IADS Library: There’s No Such Thing As Jewish Religion

By Gretchen & Ethan Davidson

I say that mostly to be provocative, you know, sort of as a conversation starter. No, but it’s true. Religion, as a discrete, cordoned off area of one’s life is actually a European-Christian concept, borne out of the Religious Wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century, in the German Holy Roman Empire, and surrounding kingdoms. As such, I would argue that Western categories such as religion, ethnicity, race cannot be easily applied to Jews, Jewish Civilization, or the various Jewish cultures.

You will undoubtedly have observed that there are Jews of many different ethnicities, as there are observant Jews, Jewish atheists, Jewish Buddhists, etc.

Because I find it difficult to define Judaism as anything other than just Jewish, Gretchen and I have decided that our contribution to the library at the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue should reflect a variety of Jewish cultural expressions. Thus, we have included the works of poets, painters, and philosophers, Bible critics and halachists. These books in no way represent a complete collection of all that Gretchen and I find compelling within the Jewish canon; if I can speak about it as such. Rather, our contributions to the Isaac Agree Synagogue Library are but a scratch upon the surface of Jewish publication.

We hope you find something you like. And we hope, just as much, that you find something which you think you might not like, and go there, go directly there, openly, and engage with it face to face.