An article from My Jewish Learning summarizes the confusion of Jewish identity:
Jews disagree about many things, and how to designate the Jews as a whole is one of them.
Are Jews united by a shared religion? Yes, the Jewish community shares certain religious inclinations, including belief in one God, shared holidays (like Shabbat, Passover and Yom Kippur), and upholding the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as central religious texts. But in practice, many Jews are secular, atheist and/or non-practicing and yet still identify as Jews and are accepted by the community as Jewish.
Are Jews a culture? Yes, broadly speaking, except that Jews whose families hail from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere often share little in the way of traditional foods, music, language and more.
Are Jews a nation? Yes, except that it has been several millennia since all Jews lived in a single country, if indeed they ever did. Even today, when there is a Jewish state, most Jews do not live there and many identify primarily with the nation in which they live.
Some Jews prefer to use terms like “people” or “tribe” — terms that encompass more of the diversity noted above, but also have less precise definitions. Such terms are generally more inclusive of the diversity inherent in the Jewish community, allowing for the possibility that one can become Jewish by either birth or conversion, that one can stop practicing Jewish religious rituals or disavow Jewish beliefs and still identify as Jewish, and that one can identify primarily as Indian or American and still be recognized as Jewish.[1]
What we see here is a lack of consensus of any irreducible attribute that defines Jewish identity. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblances helps to make sense of this. He uses the name family resemblances “for the various resemblances between members of a family—build, features, colour of eyes, gait temperament, and so on and so forth—overlap and criss-cross in the same way.”[2] There are “blurred edges” with concepts, meaning there are certain attributes we can predicate to things, even though we cannot say that if and only if thing x possesses y is it z.[3] Being a Jew can mean any number of things in different combinations. These attributes like attending Shabbat, being circumcised, eating lox, or praying daily are markers of Jewish identity as a form of positive identity. By positive identity, this means identifiers that are upheld because they are considered good in themselves, not dependent on other’s opinions, and in the case of religious identity, serve also as a sense of belonging in a community.
But there is another definition of Jewish identity not commonly discussed, specifically in the form of negative identity. Identifying oneself through opposition of some form is a common outcome of reactionary sentiment. John Panteleimon Manoussakis describes this phenomenon within the Eastern Orthodox Church:
Those who want to elevate their dislike for the pope into a definition for the Orthodox Church as a whole do not realize that, if they were right, their version of the Church would be reduced to little more than a religious club that can trace its origins to no earlier than the schism of 1054—a club that would owe its raison d’être entirely to the very opponent that it opposes. Indeed, we cannot continue to accept as “genuinely” Orthodox those things that are simply the opposite of what the Catholic Church believes. Orthodoxy cannot be merely reactionary, possessed, as it were, by the demonic spirit of naysaying, bereft of any creative powers in theology, where what constitutes “me” is always a negation of the “other.” Truth, I would suggest, is antinomian and, thus, never antithetical.[4]
Jew as negative identity is what I describe in the foreword of Jewish Business Practices: Sketches from Contemporary Social Life. I wrote that “What makes a person a Jew is their rejection of Christ.”[5] This encapsulates Jewish identity in the form of negative identity.
Michael Signer writes,
the Jewish negation of Jesus Christ was not only a denial of the truth of Christianity. It was an assertion of the continuing validity of God’s revelation and commandments that would accompany the Jewish people until their Messiah arrived to deliver them from exile and the “yoke of the gentiles.” For these reasons the Jewish negation of Jesus was couched in an angry, assertive, and almost scandalous rhetoric.[6]
In other words, there must be a strong negation of Jesus to preserve Jewish identity. Rabbi Jonathan Bernis says,
I was raised as a child in a Jewish home with the understanding that I was born a Jew, that I was to die a Jew, and anyone who wasn’t Jewish was a Christian or a Gentile. I also understood that Jewish identity meant one thing: Jews don’t believe in Jesus.[7]
This negation of belief leads to behavior that negates what can be considered as Christian principles stemming from the recognition of Jesus as commanding love and mercy. Some examples of this type of Jewish behavior include promoting abortion, practicing tikkun olam, lobbying the U.S. government for more funds for the Israeli military, and advocating for perverse and unhealthy sexual practices. Listen to Al Goldstein: “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.”[8] This negative identity isn’t always voiced as explicitly as Goldstein does, and it can even be an unconscious identity, viewing Christians as “others” to be overcome through revolutionary activity. Because of the lack of clear dividing lines between religion and ethnicity among Jewish identity, negative identity became a strong factor in Jewish identity, distinguishing themselves against the gentiles.
The Jew as negative identity in contradistinction to Christians can be applied to all gentiles in general, not just Christians; however, the opposition of Christianity has developed a core place in the identity of revolutionary Jews because Jesus is the central figure representing what they see as the perversion of Jewish identity, and thus other gentile groups, whether they be Muslims, Hindus, or any other religious or ethnic group, are built off of this rejection of Jesus, as if without Jesus there would have been no diaspora, the Jewish militant messiah would have arrived and defeated Rome, and Jews would have no need for contact with gentiles save for war. This mindset remains with secular Jews who embrace negative identity, for the messianic mindset transcends pure supernatural belief.
[1] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/are-jews-a-race/
[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §67.
[3] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §71.
[4] John Panteleimon Manoussakis, For the Unity of All: Contributions to the Theological Dialogue Between East and West (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2015),
[5] Georg Ratzinger, Jewish Business Practices: Sketches from Contemporary Social Life (2023), 2.
[6] https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-jewish-denial-of-christ-blindness-or-insight/
[7] https://www.jewishvoice.org/article/ten-biggest-lies-about-yeshua-his-jewishness-and-what-some-call-jewish-christianity
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.