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Thus Cohen writes, “We can learn much from the history of Jewish-Christian relations, but the one thing we cannot make of it is a discourse of community, fellowship, and understanding. After all, it is the Christian and not the Jew who invents the Judeo-Christian tradition. Who gets to coin something a “tradition”? Cohen seems to suggest it is only those in power. One interesting articulation of what I am suggesting can be found in the problematic yet ever-popular notion of the Judeo-Christian tradition, an idea that originated in nineteenth-century Germany but was revived, in different circumstances, in early twentieth-century America.īelow I examine this Judeo-Christian tradition through an essay written by the Jewish theologian Arthur Cohen in 1969 entitled, “ The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition.” Cohen was ostensibly writing at a time when “Judeo-Christian” was deployed to express tolerance of the Jew as “other,” generously exemplified by the shared hyphen even as that hyphen, like many hyphens, is more illustrative of anxiety than comradery.Ĭohen’s intervention is embedded in his title, “The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” using “tradition” and “myth” to offset the lie that lurks beneath, or inside, the hyphen. In one sense then, exceptionalism of one sort or another may be something America and Jews share and thus American Jews can find themselves as members of one exceptional people (the Jews) living in another exceptional country (America). Jewish notions of secularized exceptionalism in some way share common cause with the idea of America as exceptional, a notion that also has theological roots among radical Protestants who often viewed themselves as a “New Israel.” The idea that this new land was a gift from God served as an early foundation of the idea of American exceptionalism that is now largely expressed though the realm of the political. But why are the Jews exceptional if God did not choose them? Many answers are offered, from historical ones (Jews are the most persecuted people) to cultural ones (Jews are well-educated) to moral ones (Jews are ethical), all of which are rooted, in some way, in theological election now transformed. The secularization of the theology of election often yields an undertheorized notion of Jewish exceptionalism. and that this relationship is of supreme value relative to any relationship God has created or will create with any other specific nation” ( Jerome Gellman, 2016). Jewish exceptionalism is an idea that is arguably rooted in Judaism’s theology of election, the idea “that God has created a permanent, non-revocable, relationship with the Jews that God has not created with any other nation.
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Where is the “Jew” in the Judeo-Christian myth? Thoughts on Jewish and American exceptionalism by Shaul Magid Kahn’s introduction to his volume Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. In this final post, Shaul Magid reflects on Arthur Cohen’s essay, “The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” in conversation with Stephanie Frank’s reflection on Paul W.
#FRAME SUBSUME SERIES#
This is the fifth and final installment in this series of paired essays. Read the introduction to the series here. The paired posts in this series were developed in connection with a workshop supported by the three-year Luce Foundation funded project “ Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad,” directed by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin