Hebrew Orthodoxy

The New York Times reports on a court case in Britain:

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.”

The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said.

Meanwhile Louis Reprecht writes at Religion Dispatches:

Sola scriptura, sola fide is indeed “all about belief.” Which is why in contemporary English one may speak of “practicing Catholics” or “practicing Jews,” but to speak of “practicing Protestants” just sounds funny. They don’t practice. Not the old way.

If one ponders what the Protestants endeavored to take away, then they are almost all matters of materiality and attendant practices: holy water and incense, statues and frescoes, saints and pilgrimages, monasteries and celibacy, Maryology, “real presence” in the Eucharist. At the conclusion of the Reformation’s fundamental re-imagining of what religion is at its core, faith had been foregrounded in an entirely new way, and practices had receded into the background of suspicion that they were little more than “pagan” holdovers.

What remained was an empty worship space, a cross (if there were a cross) emptied of the bleeding body of the Lord, and the Book held up by the preacher in precisely the same way the priest had once elevated the Host at the culminating moment of the mystery of the Mass.

Armstrong’s historical point is that the Reformation culminated in a very Modern way of imagining religion, much as the commenter does, as “all about belief.”

Judaism, outside of the Reform movement, is not Protestantism. The modern confusion over whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity occurs because these categories did not exist in the ancient world which gave rise to the Jewish people. Similarly, the distinction between Hindu and Indian is entirely modern. What we call "Hinduism" are the traditional cultic practices of the Indian people. Only when Christian missionaries began looking for a term besides "pagan" to describe non-Muslim Indians did the term come into common usage.

Judaism is not racist; it is premodern. Thus it does not conform to Protestant norms of what religion means, and where religion stops and ethnicity begins. Judaism is more in conformity with the pagan conception of religion and ethnicity as one than it is with the Christian separation of spirit and flesh. The pagan worships the gods of his people; but, conversely, his people would not exist without the gods. The pagan has no desire to "convert" other people to his "religion," because for him worship is about fidelity to ancestors, not universal salvation. Eliminate the plural and you have Judaism.

Before the zealots ruined everything, Judaism did just fine in the context of the pagan Roman empire. Notably, the emperor Julian the Apostate, who attempted to stop the spread of Christianity after Constantine's betrayal, offered to rebuild the Jewish Temple. Anti-Semitic neopagans are too stupid to realize that they have inherited their apocalyptic obsession with the Jews from Christianity. Judaism is the closest thing to a continously-practiced pagan religion left in the West. In fact, by eliminating unnecessary goddage, Judaism could be regarded as the purified peak of paganism.

Outside of Western Christianity, Judaism is not an abberation at all. Is there not a Serbian Orthodox Church, a Greek Orthodox Church, an Ethiopian Orthodox Church? Are these not discriminatory, "ethnic" religions? Jews should form an Orthodox Church. Call Jesus a prophet and get it over with. Our orthodox credentials are impeccable: all the apostles kept kosher and cut off their foreskins. Israel could be a real crusader state. We are either the last pagans or the first Christians. I say: let's be both. Dualism is for Protestants.