Creed or People?

Is Jewishness a matter of belief, or of belonging? The question, which agitates many Jews and non-Jews in today's multicultural world, is in fact very old—and it has been illuminated by recent scholarship into the relationships among Judaism, Christianity, and the religions and rulers of the later Roman Empire. 

The traditional image of Judaism as Christianity's parent has long given way to an image of two competing interpretations of ancient Israelite religion and its spiritual legacies. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., these two emergent religious communities, in all their permutations, would develop in the shadow of imperial Rome.

How and when did they part? In the judgment of some scholars, by the time the editors of the New Testament finished their work in the 1st century, they no longer saw themselves as Jewish. For others, the decisive change was the conversion of Constantine, and with him the Empire, in the early 4th century.  What had begun in Jesus' time as an intramural Jewish debate now became, fatefully, a debate between Jew and Gentile, powered on the Christian side by the belief that the Hebrew Bible was indeed God's word, but obstinately misread by the Jews.

The debate itself, embodied in rabbinic and Christian polemics, both reflected and influenced how each community read Scripture, observed or rejected the Law, and formulated its conception of God. One scholar, Daniel Boyarin, has gone so far as to maintain that the rabbis' elevation of Torah study and development of a culture of argumentation constituted their answer to the Christian identification of God with the Logos.

In an arresting new book, the Israeli scholar Adiel Schremer reframes the discussion. The rabbinic word for heretic (min), he observes, is used not only for Christians but also for a range of Jewish groups whose common denominator was their dispute with communal solidarity.  For the rabbis, in other words, "heresy" was less about belief and doctrine than it was about group identity in the face of Rome triumphant.  

So is Jewishness a matter of belief or of belonging? The answer, of course is that it is both, and more: a peculiar and indefinable mix that since antiquity has made Judaism's boundaries so subtle, and Jewish existence so provocative and perplexing, to Jews and non-Jews alike.