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What is the "Judaeo-Christian tradition"? The currency of the
phrase is growing, yet it seems to have crept upon us without
anyone asking that question. Politicians and leader writers have
started drop-ping it nonchalantly into their texts, and, in an age
prone to ambush from pseudo-recondite language employed with
confidence, we assume somebody else must know what it means.
Challenged to point to the thing denoted, we would be stumped.
The Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations, Dr Jonathan
Sacks, should be so challenged. Dr Sacks has been writing in the
Times about "Judaeo-Christian" values, having just finished a book,
The Politics of Hope. This looks likely to prove the latest in a
newly fashionable line of thinly disguised apologia for moral
conservatism and old-time religion. Everybody is getting in on the
act bishops, imams, rabbis, party leaders - each ethical nabob
using the insecurities of the day as recruiting sergeants for
whichever - belief system accords him status. In less elevated
circles we call it drumming up trade.
The technique is as old as the pedlar's art. Never start with the
logically primary question ("Do you want to buy a Labour
government/life insurance/a patent vacuum cleaner/an invigorating
tonic?" "Do you believe in my God?"). Ask instead whether your
respondent is troubled by life (or
death/politics/debt/indigestion/the old Hoover).
Then lead your quarry gently to the thought that his insecurity can
be answered, his want supplied. Tell him you can supply it. Then
tell him the cost.
The Chief Rabbi is more skilled than some, in cloaking a harsh
message in woolly language, but the cloak slips -when he asserts
that the "Judaeo-Christian tradition" has been undermined by the
Enlightenment. Since among those of the 18th-century Church's
received wisdoms which the Enlightenment questioned was hatred of
Jewry, Dr Sacks invites rebuttal at a rather obvious level, and has
received it in a letter to the Times from the senior rabbi of the
Liberal Jewish Synagogue, David Goldberg.
But the Enlightenment will survive the Chief Rabbi's assault
without help from me or Rabbi Goldberg. So slipshod a use of the
term "Judaeo-Christian tradition", however, confirms my suspicion
that neither Dr Sacks nor the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor Tony
Blair, nor anybody else, has a clear idea what this tradition is. I
suspect the phrase began life in America as a way of saying
"Christi values" without leaving Jewish people out. Never mind the
Muslims, we do not know them. But what can "Judaeo-Christian"
mean?
Some kind of a case can be made out for a Judaeo-Islamic tradition.
Judaism and Islam still feel closer to the desert than
Christianity. Both, unlike trinitarian Christianity, are
unitarian. Both are "ways of living" in a sense in which
Christianity is not, dictating the secular details of life. Both
are truly religions of "family values" (a subject on which Christ
hardly spoke): more conservative in their attitude to women, more
sexually repressive than Christianity. Both 'Islam and Judaism
believe, ideally, in a theocracy. Both (unlike much Christian
thought) discourage iconism and the worship of "sacred" objects.
A case can also be made for a Christiano-Islamic tradition. This
pays far more attention to an afterlife than does Judaism. Islam
and Christianity, being belief systems for all mankind rather than
guides for a chosen people, proselytise. They are not infused, as
is Judaism, with a racial self-consciousness or blood-inheritance.
Judaism offers a tolerated status for "the nations" who are not
Jews. To a Jew the nations are not expected to live with the Torah
(the teaching), or at least not yet.
Judaism has no clear idea of Satan, and its concept of sin is more
akin to disorder than to "evil". But Islam and Christianity are
dualistic religions. Christianity (in Protestant form) and Islam
(in most expressions) stress the unmediated and personal link
between the individual and God. A Jew may experience God's will
but there is less possibility of intimacy: God is entirely Other.
For a Muslim or Christian it may be quite intimate, almost as
between father and son.
Finally, though Judaism has its mystics it is by instinct
suspicious of persons claiming divine inspiration. But
Christianity and Islam were born in "witness" (by Christ and
Mohammed) and are impressed by new instances. Both are (in the
polite sense) hysterical religions, where Judaism can sound like an
immensely wise highway code. Both (unlike Judaism) have been
attended by alleged miracles. Both (especially, in Islam, the
Shi'ites) have a central place for passion. Though Islam and
Christianity have often fought, they are fighting for similar
ground. Judaism is in many ways the odd one out.
So the weakest case on paper is for a "Judaeo-Christian tradition".
Properly understood, the two religions and their values are so
very different. Yet the two peoples - if peoples we be - are no
longer very different. It is easy to explain why. In Europe, most
modern Christians and most modern Jews no longer take their
religions very seriously. It is in our escape from our respective
faiths, not in our adherence to them, that European Jews and
European Christians find shared values and can speak of a common
tradition. We come from two utterly different places but we are now
travelling together. We are both travelling away from our ancient
faiths.
This we owe in great measure to the Enlightenment. Dr Sacks is not
just off-target, he is 180 degrees out. The Judaeo-Christian
tradition is secular and draws its courage from the scepticism of
Jews towards their old religion, and of Christians towards theirs.
Where British Muslims' faith loses intensity, they too are joining
the tradition. It is called liberalism, Chief Rabbi, and you can be
an Orthodox chief rabbi and you can be a liberal - but you cannot
be both.
By arrangement with The Spectator.
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