Don’t call Judaism a religion.

To refer to Judaism as a religion is to misunderstand both its fragility and its strength. Religions convert or fade. Civilizations transform, regenerate, and argue with themselves — while persisting.

A Torah scroll (photo: Shraga Kopstein/Unsplash)

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There is a persistent mistake people make when they talk about Judaism: They call it a religion.

The word feels tidy. It places Judaism safely alongside Christianity or Islam, as a system of belief, ritual, and private devotion. It suggests that what binds Jews together is theology — what they think about God.

But Judaism did not begin as a religion in the modern sense. And over time — through conquest, exile, dispersion, revival, and sovereignty — it revealed itself as something far larger: a civilization. Whereas religion is defined primarily by creed, civilization is defined by peoplehood, law, culture, language, land, memory, institutions, and power.

Judaism begins not with abstract doctrine, but with a family that becomes a nation. The Hebrew Bible opens with Abraham and Sarah leaving a homeland, but it moves quickly from genealogy to collective destiny. At Sinai, the Israelites do not merely receive spiritual guidance; they receive a national constitution. The covenant is not only about belief; it is about building a society.

The early Israelites did not conceive of themselves as adherents of a religion. They were a tribal confederation bound by shared ancestry, shared law, and shared territory. The Book of Judges depicts a decentralized political order long before monarchy. Later, the reigns of David and Solomon institutionalized sovereignty, establishing Jerusalem not merely as sacred space but as capital city.

The Torah legislates agriculture, debt release, labor protections, courts, damages, taxation, and limits on royal authority. Deuteronomy subjects the king himself to law — a striking form of proto-constitutional thought in the ancient world. Pilgrimage festivals align spiritual life with harvest cycles. Tribal allotments anchor identity in land. Prophets rebuke rulers in the name of justice.

Ancient Israel was not a church; it was a polity.

This matters because most ancient civilizations were inseparable from dynasty or territory. When a city fell, its gods faded with it. Israel introduced something structurally different: Covenant stood above the king, law stood above power, identity was portable even before exile made portability necessary.

And then the Temple fell.

When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and when the Romans crushed Judea in 70 CE, the Jewish People faced the kind of rupture that erased most ancient civilizations. Cities fall; gods disappear with them.

The Jews did something unprecedented: They portable-ized their civilization. Without sovereignty, without a central Temple, without political power, they rebuilt Jewish life around text, law, and communal institutions. The rabbinic revolution did not shrink Judaism into private faith; it transformed it into a distributed civilizational network.

The synagogue replaced the Temple not as a sanctuary alone, but as a civic center. The Talmud became not merely theology but jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, economics, astronomy, and communal governance recorded in layered argument. Hebrew remained a civilizational language even when Jews spoke Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, Persian, English, or French in daily life.

Across centuries and continents — from Babylonia to Spain, from Poland to Yemen — Jews established courts, charities, educational systems, trade networks, poetry, and philosophical schools. They operated as semi-autonomous communities inside larger empires while maintaining internal coherence through shared law and calendar.

A religion can survive privately; a civilization survives collectively.

Judaism endured not because Jews merely believed, but because they built. They built institutions. They trained scholars. They regulated commerce. They encoded memory into ritual. They preserved literacy as a communal expectation. They argued relentlessly — about God, yes, but also about damages, contracts, medicine, and metaphysics.

Even Jewish heresy remained civilizational. Secular Zionists rejected divine redemption while reviving Hebrew as a spoken language. Yiddish socialists imagined Jewish autonomy through culture rather than territory. Mystics, rationalists, skeptics, and traditionalists diverged theologically but remained embedded in a shared civilizational vocabulary.

What binds Jews is not uniform belief; it is shared memory, shared texts, shared destiny, and shared time — such as Shabbat, which interrupts the productivity cycle every seven days. The festivals reenact national memory annually. The counting of the Omer structures anticipation. Mourning rituals give form to grief. The calendar ensures that exile and redemption are not forgotten but rhythmically rehearsed. Civilizations endure when they shape time rather than being dissolved by it.

The modern era sharpened the tension between “religion” and “civilization.” In 19th-century Europe, emancipation reframed Jews as members of a religious confession rather than a nation. This allowed integration, but only by privatizing Jewish identity. Judaism was permitted in the synagogue, not in politics.

That framing persists because it is administratively convenient. A religion can be tolerated. A civilization, with claims to peoplehood and land, is harder to categorize. Reducing Judaism to faith alone obscures its national dimension and simplifies Jewish history into theology.

Zionism disrupted that simplification. The revival of Hebrew, the reestablishment of Jewish agriculture, the restoration of sovereignty in the ancestral homeland — these were not theological gestures, they were civilizational acts. They restored political agency to a people who had preserved identity without power for nearly two millennia.

Civilizations are not defined only by what they pray, but by what they produce and how they shape reality. Today Jewish civilization includes religious scholarship and secular philosophy, yeshivot and universities, literature and technology startups, military doctrine and humanitarian aid, comedy and constitutional debate. It stretches from Jerusalem to New York, from Buenos Aires to Melbourne, from Paris to Pretoria. It contains Hasidim and skeptics, mystics and engineers.

It is not unified by agreement; it is unified by continuity. That continuity becomes most visible in moments of rupture. When Jews are attacked in Washington, D.C. or Manchester or Bondi Beach, Jews everywhere feel it. The sense of shared fate is not theological; it is civilizational. Crisis exposes what theory sometimes obscures: Jews are not merely adherents of a faith, we are participants in a peoplehood whose story unfolds across geography and generations.

Antisemites often misread this, by imagining a small religious minority. But what they encounter is something more enduring: a people bound by law, language, memory, and adaptive institutions that have survived empires.

To call Judaism merely a religion is to misunderstand both its fragility and its strength. Religions convert or fade. Civilizations transform, regenerate, and argue with themselves — while persisting.

Judaism was already a civilization in ancient Israel, rooted in land, law, language, and sovereignty. Exile did not create that civilization; it revealed its depth. Stripped of territory and political power, the Jewish People did what few civilizations in history have done: they converted sovereignty into text, homeland into memory, and governance into portable law. Their sacred literature functioned not only as theology but as civil code, moral philosophy, and national archive. And when sovereignty was eventually restored, it did not replace that textual civilization; it rejoined it. The remarkable fact of Jewish history is not that Judaism became a civilization, but that it remained one across radically different political realities.

Judaism has religious components, but more fundamentally, it is a people, a legal tradition, a cultural engine, a calendar that shapes time, a language revived, a political experiment renewed, and an argument sustained thousands of years. That is not simply faith; it is civilization.

The great Jewish educator Avraham Infeld tells a great story about him praying on his porch each morning when, one morning, a non-Jewish neighbor, curious and inspired, approached him with an unusual request: The neighbor asked if he can accompany him to buy tefillin and learn how to wrap them so he can pray in the mornings as well.

Infeld turned to a rabbi and asksed, “What should I tell him?” “You’re not allowed to,” the rabbi said. “Why not?” Infeld asked. “Because he is not a member of the Jewish People,” the rabbi answered.

Infeld later admitted the neighbor never existed; the scenario was a thought experiment. But it reveals something foundational. The boundary of Judaism is not theological assent; it is belonging to Am Yisrael — the People of Israel.

Long before modern thinkers like Mordecai Kaplan spoke about Judaism as a civilization, the Torah itself used the oldest and most persistent Jewish descriptor: am — a people. Pharaoh calls the Israelites an am. The Bible speaks of Am Yisrael. The covenant at Sinai is not between isolated individuals and God, but between a people and God.

Therefore, as Infeld noted, Judaism is the culture, law, language, memory, and destiny of that people. And he made an even better point: The greatest danger facing Jews today is not disagreement over theology, it is forgetfulness of peoplehood. When Judaism is reduced to religion, it becomes an optional set of practices one can adopt or discard. But when Judaism is understood as the shared civilization of a people, it becomes inheritance, responsibility, continuity.

Then the conclusion cannot remain descriptive; it must become directional. If Judaism is not merely a religion but a civilization, then Jews must stop behaving like a niche faith community and start acting like heirs to an ancient, ongoing civilizational project. A religion asks for participation; a civilization asks for stewardship.

If Judaism is inheritance, then every Jew is a beneficiary of something built long before them — language preserved through exile, texts debated across centuries, sovereignty lost and restored, memory carried when territory was not. Inheritance, however, is not passive; it comes with responsibility.

Responsibility means recognizing that Jewish continuity is not automatic. Civilizations survive because their members build institutions, educate their children, defend their people, produce culture, and transmit confidence.

It means shifting from consumer Judaism to covenantal Judaism. Not: What do I get from Jewish life? But: What do I contribute to it?

If Judaism is a civilization, then Jewish education must train heirs, not merely ritual practitioners. It must teach law as legal philosophy, Hebrew as living language, Israel as sovereign expression of peoplehood, diaspora as creative extension of that same people. Students should leave not only knowing how Jews pray, but understanding how Jews governed, argued, built, and renewed themselves.

If Judaism is a civilization, then Jewish life must be organized around membership, not attendance. Synagogues are not service providers. Community centers are not program distributors. They are civic institutions of a people. The language must shift from “participants” to “members,” from “events” to “belonging.”

If Judaism is a civilization, then philanthropy is not charity; it is infrastructure. It builds schools, media, security networks, cultural platforms, leadership pipelines, digital ecosystems. Civilizations invest in their future long before crisis forces them to.

If Judaism is a civilization, then culture matters as much as defense. Music, film, literature, humor, technology, scholarship — these are not side projects, they are expressions of vitality. A people that only defends itself slowly contracts. A people that creates expands.

If Judaism is a civilization, then digital life must become civilizational space. The next generation will not inherit Judaism through pamphlets and programs alone. They will encounter it through platforms, content, media, and networks. Civilizations inhabit the dominant medium of their age.

If Judaism is a civilization, then peoplehood is not sentimental language; it is mutual responsibility. When Jews anywhere are threatened, Jews everywhere are implicated. When Jewish sovereignty is debated, it is not foreign policy alone; it is civilizational continuity in real time.

Religion is one dimension of Judaism. Civilization is its form.

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