The 4,000-Year-Old Question: Is Judaism a Religion, Ethnicity, Race, or Culture?

What is Judaism? What does it mean to be Jewish? Is it an ethnicity (being one of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), a religion (following the tenets of the Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud) or a cultural experience (a common experienced developed through millenia of being ostracized, otherized, and demonized by majority groups in their homelands).

Today I tackled this enormous question by first looking at the origins of the Jewish people. There's not universally accepted answer to this question. Some say the Old Testament account of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, and the deportations into Assyria and Babylon tell the story. Others say the Jewish people were an offshoot of the Canaanites who developed into their own culture. We then look into the creation of the Jewish diaspora across the Mediterranean world and how Jewish identity shifted as the circumstances of this religious group changed from the ancient world to the medieval and early modern periods. There is no clear answer to all these questions, but this episode will hopefully provide plenty of historical context.

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