JUDAISM. The English word Judaism is derived immedi ately from a similar Latin word which signified the Jewish quarter of a town' or the Jewish community,' and ultimately from the name of Jacob's fourth son, Yehisdhah or Judah, whose descend ants, later called Yehfidhim or Jews, together with those of his half-brother Benjamin, formed the Jewish, as opposed to the Israelite, kingdom, the capital of which was Jerusalem whence the religion known as Judaism spread over the world. It is in the last sense that the word is generally used ; the others are archaic. Judaism, then, denotes a religion maintained by the Jews and offered to the world. It may be defined as the belief in absolute monotheism and the practical effect of that belief on life. By emphasizing the difference between the human and divine natures (without, however, thereby succumbing to impersonal transcend entalism), Judaism differs from other creeds which also stress the Unity of God, e.g., from Unitarianism and Islam, for these faiths assign to Jesus and Mohammed respectively a higher grade than that which Judaism concedes to Moses. On the other hand, Judaism differs from theoretical systems of ethics by reason of its historical, ceremonial and racial elements. Judaism is not a mere intellectual conception or a dogmatic confession; it is a course of life lived under discipline. One of its cardinal principles is the belief in the Divine choice of the Jews to preach God's message. This principle is not particularist : it is nothing but the declaration of the function of the Jew and the duty assigned to Judaism ; it is another form of the doctrine of the Remnant.
Abraham is considered to have been the first adherent of Judaism. He is said to have reached, by thought and by revela tion, the conclusion that one Supreme God ruled the world and that idols were of no account. Critically considered, this is by no means impossible. The recognition by Judaism of Abraham as its founder, even the Midrashic allegories of his contests with Nimrod (e.g., the Midrash of Abraham's childhood, contained in
vol. i. of A. Jellinck's Bet Leipzig, 1853) are not now deemed as fantastic as they would have been half a century ago, when the very existence of Abraham was generally denied. The spirit if not the letter of Jewish views about Abraham and his age is supported by archaeology. At the International Congress of Orientalists in Oxford (1928) the lectures of Prof. Langdon and Mr. Woolley showed that at Abraham's city Ur, in Abraham's day and earlier, monotheistic speculations conflicted with crass idolatry and wholesale human sacrifices with purer worship. This is but another way of saying that the idea of One God was gradu ally evolved in Mesopotamia amid prevalent polytheism and that by the time assigned to Abraham monotheism had secured a group of believers. Nor is the personality of Abraham now categorically repudiated : it is recognised that stories referring to other times and people have been added to the account preserved in Genesis, but this does not eliminate Abraham. "Even in the delineation of the character of Abraham there is an absence of idealism, which makes against the theory that the traditions of Israel were dealing with a purely imaginary person."' From Abraham's days the ideals of monotheism were trans mitted by his descendants. The varieties of belief and cult which prevailed in Assyria are mirrored in Abraham's family. According to the Bible story, he left his kindred, who remained pagans, 'Thus, in Cambridge, the Church of All Saints in the Jewry was called All Saints in the Judaism (in iudaismo) : at Ramsay, Emma the upholstress lived in iudaismo. See H. P. Stokes, Studies in Angl.-Jew. Hist. (i913), pp. 118, 116, etc.