Jews vs. the “Judeo-Christian Tradition”

The idea that American culture has roots in “the Judeo-Christian tradition” is so widespread that it can seem like common sense. But, as historian Robert O. Smith writes, since the phrase entered the country’s vocabulary, some Jewish Americans have firmly objected to it.

Smith writes that the idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition emerged in the United States in the 1930s and ’40s as a response to both homegrown and foreign antisemitism and fascism. This was driven largely by liberal Christian denominations and the work of Christian theologians, particularly Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. Both of them viewed Christianity and Judaism as so alike that each faith might view the other as a heretical version of its own teachings. By 1952, the idea was widespread enough that President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower could cite “the Judeo-Christian concept” as the foundation of the American system of government.

But, Smith writes, there were dissenters from the start. In 1946, Rabbi Bernard Heller argued that Christianity and Judaism had many significant differences in their ethical ideas, institutions, and approaches to spirituality. At the same time, he wrote, many of the basic teachings they had in common were also shared by other traditions. He suggested that it’s possible to “speak of an Assyro-Hebraic, a Judeo-Islamic, or a Judeo-Hellenic tradition with equal cogency that one speaks of a Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Heller also noted that, historically, Christian contact with Jewish communities often meant “pogroms, persecution, exile, discrimination, death.” In the view of Heller, and other Jewish thinkers who followed, the term “Judeo-Christian” attempted to obscure that history while essentially subsuming Judaism’s unique traditions into an essentially Christian framework.

Smith notes that while the idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition was originally used to combat antisemitism, it can also be weaponized against other worldviews. The right-wing Jewish media personality Dennis Prager has suggested it helps differentiate America not just from Muslim countries but from European secularism. Likewise, far-right strategist Steve Bannon told a 2004 Vatican conference that secularization and “jihadist Islamic fascism” were twin threats to both capitalism and “the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West.”

In a response to these types of arguments, religion scholar Shalom Goldman has argued that the term has become “a cover for an attack on the values of the Enlightenment; the very values that enabled Jews to enter Western societies.”

Similar debates surround the view of Israel as an island of “Western” values. This positions Israel’s Jewish population, which has roots all over the world, including in many Muslim-majority societies, as essentially part of a white, Christian-dominated geopolitical bloc. Israel-American scholar Shaul Magid has argued that the “historical pact between Jews and Muslims has been subverted such that the Christian now becomes the political ally of the Jew against the Muslim through the ‘Judeo-Christian’ expressed, in part, through American fidelity to Israel.”

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