Picture five households on the same Saturday.
In Tel Aviv, a family packs sandwiches and drives to the beach. They are Israeli Jews. Like about half of Israel's Jewish citizens, they describe themselves as hiloni, secular. [1] Saturday is their day off, and they will not open a prayer book.
On Mount Gerizim, above the city of Nablus, a Samaritan family gets ready for Passover. The Samaritans still sacrifice lambs on their mountain every spring, as their Torah commands. They call themselves Israelites. They have never called themselves Jews. [2]
In Ohio, a Seventh-day Adventist family began resting at sundown on Friday. They will go to church on Saturday morning. They do not eat pork or shellfish, because Leviticus forbids them. Their church has more than twenty million members around the world. [3]
In the Israeli city of Ashdod, a Karaite congregation reads from the Torah. Karaites are Jews, but they reject the rabbis' oral tradition. They try to live by the written text alone. [4]
In Addis Ababa, an Ethiopian Orthodox family keeps Saturday as a holy day of rest, alongside Sunday. They avoid the meats the Torah calls unclean. They circumcised their sons on the eighth day. Their church counts tens of millions of members. [5]
Now ask two questions about these five households. Which of them are keeping the Torah? Which of them are Jewish?
The answers do not line up. Two of the households are Jewish. One of those two lives by the Torah, and the other mostly does not. Three of the households keep large parts of the Torah, and none of the three is Jewish. If being Jewish and keeping the Torah were the same thing, the two lists would match. They don't.
Two Questions
Here is this essay's whole argument in one sentence. Who you are and what you practice are two separate questions, and people have answered them in every possible combination, both today and in the ancient world.
The first question is about identity. Who are you? People answer it with their birth, their family, their history, their culture, and the community that claims them.
The second question is about practice. What do you do? People answer it with how they rest, eat, pray, pay their workers, forgive debts, and welcome strangers. In this essay, keeping the Torah means trying to live by the teachings of the five books of Moses.
Once the two questions are separate, the combinations are easy to see. Some people answer yes to both. An observant Orthodox family is Jewish and keeps the Torah carefully. Some people answer yes to identity and mostly no to practice. A secular Jewish family is fully Jewish, even if Saturday is just a day off. Some people answer no to the identity and yes to much of the practice, and Adventists and Ethiopian Orthodox Christians fit here. Some people keep the Torah under a different identity entirely. The Samaritans keep it as Israelites.
One thing needs saying clearly before we go further. Jewish communities decide who is Jewish, and this essay leaves that decision with them. A secular Jew is no less Jewish for skipping synagogue. Pew found that about a quarter of American Jews say they have no religion at all, and they remain Jews. [6]
Keeping the Torah also gives no one the right to claim another people's name. An Adventist who rests on Saturday has every reason to keep doing it. That practice does not make her Jewish, and she does not need it to.
Separating the two questions protects both groups. Jews can be Jewish without passing a test of observance. Torah-keepers can keep the Torah without borrowing anyone's identity.
How It Got Twisted
If these are two separate questions, why do they feel like one? Most of us learned, without anyone saying it directly, that the Torah belongs to the Jews. That lesson came from two directions at once.
The first direction was rabbinic Judaism, the tradition that grew from the sages after the Temple fell in 70 CE. In rabbinic law, the full Torah is the covenant between Israel and its divinity. Non-Jews have their own set of obligations, called the seven laws of Noah. These cover basics like not murdering, not stealing, and setting up courts of justice. [7] A non-Jew who wants to take on the whole Torah converts, and conversion makes that person fully part of Israel. [8]
This is a serious and fair position. It also never made Jewish identity a matter of blood alone, because the door of conversion has always been open. The rabbis even argued about how fully a convert belongs. The Mishnah says a convert should not call Abraham "our father" in prayer. Later sages disagreed. Maimonides finally ruled that a convert may say "our father," because Abraham is the father of everyone who joins. [9] Christine Hayes has shown how the rabbis built a path into Israel that older rules based on descent had closed. [10] Still, the rabbinic answer ties the full Torah to membership in Israel. In that system, practice follows identity.
The second direction was the church. Paul taught his non-Israelite followers that they did not need to take on the Torah, and later church leaders turned that teaching into a rule. Around 110 CE, Ignatius of Antioch wrote that it was absurd to confess the Messiah and live by Torah customs at the same time. [11] Around 363 CE, the Council of Laodicea ordered Christians to work on Saturday and rest on Sunday. [12] In 386 and 387, John Chrysostom preached eight sermons in Antioch against Christians who kept the Torah's festivals and visited the synagogue. [13]
Those sermons tell us something important. A bishop does not preach eight sermons against something nobody does. Christians in Antioch were keeping the festivals in large enough numbers to alarm their bishop. The church had to keep banning Torah-keeping among its members because its members kept doing it.
So the two traditions taught the same lesson from opposite sides. The rabbis said the Torah belongs to Israel, so a non-Jew who wants it should convert. The church said the Torah belongs to the Jews, so a Christian who wants it is going backward. Daniel Boyarin has shown how writers on both sides drew this border together over several centuries. [14] We grew up inside the border they drew. That is why the two questions feel like one.
The First Century Had the Same Spread
Our own world shows every combination of identity and practice, and so did the first century. The previous essay in this series mapped the many communities that kept the Torah in that era. [15] This section looks at different evidence: individual people who split identity from practice, and an empire that had to sort them out.
Start with people who kept the identity and let the practice go. Philo of Alexandria, writing around 40 CE, complained about members of his own community who treated the laws as symbols. They said the Sabbath was really about rest for the soul, and circumcision was really about cutting away desire. Once they had found this "real meaning," they stopped keeping the Sabbath and stopped circumcising their sons. Philo still counted them as members of the community. He just thought they were wrong. [16]
Philo's own nephew went much further. Tiberius Julius Alexander was born into one of the richest Torah-keeping families in Alexandria. Josephus says he "did not remain in his ancestral customs." He became the Roman governor of Judea, and later the prefect of Egypt. During the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, he served as a senior officer on Titus's staff. [17] He was born a Ioudaios, the Greek word usually translated "Jew," and he helped Rome take the city where the Temple stood.
This pattern was already old by then. Two centuries earlier, when Greek-minded reformers took control of Jerusalem, some young men had surgery to hide their circumcision. They wanted to exercise naked in the new Greek gymnasium without standing out. [18] They kept their family names and gave up the covenant's most visible sign.
Now look at people who took up the practice without the identity. Josephus boasts that there was no city, Greek or foreign, where people had not picked up the custom of resting on the seventh day, along with fasting, lighting lamps, and keeping food laws. [19] Josephus liked to exaggerate when it made his people look good, so we should not take his "no city" literally. Roman writers confirm the trend, though. The philosopher Seneca complained that these customs had spread through every land, and the poet Horace joked about a friend who would not do business on the Sabbath. They mocked the practice because it was real.
The strongest evidence comes from the Roman treasury. After 70 CE, Rome forced every Ioudaios in the empire to pay a special tax, the fiscus Iudaicus. Under the emperor Domitian, who ruled from 81 to 96 CE, the tax office went after two different groups. The historian Suetonius names them both. The first group was people who "lived the Judean life without professing it." The second was people who "hid their origins" to avoid paying. [20]
In other words, Rome's tax collectors ran into the exact problem this essay describes. Some people lived the practice without claiming the identity. Others held the identity and hid it. Suetonius remembered watching, as a young man, while officials examined a ninety-year-old man in a crowded court to see whether he was circumcised.
The tax hunt reached the top of Roman society. In 95 CE, Domitian executed his own cousin, the consul Flavius Clemens, and exiled Clemens's wife. The historian Cassius Dio says the charge was "atheism," and he adds that many others were condemned on the same charge for drifting into Judean ways. [21] When Nerva became emperor in 96 CE, he stopped the abuse, and his coins announced the end of false accusations under the Judean tax. [22] The historian Martin Goodman argues that this was the moment Rome began to define Ioudaioi by what they practiced, where before it had defined them by where they came from. [23]
The early Jesus movement fought over the same line from the inside. When Peter visited Antioch, Paul confronted him in public. "If you, a Ioudaios, live like the nations and not like the Ioudaioi," Paul asked, "how can you force the nations to live like Ioudaioi?" [24] Paul's question assumes that identity and practice could come apart, so that a man could be a Ioudaios and still live like the nations. Paul also wrote that among the Ioudaioi he "became like a Ioudaios," as if the practice were something a person could put on and take off. [25] In another letter, he went further still. He wrote that the true Ioudaios is one "inwardly," whatever his outward practice. [26]
The apostles in Jerusalem gave a different answer. In Acts 15, they decided that members from the nations did not need to convert. They asked them to keep four rules instead: avoid food offered to idols, avoid blood, avoid the meat of strangled animals, and avoid sexual immorality. [27] Those four rules come from the laws Leviticus sets for the stranger who lives among Israel. [28] The apostles were treating these new members as resident strangers inside the Covenant. They could belong by practice, without changing who they were.
Every combination we see today was already present in the first century. Some people were born to the identity and dropped the practice. Others took up the practice without the identity. An empire tried to tax the difference, and a movement argued over where to draw the line.
What the Torah Says About Who Belongs
The Torah itself speaks to this question, and it speaks in two voices.
The first voice welcomes people by commitment. When Israel left Egypt, a "mixed multitude" left with them, and that mixed crowd stood at Sinai too. [29] The Torah commands "one law" for the native-born and for the stranger who lives among them. [30] Isaiah promises that foreigners who hold fast to the Covenant and keep the Sabbath will be brought to the holy mountain. "My house," the prophet says, "shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples." [31] Ruth, a woman of Moab, joins Israel with a promise: "Your people shall be my people, and your Elohim my Elohim." [32] She becomes the great-grandmother of David.
The second voice draws the line by descent. When the exiles came back from Babylon, Ezra and Nehemiah broke up marriages between returning men and local women. They made family line the test of who belonged. [33]
Both voices are in the scriptures. This Archive reads the first voice as the older and deeper one, the voice of the Covenant at Sinai. It reads the second as a later rule, written by a returning elite to protect its own position. [34] That is our reading, and readers should know that it is ours.
Even the second voice supports this essay's point. Ezra had to make a rule about descent because practice and descent did not line up on their own. If everyone who kept the Torah had already shared one bloodline, he would have had no need for the rule.
Where the File Cuts the Other Way
The other side of this argument deserves a fair hearing.
The Torah calls the Sabbath "a sign between me and the children of Israel forever." [35] The rabbis built their position on verses like this one. On their reading, the Sabbath and the full Torah belong to Israel in a special way, and a non-Jew honors them best by keeping the laws of Noah or by converting. This is an ancient, careful, and coherent position, held by a living tradition. Jewish peoplehood is also a real and legitimate kind of identity. It was never only a religion, and nobody outside it has standing to redraw its borders.
The modern communities in this essay raise hard questions too. Messianic Jewish and Hebrew Roots groups are deeply controversial among Jews. Many Jewish organizations see them as Christian missions using Jewish symbols to win converts. That concern deserves to be taken seriously, and this essay asks no one to set it aside. [36]
Many ancient teachers also disagreed with the position this essay takes. In the first century, plenty of them held that full practice required full membership. On their view, a man who wanted the Torah should be circumcised and join the people. [37]
Finally, partial practice is different from full covenantal life. An Adventist Sabbath is a real practice of the Torah. Living the whole Covenant inside a community built around it is something larger. This essay counts both as practice, and it does not treat them as equal.
Why It Matters
Untangling these two questions helps three groups of people.
It helps Jews. Jewish identity never depended on how strictly someone keeps the commandments. No one, inside or outside the community, has standing to call a secular Jew less Jewish.
It helps people who keep the Torah without being Jewish. Their practice can stand on its own. They have no need to borrow a name, adopt a costume, or claim a history that belongs to someone else. They can keep the Sabbath as who they already are.
It also helps anyone trying to read ancient history honestly. When first-century writers argued about whether the nations should keep the Torah, they were arguing about practice and membership. When we read those arguments as fights about ethnicity, we carry our own confusion back into the past. That includes how we read Paul. Paul and Peter fought in Antioch over what members of the movement should do, and over who counted as a member.
What Would Change My Mind
Two kinds of evidence would change my view. The first would be proof that first-century debates about the nations and the Torah treated descent as the only test that mattered. The second would be proof that Philo's symbol-readers, Rome's untaxed practitioners, and the Christians of Antioch were rare oddities, with no larger pattern behind them.
A Question to Leave With You
The five households from the beginning of this essay will all wake up next Saturday and answer the two questions in their own ways. People in Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, and Jerusalem did the same thing two thousand years ago. So I will leave you with a question. If keeping the Torah and belonging to a people were always two different things, which of the two did the Covenant at Sinai actually ask for?
Recommended Reading
Christine Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities (Oxford University Press, 2002). Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness (University of California Press, 1999). Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Martin Goodman, "Nerva, the Fiscus Judaicus and Jewish Identity," Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989). Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (Eerdmans, 2016). Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Notes for the Nerds
[1] Pew Research Center, Israel's Religiously Divided Society (March 8, 2016). About half of Israeli Jewish adults identified as hiloni. Many secular Israelis still keep some customs, such as a Passover seder.
[2] Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016). The community numbers fewer than a thousand people today, living mainly at Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and in Holon, near Tel Aviv.
[3] Seventh-day Adventist Church, Fundamental Beliefs, no. 20 (the Sabbath) and no. 22 (Christian behavior, including the distinction between clean and unclean meats). Membership figures come from the General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research, Annual Statistical Report.
[4] Fred Astren, Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). Karaite communities in Israel today live mainly in Ramla, Ashdod, and Beersheba.
[5] Edward Ullendorff, "Hebraic-Jewish Elements in Abyssinian (Monophysite) Christianity," Journal of Semitic Studies 1 (1956): 216-256; Ephraim Isaac, The Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahido Church (Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2013).
[6] Pew Research Center, Jewish Americans in 2020 (May 11, 2021). The report distinguishes "Jews by religion" from "Jews of no religion," and it counts both groups as Jewish.
[7] Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 56a-b; Tosefta Avodah Zarah 8:4.
[8] Babylonian Talmud Yevamot 47a-b, on the procedure for conversion.
[9] Mishnah Bikkurim 1:4; Jerusalem Talmud Bikkurim 1:4 (64a); Maimonides, Letter to Obadiah the Proselyte.
[10] Christine Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[11] Ignatius, To the Magnesians 10.3.
[12] Council of Laodicea, canon 29. The canon forbids Christians to "Judaize" by resting on the Sabbath and directs them to work that day and to honor Sunday.
[13] John Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos, Homilies 1-8. See Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
[14] Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
[15] Jeremy Prince, "There Was Never One Israel: On the Many Houses of Torah in the Long First Century," Ebyonim.
[16] Philo, On the Migration of Abraham 89-93.
[17] Josephus, Antiquities 20.100, on his departure from ancestral customs; War 2.492-498, on his time as prefect of Egypt; War 5.45-46 and 6.237, on his place at Titus's side during the siege.
[18] 1 Maccabees 1:11-15; Josephus, Antiquities 12.241; compare 2 Maccabees 4:12-15, on priests leaving the altar for the wrestling ground.
[19] Josephus, Against Apion 2.282. Compare Seneca, quoted in Augustine, City of God 6.11; and Horace, Satires 1.9.67-72.
[20] Suetonius, Domitian 12.2: qui vel inprofessi Iudaicam viverent vitam, vel dissimulata origine imposita genti tributa non pependissent. The story of the ninety-year-old man appears in the same passage.
[21] Cassius Dio, Roman History 67.14.1-2.
[22] The coin legend reads FISCI IVDAICI CALVMNIA SVBLATA. Compare Cassius Dio, Roman History 68.1.2.
[23] Martin Goodman, "Nerva, the Fiscus Judaicus and Jewish Identity," Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989): 40-44. Goodman develops the argument further in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Allen Lane, 2007).
[24] Galatians 2:14. The verb Paul uses for "live like Ioudaioi" is ioudaizein.
[25] 1 Corinthians 9:20-21.
[26] Romans 2:28-29.
[27] Acts 15:20 and 15:29; compare Acts 21:25.
[28] Leviticus 17:8-16 and 18:6-26. See Richard Bauckham, "James and the Gentiles (Acts 15.13-21)," in History, Literature, and Society in the Book of Acts, ed. Ben Witherington III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 154-184.
[29] Exodus 12:38. The Hebrew is erev rav. See the Archive's "Why Do You Keep Saying 'Yahwist'?"
[30] Exodus 12:49; Numbers 15:15-16.
[31] Isaiah 56:3-7.
[32] Ruth 1:16; on Ruth as David's great-grandmother, Ruth 4:17.
[33] Ezra 9-10; Nehemiah 13:23-30.
[34] On this reading of the returning elite and its rules of descent, see the Archive's "There Was Never One Hebrew Bible" and "Why Do You Keep Saying 'Yahwist'?"
[35] Exodus 31:16-17.
[36] Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880-2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Carol Harris-Shapiro, Messianic Judaism: A Rabbi's Journey through Religious Change in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
[37] Acts 15:1 and 15:5; Galatians 5:2-3; Josephus, Antiquities 20.38-48, on the Galilean teacher Eleazar in Adiabene.
