Beginning with the question ‘Who is a Jew?’, this book proceeds to
offer a lucid account of Judaism and the Jewish people. Written for
Jews and non-Jews alike, be they students or teachers or general
interested readers, the book brings out the extraordinary richness
and variety of Judaism: its historical depth, and the vigour and at
times amazing endurance of its traditions – in the home, in the synagogue, in its literature, in individual and community life.
Nicholas de Lange writes as a Jewish scholar, a knowledgeable
insider, explaining the history and details of inherited rituals and
customs; of organised religion (be it Orthodox, Conservative,
Reform or Liberal); of concepts such as Zionism, Diaspora,
Messianism. Half of the world’s Jews live in North America and the
rest are widely scattered, and the book is sensitive to the global
context of Judaism, both historically and in our postmodern age.
The philosophy and theology of Judaism are examined, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust, and there are speculations on
the future. Dr de Lange does not shirk the difficulties posed by questions of Jewish identity and by some of the irreconcilable
differences which exist within Judaism as well as between Judaism
and other cultures.
An Introduction to Judaism contains illustrative tables and maps, a
full glossary, chronology, bibliography and index, and can be used
for reference, to check details and dates, as well as read consecutively or dipped into at leisure. This is a stimulating and comprehensive introduction to a major world culture.
Nicholas de Lange is Reader in Hebrew and Jewish Studies in
the University of Cambridge. A distinguished scholar and translator and a rabbi, he is author of the popular Atlas of the Jewish World
and Judaism. His many translations include novels by Israeli writers
such as Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. With Cambridge, Dr de
Lange has published Origen and the Jews and the English translation
of Oz’s Under this Blazing Light.


This Page Intentionally Left Blank

A N I N T RO D U C T I O N TO
J U DA I S M
NICHOLAS DE LANGE
University of Cambridge


PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING)
FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

© Nicholas de Lange 2000
This edition © Nicholas de Lange 2002
First published in printed format 2000
A catalogue record for the original printed book is available
from the British Library and from the Library of Congress
Original ISBN 0 521 46073 5 hardback
Original ISBN 0 521 46624 5 paperback
ISBN 0 511 00931 3 virtual (netLibrary Edition)


For Alexander


This Page Intentionally Left Blank



Contents

List of tables
List of illustrations
Preface
Chronology
Map of the Jewish world in 
Map of the Jewish world in the s

page x
xi
xii
xiv
xvi
xix

 The Jews in the world
Who are the Jews?
Facts and figures
Natives or immigrants?
The Jews throughout the world
North America
Israel
Former Soviet Bloc countries
The European Union
Latin America













 The Jewish people and its past
The Jewish nation
Enemies of the nation
Universalism
Assimilation
Individualism
Dispersion
Fragmentation
Genocide











 Jewish books

The Bible
The prayer book




vii


viii

Contents
The Talmud
The Shulhan Arukh
The Zohar
The Guide of the Perplexed






 The Jewish religion
Traditional Judaism
The modernist reform
Radical alternatives







 The family
The family as a unit
The Jewish home: space
The Jewish home: time
Rites of passage







 The community
The Jewish community and how it works
The synagogue
The worship of the synagogue
Religious services
The cycle of the year
Moments of life
Other communal institutions











 God and the Jewish people
The Jews and God
Sources of Jewish theology
The Bible
Midrash and Haggadah
The philosophers
Mystical approaches
The liturgy as a source of theology
God in the twentieth century
Hermann Cohen and his legacy
American Jewish theology
God and the Shoah
New issues
















 Objectives
Holiness
Obedience






Contents
Righteousness
Faith
Fear
Love
Bringing the Messiah
Repairing the world
Making peace
After life
 Judaism and the future
External pressures
Demographic trends
Political aspects
Social aspects
Religious pluralism
Theological developments
Glossary
Further reading
Index

ix





















Illustrations








Torah scroll and pointer

The Rabbinic Bible (Mikraot Gedolot)
A page of the Babylonian Talmud
The Jewish calendar
The ten Sefirot
Tefillin (phylacteries)

x

page 







Tables

.
.
.
.

Chronology
Countries with the largest Jewish populations, 
Metropolitan areas with largest Jewish populations, 
American States with the largest Jewish populations, 
Books of the Bible

xi


page xiv






Preface

This book is intended for students of religion and others who seek an
introduction to Judaism. It is, as its title says, an introduction, and
nothing more. Some suggestions for further reading are given at the end.
I hope I have covered the main points, without becoming too embroiled
in details. I make no apology, however, for including a certain number
of quotations, from the prayer book and other sources, because Judaism
is a text-based religion, and to describe beliefs or rituals without giving
texts would be to offer a very faint glimpse.
The focus throughout is on contemporary Judaism. Insofar as I delve
into history, I do so through the eyes of the present. There are many
books which tell the story of the Jewish people, but what matters for this
introduction is the way that the past is perceived today and the ways that
it affects contemporary Judaism.
Judaism today is very fragmented, as I have tried to explain in the
book, and I have been careful to try to do justice to the different strands,
roughly in proportion to their numerical importance. If I have been less
than fair to secular Judaism that is because it does not yet seem to be as
articulate about itself as the other trends.
The main centres of Judaism today are in the United States and
Israel, and I have tried to reflect that importance in the book. However,

I have also referred to Judaism in Europe, not only before the Second
World War but today as well. Although the heyday of European Judaism
lies in the past, it cannot be written off.
I have designed the book so that the chapters can be read in any order,
and have deliberately included some repetition and cross-reference to
that end. However, I believe there is a certain logic in the order in which
the subject is presented, and recommend readers to follow the good
advice to ‘begin at the beginning’.
I acknowledge that my attempts to avoid sexist language may seem
half-hearted. I have aimed at a compromise between accuracy and
xii


Preface

xiii

elegance, and I know I have not always succeeded. It is hard to avoid
sexism completely when writing about Judaism, because it pervades the
sources. I do hope, though, that when I refer to God as ‘he’ I do not give
the impression that he has a sex or gender, and I sincerely hope I do not
use the word ‘Jew’ to mean ‘male Jew’.
Since this is an introduction, I have allowed myself to use a simplified
system of transliteration of Hebrew, which aims to give an approximation of the pronunciation, rather than to permit words to be retranscribed directly into the Hebrew alphabet. There are pitfalls: in
particular, the letter h is used for two Hebrew letters, one of which is a
harder sound than English h. Those readers who know some Hebrew
should have no difficulty in identifying the transliterated words, but for
added clarity I have inserted a more exact transcription of each word in
the Glossary.
I have incurred many debts while writing this book. I must thank the

Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, for offering me shelter while I was
researching the Israeli aspects, and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and
Jewish Studies, Yarnton, for similar hospitality during the writing. I
derived terrestrial and intellectual nourishment from friends in both
places. I am grateful to my students in Cambridge and during a brief
stay at the Free University of Berlin for letting me test out my ideas on
them, and for trusting me with some of their own. Several friends have
offered advice and suggestions, for which I am duly grateful. Finally, my
warm thanks to my mother and to my children for not letting me stray
too far from reality, and for putting me right on lots of details.


Chronology

c.  BCE
c.  BCE
c.  BCE
 BCE
 BCE
c.  BCE
– BCE
 BCE
 BCE
– BCE
– CE
–
–
–
c. 


c. 

eighth century
–

–
c. 



Suggested date for Exodus of Israelites from Egypt
Kingdom of David and Solomon
First Temple
Sargon of Assyria conquers kingdom of Israel
First Temple destroyed by Babylonians.
Babylonian exile. Beginning of eastern Diaspora
Second Temple
Conquests of Alexander the Great
Revolt of the Maccabees (Hasmoneans) against
Seleucid rule
Hasmoneans capture Jerusalem. Hasmonean
dynasty
Herod the Great king of Judaea
Great revolt; sack of Jerusalem by Romans ( CE)
Flavius Josephus, Jewish War
Diaspora revolt
Bar Kokhba revolt
Mishnah compiled
Emperor Constantine establishes tolerance of
Christianity: beginning of Christian dominance

Jerusalem Talmud compiled
Beginning of the Geonic period; Babylonian
Talmud compiled
Rise of Karaism
Rashi
Crusaders massacre Jews in Rhineland
Maimonides
Zohar compiled
First printed Hebrew Bible
Unbaptised Jews expelled from Spain
xiv


Chronology
–

–

–
–
–




from 
–


–



–

–






xv

Isaac Luria
Shulhan Arukh published
Shabbetai Tsvi
Jews arrive in New Amsterdam
Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism
Elijah of Vilna (the ‘Vilna Gaon’)
Moses Mendelssohn
First public synagogue in New York
Russian Pale of Settlement, Jews of France
emancipated
First Reformed congregation in Hamburg
Union of American Hebrew Congregations
Pogroms in Russia; rise of antisemitism; migrations
First aliyah (Zionist immigration to Israel)
Codification of Reform Judaism (Pittsburgh
Platform)
Jewish Theological Seminary of America

‘Dreyfus Affair’ in France
First Zionist Congress; founding of the Bund
(Jewish Workers’ Union)
Emancipation in Russia following the Revolution;
Balfour Declaration
Palestine under British Mandate
Founding of Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Nazi persecution; the Holocaust
Birobidzhan proclaimed ‘Jewish Autonomous
Oblast’
World Jewish Congress
State of Israel founded
Six Day War
Yom Kippur War


xvi

Map of the Jewish world in  (a)


xvii

Map of the Jewish world in  (b)


xviii

Map of the Jewish world in  (c)



Map of the Jewish world in the s (a)


xx

Map of the Jewish world in the s (b)


xxi

Map of the Jewish world in the s (c)


xxii

Map of the Jewish world in the s (d)


 

The Jews in the world

            
The Jews are a scattered people. They live in many different countries,
and with one exception they are a numerically insignificant minority in
all of them. They belong to many different ethnic and linguistic groupings, and many different cultural backgrounds. Even within a single
country these differences divide the Jewish communities from one
another. So what is it that binds them all together, and allows us to speak
in general terms about ‘the Jews’?

One superficially attractive but actually misleading answer is that they
are united by a common religion. There is a Jewish religion, and for very
many Jews it is the focus of their lives and a strong cement binding them
to other Jews. But it would be unrealistic to maintain that it is the Jewish
religion that unites the Jewish people. In fact the Jewish religion divides
the Jewish people today, perhaps almost as much as it divides Jews from
non-Jews. And even the most pious Jews would probably admit that it is
not their religion that defines them as Jews. They practise the Jewish
religion because they are Jews, not the other way around.
What is it then that makes a Jew a Jew? In today’s world, although
there are many ‘Jews by choice’, the overwhelming majority of Jews are
born into Jewish families. Most Jews would answer the question ‘why are
you a Jew?’ by saying ‘because I was born a Jew’.
This basic fact has important implications. It is sometimes said that
‘Judaism is not a proselytising religion’, meaning that Jews do not
actively seek to make converts to Judaism. Yet this formulation is fundamentally misleading. Religious Jews are generally proud of their religion, they are happy to explain it to non-Jews, they welcome and are even
flattered by the interest of outsiders. But since in their minds the religion is somehow secondary to Jewish identity, it is not conversion to
Judaism that is the issue. In the relatively rare cases where a non-Jew does
