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Jewish identity began to gain the attention of Jewish sociologists in the United States with the publication of Marshall Sklare's "Lakeville studies". [20] Among other topics explored in the studies was Sklare's notion of a "good Jew". [21] The "good Jew" was essentially an idealized form of Jewish identity as expressed by the Lakeville ...
Describing Judaism as a religious civilization emphasizes the idea that Jewish people have sought "to make [their] collective experience yield meaning for the enrichment of the life of the individual Jew and for the spiritual greatness of the Jewish people." The definition as a civilization allows Judaism to accept the principles of unity in ...
Though the question is undecided, some trace the start of a biological interpretation of Jewish origins back as far as the Spanish Inquisition. [12] A tradition of thought and ethnography premised on a hierarchy of racial distinctions, though in retrospect known to be a pseudoscience, was deeply entrenched, indeed ubiquitous, among Western scholars by the early twentieth century. [13]
the mere presence of the language in spoken or written form could invoke the concept of a Jewish national identity. Even if one knew no Hebrew or was illiterate, one could recognize that a group of signs was in Hebrew script. ... It was the language of the Israelite ancestors, the national literature, and the national religion.
Defining secular culture among those who practice traditional Judaism is difficult, because the entire culture is, by definition, entwined with religious traditions: the idea of separate ethnic and religious identity is foreign to the Hebrew tradition of an " 'am yisrael". (This is particularly true for Orthodox Judaism.)
This wisdom captures the Jewish response of transforming hatred and threats to a catalyst for strengthening faith and identity, like the flickering menorah’s flames shining in the darkest nights.
Zionism rejected traditional Judaic definitions of what it means to be Jewish, but struggled to offer a new interpretation of Jewish identity independent of rabbinical tradition. Jewish religion is viewed as an essentially negative factor, even in religious Zionist ideology, and as responsible for the diminishing status of Jews living as a ...
[9] [10] [11] They argue that only patrilineal descent can transmit Jewish identity on the grounds that all descent in the Torah went according to the male line. [12] Only someone who is patrilineally Jewish (someone whose father's father was Jewish) is regarded as a Jew by the Mo'eṣet HaḤakhamim, or the Karaite Council of Sages based in ...