Greetings, one and all, and welcome to First Things’ new newsletter on all things related to Jews and Judaism. I shall, with the grace of God and my editors, be descending into your inbox twice a month (or fortnightly, as we would say back in my home country), enlightening and outraging my readers with sundry observations, reflections, and provocations. While not wishing to burden your time and attention unduly, I believe that this novel endeavour requires a set of introductions.
What, exactly, will this newsletter cover? To shed light on the scope of this new project, let us turn our attention to a deceptively simple and innocuous nest of questions, which has bedeviled thinkers for millennia. Namely: What exactly are the Jews? How are we to define, calculate, or categorize Jewishness? Which entities or phenomena can rightly be labelled “Jewish,” and what might constitute their boundaries?
Attempted definitions are as numerous and diverse as those who have attempted to define it. Yet despite the extrusion of much scholarly ink over the centuries, no single definition—one which would seamlessly unite the Hasidic Rabbi studying the Talmud in Brooklyn, the atheist Kibbutznik raising pigs in the Galilee, and the Buddhist Jew meditating in some Oriental ashram—has attained universal assent.
Are the Jews a nation? Their ancient history suggests that this was once the case. Yet it is hard to see how a diasporic collective, whose members live within dozens of nation-states and pledge loyalty to as many sovereigns, might still be classed as a single national entity. Are they, perhaps, a religious group? The presence of secular and non-religious Jews, few of whom consider their irreligiosity an impediment to their Jewishness, suggests otherwise. Ethnicity, then? Not likely, as Jews from Ethiopia, China, Argentina, and Denmark all exhibit the ethnic qualities of their respective regions. Other terms—culture, civilization, family, ethos—have all been pressed into service at one point or another. Each is handy to a point, yet their vagueness and permeability ultimately undermine their usefulness.
We might say that Jewishness possesses a “family resemblance”: each aspect recognizable, though none identical.
With no single definition satisfying our needs, we are left with little choice but to concede the partial truth of each suggestion. Borrowing from Wittgenstein (who in turn purloined this term from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), we might say that Jewishness possesses a “family resemblance”: each aspect recognizable, though none identical. In some respects, the Jews represent a diasporic nation, in others, a religious minority, a culture, an ethnicity, or a civilization.
My own three decades of lived Jewish experience (as the trendy phrase goes these days) have borne out the truth of this complexity.
On any given day, the identitarian mantle of “Jew” may be worn in any number of ways: as a member of one of the world’s oldest surviving nations, as an adherent of an ancient and thriving religion, as an heir to a magnificent cornucopia of loosely-affiliated cultures, as a participant in a series of vexing and urgent political struggles, as concern for the propagation of specific values, and as the steward of one of humanity’s great textual corpuses. Life as a Jew is multifaceted and ceaselessly evolving—at once ancient and immediate, particular and universal, tribal and global, earthy and transcendent.
This digression, among other things, explains what we shall be covering in this newsletter. In short: almost everything. One of the many glories (and frustrations) of Jewishness is its multiplicity. To write about “Judaism” is to move through several millennia of argumentation, creation, exegesis, exile, renewal, and rebellion. It is to touch upon philosophy and halakhah, mysticism and modernity, nationalism and diasporism, scientists and poets, rabbis and heretics.
It is to enter a clamorous yet edifying conversation with Moses and Freud, Ibn Ezra and Barbara Streisand, the Ba’al Shem Tov and Rosa Luxemburg, and emerge with one’s ears ringing and soul singing. Terence, a leading playwright of the Roman Republic, famously remarked, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” (“I am a human being, I think that nothing human is alien to me.”) Judaism’s great Romantic thinker, the Italian polymath Samuel David Luzzatto (1800-1865), concocted his own revision of this mantra: Judaeus sum, Judaici nihil a me alienum puto. It is this expansive vision of Jewishness, as well as its connection to all the concerns of humankind, that will guide us here.
I perhaps ought to add something important here, by way of audience. Having enjoyed the company of the First Things readership for some time, I will be assuming that the lion’s share of the readers of these pages will not themselves be Jewish, but will harbor a reasonable background, perhaps even an abiding interest, in an array of Jewish-related topics. My role will be that of the generous and welcoming host, eager to show his guests around the beauties and peculiarities of his well-tended garden, rounding out the evening with a fine witticism or amusing anecdote.
I will be presenting a highly selective and opinionated insider’s view of a boundless world that stands beyond the scope of any one peculiar lens.
To that end, I will be presenting a highly selective and opinionated insider’s view of a boundless world that stands beyond the scope of any one peculiar lens. Such an endeavor will no doubt exhibit the inevitable tensions that arise between the internally subjective world of the viewer and the externally objective world that I will attempt to describe. Such tensions have been explored in Thomas Nagel’s splendid 1986 book The View From Nowhere, which argued for the necessity and potential fruitfulness of this encounter. It is in celebration of this, alongside an appalling lack of literary imagination, that I have bestowed upon this newsletter the title The Jew From Nowhere. Hopefully, with enough vision and collaboration, we may just arrive somewhere.
Finally, a brief introduction to your humble servant is in order. It has been my fortunate lot in life to drink deeply from the cup of life in a wealth of extraordinary times and places. My mischief has taken me from London, where I was born and raised, to the environs of Jerusalem, where I spent much of my young adult life. Displeased, apparently, with this existence of contentment and fulfillment, I uprooted and replanted myself in the United States, where I have spent several years in alternating states of enchantment and bafflement at the goings-on within this remarkable nation. That I have recently become a resident of the Lone Star State (although without the six-guns and ten-gallon headgear, at least for the time being) is naturally a source of both pride and amusement.
My educational peregrinations have been no less varied. Intellectual homes have included truly elite schools (such as my alma mater, Shalem College in Jerusalem) as well as some rather more disreputable institutions—among them a certain university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I recently received my PhD. After many years of restlessness and searching, I am pleased to report that I find myself settled in my new location and occupying several enviable positions: husband, father, author, podcaster, and professor of religion and philosophy at the University of Austin. Nestled within this unique set of fortunate contexts, I shall seek to dispense my nuggets of insight.
With these various throat-clearing exercises behind us, little remains but to welcome you to A Jew From Nowhere. The precise content and direction of this newsletter lie in the murky future, always subject to the capricious whims of fate and events. Yet I can promise that these pages will mirror the intellectual restlessness, spiritual provocation, and ironic wit that is “a lamp to my feet and a light for my path” (Ps. 119:105).
It would be my honor to have you along for the journey.
— J.J. Kimche