a thought: judaism as we understand is a creation of christianity. judaism as it was for the past 2,000 years was mostly a christian (and muslim) creation. as some of you might know before the year 300 or so there were many judaisms. specifically there was a difference between what might be called ‘hellenistic’ judaism and rabbnical judaism. orthodox judaism is the direct line descendant of the latter. with a few exceptions rabbnical judaism had the floor for nearly 1500 years, between 300 and 1800. what happened to hellenistic judaism? many argue most hellenistic jews became christian, that christianity is actually just a successful hellenistic jewish cult. the differences between rabbnical judaism and christianity are stark. those between hellenistic judaism (which was a plural movement which we define post facto) and christianity likely less so. in a christian environment rabbinical judaism was the only stable equilibrium for jews, or more precisely, the jewish community.
i thought about this when reading about the catholic church in the hapsburgh empire auditing jewish writings and works to make sure that it didn’t go beyond “old testament” principles. jews were given sufferance to exist because they were witness to the pre-christian covenant, and christians had specific ideas of what jews could be. this changed after 1800 as the monopoly of the christian church was broken, and constraints on jewish religious creativity were removed. reform judaism wouldn’t have been possible before 1800 because they would have been persecuted as heretical by christians and rabbincal jews. there is a reason that many reform jews explicitly feel kinship with hellenistic judaism: they fill the same space on the religious spectrum.
but i think a common sense reality here is that the “ism” temptation is a structural outcome of the nature of our lived experiences as people. the specific orientalism which said pointed to was only an element in the larger set of social phenomena. it is basically the fact that any human when examining a system of belief or culture which is not one’s own sees the world through their own subjective viewpoint. their own values and norms have a distortionary effect on perception.
this shows up with muslims obviously. i recall when aziz claimed that ‘the west’ was defined by its opposition to islam. that’s what i’ll call occidentalism; aziz is looking at the west from a muslim perspective so that muslim-christian conflicts loom large. he naturally doesn’t privilege the genocide which pagan prussians and lithuanians suffered during the period between 1100-1400 which were also called crusades on behalf of the catholic church and german civilization against the northern barbarians. because the prussians were exterminated or assimilated and the lithuanians eventually made their peace with catholic civilization this northern “front” which helped defined catholic christiendom is not particular emphasized today despite its contemporary salience (some of the crusaders who went to the holy land went to the baltic first).
but there is another civilization against which the west did define itself, and that is russian orthodoxy. within russia there have been those who identified with the west, but historically the stronger and more resilient strand has been a slavophile-orthodox anti-western impulse which defines itself in opposition to *both* islam and catholic christendom (even when catholic christendom split in half). intellectuals of the orthodox world can engage in both orientalism and occidentalism, because their tradition is one which is at tension with both islam and the west.
finally, let’s move outside the west to the east. in china when roman catholic missionaries arrived in the 16th century with the iberian powers in the south china sea they were initially assumed by locals to be another sect of pure land buddhism. the necessity of co-option of local terms to communicate the christian religious message meant that this sort of confusion was natural. additionally, there was long the ethnographic problem for the jews of kaifeng that the han chinese had a difficult time perceiving what difference there was between their religion and islam (after some natural catastrophes those kaifeng jews who were not absorbed into the han population often became muslim but remain identifiable by a few cultural markers; e.g., wearing a black cap instead of white at masjid), the two seemed fundamentally so similar to the chinese.
the voyages of chinese to kerala and later the portuguese illustrate the importance of subjectivity. the chinese who visited kerala made little distinction among the monotheists (muslims, christians and jews), assuming them all to be a variant of islam. the hindus they believed to be buddhists. in contrast, the portuguese were precise in their understanding of islam, but vasco dama doffed a hat to local brahmins because he assumed that they were catholic priests, as he initially confused hinduism with catholicism.
all this is not to give in to the post-modern temptation, and assert there can be no cross-cultural communication. i believe there are common semantic currencies which may be developed. familiarity breeds intelligibility; no chinese would confuse a christian with a muslim today. the importance of the intellectual revolution of the past generation is not that all fact becomes opinion, but that opinion has a causal relationship in terms of the perception of fact.
…but there will always be a prophet.