The Linguistics and Theology of Defining, Understanding, Misunderstanding, Liking and Disliking Jews and Judaism

Abstract

The words “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Judaism” have offered a treble-definitional problem in the sweep through history and in particularly Christian-Jewish relations during the past two millennia. (1) The failure to distinguish “Jew/Jewish” from “Judaean” is a starting point of misconceiving the group that shares a common spiritual heritage with Christianity from which each turns in its own direction in the first few generations after the crucifixion of Jesus. (2) On the other hand, the emergence in the West from a strict if troubled adherence to a religion-based identity on the part of Christianity, offered a temporary respite from 15 centuries of negative feelings regarding Jews; Jews were able to shift from the margins to the mainstream of socio-economic and cultural realities. In the end this yielded to a reinvigorated negative that, through the new academic disciplines of linguistics and anthropology, derived from a redefinition of Jews as a race, allowing a newly-coined, race-based hostility, “antisemitism” to replace the “anti-Judaism” of the medieval period. (3) One further layer of language-and-concept-based complication evolves with the development of Romantic Nationalism in the nineteenth century, with consequences both for outsider definitions of Judaism and for Jewish self-definition. These complications have merged into a newly nuanced complexity in the response to the events in Israel-Palestine-Gaza between October 7, 2023 and the time of this writing. Ignorance of the definitional and conceptual issues of the past two millennia have helped reshape the possibility of meaningful dialogue into powerful but meaning-deficient rhetoric with confusing and violent consequences.