Judaism

What makes Judaism distinctive

Judaism occupies a unique position among the world’s major religions because it is simultaneously a religion, an ethnicity, and a civilization. A person can be Jewish by birth, with no religious beliefs whatsoever, and be recognized as Jewish — both by Jewish communities and by the wider world. This is not how Islam or Christianity works. There is no equivalent of the secular Christian or the atheist Muslim in quite the same structural sense. The overlap of religious and ethnic identity in Judaism creates possibilities — and complications — that other traditions do not share.

Judaism is also the oldest of the Abrahamic religions, with roots in the ancient Near East going back at least three thousand years. Both Christianity and Islam emerged from it, borrowed its scriptures, and defined themselves partly in relation to it. With approximately 15 million adherents worldwide, it is far smaller than either of its descendants — roughly 0.2% of the world’s population — but its cultural and intellectual influence has been disproportionate to its size.

The three main branches

Modern Judaism is not monolithic. Three major denominations — Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform — represent distinct approaches to tradition, authority, and modernity.

The Torah and the Talmud

The Torah — the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) — is the foundational text of Judaism. In the broadest sense, “Torah” refers to all Jewish religious teaching. In the narrowest sense, it refers to the handwritten scroll read aloud in synagogue on Shabbat and holidays. These five books contain the narrative of creation, the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai, and the giving of the commandments — traditionally numbered at 613.

The Talmud is the record of rabbinic debate and discussion about the meaning and application of Torah law, compiled between roughly 200 and 500 CE. It is an enormous and complex document — the Babylonian Talmud runs to over 6,000 pages — and it forms the basis of traditional Jewish legal reasoning. Talmudic study is the central intellectual activity of Orthodox Jewish life and has historically produced a culture of rigorous argument, textual analysis, and careful reasoning that many scholars credit with Judaism’s disproportionate intellectual output.

The secular Jewish tradition

Some of the most consequential atheists and secular thinkers in modern history have been Jewish by birth and identity. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was excommunicated from his Amsterdam Jewish community for his rationalist philosophy, which effectively denied a personal God who intervenes in history — and is now widely regarded as one of the founders of modern secular thought. Karl Marx, whose critique of religion as “the opium of the people” shaped the secular left for over a century, was born Jewish and baptized as a child but identified with neither tradition. Sigmund Freud described himself as “a completely godless Jew” and wrote one of the most direct psychoanalytic critiques of religion, The Future of an Illusion(1927). Albert Einstein rejected the idea of a personal God while maintaining a sense of cosmic wonder he sometimes described in religious language, famously saying he believed in “Spinoza’s God” — not a deity who answers prayers but the rational order of the universe.

This tradition continues. A disproportionate number of prominent secular thinkers, philosophers, scientists, and public intellectuals have been culturally Jewish while holding no religious beliefs. The comedian and cultural critic Lenny Bruce, the philosopher A. J. Ayer, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould — the list is long. Jewish atheism is not a contradiction in terms but a well-established identity with its own history, literature, and community. The Jewish Secular Society and Humanistic Judaism are organized movements that maintain Jewish culture and community without theological belief.

The Holocaust and Jewish theology

The systematic murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945 — representing roughly two-thirds of European Jewry — is the central catastrophe of modern Jewish history and has had profound effects on Jewish theology. The question it poses for religious Jews is acute: how could the God who chose the Jewish people, who redeemed them from Egypt, who promised to protect them, have permitted Auschwitz?

The theological responses have varied. Some Orthodox thinkers have maintained traditional frameworks, arguing that the Holocaust was divine punishment for Jewish assimilation or sin — a position most find morally repugnant. Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor, wrote in Nightabout his faith dying in the flames at Birkenau. The philosopher and rabbi Eliezer Berkovits argued for a “hester panim” theology — God’s hiding of his face — as the price of human freedom. Richard Rubenstein, in After Auschwitz (1966), argued that the death camps made the traditional God of history, covenant, and chosenness intellectually untenable.

For many secular Jews, the Holocaust confirmed what they already believed: that the universe is indifferent, that history offers no guarantees, and that human solidarity is the only reliable protection against human evil. The experience of genocide has also shaped a strong secular Jewish commitment to human rights, civil liberties, and opposition to authoritarianism.

Atheism within Jewish identity

Surveys consistently find that a substantial minority of American Jews describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. A 2020 Pew Research survey found that 27% of American Jews said they do not believe in God. The same survey found that nearly one in five American Jews identify as Jews “of no religion” — meaning they consider themselves Jewish by ancestry, culture, or upbringing but not by religious belief or practice.

This is a distinctive feature of Jewish identity that has no real parallel in the other Abrahamic faiths. A Muslim who stops believing in Allah generally stops being Muslim, at least in the eyes of their community. A Jew who stops believing in God often remains, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their community, entirely Jewish — attending seders, observing Yom Kippur as a cultural occasion, and identifying strongly with Jewish history and peoplehood. This is neither hypocrisy nor confusion; it is the distinctive character of a tradition that is as much ethnic and civilizational as it is theological.