subjects. My hope, however, is that we will do more than reflect. Rather, as I argue below, by decentering the Jewish people and its places or productions as the subjects of Jewish history, we can transform Jewishness from a personalist or territorial claim that guides historical analysis to an interpretive mode of historical analysis able to travel across peoples and spaces (used here in the broadest sense to include physical places, material objects, texts, and ideas) to illuminate networks, relationships, behaviors, and materiality.

To approach Jewishness as an interpretive mode is to meet persistent concerns about the overessentializing impulse in Jewish history by explicitly constructing Jewishness beyond the Jewish people. The historian's attention could move from identifying the bodies, objects, and territories of the Jewish people to interpreting the ideas, politics, and material resources that structured bodies, objects, and territories as operating in Jewish frames. The creative task of the historian would be to define Jewish frames, not Jewish people, as modes of thinking, exercising power, or interacting with materiality.

Efforts to advance the field of Jewish history to embrace a diversity of Jewish bodies, objects, and territories, and to account for their dynamism, are valuable starting points for reconceiving Jewishness as an interpretive mode. Already, the burgeoning body of literature on the “new Jewish studies” has pledged itself to upending the field's earlier “excessive reliance on normative categories” in favor of an approach that values variety and heterogeneity. Footnote 11 Similarly, a growing field of Jewish cultural studies has worked to trace the “fast moving shape and dynamics of contemporary Jewish cultures as they are produced by people in real time within specific material locations and while enmeshed by the fluctuating, interconnected influences of human social and political relations.” Footnote 12 But these efforts still direct their attention to those bodies, objects, and territories that one might claim as verifiably Jewish.

My aim is to highlight the interpretative limitations of using personalist and nationalist identity-based claims (Jewish people, Jewish land) as the anchor point for Jewishness as it tends to be deployed in Jewish history. By cataloguing the practices of Jewish historians, especially those in my own field, American Jewish history, I try to bring to the surface of discussion the regnant methodologies—practices—of employing Jewishness in Jewish history and the stubborn contradictions between these methods and the historical project of marking change over time. I draw on Joan Scott's essay “The Evidence of Experience” to sketch a new method for deploying Jewishness as an interpretive mode of historical analysis, what I call a “critically constructive” mode, freed from the tests of individual, group, or nationalist verifiability on which the practice of Jewish history has relied.

With Scott's framework in mind, Jewishness could be reconceived as a structuring mode to help us understand not the “fact” of Jewishness but rather how it “is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and act in the world.” Such an approach would be “nonfoundational,” to use Scott's formulation, because instead of being built on a preliminary act of identification, Jewishness would serve as a constructive tool capable of crafting historical contexts and sets of relationships and would be informed by, but not limited to, our ability to account for Jewish people and spaces. In other words, Jewishness could be one heuristic, among many, to help us critically and constructively make new sense of the past. Footnote 13

My vantage point, as the introductory anecdotes reveal, is that of an American Jewish historian. To be certain, particular concerns, politics, and subject matters differentiate American Jewish history from other fields within modern Jewish history. For one, it is a young subfield within Jewish history, both because of the relative newness of a numerically significant Jewish presence in the United States, and also because it is a latecomer—if included at all—to university history departments. Furthermore, American Jewish history, more so than other fields of Jewish history at American universities, has dual status as a subject of academic inquiry and as a site of communal heritage. Finally, a critical pivot point of American Jewish history has been its own exceptionalism as a manifestation of American exceptionalism as well as within the span of Jewish history; American Jewish historians have delimited our field, in part, by explaining that the Jews we study have been more active in naming themselves and defying the boundaries between the Jew and the Other than Jews in other places and other time periods. While American Jewish history also participates in many of the same trends and practices as other fields within Jewish history, its particular composition of youth (and sometimes marginality), multiple audiences with claims to it, and self-proclaimed exceptionalism may position it as more porous to the experimentation I am suggesting but also more resistant and fearful to cede precious ground. Footnote 14

I write this essay as a proposal, provisional and, thus, an invitation to debate, reframe, and revise. At present, a shortcoming of the proposal may be my inability to identify clearly what we will better understand, if not “the Jews,” or Judaism(s), should we pursue the historical practice I am suggesting. In the end, readers may decide this is a damning deficiency. After all, I have failed to advance the clear measurable outcome, the standard of assessment to which most of our professional institutions hold us accountable. However, the imprecision of the object of interrogation (capitalism? community activism? urbanism?), if not the Achilles’ heel of the proposal, could be its strength. When Jewishness becomes an interpretive mode, we must release ourselves from the privilege and responsibility of owning its object of interrogation, and instead learn to rest easily—even happily—in watching its journey to places and peoples beyond our current imaginations.

Historian David Hollinger offers a starting point to reflect on the historical practices that have characterized American Jewish history. In the early 2000s, Hollinger, whose first book was an intellectual biography of philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, issued a call for American Jewish historians to broaden their subjects of inquiry beyond what he called “communalist” Jews to include what he called “dispersionist” Jews. He wrote, “By ‘dispersionist,’ I mean a more expanded compass that takes fuller account of the lives in any and all domains of persons with an ancestry in the Jewish diaspora, regardless of their degree of involvement with communal Jewry and no matter what their extent of declared or ascribed Jewishness. To dispersionist history, the concept of ‘the Jewish people’ means little.” Footnote 15

Hollinger calls American Jewish historians to task for writing only about communalist or, more colloquially (in my words, not Hollinger's), “Jew-y” Jews and, as a result, neglecting the far broader role that men and women with Jewish “ancestry” have had in shaping the world. Those few historians who pursue dispersionist Jewish history, according to Hollinger, “confront the challenge of dealing with historical actors who were obviously shaped by the conditions of the Jewish diaspora in Europe yet affiliated only nominally or not at all with any Jewish community and/or were only rarely treated by gentiles in any special way on account of their Jewish history.” Footnote 16

Using his own historical practices as an example, Hollinger reveals that when he was working on his dissertation, his “Jewish then-fiancée” drew his attention to the fact that Morris Cohen was Jewish and set him on a path toward understanding how Cohen's philosophical work reflected his Jewishness, even as Cohen was not operating in a specifically Jewish space. Footnote 17 In other words, Hollinger did not set out to study Jews; rather, Jews presented themselves as crucial figures in almost every major twentieth-century intellectual movement, so to write American intellectual history, Hollinger by necessity wrote about Jews.

For Hollinger, the vector of inquiry into Jews is significant. If one starts by looking for places where Jewishness is visible and stated, then one will write about Jew-y Jews. To move only in this direction, according to Hollinger, limits the possibilities of Jewish history to communalist history, which, he implies, tends toward an inevitable narrowness or parochialism. In an article entitled “Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained instead of Avoided or Mystified,” he champions his historical practice as producing better and more significant historical scholarship than communalist American Jewish history. He argues, “The role in history played by people who were shaped by the conditions of the Jewish diaspora is a much broader site for inquiry than the history of communal Jewry.” Footnote 18 Where Jewish historians may feel their area of study is marginal to broader American history, for example, Hollinger would have us understand that we must take some responsibility for our methods as instruments of ghettoization. If we cannot see Madeline Albright, Walter Lippmann, or Ayn Rand as much our subjects as Stephen Wise, Mordecai Kaplan, or Sally Preisand, then we have built our own wall.

While Hollinger clearly intends to widen the scope of Jewish history, his recommendations hinge on expanding the field, not changing the discipline's practices. The fact that he happened upon Morris Cohen's Jewishness—at the suggestion of his explicitly noted Jewish fiancée—may indicate he traveled a different path toward his subject's Jewishness from the one Jeffrey Rosen, for example, took in his recent biography of Louis Brandeis as part of Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series. Rosen approaches Brandeis as a Jewish man, suitable for a biographical series defined by the verifiable Jewishness of its subjects, while Hollinger approaches Cohen first as a thinker, significant enough for a dissertation, and only later as a Jewish man. Nonetheless, in both formulations, the measure of an individual's fitness to serve as a subject of Jewish history remains his or her self-identification as Jewish, or the historian's ability to identify him or her as Jewish.

Hollinger presses Jewish historians to see that Jew-y Jews are not the only appropriate subjects of inquiry. He creates a tension between communalist and dispersionist historians, in part to argue that dispersionist historians and their subjects deserve inclusion in the canon because they will improve it. Even as outsiders to American Jewish history, dispersionists operate in special and less marginalized ways than communalists—echoing Hollinger's implied sense that dispersionist historians, likewise, engage in fewer practices of self-marginalization than communalist historians. Yet his mild polemic aside, Hollinger's measure of Jewishness is still an individual's “ancestry in the Jewish diaspora,” making his distinction between the two realms substantively negligible. In both cases, communalist and dispersionist Jews will meet his threshold. They are both Jewish people, and this, more than any other reason, is why they are both appropriate subjects of Jewish history.

The practice of using the word “Jewish” as the adjectival modifier in an appositive phrase made equivalent to an individual, group, or space remains the standard of Jewish historical practice. Thus we learn about Norman Sugarman, a Jewish man, born in Cleveland, a tax attorney, and so on; or the Twelfth Street neighborhood in Detroit, a Jewish neighborhood in the mid-twentieth century, where George Schermer settled, and so on. On the other hand, should I suggest that I am writing about George Schermer, born in Minnesota, and a housing-rights activist, as a Jewish man, I would be making a false claim. Schermer was neither a communalist nor a dispersionist Jew, neither a Jew-y Jew nor just a Jew. Yet, what if my explanation of Schermer's political and economic activism—and of the Jewish political economy of midcentury liberalism—were more analytically profound and interpretatively incisive by writing about Schermer through the lens of Jewishness? Indeed, is it possible that I can gain as much historical depth in describing Schermer through the frame of Jewishness as I can from ascribing Jewishness to Sugarman, no matter that one of these men could trace his ancestry to the Jewish Diaspora and the other could not?

As Jewish historians, we face a perplexity: accounting for Jews, whether as a people or a nation, within history, while relying on ahistorical categories to designate them. Historians can write about the formation of nations or the formation of individual modes of expression, but when we reify something that is already formed as the subject of our inquiry, we limit our ability to use historical methods. The “Jewish people” may stand for a collective or a nation, and also—or sometimes instead—“Jewish people” is shorthand for the Jewish individual and the varieties of individuals who can all be tagged as Jewish and as producing and consuming Jewish objects and ideas. As historian Noam Pianko has argued, the term “peoplehood” “provided a bridge between the denationalized connotations of people in the American context and trends in European nationalism and Zionism that influenced American Jewish perspectives on collectivity.” Footnote 19 His excavations into the coining and formation of American Jewish peoplehood illustrate the interpenetration of Jewish bodies (people) and Jewish collectivities (the nation) as central to how American Jews and their historians have named individuals, groups, and spaces as Jewish. While Pianko's scholarship traces the process of naming, Jewish historians tend to use the name and its variations—Jews, Jewish, Jewishness, Jewish people(hood)—as an ahistorical foundation for historical questions.

The problem may be made less abstract if we consider the difference between talking about race and talking about racism or racial ideologies. Racism or racial ideologies are processes, with histories; race is a formed ideology, and should we chase it across time or space, we are allowing its ideology to dictate our inquiry. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, “Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism … inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature…. But race is the child of racism, not the father…. [T]he belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea.” Footnote 20 Similarly, literary scholar Benjamin Schreier argues that writing about Jewish literature as necessarily tied to “The Jews as a population” assumes that the process—in this case, the literature—emerged from a stable, empirical reality of the Jew, when, really, the process is what creates the conditions of belief in that reality. Footnote 21

Jewish historians have been vital participants in moving the insights of literary deconstruction, which pull apart the existence of any stable subjects or texts, into historical inquiry. We study how Jews construct their Jewishness at different moments and in different places—as a function of mobility, of transnational relationships, of scarcity or abundance, of urbanism, and more. In American Jewish history, one can easily observe the ubiquity of Jewish adaptation as a central scholarly theme, perhaps the central scholarly theme of the field. Indeed, from the earliest to the most recent scholarship, adaptation emerges as a thread of continuity to explain how Jewish life worked in the New World. For example, in her now-classic 1981 study of second-generation New York Jews, Deborah Dash Moore wrote, “Out of the second generation's encounter with the city emerged a new American Jew, one whose Jewishness was shaped by the city's peculiar dynamic.” Likewise, Shari Rabin's recently published monograph on nineteenth-century American Jewish practices asserts, “And yet for most Jews, the relationship between Judaism and American mobility was a fraught one that occasioned debate and inspired adaptations.” Footnote 22

Intellectual and cultural historian David Biale, in the introduction to his 2002 anthology, Cultures of the Jews , meditates on the question of how one can write “ a Jewish history” given Jewish historians’ discovery of persistent adaptation and change in their subjects’ experiences. He resolves that, in fact, a Jewish history can be written as “a dialectic between, on one hand, the idea of one Jewish people and of a unified Jewish culture, and, on the other, the history of multiple communities and cultures.” Footnote 23 Similarly, in a more recent anthology, Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History , the editors conclude that big analytical categories, such as Diaspora or tradition, should be employed in Jewish history “in a manner that not only makes room for Jewish heterogeneity, but that also accounts for hegemony in determining the scope and substance of what has historically been incorporated into the Jewish traditions.” Footnote 24 Thus, in one volume they collect historical and anthropological scholarship as a way of grappling with the challenge of melding phenomenological inquiry (the method of anthropology) with historical inquiry. The editors ask, “How can we describe Jewishness?,” a phenomenological question, alongside the historical, “How has it changed?” In vexing the boundaries of Jewish history and anthropology, they magnify the tension that Biale describes within the very attempt to write Jewish history.

In both cases, Jewish studies scholars suggest a dual-pronged approach of accepting the variety and changing nature of Jewish forms while, nonetheless, asserting a less historically flexible and more hegemonic Jewish category. Doing so makes possible the task of writing Jewish history. In the past, especially before the turn toward social history, historians often relied on a corpus of great Jewish texts to define the parameters of the varieties of Jewishness, still presupposing that an ahistorical category—Jewish text—delimited the boundaries of a canon. More recently, Jewish historians appear to turn toward phenomenological disciplines, ritual studies or anthropology especially, to help them define the coherence of their ever-adapting historical subjects. I interpret these scholarly moves as efforts to fuse the rhythm of historical scholarship, with its fixation on charting change and adaptation, to the rich classificatory and descriptive categories that have emerged within anthropology and religious studies. Footnote 25

If Jewish history is predicated on identifying the Jewish subject, then I agree we must acknowledge, even inhabit, the tension between categorical ways of naming a phenomenon and historical methods of marking change over time. The Jewish subject is only knowable through its descriptor as being Jewish. This calculable subject may serve an important role in providing models for how individuals can organize their lives around being Jewish, or how a Jewish state can exist, or, even, how individuals or groups can hate Jews as a people or an idea, but the Jewish subject possesses no intrinsic value as a historical tool to help with our practice. By this, I mean it does not help historians do our work of understanding how, when, and why formations of Jewishness have intersected with formations of power or meaning. Footnote 26

If we orient our study toward understanding how Jewishness is an interpretive mode that can help us better apprehend facets of our world, whether or not the subjects of analysis are necessarily and verifiably Jewish, then we free ourselves from ahistorical foundations. Instead, we use Jewishness as a tool for interpreting modes of exchange, forms of power, methods of resistance, and spaces at specific moments in time.

I am agitating for a more precise set of historical practices that will enable historians to employ Jewishness in broadly interpretive ways. In order to make my case, I offer a typology of three practices of Jewish history. The first two—which I call conjunctive and contingent—represent my effort to classify the practices that currently guide the field, while the third—critical constructive—I render as a prescription and aspiration. I suggest this practice, which orients aspects of some historical scholarship already and can draw vitality from other fields that follow critical constructive approaches, holds promise for expanding Jewishness beyond its foundational and ahistorical uses in Jewish history.

Jewish historians, hoping to resist essentialist claims about Jewish people and spaces, often rely on a conjunctive historical practice. We write about the Jew or Jewish people and another topic: Jews and cities; Jews and business; Jews and Hollywood; Jews and African Americans. The conjunction serves to prove a gap between the Jew and whatever the topic of study; Jews are not Hollywood, but they can be studied alongside it, just as they are not defined entirely by cities or businesses, but a subset of them can be studied in those frames. Ironically, in hoping to avoid essentializing Jewishness, historians who rely on conjunctive claims premise them on an implicit essentialism—of the verifiable Jewish subject. This practice of Jewish history aligns well with dispersionist Jewish history. It can make Eli Broad or the Toll Brothers (Robert and Bruce) the subjects of Jewish history just as easily as the researcher can come up with proof that they are Jewish. Thus, we write about Jews and real estate by writing about how Eli Broad, a Jewish man, developed his real estate holdings and home-building enterprise, first in postwar Detroit and then in Los Angeles. Footnote 27

The conjunctive mode, alone, empties Jewishness of any interpretive meaning. Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller explain in the introduction to a volume of essays about Jewish economic history that Jewish historians often merely note a correspondence between an economic industry and the preponderance of Jews in it “sometimes to the point of denying any significance to the Jewishness of the subjects under discussion.” Footnote 28 The same could be said about Jewish political, cultural, and social history, all fields rife with conjunctive scholarship.

More often than not, however, historians explain the conjunction of Jews or Jewish spaces and some other variable, say, midcentury American tax law, through a practice of contingency, the second in my typology of historical practices. Contingency tends to be bidirectional. In my own scholarship, I am struck by how often I write that Jews “shaped and were shaped by” something or another—social-scientific language, or urban politics, for example. Footnote 29 An argument of historical contingency would assert that tax law and Jewishness were in some measure dependent on one another. So the fact that Norman Sugarman was a Jewish tax lawyer is not just a matter of a conjunction; rather it also provides a way of understanding Jewishness, midcentury tax law, or both.

Historical arguments of contingency still hinge on the historian's ability to define a subject as Jewish, but they allow for explication of the connectivity between Jewishness and another variable. For example, in her recent dissertation, Britt Tevis writes powerfully about the history of American Jewish lawyers and American law through this mode. We learn more about Jews and the legal profession by examining their contingency on one another than we would by studying each alone, all the while seemingly avoiding the pitfall of essentializing our subjects. Footnote 30

Contingent arguments also lend themselves to comparative claims about why Jews were positioned differently from other groups in their relationship with a particular industry, pattern, commodity, or form of expression. For example, Susan Glenn's seminal study of immigrant women and the garment industry explains that Jewish women gravitated toward union politics more than their Italian immigrant counterparts because of the “structures and politics” and “cultural boundaries” of each immigrant community. Footnote 31 Likewise, in his book about Jewish and Catholic responses to postwar urban transformations, Gerald Gamm argues that Jews left urban neighborhoods with greater alacrity than Catholic residents because of the striking differences in their institutional structures. He writes, “Ancient rules binding churches and synagogues have shaped the twentieth-century urban battle of race and housing,” and he attempts to show how disparities in these rules accounted for varied residential patterns. Footnote 32 Glenn and Gamm, through their comparative analyses, depict specific and contingent relationships between Jews and the garment industry or Jews and postwar urban politics. They illustrate just how much Jewishness mattered to that relationship by holding constant one subject of their study—the garment industry or postwar urban politics—and shifting the group variable. Given that Italian women or urban Catholics had a vastly different relationship with labor politics or urban politics, each scholar concludes that Jewishness is interpretively significant to understanding American Jewish experience and broader trends in American history.

Communalist Jews are better suited to contingent history than dispersionist Jews, because contingent history aims to show how and why actual, verifiable, lived Jewishness made a difference. If writing about a Jew for whom being Jewish made little difference, the historian is more likely to note that person's Jewishness as a conjunctive factor (she was Jewish and a judge) than as a contingent factor, which would demand some explanation of why Jewishness mattered or, at least, how it was altered in the course of a dynamic relationship between it and something else. What Michael Walzer describes as the “imaginary Jews” of Nirenberg's book on anti-Judaism are poor subjects of contingent history until Nirenberg discusses how real Jews felt the effects of anti-Judaism in the rise of antisemitism. The shift from imaginary to real subjects (or victims) enables the contingent mode to spring into action. A non-Jewish figure, such as George Schermer, is a similar puzzle for the contingent mode. He may have shaped the world of urban politics in which Jews operated, so he can certainly take the position of one of those contingent factors that shaped (and was shaped by) Jewishness, but before he can be considered through contingent Jewish history, he must meet the threshold of having affected actual Jewish bodies and spaces or having been affected by them. Footnote 33 In other words, a contingent approach to Jewish history is only equipped to make analytically important claims about non-Jewish bodies and spaces in relation to verifiable Jewish bodies and spaces.

In its many varieties, only superficially observed here, contingent history is the standard of professional, university-based Jewish history. As we write Jewish history through a mode of contingency, we Jewish historians enact our own contingency: we position ourselves as contributing to and participating in other fields of study, such as labor history or urban history. We present our work as capable of shaping and being shaped by broader trends in the field and, thus, make the case for its valuation outside of Jewish history. And we reproduce this mode by training graduate students to approach their research as staking claims in multiple fields by showing the contingency of Jewish history and something else. The more facility they have in making convincing contingent claims, the more their work will be appreciated outside of Jewish history, a necessity—no matter how elusive the feeling of being appreciated adequately by those outside of one's specialty—when it comes to making oneself competitive in the job market. Yet however the historian pitches his or her central claim, contingent history remains beholden to foundational conceptions of Jewishness. Footnote 34

The preliminary task of determining the Jewish subject is no different in contingent history than it is in conjunctive history. That determination serves as a foundation—or in Joan Scott's terms, “a foundationalist discourse” that is “considered permanent and transcendent.” The foundation, thus, is beyond historical scrutiny, and yet historical scholarship relies on it. Scott, however, advocates intense scrutiny by asking, “[W]hether history can exist without foundations and what it might look like if it did?” Footnote 35 I refine her question here to ask: What would Jewish history look like without the foundation of verifiable Jewish people or spaces?

My proposal—and the third and prescriptive piece of my typology—is that only if it embraced a critical constructive practice of marking its subject could Jewish history untether itself from the foundations of naming Jewish people or spaces. To do so would mean releasing Jewishness from the claims of specific bodies and spaces. As a critical practice, this different mode of employing Jewishness would upend empiricism, whereby Jews could be counted and classified, and instead force historians to construct why and how and in what situations we interpret a body or space as Jewish. Footnote 36

The interpretative strength of the historian's critical construction of Jewishness and not the empirical verifiability of Jewishness would become the ever-shifting grounds on which historical scholarship would be evaluated. In a sense, this is already the case—“good” history hinges on persuasive interpretation—but I am suggesting we dismantle the foundationalist discourse of Jewishness and repurpose it, as a molding here, a piece of scaffolding there, a roof beam there, without boxing ourselves into the entirety of the structure. Jewishness may help us interpret a person, a place, an idea, a text, an object, or a relationship without first having to meet any preexisting condition of being Jewish. Indeed, Jewishness might be approached as a formation, potentially just as vital in bodies or spaces identified as not Jewish as those identified as Jewish. Nirenberg's anti-Judaism provides a suggestion of what this could look like, but his confinement to the history of thought and the history of a negation or “othering” may blinker our ability to perceive the extents of the critical constructive practice I am envisioning.

The fields of queer studies and critical race theory are instructive in helping us imagine how such a historical practice could operate. In each, the subject of study is avowedly not true or real queer people or “raced” people, whatever that would mean. Rather each uses queerness or racial thought to dismantle the reification of socially constructed categories. Queer theory puts the reality of fixed categories into “crisis,” as Judith Butler writes. Footnote 37 Man, woman, straight, gay, white, black, and so on all might be imagined to serve as the foundational discourse for particular fields of historical studies. But queer theory, operating often in tandem with critical race theory, demands we see each of these categories as formations. A history of gay male urban spaces may help us learn something about people who identified themselves and who historians see as gay men, but it should also advance an understanding of what how gayness and masculinity operated at a specific time, regardless of whether the subjects were verifiably gay or male. Footnote 38 Likewise, in her article on lesbianism and transvestitism in Nazi Germany, Laurie Marhoefer sets queer theory into motion by showing that nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality were only visible in certain moments and by certain people within the Nazi state. She explains, “Perceived gender nonconformity put some women and some transvestites at risk, but not all women who had affairs with women transgressed gender norms.” Footnote 39 Her precise and microhistorical analysis illustrates the ways that different witnesses constructed each of these categories at various moments and the ways in which Nazi state apparatus classified the same mode of behavior as normal or abnormal depending on the priorities of the state at a particular moment. Finally, in her essay documenting the perils of analogizing Jewishness and queerness, Janet Jakobsen suggests that the interpretive meaning of personalist categories, such as Jews or queers, can differ profoundly from the empirical gesture of defining membership, such that we might talk about “whether we can queer queers.” Footnote 40

Critical race theory as a tool for historical scholarship pivots on a similar antifoundational logic, while also emphasizing the consequences that real people and real spaces experience because of their assignation to racial categories. Indeed, critical race theorists and historians engaging in its practices have studied legal and property structures, in particular, to show how racial classification carried material risk for real people. Footnote 41 By understanding queerness or racial formation or Jewishness as critical and constructed categories, the historian, in other words, need not—indeed, cannot—shed the responsibility of studying material consequences of the legal, cultural, or political reification of each category. The challenge is to do so without replicating that reification. In her response to whiteness studies, historian Barbara Fields castigates “well-meaning scholars” for being “more apt to speak of race than of racism ,” and, thus, for dodging the question of how race was formed in the service of racism. She writes, “With identity and agency displacing questions of political, economic, and social power, whiteness offers us endless variations on the theme of race that, reproducing their assumptions as conclusions, invariably end where they started.” Footnote 42

In similar fashion, Jewishness as a process and an interpretive tool would not necessarily reflect back on Jewish people or Jewish spaces in the way that Jewishness as an ahistorical assignation of actual identity always gestures toward the Jewish people or Jewish spaces, even in their endless variations. While queer theory and critical race theory have influenced Jewish history, neither has fueled similar interpretative modes about Jewishness, in part because the project of Jewish history has been defined by the goal of saying something about actual Jewish people and spaces. Yet all too often the most that historians can say is that there are many different types of Jews and many different types of Jewish spaces, even as each can still be—or, in some historians’ views, must be—characterized as Jewish. Variety here operates to obscure the essentialism of a foundationalist discourse.

For American Jewish historians, variety has become the touchstone of the modern Jewish experience, yet I fear it serves as only a shallow evasion of essentialism built on a profound embrace of it. As my colleague Tony Michels has observed, American Jewish historians are notable among US historians for our lack of field-defining debates. At least one reason for the equanimity within our field is our almost wholehearted acceptance of pluralism or variety as the signature of the American Jewish experience and as the exceptional feature of Americanism. Footnote 43 Eli Lederhendler, in his recent synthetic history American Jewry sets himself the task of moving American Jewish history “beyond diversity” and the endless iterations of multiple American Jewish self-inventions. He builds on his earlier criticism of American Jewish historians’ overreliance on ethnicity to explain how American Jews uniquely balanced being American and Jewish. One of his aims is to connect American Jewish history more clearly with global Jewish patterns, a goal that hinges on a calculable Jewish subject. Footnote 44 Still, he compels us to confront the fact that variety is only variety in relation to something else; that is, American Jewish historians have tethered variety to a stable center, and for most of us, the liberal promises of the United States and the blurred nationalist and personalist dimensions of Jewishness (recall Pianko's discussion of Jewish peoplehood) anchor variety and account for the relative harmony within the field.

The tendency to lean into a stable center of verifiable Jews in order, then, to document its variety may not be unique to American Jewish history. As Adam Sutcliffe writes in a recent essay about Werner Sombart (the author of The Jews and Modern Capitalism [1911]), “Jewish history has become a field particularly averse to ‘grand theory.’” He explains that the “heavy over-determination” of Jewishness in the hands of Christians and antisemites accounts for this aversion and has created a historiography tilted toward diffuse narratives of Jewish experience and resistant to theorization. Footnote 45 It is no accident that a historian writing about a controversial economic treatise explaining the deep relationship between capitalist development and Jews, as individuals, and Jewishness, as a mode of modern economic relationships, notes his field's timidity when it comes to advancing theory. As Jerry Muller explains in his book Capitalism and the Jews , “For a variety of intellectuals in modern Europe, Jews served as a kind of metaphor-turned-flesh for capitalism.” Footnote 46 Yet in replicating the assumption that characterizations of Jewish modes must directly correspond to real “flesh” Jews, Jewish historians make it impossible to use Jewishness as a critical constructive mode of interpretation.

Three intellectual shifts are the necessary preconditions should we wish to experiment with a critical constructive approach to Jewish history. To varying degrees, I see each of these shifts as already in process. First, a critical constructive practice will demand we decouple Jewish history from the work of defending liberal nationalism, and, especially, the modern Zionist project, not because Jewish history somehow proves the wrongheadedness of those experiments, but rather because Jewishness as an interpretive process is not oriented toward providing empirical answers or redemptive claims about particular groups of people. Rather, as a tool for interpretation, the practice of using Jewishness may equip us, for example, to write with precision about non-Ashkenazic peoples or spaces as more than simple variations—objects for tolerance—on a stable Jewish center but rather as broadening the interpretive possibilities of Jewishness. Or the practice may allow us to propose that Israel, as a modern nation-state, does not in all ways manifest Jewishness. For example, we could ask when charitable contributions made to entities operating within the State of Israel are best interpreted through Jewishness and when they are not, instead of simply assuming that any donation made by a Jewish person to Israel should be classified as Jewish philanthropy, but those made by, perhaps, evangelical Christians should not. In other words, the interpretive claims of Jewishness, detached from verifiable Jews as subject, may not fit each and every person or space claiming Jewishness. The test will be how we critically construct it, not who or what land mass or text or object claims the right to occupy it. Footnote 47

Second, a critical constructive practice will ask us to emancipate Jewishness from Jewish history and obligate historians from other fields to grapple with it. A recent book about New York City politics in the 1970s, for example, cursorily cites Irving Howe's 1976 World of Our Fathers in a very brief description of Mayor Abraham Beame's Jewish and socialist heritage. This superficial treatment makes sense, though the author might have found a wider and more current literature to cite, because the author's claim is only the most modest of conjunctive Jewish history: Beame was mayor of New York and Jewish. She verifies his Jewishness, gestures toward why it might matter to the person he became, and then moves on. But when Jewishness is approached as a critical constructive practice, even historians who do not set out to write about Jewish bodies or places will be compelled to deploy Jewishness as part of their interpretive apparatus. In this case, the author might explore how the austerity politics and privatization she so insightfully traces are related to historical processes that include Jewishness. This is not because Jews called the shots in the city—sometimes they did and sometimes they did not. Rather this is, perhaps, because Jewishness helps us understand how power moves between state and nonstate entities. Footnote 48 Although conference panels and a few special issues of journals have started to experiment with new ways to join conversations about Jewishness to other historical inquiries, I am not aware of sustained efforts to move Jewishness beyond Jewish history in this fashion. Footnote 49

Third, a critical constructive approach will only be as critical and constructive as our vigilance against creating new foundations. That is, we must constantly reimagine the “nonfoundational” demands of our practice, since each attempt will challenge us with the temptation to settle, again, into a foundation. For this reason, as much as I admire the sweep of Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism or Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century , both books that a reader may think fully achieve what I am suggesting, I worry that each refutes a particular foundation by, in fact, creating a new one: that all of Western thought is oriented around imaginations of Jews and Judaism; or that all of the twentieth century is Jewish. These are provocative theses, good to think with, but if fully embraced, they become their own foundations, in need of unsettling. Footnote 50

The animating question of a critical constructive approach is: How does Jewishness help us explain a subject of interrogation? This is to take seriously Scott's admonishment that historical tools should be “neither self-evident nor straightforward” but “always contested.” Footnote 51 Our goal is not to refine and sharpen Jewishness, in the hopes of one day knowing what it is. Rather, the goal is to blur it, such that, in motion, its shape loses the solidity of a foundation and, instead, gains the flexibility of a process that moves through bodies, ideas, objects, and spaces.

I submit this plea to think about Jewish history beyond the Jewish people and its spaces with some trepidation. I worry this proposal may seem feisty or tendentious. My typology of historical practices is meant neither to discredit how Jewish history has been done nor to orient it entirely toward a new practice, though I recognize how the blunt instrument of a typology might be perceived as bombastic and ungenerous. Still, in intellectual circles, quietism is not a value. We do not praise consensus; rather we are suspicious of it. In this spirit, I feel some excitement about the possibility of inciting new debate about why and how we study Jewish history, even if the direction of debate rejects elements of how I have defined a critical constructive historical practice. Should anyone write about urbanism without invoking Jewishness? Should anyone study capitalism or philanthropy without wrestling with Jewishness? And what about liberalism and neoliberalism? This is not to expand Jewishness into absurdity, but rather to untether it from its center and allow it range and depth.

Although I have tried to be precise in my critique and my constructive claims, I recognize that this essay skims the surface of specifics, yet another potential slight to the scholarly labor that fuels our field. Readers have witnessed my effort to read more widely—within and beyond the field of Jewish history and from theoretical literatures—than has been my practice. To be perfectly candid, I felt intellectually promiscuous as I read for this essay, and my sense of propriety almost compelled me to expunge discussions of texts and ideas far from my own field—or at least preface discussions of them with disclaimers about my expertise. (And, indeed, I could not stop myself from doing just this at several points.) Yet as exposed as I feel when discussing topics from ancient or medieval Jewish history or from certain theoretical perspectives, doing so is a necessary element of the historical practice I am envisioning.

To write Jewish history beyond foundational claims about Jewish people and spaces, we will need to find ways to avoid the shackles of our own expertise. This means being generous with one another, not only in showing patience when someone who may lack certain linguistic and scholarly credentials attempts to speak about our field but also in sharing our knowledge in more accessible forms to allow others to do their own promiscuous reading. Some may see this practice as threatening our proprietary claims over our work. This is exactly the case: a critical constructive approach to Jewishness calls into question how scholars and others possess Jewish history.

The historical scholarship I am envisioning would be no more the property of the historian of the Jews, or Jewish studies, or the Jewish people, than the possession of any other group. This could cause discomfort on multiple levels. Those of us who work at universities well know the pressures to define our turf, as we compete for scarce resources allocated according to our ability to prove our value. The more value I—or my field or program—possess, the more I stand to gain. And if our value proposition is control over a discrete field of knowledge, then we lose value according to my approach. Furthermore, among those of us who raise money to sustain the programs we run, we often rely on the fact that a particular community feels claim over—and, thus, will invest in—the work we do and recognizes our singular ability to do that work. We may, then, need to develop a new case to explain to the communities that fund and support us that Jewishness as shared property can be as durable and grounding as Jewish history as private property. And, beyond this, we might explain how our intellectual work demands nothing less than an ability to use the tools we have to the full extent of their ability to help us, all of us, live in this world. The languages we know, the texts we can read, and the archives we have studied: all of this could help us share knowledge more than compete for it. Footnote 52

In my present state of mind, about my country and our world, I glare cynically at my above words about shared property and the ways we might rely on intellectual work, about Jewishness of all things, to help illuminate our world today. Is it possible to think of Jewishness as anything other than real Jewish bodies and spaces, when some of our leaders at home and abroad are intent on drawing stark, historically familiar, and violent lines of division based on these very categories, alongside those of race, sexuality, and gender? Indeed, my cynicism about my proposal here is not too far from the plain and simple fear I feel.

Near the conclusion of her essay, Scott writes that the quest for nonfoundational history is “always therefore political.” Footnote 53 When we write Jewish history beyond its foundational claims—the Jewish people or a Jewish space—we must announce that these claims are neither inevitable nor eternal. Rather, they are historical constructions and processes that can be explanatory for a broad range of people and spaces. Ultimately, to employ a critical constructive process and aspire toward nonfoundational historical scholarship, we must refute the depoliticization of history and, instead, assert its political nature. This does not mean our historical scholarship on Jewishness must instruct political debate today, though it could, but a critical constructive approach will not sanction efforts to claim the past as the spoils of one people or space. And this is political today, as we hear the clamor of identity politics, nationalism, and the deserving and undeserving recipients of resources, land, and water, couched in the language of historical right.

We Jewish historians have far more to contribute to scholarship and our world than we have allowed ourselves. The day presses us to think broadly and to share what we know about power, oppression, liminality, space, capital, politics, movement, hatred, and so much more, and not allow fear to stand in our way. In motion, our historical work makes it impossible to assert a single narrative, a single theory, and a single ideology to explain the world, but it also allows us—indeed, requires us—to share the tools we have as widely as we can.

This article started as a seminar paper for a session entitled “Critical Jewish Studies: In Theory and Practice” held at the 2016 Association for Jewish Studies conference. I am grateful to Ben Schreier for organizing the seminar, Laurence Roth for commenting on my paper, and all of the participants for excellent discussions throughout. Catherine Rottenberg pointed me toward Joan Scott's essay and in several other significant ways improved this article. Jodi Eichler-Levine, Jessica Cooperman, and Jessica Carr invited me to a workshop at Lehigh University called “Situating American Jewish Studies.” The group they assembled and conversation they stimulated provided valuable fodder for this piece. Finally, I thank the editors of AJS Review and its two readers.

1. Berman , Lila Corwin , “ Jewish Urban Politics in the City and Beyond ,” Journal of American History 99 , no. 2 (September 2012 ): 492 – 519 CrossRef Google Scholar .

2. Berman , Lila Corwin , Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit ( Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press , 2015 ), 89 – 96 Google Scholar ; and Perkiss , Abigail , Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia ( Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press , 2014 ) CrossRef Google Scholar .

3. “George Schermer, Rights Expert, Dies at 78,” New York Times , June 6, 1989.

4. Email exchange with author, May 13, 2011 and June 15, 2011.

5. Berman , Lila Corwin , “ Donor Advised Funds in Historical Perspective ,” Boston College Law Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good 1 (October 2015 ): 5 – 27 Google Scholar .

6. Lila Corwin Berman, “How Norman Sugarman Became the $50B Godfather of Charitable Funds,” Jewish Daily Forward , November 14, 2015, http://forward.com/news/324259/how-norman-sugarman-became-50b-godfather-of-charitable-funds/ . The most recent calculations now estimate the total assets in DAFs to have grown to $85 billion. See National Philanthropic Trust, “2017 Donor-Advised Fund Report,” at https://www.nptrust.org/daf-report/ .

7. Baker , Cynthia , Jew ( New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press , 2017 ) Google Scholar ; and Nirenberg , David , Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition ( New York : Norton , 2013 ) Google Scholar . Along somewhat similar lines, for efforts to theorize Judaism as a structuring mode of thought, see Goldberg , Chad , Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought ( Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press , 2017 ) Google Scholar ; and Steinberg , Michael , Judaism Musical and Unmusical ( Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press , 2007 ) Google Scholar . Finally, Daniel Boyarin is writing a new book in Rutgers University Press's Key Words in Jewish Studies series about “Judaism,” which will build on his scholarship on language, categories of religion, ethnicity, race, and sexuality in rabbinic literature. He previews this work here: Daniel Boyarin, “Yeah Jew!,” Marginalia Review of Books , June 19, 2017, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/yeah-jew/ . Boyarin contributed to a rich forum on Baker's book, convened by Shaul Magid and Annette Yoshiko Reed. For the full forum, see http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/introduction-forum-on-cynthia-baker-jew/ .

8. Cohen , Shaye J. D. , The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1999 ) Google Scholar ; and Glenn , Susan , “ In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity ,” Jewish Social Studies 8 , no. 2/3 ( 2002 ): 139 –52 CrossRef Google Scholar .

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10. Naomi Seidman, “Jewish Identity as a Psychic Wound?,” Marginalia Review of Books , June 19, 2017, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/jewish-identity-psychic-wound/ .

11. Boustan , Raʿanan , Kosansky , Oren , and Rustow , Marina , eds., Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2011 ), 2 Google Scholar .

12. Roth , Laurence and Valman , Nadia , eds., The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures ( New York : Routledge , 2015 ), 9 Google Scholar . For other examples of this critical thrust, see Batnitzky , Leora , How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2011 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; Biale , David , ed., Cultures of the Jews ( New York : Schocken , 2002 ) Google Scholar ; Boyarin , Daniel and Boyarin , Jonathan , eds., Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1997 ) Google Scholar ; and Bush , Andrew , Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction ( New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press , 2011 ) Google Scholar .

13. Scott , Joan W. , “ The Evidence of Experience ,” Critical Inquiry 17 , no. 5 (Summer 1991 ): 777 CrossRef Google Scholar .

14. For perspectives on the position of American Jewish history within Jewish history, see Hyman , Paula , “ The Normalization of American Jewish History ,” American Jewish History 91 , nos. 3–4 ( 2003 ): 353 –59 CrossRef Google Scholar ; and Ruderman , David , “ Reflecting on American Jewish History ,” American Jewish History 91 , nos. 3–4 ( 2003 ): 371 –78 CrossRef Google Scholar . On the ties between American Jewish history and heritage, see Wenger , Beth , History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2012 ) Google Scholar . And on exceptionalism, see Michels , Tony , “ Is America Different? A Critique of American Jewish Exceptionalism ,” American Jewish History 96 , no. 3 ( 2010 ): 201 –24 CrossRef Google Scholar ; and Sorkin , David , “ Is American Jewry Exceptional? Comparing Jewish Emancipation in Europe and America ,” American Jewish History 96 , no. 3 ( 2010 ): 175 – 200 CrossRef Google Scholar .

15. Hollinger , David , “ Communalist and Dispersionist Approaches to American Jewish History in an Increasingly Post-Jewish Era ,” American Jewish History 95 , no. 1 ( 2009 ): 4 Google Scholar .

16. Ibid . Also, see Hollinger , David , Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal ( Cambridge, MA : MIT Press , 1976 ) Google Scholar .

17. Hollinger, “Communalist and Dispersionist Approaches,” 6. Of course, Hollinger also would have realized this when he came across Cohen , Morris Raphael , Reflections of a Wandering Jew ( New York : Free Press , 1950 ) Google Scholar .

18. Hollinger , David , “ Rich, Powerful, and Smart: Jewish Overrepresentation Should Be Explained instead of Avoided or Mystified ,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94 , no. 4 ( 2004 ): 601 CrossRef Google Scholar . For an excellent framing of Hollinger's essay that distills these points, see Michels , Tony , “ Communalist History and Beyond: What Is the Potential of American Jewish History? ,” American Jewish History 95 , no. 1 ( 2009 ): 61 – 71 CrossRef Google Scholar .

19. Pianko , Noam , Jewish Peoplehood: An American Innovation ( New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press , 2015 ), 8 Google Scholar .

20. Coates , Ta-Nehisi , Between the World and Me ( New York : Spiegel and Grau , 2015 ), 7 Google Scholar . For a similar genealogy of racism and race, mapped onto the shift from anti-Judaism to antisemitism, see Fredrickson , George , Racism: A Short History ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2002 ) Google Scholar .

21. Schreier , Benjamin , The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History ( New York : New York University Press , 2015 ), 1 CrossRef Google Scholar .

22. See Moore , Deborah Dash , At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews ( New York : Columbia University Press , 1981 ), 4 Google Scholar ; and Rabin , Shari , Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America ( New York : New York University Press , 2017 ), 5 CrossRef Google Scholar .

23. Biale, Cultures of the Jews , xxiv.

24. Boustan, Kosansky, and Rustow, Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History , 3.

25. See, for example, Rachel Gross, “Objects of Affection: The Material Religion of American Jewish Nostalgia” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2014); Imhoff , Sarah , Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism ( Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2017 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; and Rabin, Jews on the Frontier . Conversely, a recent crop of anthropology dissertations examines American Jewish life, similarly melding historical approaches (especially as the context for their discussions) with phenomenological ones. See, for example, Joshua Friedman, “Yiddish Returns: Language, Intergenerational Gifts, and Jewish Devotions” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015); and Moshe Kornfeld, “The Chosen Universalists: Jewish Philanthropy and Youth Activism in Post-Katrina New Orleans” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015).

26. For an excellent meditation on Jews as calculable subjects, see Kravel-Tovi , Michal , “ Counting in Jewish ,” in Taking Stock: Cultures of Enumeration in Contemporary Jewish Life , ed. Kravel-Tovi , Michal and Moore , Deborah Dash ( Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2016 ) Google Scholar .

27. The chokehold of conjunctive claims, even when they have little interpretive value, can be witnessed in stark relief in a recent Tablet article about the New York Times ’s failure to note in obituaries when the deceased was Jewish. The author argues that the omission “subtly erases what Jews have accomplished in this country.” See Gabriela Geselowitz, “Does the New York Times’ Obituary Section Have a Jewish Problem?,” Tablet , July 10, 2017, http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/240254/does-the-new-york-times-obituary-section-have-a-jewish-problem . I saw firsthand the shortcomings of the conjunctive mode when I organized a conference entitled “Jews and the American City” in November 2011 through Temple University's Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. A lineup of some of the most important urban historians did their best to talk about the connection between Jews and city planning and development, but each found the task of moving from asserting the connection to analyzing it amorphous and somewhat meaningless, even as they gave it a good shot. For the program, see http://www.cla.temple.edu/feinsteincenter/files/2014/03/051_1011_feinstein_self_mailer_102610.pdf , and for a video of the conference see https://vimeo.com/channels/feinstein/ . For a compelling theory about Jews and American urbanism, see Moore , Deborah Dash , The Urban Origins of American Judaism ( Athens : University of Georgia Press , 2014 ) Google Scholar . The book focuses on American Judaism as a product of urbanism and is not primarily concerned with how or whether American urbanism itself can be better understood through a Jewish analysis.

28. Kobrin , Rebecca and Teller , Adam , introduction to Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2015 ), 17 Google Scholar .

29. See Berman, Metropolitan Jews ; and Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 2009 ) Google Scholar .

30. Britt Tevis, “May It Displease the Court: Jewish Lawyers and the Democratization of American Law” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2016).

31. Glenn , Susan , Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation ( Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press , 1990 ), 199 Google Scholar .

32. Gamm , Gerald , Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed ( Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 1999 ), 17 Google Scholar .

33. Michael Walzer, “Imaginary Jews,” New York Review of Books , March 20, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/03/20/imaginary-jews/?insrc=toc .

34. For a highly disapproving assessment of Jewish studies and its practices in relationship to Jewish community imperatives, see Hughes , Aaron , The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship ( Albany : State University of New York Press , 2013 ) Google Scholar . For a more varied and less polemical assessment, see “The Questionnaire,” AJS Perspectives (Fall 2012): 60–63; the question asked was: “As a professor of Jewish Studies, how do you perceive your responsibility to the Jewish community?”

35. Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” 780–81.

36. In his exploration of Jewish philosophy, Josef Stern makes a similar argument about the “constructive pursuit” of philosophy and, thus, the necessity of delineating Jewish philosophy not by a foundational claim about Judaism, but rather by the scholarly act of constructing a plausible chain of “shared discourse” or tradition, permeable and ever-changing as scholars identify new and different networks. Stern , Josef , “ What a Jewish Philosophy Might Be (If It Exists): A View from the Middle Ages ,” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 66 , no. 2 (July 2017 ): 228, 243 –44 Google Scholar .

37. Butler , Judith , preface to Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( New York : Routledge , 1999 ), xviii Google Scholar .

38. For example, see Howard , Clayton , “ Building a ‘Family-Friendly’ Metropolis: Sexuality, the State, and Postwar Housing Policy ,” Journal of Urban History 39 , no. 5 (September 2013 ): 933 –55 CrossRef Google Scholar . His discussion of the “metropolitan dimensions of the closet” illuminates how state policies defined space as “straight,” and builds on Margot Canaday's work on state military practices that similarly worked to define queerness and straightness as policy categories. See Canaday , Margot , The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2009 ) Google Scholar .

39. Marhoefer , Laurie , “ Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939–1943 ,” American Historical Review 121 , no. 4 (October 2016 ): 1169 CrossRef Google Scholar .

40. Jakobsen , Janet , “ Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They? Analogy and Alliance Politics ,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question , ed. Boyarin , Daniel , Itkovitz , Daniel , and Pellegrini , Ann ( New York : Columbia University Press , 2003 ), 86 Google Scholar .

41. Bell , Derrick , “ Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory? ,” University of Illinois Law Review 893 ( 1995 ): 893 – 910 Google Scholar .

42. Fields , Barbara , “ Whiteness, Racism, and Identity ,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001 ): 48, 54 Google Scholar .

43. Michels offers an interpretation of this state of affairs, related to the fact that Jewish studies, unlike other ethnic studies programs, did not emerge as a result of protest or debate. See Michels, “Communalist History and Beyond,” 68–69.

44. Lederhendler , Eli , American Jewry: A New History ( New York : Cambridge University Press , 2017 ), xix CrossRef Google Scholar . Lederhendler's criticism of American Jewish historians’ overly eager embrace of ethnicity is visible in much of his scholarship, but see in particular, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970 ( Syracuse, NY : Syracuse University Press , 2001 ) Google Scholar ; and “ Domestic Virtues: Deborah Dash Moore's At Home in America and Its Historiographical Context ,” American Jewish History 100 , no. 2 (April 2016 ): 205 –19 CrossRef Google Scholar .

45. Adam Sutcliffe, “Anxieties of Distinctiveness,” in Kobrin and Teller, Purchasing Power , 255.

46. Muller , Jerry , Capitalism and the Jews ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2010 ), 15 Google Scholar .

47. From scholars particularly attuned to language and literature of Israel/Palestine, I have gained new perspective on the ways that Jewishness could be understood as working against nation-building aspirations, even as it also endorsed those same aspirations in other contexts. See, for example, Halperin , Liora , Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 ( New Haven, CT : Yale University Press , 2015 ) Google Scholar ; and Levy , Lital , Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2014 ) Google Scholar . Recent historical and literary studies of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews have also moved the field to see Jewishness beyond Ashkenazic Jews’ experiences with modernity, empire, or citizenship. For example, see Cohen , Julia Phillips , Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era ( New York : Oxford University Press , 2014 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; Naar , Devin , Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece ( Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2016 ) Google Scholar ; and Stein , Sarah Abrevaya , Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century ( Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press , 2016 ) CrossRef Google Scholar . For a compelling discussion of the regulating power of tolerance and how multiculturalism and its focus on variation is a political discourse and practice of governmentality, see Brown , Wendy , Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2006 ) Google Scholar . The basic assumption that whenever American Jews donate money to Israel, they are engaging in a Jewish act guides most historical and sociological studies of Jewish philanthropy. Most recently, see Wertheimer , Jack , Giving Jewish: How Big Funders Have Transformed American Jewish Philanthropy ( New York : The Avi Chai Foundation , March 2018 ), 21 – 25 Google Scholar , http://avichai.org/knowledge_base/giving-jewish-how-big-funders-have-transformed-american-jewish-philanthropy/ .

48. Phillips-Fein , Kim , Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics ( New York : Metropolitan Books , 2017 ), 47 Google Scholar .

49. The American Jewish Historical Society's Biennial Conference on American Jewish History has often included a plenary session that invites a US historian to enter into conversation with the theme of the conference. For example, in 2014, the conference organizers invited Gary Gerstle to talk about his work on immigration and Americanization and its connection to American Jewish history, and Tom Sugrue to discuss US urban history and American Jewish history. In a somewhat similar vein, when Tony Michels and I edited a special issue of American Jewish History marking the thirty-fifth anniversary of Deborah Dash Moore's At Home in America , we invited Jon Butler, a historian of American religion, and Lily Geismer, a US political historian, to contribute. See Jon Butler, “At Home, Indeed: Deborah Dash Moore and the Religious Modernity of New York City's Second Generation Jews” and Geismer , Lily , “ At Home in America: Through the Lens of Metropolitan and Political History ,” American Jewish History 100 , no. 2 (April 2016 ): 191 – 204 and 247–59 CrossRef Google Scholar .

50. Slezkine , Yuri , The Jewish Century ( Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2004 ) CrossRef Google Scholar .

51. Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” 797.

52. My understanding of competition as a facet of neoliberalism is informed by Brown , Wendy , Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution ( New York : Zone Books , 2015 ), especially chapter 2 Google Scholar .

53. Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” 797.

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Judaism Research Paper

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Judaism’s greatest legacy to world history is its success as the earliest entire community to adopt monotheism. The religion’s impact on world history is therefore both direct and felt through its relationships with the conquering religious civilizations that followed it, first Christianity and then Islam.

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Starting from the Hellenistic period, when outside observers first attempted to write about the “other” in a dispassionate manner, Greek writers observed the unique monotheism of Judaism, noting how this aspect of their religion singled out Jews from all other peoples that the Greeks had encountered. The reports that reached philosophers such as Theophrastus and Megasthenes (c. 300 BCE) led them to consider the Jews a nation of philosophers. The Jews, they wrote, were stubborn believers in a singular god who was both the god of Israel and the god of the world. Other writers noted that the Jews insisted on certain practices that were strange to the Greeks: circumcision, abhorrence at consuming pork, and a kind of insular culture that was at odds with what the Greeks believed to be their own open-mindedness. Such traits were considered by some observers as both peculiar and the reason for what they called— perhaps unconsciously describing their own elitism— Jewish misanthropy, lack of patriotism (toward Greek culture), and general disregard for humankind outside of their own nation.

The Greeks thus articulated both a kind of attraction and repulsion toward Judaism. Despite such ambivalence, however, many Romans (to the dismay of their ruling classes) were fascinated by this religious civilization. Large numbers either converted or “Judaized,” meaning that they adopted Jewish customs such as holiday observance and food habits without enduring the circumcision that was required for full conversion. Roman writers noted that Judaism’s popularity was based on its great antiquity, its written scriptures, its deep sense of morality, and its monotheism. Judaism’s engagement with Western civilization was thus deep and enduring but not without controversy.

Judaism had an overwhelming influence on the premodern history of the world west of the Indus River, and an enduring impact on the entire world in the modern period. The impact of Judaism on world history is both direct and felt through its relationships with the conquering religious civilizations that followed, first Christianity and then Islam.

Impact of Origins

Judaism emerged out of a religious civilization based on what is often referred to by scholars as “biblical” or “Israelite” religion. As such, what we today call Judaism must be distinguished from its older forms. In fact, Judaism is only one of the heirs of biblical religion, as are all the faiths in the family of religions referred to as Christianity. Biblical religion itself is multifaceted, since it evolved for centuries during the historical period represented in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). It has become evident to scholars that biblical religion was not always purely monotheistic, for it reflects periods of tension between those who would allow rituals associated with figurines representing other powers or deities and those who would accept nothing other than the one god, the God of Israel (1 Sam. 26:19, 1 Kings 11, 2 Kings 23).

It is clear, however, that the people that called itself Israel (the name derives from the biblical figure Jacob, who was also called Israel—Gen. 32:29) was the first community to take on the doctrine of monotheism successfully. It is likely that the concept of monotheism existed among individuals before the emergence of the people of Israel. Even powerful and influential individuals such as the pharaoh Akhenaton (mid-fourteenth century BCE) may have been monotheists or proto-monotheists, but no entire community succeeded in adopting monotheism prior to ancient Judaism. This is perhaps Judaism’s greatest legacy to world history. It established a theological paradigm that would have a profound impact on the nature of all subsequent religions, whether monotheistic or not.

Ancient Israel saw itself as a small and beleaguered monotheistic people living in a world of countless foreign nations, all sharing the temptation of worshipping multiple deities (Deut. 7:7). Out of this awkward and precarious social and political situation, coupled with a feeling of obvious theological uniqueness, emerged an impression, and then a doctrine, of election, of being chosen by the one and only true god to represent and worship him unreservedly and unconditionally (Deut. 7:6–8). Throughout the Hebrew Bible we find the message that all the nations of the Earth worship their sets of gods, but only Israel worships the One God, the God of the entire world. Election, therefore, became deeply ingrained into the Israelite consciousness. Ironically, despite or perhaps because of Israel’s beleaguered position in relation to the mighty idolatrous nations and empires of the ancient world, its unique community commitment to monotheism engendered the feeling that only it was uniquely elected to carry out the will of the true God. Israel was God’s royal nation (Exod.19:5, Deut. 7:6, 14:2, 26:18), and a holy nation (Exod.19:6, Deut. 14:2, 21). Israel was God’s chosen people (Deut. 7:6, Isa. 43:20, 45:4, Pss. 33:12, 132:13, 135:4).

The special relationship of election is symbolized by an institution called “covenant” (b’rit in Hebrew). The term actually refers to a host of formal or legal relationships in the Hebrew Bible ranging from agreements between two individuals (Gen. 21:22–33, 1 Sam. 18:3) to pacts between nations (1 Kings 5:26, 20:34). But one special type of biblical covenant agreement came to define the relationship between the only community of monotheists and the only true God. Forged between God and Israel, this is the “covenant par excellence,” an institution found throughout the Hebrew Bible and a unique contribution of Israelite religion. The covenant was first rendered between God and Abraham’s family (Gen. 17). It was reaffirmed with the biblical patriarchs (Gen. 26:23–24, 28:10–15) and then at Mount Sinai (Exod. 19, 24) between God and all the extended families and clans of Israel that were redeemed from Egyptian bondage. This divine covenant was extended also to non-Israelite peoples who escaped along with Israel in the redemption from Egypt (Exod. 12:38).

The concepts of election and covenantal relationship with God originated with ancient Israel and its religion, but these traits became intimately associated with monotheism in general. Election and covenant, therefore, are not only essential to Judaism, but are intimately associated with Christianity and Islam. Early Christians came to articulate their religion as representing a “new covenant” between God and a “new Israel,” namely, those who accept the particular self-definition of Christianity. Christians, therefore, become the new “chosen,” with only those who had chosen Christ as savior able to achieve their own salvation (1 Cor. 11:23–32, Heb. 8–9). Although less prominent in Islam, covenant (‘ahd or mithaq) also defines the relationship between God and a newer community of believers. But Islam is less exclusionary in that it accepts, in theory, the salvation of prior communities of righteous believers (Qur’an 2:62, 5:72). Nevertheless, Muslims are defined in the Qur’an as a kind of elect, the most moderate or a “middle community,” chosen to be witnesses (Qur’an 2:143), and “the best community brought forth for humankind” (Qur’an 3:110).

Election and covenant, closely associated with Israel and Judaism (and an integral part of all expressions of monotheism), can be viewed as divisive traits. The legacy of Israelite religion is not, however, all exclusion and division. The inclusive and compassionate aspects of the universal religious imperative in Western religions also seem to have originated in ancient Israel.

Compassion For the “Other” and Repairing the World

The exclusivist aspects of monotheism in Israelite religion were always in tension with inclusionism, as defined by care for the stranger and a sense of responsibility toward others. Thus, although Israelites may have considered themselves to be the only people in the ancient world that truly respected the one God of the universe, God was nevertheless the God of all, including those who did not recognize him. Israelite monotheism thus required care and concern even for those outside of Israel, and this responsibility was articulated through the concept of imitateo dei, emulating God, because the creator of all the world must be good: “For the Lord your God is God supreme, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Jewish Publication Society, Deut. 10:17–19).

Social Justice

Codes or lists of formalized social precedents (customs) and formulaic duties existed before the emergence of ancient Judaism. These are similar to what today would be called law (obligations to state, society, and private individuals). The ancient Mesopotamian “codes” of Ur-Nammu (twenty-first century BCE), Eshnunna (c. 1800 BCE), and Hammurabi (mid-eighteenth century BCE) existed long before the legal and social requirements enumerated in the biblical parallel, the Book of the Covenant (Exod. 20–23). This pre-Israelite material was as closely associated with a sense of societal justice as that found in the Hebrew Bible. That is, offences would be termed criminal when they were considered inimical to the well-being of society as a whole, and sanctions were imposed by the public authority rather than the injured party or a powerful private individual (the latter might be termed “family justice” and was not law).

On the other hand, the prebiblical codes maintained a sharp tripartite division of society into an upper level of free men, a class of state dependents, and a slave caste. There was no expectation of social mobility between these classes, and the rights, responsibilities, and sanctions in the codes reflected this rigid division. In contrast to the previous systems, the biblical codes extend the rights of the elites to all layers of society: “You shall appoint magistrates and officials for your tribes, in all the settlements that the Lord your God is giving you, and they shall govern the people with due justice. You shall not judge unfairly: you shall show no partiality; you shall not take bribes, for bribes blind the eyes of the discerning and upset the plea of the just. Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you (Deut. 16:18–20)” and “You shall have one standard for the stranger and citizen alike: for I the Lord am your God” (Lev. 24:22).

Civic Duty and Responsible Behavior

Another of Judaism’s most important legacies, found not only in its sister expressions of monotheism but also in democracies and all forms of responsible government, is the idea that people are responsible to one another. Individuals are accountable, not only for themselves but also for others. This is represented by the term, and the concept, Torah (meaning “teaching”), which has sometimes been misunderstood as a rigid code of Israelite law. It should be likened more to a set of behavioral expectations for ritual and social behavior, centered around the idea that the individual is responsible to the group and the group to the individual. That the entire nation is punished by God for the misbehavior of the few is a foundation of Israelite law and referenced throughout the Hebrew Bible. One is accountable for both the behavior and the welfare of one’s fellow. All the people were witnesses at the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, and all are therefore responsible to ensure that the Torah teaching is upheld. This is the essence of the Israelite system, which is based upon a balance between individual and community and between freedom and responsibility (Deut. 29–30).

From Israelites to Jews

The true origin of the Israelites remains uncertain. While some have suggested that it lies in Mesopotamia or Egypt, recent scholarship places it within Canaanite society, suggesting that Israel symbolizes a monotheistic trend in Canaanite culture originating perhaps as early as the second millennium BCE that eventuated in an independent identity. The danger of assimilation back into the old and familiar idolatrous ways of local Canaanite culture is a constant theme of biblical literature, and the nations “here at hand” (Deut. 20:15) in the land of Canaan always represent the most dangerous threat to Israel’s distinctive identity and existence.

But the tribes of Israel were not always purely monotheistic, and the journey into the kind of theology we would recognize today as monotheism did not end until the exilic or post-exilic periods after the destruction of the first Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Prior to that time, such seminal statements as “Who is like you among the gods” (Exod. 15:11) suggest that while ancient Israelite theology required unconditional obedience to the God of Israel, it did not deny the possibility of other gods existing as well. It may have been the realization that the God of Israel could be worshipped even in Babylonian exile that solidified the tendency toward monotheism and convinced the exilic community that there was one God who created the universe, and that the same one God maintained it.

Israel had divided into two separate nations with independent monarchies and centers of worship shortly after the reigns of kings David and Solomon (c. 900 BCE). The northern kingdom, composed of ten of the twelve tribes of Israel, was destroyed by the Assyrian empire in 721 BCE and never recovered. The southern kingdom, formally made up of the large tribe of Judah and the small tribe of Benjamin (but including parts of other tribes and peoples as well), was destroyed a century and a half later by the Babylonian empire. But the Babylonians were soon overtaken by the Persians, who were friendly to the exiles from the tribal areas of Judah and Benjamin. The Persians invited the exiles to return from their banishment to the east and reestablish themselves in the ancient land. The overwhelming majority of survivors were from the large tribe of Judah, so the returnees joined with those who remained and were soon known as Judeans, or Jews (biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah), though Jews throughout history have also referred to themselves as Israel, Israelites, or the people or nation of Israel (Hebrew: b’ney yisra’el or ‘am yisra’el).

The Judean community, like its parent, the intertribal community of Israel, remained small in numbers relative to the great empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. But as a result of the conquests by the Mesopotamian powers and the dispersion of the Israelite tribes, Jewish communities began to establish themselves in many parts of the Mediterranean basin. The largest communities remained in Mesopotamia and Judea, but significant communities grew up also in Egypt, Anatolia, Greece, and North Africa.

These communities did not look like Jewish communities of today, for they practiced a kind of ancient Judaism that was still oriented toward temple worship with sacrifices and burnt offerings. In some places such as Elephantine, an Egyptian island community in the Nile, they established their own temples independent of the Temple in Jerusalem. In others closer in proximity to Jerusalem, the communities joined in the annual pilgrimage festivals to the Jerusalem Temple and worshipped according to the systems described in the Bible.

The Hebrew Bible conveys the message that monotheism always survived precariously and, aside from the Persians, was resented by the nations of the world. The Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Canaanites, Midianites, and Aramaeans—all opposed the Israelites’ stubborn worship of one god only. The reason for Israel’s isolation in this regard appears quite simple. When traveling, for example, it was a common practice among polytheists to make offerings to the gods of the local area or people. It was considered a common courtesy and expected polite behavior, and to peoples who worshipped multiple deities, it created no theological problem to make a token offering to foreign gods. Not so Israel, which was commanded to worship only the one God of Israel, the God of the universe. The Hebrew Bible indicates that it was quite expected that other peoples worship their national gods or even other people’s gods (Judg. 11:23–24), but Israel was allowed to worship only the one God (Jer. 44:1–10).

This situation continued into the Hellenistic period that began with the invasion of Alexander in the 330s BCE, and into the Roman occupation of Judea that began three centuries later. The Judeans remained a small community and largely without power aside from a few generations under the rule of the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty of kings. Finally, in 70 CE, after a major Judean revolt against Roman imperial rule, the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed a second and final time, never to be rebuilt.

By this time, Jews had been dispersed throughout the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds and brought their religion with them. Monotheism, the theological core of ancient Judaism, survived the vicissitudes of history, but the religious rituals and worship that articulated that basic theology evolved and changed over the centuries. The repeated destructions of the Jerusalem Temple put an end to the sacrificial system, but the core idea of a singular god endured. However, the geographical dispersion, influence of multiple cultures, and internal cultural change brought new ideas into biblical Judaism. This eventuated in a synthesis that gave birth to factions or parties, sects, and eventually new religious movements. One of these was the Jesus Movement that began in Judaism and became the starting point out of which the family of Christian religions emerged.

Judaism of the Rabbis

Another was a movement that emerged around a core group of leaders steeped in an oral tradition of Judaism that existed parallel to the sacrificial system and written scripture of the Bible. Those leaders we know of were almost all men, though it is clear that women were also instrumental in the transmission of oral lore. They could be described as traditionists, and included the Pharisees as well as others. Later, they were known as rabbis. When the long process of recording the oral tradition ended in the sixth century CE, it became known as the Talmud.

This form of Judaism is called Rabbinic Judaism, and all expressions of Judaism today, aside from one tiny group known as Kara’ites, derive from the Judaism of the rabbis and their great source of authority, the Talmud. This Judaism existed in exile for close to two millennia, even in the core land of Judea, which was governed by non-Jews. Rabbinic Judaism always represented the stranger in the lands of others. It is quietist and highly intellectual, relying more on the survivability of its adherents and the wits of its leaders than directly on the biblical God acting in history. Unlike Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism requires little dogmatic theological belief beyond that in the unity of God, and salvation is presumed for all who live a pious life of good deeds.

One of Rabbinic Judaism’s great contributions to world history has been its unique ability to adapt to multiple environments within a world hardly tolerant of diversity, religious or otherwise. Its stubborn existence in both Christian and Muslim worlds required all religious leaders, thinkers, and politicians to consider and respond to the Jews, the quintessential “other” in their midst. This required repeated reevaluation of the meaning of self in relation to the other of Judaism, and resulted in the growth of theologies, laws, and various religious and secular sciences in both Jewish and non-Jewish civilizations.

At the same time, the Jews’ lack of political power throughout this period required that their religion consider a larger range of possible doctrine than the religions of political powers who could enforce their will by the sword. Judaism therefore contains many ideas but little absolute dogma. The customary argumentation found in Jewish literatures rarely arrives at any final conclusions. Every issue and point can and should be revisited and reexamined, and new meanings are always possible. The huge written compendium of the Talmud and its interpretation contain complex discussion and argument over topics that range from folk medicine to legal theory, property law, family law, business ethics, and theologies. The literatures that epitomize Rabbinic Judaism stress the need for a deep and universal intellectual engagement with the divine word in Bible and Talmud, and this foundation of Judaism encouraged a very high per capita involvement in reading and education.

In the Modern World

In the modern period, when Jews were eventually released from their restricted status in the West and were allowed to enter the universities and engage in the professions and sciences, their religious culture provided the intellectual training that would result in contributions far above their per capita representation. To provide one striking example, Jews make up less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of the world population, yet they account for some 18 percent of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the twentieth century. There is no need to list the many contributions of Jews to the arts, science, literature, and music. Some of the ideas that were incubated in premodern Judaism have come to the fore in contemporary postmodern thought. These include aspects of literary deconstruction and concepts of exile, both of which have had a major impact on current intellectual discourse.

Judaism, like all religions, encompasses more than a theological system of beliefs. It is best described as a religious civilization, and this civilization has had a foundational influence on world civilizations west of the Indus River for two millennia. Its influence comes not only from its own direct contribution, but also through the contribution of the religious civilizations that emerged from or associated themselves with it. Monotheism, the belief in the universality and unity of the divinity, is the very core of Judaism, and religions that preach monotheistic theologies have not only encompassed the Western and Mediterranean worlds, but now reach deeply beyond into Africa and Eastern Asia. Although representing a tiny fraction of the human population, Jewish religious civilization has remained of great significance in world history.

Bibliography:

• Alon, G. (1977). Jews, Judaism and the classical world. Jerusalem: Magnes.
• Ben-Sasson (Ed.). (1976). A history of the Jewish people. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cohen, M. (1994). Under crescent and cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
• Cohen, S. (1987). From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster.
• Finkelstein, J. (1970). Cuneiform law. Encyclopedia Judaica, 16, 1505f–1505k.
• Firestone, R. (2008). Who are the real Chosen People: The meaning of chosenness in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing.
• Goldenberg, R. (1997). The nations that know thee not: Ancient Jewish attitudes toward other religions. Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press.
• Holtz, B. (1984). Back to the sources: Reading the classic Jewish texts. New York: Summit Books.
• Killebrew, A. (2005). Biblical peoples and ethnicity: An archeological study of Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, and early Israel 1300–1100 BCE. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
• Mendez-Flohr, P., & Reinharz, J. (1980). The Jew in the modern world: A documentary history. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Orlinsky, H. (1960). Ancient Israel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Sacher, H. M. (1977). The course of modern Jewish history. New York: Delta.
• Schiffman, L. (1991). From text to tradition: A history of the second temple and Rabbinic Judaism. New York: Ktav.
• Stow, K. (1992). Alienated minority: The Jews of medieval Latin Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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In the United States, 21% of adults overall say they fast for certain periods during holy times.

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40% of U.S. adults say there’s a lot of discrimination against Jews in society, and 44% say there’s a lot of discrimination against Muslims.

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Incidents against Jewish people in 2020 ranged from verbal and physical assaults to vandalism of cemeteries and scapegoating for the pandemic.

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Below is a selection of dictionaries useful for use in Jewish Studies.

• Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic of Byzantine period
• Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods
• Webster's New World Hebrew dictionary / Hayim Baltsan
• Harduf's transliterated English-Hebrew dictionary
• The dictionary of classical Hebrew / David J.A. Clines, editor.
• New American standard exhaustive concordance of the Bible: [including] Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek dictionaries
• Milon la-ʻArvit ha-Yehudit ha-ḥadashah
• Diccionario básico ladino-español / por Pascual Pascual Recuero
• Dizionario ladino fassano (cazét)-italiano : con indice italiano-ladino / Massimiliano Mazzel
• Diksyonaryo Judeo Espanyol-Turko = Ladino-Türkçe sözlük / Klara Perahya & Karen Gerson Şarhon, ed.
• Sephardic folk dictionary: English to Ladino, Ladino to English
• The Yiddish dictionary sourcebook : a transliterated guide to the Yiddish language 
• A Yiddish dictionary in transliteration / by Harry Coldoff
• English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English dictionary / David Mendel Harduf 
• Transliterated English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English dictionary / David Mendel Harduf

The dictionaries, encyclopedias, and resources below are in pdf, print or web-based format. Some are freely available and some are only open to current members of the UCLA community, which will require access via a VPN or proxy server for off-campus use.

• A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature. Compiled by M. Jastrow

Online encyclopedias, dictionaries, and specialized reference sources, primarily in the social sciences and humanities.

• International Encyclopedia of Human Geography

• Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Archival Resources on the History of Jewish Women in America (Weisbard, 1997)
• Jewish Magic by Scott B. Noegel
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• Latin American Jewish Studies: a bibliography (Pre-2002)
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• Friedberg Genizah Project The Friedberg Genizah Project (FGP) was established to facilitate and rejuvenate Genizah research. It is achieving this goal by locating the Genizah manuscripts and then identifying, cataloging, transcribing, translating, rendering them into digital format (i.e., photographing) and publishing them online. FGP is operating in a joint venture with the Jewish Manuscript Preservation Society of Toronto, Canada.
• GOLD Geniza On-line Database, Cambridge University Library The GOLD databases contain a selection of Genizah material. The material includes cataloguing, bibliographical details, and digital images of fragments
• The Great Isaiah Scroll View a high-resolution digital surrogate of the Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1Qlsaa)
• GBBJ Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism "The object of the project is to gather together textual evidence for the use of Greek Bible translations by Jews in the Middle Ages and to produce a corpus in digital and print form. .."
• New Testament - Virtual Manuscript Room
• אוצר כתבי יד תלמודיים - Online Treasury of Talmudic Manuscripts
• Princeton University Geniza Project Initiated in the mid-1980s, the Computer Geniza Project of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University seeks to extend the methodologies available to Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, and Arabic scholars working with the documents found in the Geniza chamber of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the late 19th century.
• PUSHD Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database Free with registration
• Rosenberg-Lewin Collection of Hebrew Manuscripts
• Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection is a window on the medieval world of the Mediterranean area. Its 140,000 manuscripts fragments, mainly in Hebrew and Arabic, shed light on the mundane as well as the religious and cultural activities of that world...
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Click the links below to see Library of Congress Romanization tables, which you will need in order to locate UCLA Library holdings:

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• Ḳiryat sefer : rivʻon bibliyografi shel Bet ha-sefarim ha-leʾumi ṿeha-universiṭaʾi bi-Yerushalayim. Israel National Bibliography
• Kiryat sefer - National Bibliography of Israel Database "Kiryat Sefer" – the national bibliography of the State of Israel and the Jewish people – was founded in 1925. The purpose of the national bibliography is to document all publications published in Israel in all fields and languages ​​that are deposited at the National Library. In 1953 legal deposits began to be mandated by law. The law included print materials only, and in 2001 was expanded to include non-print and non-book materials. Kiryat Sefer also includes publications in all languagues, from all countries, that pertain to Judaism and Israel, and that are purchased by the Library. Until the year 2003, the bibliography was availabe only as a print journal, sold exclusively to subscribers. Since that year, the material is available online, free of charge and accessible to everyone, and is updated daily.
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How to Start?

The start of any research is always a question or problem one wishes (or needs to) answer or find a solution to. In many cases, there is a path one has to take from a broadly described subject to a specific question. The subject can be the topic of the class one takes, an era, geographical region, event, person's life, idea, impression, or a phenomenon. In order to narrow down the subject and develop a research question, two important factors must be considered: available sources and personal interest. Without either of these two, conducting a research becomes unnecessarily more challenging and significantly less fulfilling.

Questions that can help lead the way from the broader subject to the specific research question are, for example: what do I know about this era/geographical region/event/person's life/an idea/phenomenon? How can I find out more? Why is it interesting to me? Why do I think it is important to explore more about this subject?

Warning: sometimes, while reading available sources, the originally set research question might change. Researchers should not be discouraged by the discovery that the original research question seems less exciting than a new one.

One begins a research project either based on previous knowledge of the subject, having read various sources on it, or just being intrigued by a particular subject, having read or heard about it very little. Reading more can deepen one’s interest or urge one to turn to another research subject. 

Beginning a research project on a subject you already studied or read about:

As a first step, summarize what you already know and list your primary and secondary sources. This list will serve you as your primary annotated bibliography. The entries on secondary sources should include the date of the listed sources’ creation (so you know to look for newer, more updated resources), the questions and problems the sources address and emphasize and those they leave unanswered, and the primary sources they rely on to make their arguments. The entries on primary sources, especially those you can access, should similarly describe the circumstances of their creation and their content. If you can, try to establish connections between the sources you already saw and keep thinking about the dialogue between them as you read on.

Beginning a research project with little prior knowledge of the subject:

Knowing the chronological and geographical boundaries of the research and perhaps names of specific persons and/or events is a good place to start an inquiry. As a next step, attain information from general reference works also known as tertiary sources, such as dictionaries and lexicons. This guide lists some of them. Compile a subject-related vocabulary for your research. These words can help you search the catalog for additional resources. For example, if you are studying the life of a Jewish athlete, list all the words you think characterize your knowledge about this person: dates of birth and death, sport they competed in, city where they lived, events they participated in, etc. If you are using social media, this practice will be familiar, because it parallels tagging. Consult the  Library of Congress Subject Headings to formulate your terminology. Use your list to search the Emory Library Catalog using the search for “subject,” “keyword,” “creation date,” etc. Keep adding to and removing from your list of subject headings as you read on. You may want to search for articles, including book reviews, accessing various databases or specific journals.

Review articles and bibliographical indexes

You can gain access and learn how scholars view the available literature on the subject you study by reading bibliographic review articles. They are informative of how researchers approach the questions that arise through the discussions on the subject of your interest. Thematic bibliographies map the scholarship on the given subject.

Using your readings as a resource to discover additional sources

Academic and some non-academic authors document their works by providing footnotes and bibliographies as part of their publications. These notes help the reader follow how the researcher reached their conclusions and based on what information they made their arguments. Use this feature of academic writing not only when compiling your annotated bibliography, but also when adding to your sources. Check what source the authors you read had consulted and if you can use those sources for your work, maybe to interrogate them for other purposes.

Also, academic authors often dedicate several works to a subject or related subjects, which can help your research. Sometimes they return to a subject they worked on because a new source, a new method, or just the passing of time led them back to that topic and maybe revise their previous conclusions. Check the catalog to see if the authors you consulted have written something more recent on the subject you research.

Call numbers can also help you discover additional sources relevant to your research. Because Library of Congress call numbers are subject- and creator-based, just by looking at the shelf where your source is located can lead you to additional, relevant sources. Sometimes, you may find the best resource when applying the methods of the times before the introduction of online catalogs: by standing in front of the bookshelf browsing books.

Beyond the Emory collection

Beyond the physical collection, Emory Libraries offer access to a broad variety of databases and other online and electronic sources.

Visit OCLC Worldcat.org to check the availability of sources you would like to access but are unavailable at Emory. By using the Interlibrary Loan or the Electronic Documentary Delivery services, you can consult sources from all over the United State.

Compiling a bibliography

Documenting the sources you consult during the research in the form of an extended or annotated bibliography will help you finalize the paper and add the bibliography (if it is a requirement of the class). During the research phase, however, it helps organize the information you gathered and through your questions and notes to each and every entry on your list, you will organically develop the question you will address in your paper. Ensure you check the assignment's requirement of citation style and that you format your paper and references accordingly. Use the catalog's "cite" feature as a help.

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Judaism research guide.

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• Journal Finder Find out what journals we carry that have Judaism and Jewish Studies as part of their primary content.

The indexes below are among the best to use when performing research in Judaism. For an expanded listing of possible resources, see the listings in the Electronic Databases by Subject . Use the Journal Finder to help you locate the full-text of articles you have identified in one or more of the indexes listed here. Just type in the title of the journal to see where it is available. If we do not have access to it, you can request the article via Sewanee ILL, our interlibrary loan program, which is linked below.

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• Last Updated: Aug 15, 2024 6:01 PM
• URL: https://library.sewanee.edu/judaism

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Home — Essay Samples — Religion — World Religions — Judaism

Essays on Judaism

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