Somewhere around 1000 BCE in a desert area to the east of the Mediterranean Sea a tribal king named David managed to conquer the town of Jerusalem and set it up as his capital.  He was filling a power vacuum left by the fall of the Hittite Empire, which had even managed to rule over Egypt as well as the lands between Egypt and what today we know as Turkey.  David did make use of experienced Hittite warriors, even in his elite bodyguard.  While his army was on a campaign away from the capital, he ordered the wife of one of these Hittite warriors to his own bed and later, after she had become pregnant and he risked exposure, he dishonorably set up her husband to be killed.  He then married the woman, who was named Bathsheeba, and despite the loss of the first child, interpreted as a punishment from his god, she gave birth to Solomon, who established the importance of Jerusalem by building a massive temple in which their god mysteriously resided in the Ark of the Covenant.

According to their legends, David and his people were descended from Abraham, who had been promised all the lands in their area by a divinity that had insisted on exclusive worship as his only god.  Abraham's grandson was originally named Jacob, but according to the legends their god had renamed him Israel.   Israel had twelve sons, and their descendants were the twelve tribes of Israel.   These tribes migrated to Egypt, where eventually they were made slaves and lived in an oppressive regime until one of their own, a man named Moses who had been abandoned at birth but found and raised as an Egyptian, claimed a mission from their god to liberate them and return them to what was then known as the land of Canaan.  After years of wandering, constant warfare had paid off and the Israelites had become a kingdom.

Within the next several centuries these legends were compiled into a set of five books that would be known as the Torah and would be seen as the expression of God's contractual relationship to a chosen people.  From the time of Abraham there is the demand for male circumcision as the individual's expression of his part in the contract, and from the time of Moses, who brings down the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, there are all the ritual restrictions on food (what we still think of as "keeping kosher") and all the rules for how God was to be worshipped, especially by observing the Sabbath.

"God" is not really a name, and the four letters of the name cited in the Torah were never to be pronounced.  Since the Hebrew alphabet only contained consonants we never can be sure even of how it would have been pronounced.  Modern versions are Yahweh and Jehovah, but it is the Hebrew word adonai (lord) that remains in use in Jewish ritual and Ha Shem (literally, "the name") is what often appears otherwise.  Many modern Jews in America try to respect what they see as the original prohibition against pronunciation by simply using "G-d" in writing.

David had united what were several warring tribes, but this union was challenged even in his lifetime, and after Solomon's death there never again would be just one Jewish kingdom.  At one point much of the population of the region was deported to Mesopotamia (the Babylonian captivity) and Solomon's temple (one of the "seven wonders of the ancient world") was destroyed.  Repatriated by the Persians, a new kingdom of Judah was set up in the south and a new temple was built.  Not all who lived in the region of ancient Palestine accepted this Second Temple of Jerusalem: for those living in Samaria only their own temple on Mount Gerizim was the true center of worship, and there would be lasting conflict between Judeans and Samaritans.  In the time of Alexander the Great the stretch of land that was Palestine would again be subjugated by a foreign power, and after the Greeks came the Romans.

Shortly after the end of the first millennium, in the time of Jesus, the area around Jerusalem, in the old kingdom of Judah, was under direct Roman rule and a nominally Jewish king educated as a Roman ruled in the kingdom of Israel to the north.  Aspirations for independence led to repeated uprisings that typically centered on the idea of a new messiah ("anointed one") or warrior king who would bring back the glory of King David to Jerusalem.  Finally the Romans opted to destroy the Second Temple and end the importance of the city.  By this time, though, Jewish emigrants had established communities throughout the Roman world as well as beyond it, and in the diaspora ("scattering") they successfully established new patterns of worship that centered on ritual reading of the Torah.

Hinduism could be exported and even embrace other ethnic communities, as in Indonesia, without losing its essential qualities.  The importance of the Temple, which could only be in Jerusalem, stands out since Jewish communities anywhere else could not conduct the ritual sacrifices commanded in the Torah.  Also, although only members of the tribe of Levi could function as priests in Jerusalem, elsewhere their role was reduced and services in meeting halls (perhaps the best translation of the Greek word "synagogue") could be led by anyone.  Although commemorating the escape from Egypt in the festival of Passover was important in ancient times, the particular liturgical forms in use today are only from recent centuries, and the emphasis given some holidays, such as Chanukah, are more distinctively American efforts to provide Jewish equivalents to Christian celebrations.  Even the widespread use of the Star of David in Jewish art and architecture dates just from the last few hundred years.

The high period of Jewish culture was in the Middle Ages in those countries under Islamic control.  In Christian Europe there was typically forced segregation and frequent bouts of genocide.  By the turn of the twentieth century a new movement, referred to as Zionism, was promoting a Jewish return to Palestine that included converting the ancient language of Hebrew into a modern spoken language to replace Yiddish (a German dialect used by Ashekenazi Jews in Europe) or Ladino (a Hispanic dialect used by Sephardic Jews in the Mediterreanean countries).  After the Second World War, when more than half of all the world's Jews died in the Shoah or Holocaust, a new state of Israel was proclaimed.  Ironically, the most fervent Orthodox Jews have refused to accept the legitimacy of this government, arguing that only the Messiah can reinstate the political order that would be the fulfillment of the covenant.

Jews differ on what it does mean to be Jewish.  The extremes range from those secular Jews who see themselves as a distinctive ethnic group but have little interest in religion to the extremely Orthodox, who insist that religious purity as well as birth from a Jewish mother are required.  In the United States there are Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform synagogues, and the divisions even among the Orthodox, especially the Hasidim, can often be deep and bitter (one 1982 film worth viewing  to better understand these divisions, if it can be found in a rental store, is The Chosen, based on a novel by Chaim Potok).  In Israel itself, where Orthodox rabbis are dominant, there is a tendency not to accept most American Jews, who are not Orthodox, as truly Jewish, yet that does not keep American Jews from continuing to regard Jerusalem as their sacred city also.

In the same way there can be a great divergence in what might seem very basic beliefs, such as the question of personal immortality.  In this respect Judaism is much more like Hinduism, which emphasizes ritual acts affirming the solidarity of the group, than it is like Christianity, which tends to stress individual practices that reflect specific theological beliefs.  Someone might well consider himself both Jewish and an atheist, and for such a person attendance at temple on the Holy Days or the observance of the rules of kosher is meant to express Jewish identity rather than a commitment to particular doctrines.

What is of special importance to us in this study is the role of the written word in establishing a tradition.  We have already seen the place of the Vedas as scripture in India, but a key cultural difference is that the Rig Veda is a collection of chants and not at all the supposed record of a people.  If anything, Hinduism tends to downplay any sense of history while in Judaism history is everything.  The Torah presents a picture of God as establishing a special relationship with one man and his descendants and so defines what it is to be Jewish.  By the end of the first millennium a collection of writings (the tanakh) that included not just the Torah but other historical accounts and a number of vivid literary pieces came to be known collectively as "the book" (biblios in the Greek that was in common use in the eastern part of the Roman Empire) or, in Christian parlance, the "old" testament.

During the Roman period the accidental fact that in both Hebew and Greek the letters of the alphabet could also be used as numbers led to a tradition of number magic according to which words that would have the same total when the letters making them up were added as numbers would have some type of mystical connection.  Devout students of the Torah could then attempt to decipher hidden meanings by the judicious use of equivalences on the theory that if God created the world by his word and the Torah is also his word then there must be such linkages.  In the Middle Ages this concept developed into the Kabbalah, which has continued to the present as a distinctive tradition that has had a checkered history in the Jewish world.  (Oddly enough, the notion of "Torah codes" resurfaced in a best-selling book just a few years ago.)

Most generally Jews do not believe in personal immortality (an afterlife with either a heaven or a hell), so that the dealings of God and man must be accomplished in this world and not in some next one.  What matters is fidelity to the covenant, even if it is not the individuals themselves but their descendants who will benefit most from it.  The Torah is the record of this covenant, and the traditional bar mitzvah ceremony in which a thirteen-year old boy is accepted as an adult centers on a presentation of a Torah scroll and the boy chanting from it.  (Conservative and Reform Jews also conduct parallel bat mitzvah ceremonies for girls.)  The importance of the Torah also is seen in the practice of having a tiny scroll inscribed with something from it wrapped inside a container (a mezuzah) mounted on the doorway to be saluted with a kiss from the fingertips.

Judaism does resemble Hinduism both in being initially a tradition into which one is born and in the importance of ritually correct conduct ahead over any fixed set of dogmas.   For a devout Jew, God cannot be named or described (classically, there was to be no representational art at all in order to further distance the the faithful from those who worshipped idols), and theology in the sense in which it emerges with Buddhism or with Christianity does not exist.  Instead there is the entire literature of the Talmud recording the efforts of learned rabbis from ancient times to define the particulars of Jewish life.  For many observant Jews, especially among the Hasidim, the study of the Talmud is an entire life's work that takes precedence over any other vocation (a point explored by Joshua Hammer in his book Chosen by God).



REVIEW QUESTIONS FOR SECTION A:

In the text you have a very balanced presentation of the wide divergence of views within Judaism on even the most important issues.  This is something you have already seen as true about Hinduism, and it points out that in an essentially ethnic tradition (one that an individual is born into) what matters is less an agreement about belief than a certain conformity to traditional practices.

As you read along please note the parallel between how the Upanishads went beyond the original Hindu mythology to present a more mystical vision and how in Judaism the Kabbalah (or Qabala) does the same thing.

During the second half of our course one theme I ask you to consider very carefully is the contrast between what we might call a poetic vision of reality and a more scientific one.  Karen Armstrong discusses this in her book A Battle for God as the contrast between mythos and logos, and she sees it as the basis for the fundamentalism that has appeared in all three Abrahamic traditions.