By David Schraub
In the last few years, Judaism was seen less and less as an independent religious and cultural group. Instead, to quote Stephen M. Feldman, it is viewed more along the lines of a "quirky Protestant sect." That is, there are the mainline Protestants, then farther away the fundamentalist Protestants, then yet further groups such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and finally in the furthest, the Jews: so weird, they don’t even accept Christ! But unlike, say, Muslims, Jews are still considered "part of the family" -- a group fundamentally united with Christianity and whose differences are primarily intramural.
Witness the explosion in recent years of appeals to "Judeo-Christian values" or the "Judeo-Christian tradition." They are pervasive in our political discourse and are a staple amongst a certain class of politicians who like to think of themselves as representing "people of faith." These appeals also all share one defining characteristic: they are nearly universally made by Christian speakers in pursuit of fundamentalist Christian (not Jewish) values. The "Judeo" comes in to offer faux diversity, but there is little to no consultation with the group they purport to represent. In effect, "Judeo- Christian" is identical to "Christian," and the "Judeo-" aspect is at the same time meaningless and self-defeating.
Consider the case of abortion. Nowhere will you find more strident referrals to the "Judeo-Christian tradition" than when a conservative pastor addresses this topic. Indeed, abortion may be the paradigmatic issue where religious values and arguments have been incorporated into mainstream political discourse. Of course, many people come to both pro-life and pro-choice views without ever referencing a religious text. But when religious values (especially traditional ones) are introduced into the debate, few people doubt that the speaker will use them to favor a pro-life position. Many assume that the traditional "Judeo-Christian" convention speaks with a clear and monolithic voice, and that the voice is pro-life.
It may come as a surprise to many readers, then, to learn that the classical Jewish doctrine on abortion is moderately pro-choice. We should not exaggerate: Abortion is not seen as a good thing in Jewish law. However, it is emphatically not considered murder, and the life of the fetus is not considered to have begun at conception. The Jewish model emphasizes the competing interests of fetal life versus the health and autonomy of the mother. There are, of course, differing conceptions of how much weight should be given to each factor. But even under the most restrictive definitions, a fetus is not considered to be human, abortion is not considered to be murder, and abortion in the case of legitimate threat to a mother’s life is not just permissible but mandatory.
It is not surprising that few people are aware of an alternative Jewish framework in the abortion debate. The majority of the abortion debate is cast in either secular terms which do not include Judaism as a religion or in Christian terms which purports to absorb Judaism as a religion. Sometimes, liberal scholars will search for alternative perspectives by which to view abortion, such as the Buddhist tradition (for religion), or a Native American tradition (for a secular but non-White culture). However, it is presumed that Jews have been spoken for by their Christian colleagues. So the possibility of alternative viewpoints within the "Judeo-Christian" perspective is assumed away without any examination. Abortion is not the exception. While most politically aware college students could articulate the traditional "(Judeo-)Christian" viewpoint of euthanasia, the death penalty, just war, or religious freedom, few would be able to identify the religious Jewish position on any of these issues, if they even recognized that a unique Jewish position could exist on its own.
What are the roots of this phenomenon? Two sources can be identified. The first is the long history of anti-Semitic oppression that continues to this day. Whenever Jews have had a vibrant and distinct identity, they have become convenient targets for social scapegoating. The still fresh wounds of the Holocaust have made Jews understandably skittish about flaunting their identity in what remains a world very hostile to others. Second, the particular dynamic of Jewish-Christian interplay has led Christianity to actively pursue the real and discursive absorption of Judaism as a theological strategy. The more Judaism fades away, the greater theological legitimacy Christianity has as heir to the biblical tradition.
100 years ago, Benjamin Disraeli put it best: "The Jews are a nervous people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have taken a toll." Mainstream society (both Western Christian and Eastern Islamic) has to come to terms with the fact that it has so deeply abused the Jewish people that they appear willing to commit social suicide rather than re-assert their identity in public. And no wonder; the pattern of abuse remains constant and unchanging even as every other group in the world is recognized as full and equal members of the global community.
The most visible instance of Jewish identity in the world today -- the state of Israel -- is constantly assailed as a "colonialist" or "crusader" state (note in the latter the labeling of a Jewish state with Christian terminology), as illegitimate, unjust, illegal or racist. Attacks against Jewish civilians are rationalized, justified, even applauded. Anti-Israel advocates deny that Jews can be considered a "people," or that Jews have any historical or religious link to Israel. Even after Oslo, the Palestinian National Charter continues to assert that "[c]laims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history ... ."
A full examination of Zionism and Israeli history is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, when prominent "liberal" scholars refuse to accept any Jewish presence in the Middle East as legitimate, and seek to excuse the global complacency toward anti-Semitism by casting Israelis as the ultimate evil, it is clear that somewhere along the line Jewish experience has become superfluous. In this context, where the "facts of history" are rewritten to deny Jewish experience, history, and culture, or to accept their validity only insofar as they can be vilified as an imperialistic or colonialist presence, it is no wonder that many Jews choose not to identify as Jewish at all.
The history of the Jewish people is one of continued aggression, oppression, suppression and repression against our people and institutions. This legitimized violence crosses cultures and time periods. While one can trace wide fluctuations in interracial conceptions between Whites and Blacks Whites and Asians, Asians and Blacks, and other groups over the past millennia, anti-Semitism has altered only in the type of weaponry used to carry out the destruction. But while the methods may have changed, one justification has remained constant. Jews are falsely seen to possess power they don’t have. The myth of Jewish power remains one of the most pervasive anti-Semitic legends in the world today. Egypt recently commissioned a TV adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic forgery which purports to reveal the Jewish plot to take over the world.
In the 19th century, Jews were simultaneously alleged by conservative elites to be Communist rabble-rousers, and by liberal revolutionaries to be heartless capitalist elites. In America today, the right-wing activists rail against the anti-Christian Democratic leadership (read: Jews who still cling to the notion of an independent Jewish identity), while leftist protestors clamor about the Jewish neo-conservative cabal which apparently runs the Bush administration. It goes without saying that "the Jews" cannot fill all these roles at the same time (and at well less than one percecnt of the global population, they would have difficulty filling any of these roles at any time). However, since power has been inscribed into the popular reality of what is Jewish irrespective of actual realities of oppression, Jews often find themselves on the defensive and always the enemy. They are defined as inherently opposed to the good, regardless of what good is. Constructed as such, the Jewish identity becomes a death trap. Meanwhile, since Jews are always assumed to be powerful, society will simply dismiss any claims that Jews may be victims of oppression except in the most shocking cases, like the Holocaust.
The second cause may seem independent of the first, but in actuality they interact in interesting ways. Christianity did not originally conceive of itself as a religion in competition with Judaism. Rather, it saw itself as Judaism 2.0, the next step in Jewish evolution. Christianity casted Judaism as a dead religion, a tree that bears no more fruit. Continued assertion of independent Jewish perspectives, beyond those of the Tanakh (Old Testament) and unconstrained by the Christian Bible, was a serious challenge to this doctrine. That Jews didn’t rush to become good Christians was not anticipated by the early Church, and they had to adapt accordingly. What they settled on was a concerted effort to marginalize Judaism, such that if it refused to go away willingly, it would forcibly become irrelevant.
Part of this was manifested in anti-Semitic preaching and violence. It would be wrong to minimize the way that Christian rhetoric and dogma were part and parcel of the pogroms, rioting, pillaging, rape, and murder that characterized Jewish experience throughout the last two millennia. Jews were objectively evil, "Christkillers," servants of the devil. However, as the Enlightenment came the willingness of elites to totally sanction the murder of Jews was significantly lessoned. It didn’t go away entirely; Russian pogroms continued well into the 20th century, and Hitler drew on a rich tradition of German religious anti-Semitism to justify his genocidal campaigns. As a result of these travesties, a new feeling of unity developed among Jews as members of a shared faith. Had this extension of unity been made on equal terms, it could have been the start of a new era of Judeo-Christian cooperation and respect. But it was not made on equal terms.
A bargain was arranged: If Jews agreed to become mere "persons" in the public life, then Christians would stop discriminating against them as Jews. On face, this seems fair; everybody in society is treated as if their religion is irrelevant and is free to practice their faith in private. However, in a society that is as hegemonically Christian as 19th and 20th century Europe, a "mere person" is, in all practical effect, a "mere (Christian) person." Even as the state proclaimed neutrality, Christianity remained inextricably entangled in the warp and woof of everyday affairs. A state banquet may not have had meat on Friday to accommodate Catholics, but it wouldn’t hesitate to serve pork on Tuesday. Jews who protested were accused of asking for special favors on account of religion, breaching the very terms of the original bargain. As Michael W. McConnell puts it
:"[T]his vision of secular equality ... would protect them from laws that explicitly singled out Jews for disabilities, and it would maintain a secular public order in which all citizens could participate on the basis of their shared characteristics ... But it would not protect the ability of religious minorities to maintain their differences from secular society. It would provide no protection for religious practices at odds with the secular interests of the majority."
By this point, Christianity was so well entrenched in American and European society that it was inconceivable a law might be passed that would force a committed Christian to violate his faith. For Jews, of course, it was not just conceivable but a daily reality that had to be dealt with. To cite just a few examples, Jewish immigrants discovered that closing their business on Shabbat was a sure-fire route to bankruptcy; Jews who wished to remain open on Sunday were legally mandated to close in accordance with Sunday Blue Laws; Laws designed to prevent companies from fraudulently labeling their products "Kosher" were struck down as unconstitutional; and Jews were forcibly required to testify under oath on Shabbat, even though Courts were closed on Sunday to prevent Christians from violating their Sabbath. However, for the myth of equal personhood to survive, it had to pretend that all cultures were equally protected within the universalist paradigm. This, in turn, required the minimization of distinctions between Judaism and Christianity so society could claim to be protecting both. Jews who refused to accede to this reinterpretation were faced with heavy sanctions, both legal and social.
The social requirement that Jews and Christians be seen as interchangeable was quite compatible with the theological requirement that Judaism be marginalized as far as possible. Because the equivalency was based on a Christian model (in which Jewish difference was suppressed as "deviant" or particular to the "universal" (read: Christian norm), Jews could be suppressed by the very legal and discursive framework that purported to be liberating them. Implicit in this framework was a threat of violence, always lurking beneath the surface was the alternative world of pogroms, suppression, and death. In this environment the "choice" of Jews to become Christian was not really a choice at all. As Christianity bound Judaism closely to itself, it sapped Jewish history, experience, and identity, and transferred it into the new "Judeo-Christian" alliance. As it did so, the ability of Jews to assert independence based on their own recognized cultural institutions and values grew weaker and weaker until finally their voice became inaudible, drowned out by Christian pastors and politicians all speaking for the Judeo-Christian way.
The impact of this does not just manifest itself in certain political outcomes. It goes far deeper than that. The whiplash of Jews being simultaneously written into and then excluded from the Christian narrative has the effect of entirely writing them out of history as an independent entity. Absent conversion (the ultimate end goal of this entire endeavor), Jews can never become fully Christian no matter how far they assimilate. Since the exposure of non-Christians to Christianity is primarily characterized by the oppressive use of power, and Jews are the epitome of illegitimate power, Jews are Christians differentiated only by the fact that they are definitionally irredeemable. Stripped of any other defining characteristic, Jews can not find sustenance in their own traditions because society refuses to recognize them or give them any weight. Nor can they appeal to liberal scholars plying their trade in reinserting subordinate voices back into the dominant discursive stream. Jews fall under the category of Judeo-Christians, do they not? And Judeo-Christianity is the dominant framework that these scholars are trying to undermine, supplant, supplement or modify. Besides, even if Jews could be conceptualized outside of Judeo-Christianity, since these people are Jews, ipso facto they are empowered. The death of critical Jewish literature in forms akin to critical feminism or critical race theory can be attributed to the fact that Jews have nothing to critique, they are part of the body to be critiqued.
In the process of developing this socially constructed account of Judaism, the actual aspects of Jewish experience which conflict with the construction (i.e. nearly all of it) have to be not just abandoned, but erased. They never could exist, because they are an account of a people whose oppression and marginalization never could have happened. The Jews of the pogroms of the Holocaust, of the Exile, are no more, replaced by the Jews of the Protocols, of the Colonial-Crusader state, of the Christian Bible. The reality of Judaism is replaced by the narrative of Judeo-Christian, and the actual Jews and everything they stood for cease to exist.
Society loses something when it so completely writes off such a rich and vocal tradition as Judaism. Jewish texts have much to add to our conceptions of many politically salient issues, ranging from social justice to abortion. This is not to say that our problems would be solved if America became a Halakhic state. However, the idea is even broader: Jewish perspectives provide valuable insights on the way our society ought behave, just as feminist, black, Asian, Confucian, Islamic and yes, Christian perspectives do. Society should oppose the cultural erasure of Judaism regardless of whether it benefits the world or not, out of a basic respect for humankind and cultural pluralism. That the world appears to be engaged in a concerted effort to drive Jewish voices out of public discourse and onto the cross should give pause to us all. There is a global obligation to oppose this type of oppression, and everybody, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist, has the duty to join. Jews are a people who have been forcibly ripped from their own past and set adrift. They float without direction or control, unable to reclaim agency over themselves or even guarantee their own survival. They can choose to leave space, it is true, by becoming Christian. However, those of us for whom conversion is not a choice remain lost. In the old days, the mantra was "convert or die." Today, there is a bit more humanity, so Jews who don’t convert are left alone as the rest of the world goes about its way. Left alone in space. What are the odds for our survival? 
David Schraub is a sophomore from Bethesda, Maryland.