(DB) In March 2011,

the New York Times published the results of a social scientific study of satisfaction with life among various groups in the USA. Asian Ameri-cans were considered to be the "happiest" ethnic group, while Jews were considered to be the "happiest" religious group, thus leading to the in-exorable conclusion that Asian American Jews were the happiest folk in America. This result is obviously flawed, because we all sense that both Jews & Asian Americans are ethnicities, whereas Christianity is never considered as an ethnic category at all.

In fact, for us Jewishness is a very mixed category that doesn't really map onto either ethnicity or religion alone. This has a good historical basis. As Paula Fredriksen has recently written, "In antiquity ... cult is an ethnic designation; ethnicity is a cultic designation." That remained the case for Jews right up into modernity & to a not inconsiderable extent remains so been now. In his book, Daniel Boyarin uses the term "Judaism" as a convenience to refer to that part of Jewish life that was concerned with obedience to God, worship, & belief, though he recognizes that the term is an anchronism.

The Temple @ Yerushalayim was one of the most impressive cultic centers of the ancient world & famous throughout the known world for its splendor & magnificence. As opposed to most people, who had many cultic centers, the Israelites performed all of their sacrifices at one place, the Temple @ Yerushalayim, for centuries ~ from Josiah's reform in the seventh century B.C. until the Second Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 (at least officially).

When this Temple was extant, most Jews organized their religious lives around its festivals & rites, its priests & practices; distant Jews in Alexandria & similar places sent in donations. At least in principle, all Israelites were expected to make a pilgrimage to the one Temple @ Yerushalayim three times a year to celebrate the great festivals. This provided an organizing & joining principle for all the people transcending many disagreements & diversities. Even this, however, was not always the case, as there were groups, such as the people of the Dead Sea Scrolls, who rejected the Temple @ Yerushalayim as corrupt.

Once the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, however, all bets were off.

Some Jews wished to continue sacrifices as best they could, while others rejected such practices entirely. Some Jews thought that the purity practices that were important in Temple times were still to be practiced, while others thought they were irrelevant. There were, moreover, different interpretations of the Torah, different sets of ideas about God, different notions of how to practice the Law.

In Yerushalayim, which had been re-founded by priests & teachers (scribes) returned from the Babylonian Exile (538 B.C.), new religious ideas & practices had been developed, many of them adopted by a group called the Pharisees, who were apparently rather aggressively promoting these ideas among Jews outside Jerusalem who had different traditional practices, the so-called People of the Land, those who had not gone into Exile in Babylonia.


(We'll see, or we won't!)