Judeo-Christian

Great Debates
1

For a thousand years or more, Jews were second class citizens in European civilization, to say the least. Pogroms were not unusual. Even as late as a few decades ago, Jews were not welcomed in certain clubs. Fundamentalist Christians were fonts of antisemitism of the “Jews killed Christ” variety. Now conservatives talk about our “Judaeo-Christian heritage”, for political reasons.

We all know that Christianity is one of three Abrahamic religions along with Judaism and Islam, but is there any basis for us of the term “Judaeo-Christian” to describe Western civilization?

We understand that there is a strong influence of the Greeks and Roman law is the basis of our legal system. Then there is Islam. I am no scholar, but it seems that since most of the stars in the sky have Arabic names, the must have been some serious scholarship there between the end of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, in a way providing a bridge from Greece and Rome to our modern day civilization.

2

Part of the evangelical Protestant support for the nation of Israel is not really based on any change of attitude or acceptance of the Jewish people but rather on how they interpret Biblical prophesy. They believe that Christ can not return until Solomon’s Temple is rebuilt. Unfortunately this would require the removal of the Al-Aqsa Mosque which would be rather unpopular with many if not all the Muslims in the world.

So some, primarily US Christians are willing to support the Israelis over the Palestinians to get Jesus back quicker.

3

FWIW, my take is that “Judeo-Christian” is code for “conservative Protestant legalism.” It’s been observed that Protestant Christianity, in its American incarnation anyway, is closer to Judaism that Christianity, with an emphasis on proper behavior and ten-commandment keeping as opposed to the more “mystical”, transcendent belief of Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. “Judeo”, as a descriptor, conjures up, in the American Conservative Protestant mind, ideas of patriarchal authority, law and order, Puritanism, exceptionalism (we are the New Israel, the “shining city on a hill,” the Chosen Nation), and provides a justification for unqualified support of modern-day Israel in the Middle East. I think, as a general thing, Jews don’t care for the concept, and for exactly the reasons you mentioned - but it provides a tailor-made justification for conservative political and social dominance (once perfected by WHITE PEOPLE, of course - that’s provided by the “Christian” part of the mix).

4

What is the specific question? I think I get it but I am not quite sure. Is it early Jewish contributions to modern Western society or why Judeo-Christian is used as a popular term in political speech?

The answer to the latter question is that American religious conservatives know that Moses, Abraham, Mary and Jesus and many others of Bible fame were Jewish themselves. Evangelicals and fundamentalists love Israel because it is “the Holy Land” and the Jews are the rightful protectors of it in their view. The term “Judeo-Christian” simply acknowledges the progression of ancient Jewish practices to modern Christian ones in an unbroken line (that is very important to some people).

5

Only Basis i can see myself, is the christian church takes the Torah, translates it and calls it the holy bible old testament.

Somewhat odd i guess, because if they read it, because they are non Jews, they are not bound by a lot of the laws in it.

The Arab world was once a center of learning and knowledge etc.
I think this was long before Islam though? so one may have nothing to do with the other.
Islam being something like 7th century?

And Arab world scholars doing mathematics and astronomy etc probably before 1st century even without looking anything up specifically, long before Mohamed

6

The Crusades were Christians vs. Muslims, and at the time, the Muslims were far ahead of the Christians in scholarship. Which might be one factor explaining the net scorecard of the Crusades.

7

Nope, later, under the Baghdad Caliphates made famous in the Arabian Nights. The Islamic Golden age with roughly from the 8th to 13th centuries (A.D.)

8

I find that kind of humorous.
And not to piss anyone off, who am i to tell you what to believe, but i do not see how that works.

There is no unbroken line of progression per say, because there is no progression.

There is the Jew, and there is the Goyim.
Technically yes, the Goyim came first.
After some rough starts and having to start over again, God gave the Goyim 7 laws to maintain and the promise of no more do overs.
That was His covenant with the Goyim, it was theirs and it was for all time.

Ok now let’s speed forward through life in the human world.
God is upset, he gave only 7 laws, and 99% of the world still can not get their act together and dont even remember he exists for the most part.

So God goes to the different nations that have sprung up and says Hey, i will make a covenant with you, i will give you my words and a detailed set of laws and ways to carry yourselves and keep yourselves safe and happy and on my good side.
I will guide you and make you a strong and prosperous people, you of course will accept that i am the one true god and worship me a bit, nothing you can not easily and happily bear, and life will be good.
And i will make you known throughout the world, and the world will see through you that i am God, the one and only, you will be my light and beacon to bring them back to me, you will be my special ones, it will be good.

And pretty much everyone said go sod off ya git, we got our own thing going here, dont need ya.

So God sees this small group of oppressed people, children of Abraham, yea they are not doing well at all, bottom of the feeding chain, powerless.

So he picks them
so he holds a mountain over their heads.
Which you can take literally or figuratively, the meaning is the same, I am God, stop pissing me off, do you not see that i could make you cease to exist as easy as you pick up a pebble?
You will accept the written Torah, not as wisdom that you can freely chose to use or not use, but as a final written binding contract.

See, before that, the wisdom of the Torah was known, Abraham knew it, Noah knew it, Adam knew it, others knew it, but it was not a binding contract.
There were 7 Laws, then there was the wisdom of the Torah you could chose to make use of if you wished.

To become Jews, they had to adopt it as the law, and not deviate from it, and accept and fullfill all 614 laws etc.

So this group, who are not yet Jews, they are still Goyim up to that point.
They agree and God makes his Covenant with them, and now they are Jews.
And he does what he promises, and they keep their end of the covenant, at least for a while, we humans always mess up but thats a different discussion.

What were they before? Israelites, Hebrews, Children of Abraham.

So we have Goyim and we have Jew, that is it, if there is a progression at all, it would be from Goyim to Jew.

Catholic? Goyim
Muslin? Goyim
Protestant? Goyim
Native American, pre euro invasion? Goyim
Satanist? Very strange Goyim
Feel free to pick apart my fast forward trip, its badly condensed but you get the general idea

9

Hate to differ but they had a lot going on before Mohamed.
It might be considered the Islamic Golden age, but i dont think i would call it the golden age of the arabian penensula.
Might look into the Vedic culture.

10

What, if I may ask, does the culture of North India have to do with anything going on in the Arabian Peninsula, or even in Mesopotamia, prior to the advent of Islam?

Certainly, it is well-established that Arabian mathematicians derived their pre-eminence in the Islamic period from earlier efforts in India. But those efforts had nothing to do with Arabia, Arabs, or anything remotely having to do with what you’ve claimed. :confused:

11

Well, because they were there in the peninsula, unless their libraries and schools etc dont count?

We have advanced mathematics out of Babylon, long before Mohamed’s grand pappy was born. Ok fine we all hate algorithms but

Ancient Persia? no wonderous scholarly stuff going on there?
Art Science Medicine Universities?

I mean come on man, you are saying none of this counts? why?
Is there a criteria i am missing or something?

12

There was “a lot going on,” certainly, but they weren’t doing “mathematics and astronomy” yet, beyond the relatively primitive forms required to count days in a month to base a calendar on. And they might have gotten that from some other culture, instead of originating it. (Lunar calendars had been around for a very long time.)

The real advances in mathematics and astronomy came somewhat later.

And…why not apply it to the Arabian peninsula? That was part of the great Caliphates, from the 8th to 13th centuries.

(Their civilization was served a very rude setback by Genghis and Tamerlane, largely ending their golden age.)

13

I think this is better suited to Great Debates than General Questions.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

14

Re-christening Western Civilization as “Judeo-Christian” has always sounded to me as people wanting to call it “Christian” but needing a PC way to say it. The aim as far as I can see it in its usage is to imply that Western Civ is built upon, derived from, and made great by, Biblical Teachings and Values, above those of Classical Humanistic Philosophy as the successor to Graeco-Roman civilization.

15

I’ve always hated that phrase as a Jew, since it always seems to get trotted out when someone wants to justify using generally Christian reasons for imposing biblical morality on our secular society.

16

Um, no. As long as you are talking about Christianity, you are talking about a religion that emphasizes personal experience of the deity. That is the opposite of Judaism.

~Rivkah Chaya bat Moshe uMalke Rina

17

You did fine but I can tell you that your post makes almost zero sense to evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. I went to a heavily Jewish university, am partly Jewish myself by heritage and I still don’t get it even though I have tried many times.

You can’t overthink this. From what I can tell, Judaism is much more complicated than Christianity. I grew up in the very moderate Methodist church. You do good works, try your best, do concrete things like outreach programs and you will probably be rewarded for it in some way. There are no strict rules. You just try your best to be a good person.

However, we were taught that Jews were God’s “chosen people” and to protect them at any cost. Other U.S. denominations take that very literally. That is why the Religious Right is so pro Israel. It has been drilled into their heads since they were young.

However, Judaism and Christianity are very different from what I can gather. The former is very rule based, “tribe” oriented and technical while Christianity is just about general ideas. For example, I could walk into almost any Christian church and become a member just by signing a book. If I tried to do that in a synagogue, they would try to talk me out of it several times if I could ever be accepted at all.

Most American Christians don’t know that much about Jewish practices. They just know Jesus was one and God said to protect them even if some haven’t converted yet (that is not my personal view, I am just repeating what other people have told me).

18

Sounds about right to me. I’d only add that the phrase seemed to have gained traction around the time of WWII hence a desire to include Jews because, well the holocaust.

19

Being a Jew is more complicated
Part of their covenant is that you are going to accept my (meaning God’s) former wisdom as the now Written word of Law
You now have 614 laws to fulfill instead of 7.
More too it than that, but yes, it is much more complicated.

The rest of the world is bound by the 7 laws given to Noah, those were the 7 laws for all the world, and the Torah was added knowledge and wisdom.
But only the 7 laws were a binding thing, obey those and you wil always be my beloved children etc etc.

I hope i dont offend you, this is just my view and it means nothing personal against you.

Christianity, for a long period of time gave no sympathies or affections for the Jews
even up into WWII, there was no universal christian thought to protect the Jews.
It was more universal to reject or hate the Jews.

Part of the current vibe i think perhaps draws from guilt from the holocaust perhaps.
Countries were rejecting the Jews when they could still get out, and then they learned that 6 million of the people they rejected have died in bad ways.

The other is the notion that Jesus will come back as soon as the Jews build a temple, so if we protect them, they can build it faster and we can all go to heaven.
But in my mind that is a flawed reasoning because to pull that off, you have to incite revelations.
And in revelations, i do believe the majority of the Christians suffer horrible deaths at the hand of the beasts regime?

And all who will not
worship The Beast shall
be killed

And I saw the souls of
those beheaded for the
witness of JESUS who would
not worship the beast and
receive his mark on their
right hand and forhead.

If i was asked to give a valid kind of not selfish reason for protecting specifically Jews, i would have to say it is because they were assigned God’s light to the world, and the keepers of his wisdom so it will always be there for anyone who asks.
How would i answer to God if i watched that be destroyed and did nothing?

Not true
You may attend synagogue as much as you like as a non Jew, you may attend it all your life.
That is not what the Rabbi would try to turn you away from.
he would try to turn you away from converting to Judaism.
And the reason is not that he dislikes you, it is because he does care.
Converting to Judaism means you swear to God, not the Rabbi, that you will Uphold and Abide by all the things the Jews had to.
If you fail, you don’t fail the Rabbi, you fail God directly.
That is a lot of responsibility as opposed to 7 Laws he otherwise expects of you.
A lot of risk etc.
The Rabbi does not want people to do it with out realizing how hard it is, or for the wrong reasons and fail and get punished for it.
He would rather God remain happy with you, because you were able to keep to the 7 Laws you were given.

But he would be happy to have you come, answer questions to after the service.
Heck he might invite you to dinner.
But do not be offended if he declines you inviting him, see he must strictly follow kashrut, Kosher that is, so unless he knew that you had studied the dietary laws, and properly equipped your kitchen, and knew the proper foods to use, and probably watched you cook a few times, it is better that he invite you

I do not know anyplace where God commanded “World, protect my Jews”
He already commanded “Hey, don’t kill my Jews” when he said “Hey, do not commit murder”

As far as understanding, your old testament should give you a fairly good idea, and you can always ask a Jew, they will tell you anything you want to know.
Basically abide by what is in the Torah, the other Jewish books are basically Rabbis helping apply the wisdom to life situations, helping relate it to real life for someone who did not happen to be standing at the bottom of Sinai
Kind of like
LAW says DO THIS but you dont quite understand how
RABBI says well, here is a way in your life you could fulfill that
(probably horrid explanation)

20

While many references using the term “Judeo-Christian” are tied to Right Wing Evangelical Christian politics, today, its development is a bit more benign.
As Hitler rose to power and overt anti-semitism (including, but hardly limited to the Ku Klux Klan) rose in the U.S., a number of efforts by Christians and Jews working together were made to establish that the two groups shared a lot of theology and culture and the word came into frequent use in an effort to identify that common tradition. It may still be found in a number of mainstream Protestant and Catholic works appealing to the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures as used among those groups.

More recently, the right wing political factions of Evangelical Christianity have often used the term in a way that makes many Jews uncomfortable, as if Jews hold nearly “Christian” beliefs and simply have not yet caught on how close they are to Christianity. With the (general) reduction in anti-semitism in the U.S., many people no longer feel the need for a united front of all religious denominations against anti-semitism and many Jews consider the term off-putting by minimizing the separate nature of their beliefs and traditions.

While the phrase has come to be regarded as either dishonest or patronizing among some people in recent years, there has been no public movement to suppress it and one should seek to ascertain how it was intended before presuming the worst about the speaker.