We need to stop thinking of Judaism as a religion

To fully embrace Jewish indigeneity and reject the non-Jewish world’s attempt to impose its thinking upon us, the Jewish people must re-examine how we define our Jewish identity. There is no aspect of this process more vital than the notion of Judaism as a religion.

This perspective is so deeply embedded in our collective psyche that it seems almost like a natural truth. Overcoming it will be extraordinarily difficult and will require significant effort on both individual and collective levels. However, despite being so embedded, this concept is actually a relatively modern phenomenon.

The Jewish people were always self-described as an Am (people). There is no word for religion in the Tanakh. And while the modern Hebrew word for religion is Dat, historically, it first appeared in Megillat Esther (the Scroll of Esther), where it was first used to reference law.

The redefinition of Judaism began in earnest between the 16th and 18th centuries when Judaism started being referred to specifically as the Jewish religion, in response to the Christian discourses that dominated at the time. Prior to the Reformation, ‘religion’ was used only in reference to Christianity, but after this point it came to be used in a broader sense, meaning a set of theological beliefs; in other words, what we define today as a ‘religion’. Crucially, this definition was applied to Jews by Christian scholars.

The process accelerated in the 19th century, following the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), when new definitions of Judaism were created in order to assimilate Jews and Jewishness into Europe. By this process, Jews were ‘remade’ in the likeness of the new post-Enlightenment world.