I take as my text a passage from David Denby’s book Eminent Jews (New York: Holt, 2025, p. 118).

Identity should require, at a minimum, an assertion, either public or silent, that one is Jewish, that one acknowledges, in doubt or belief, the power of monotheism in the Jewish version – a single, indivisible, overpowering God whom one cannot see but one has to imagine; and that one further acknowledges that the Messiah has not come and that the gifted young man who taught in Judaea and Galilee two thousand years ago was not the son of God. It should also mean, one hopes, that one accepts the burden and the glory of Jewish history and perhaps some of the humor and complication of a Jewish temperament; and that, given the persistence of oppression in that history, you understand the situation of the outsider and the scorned.

In this discussion I will draw out the connection between “the Jewish version of monotheism,” as Denby labels it, and Jewish identity. As my title signals, animating me at the same time is a less parochial ambition, namely, to shed light on the conception of personhood – the Western conception – that first developed in the culture from which the [Hebrew] Bible emerged.

Denby’s treatment barely scratches the surface. A sign of the superficiality is the speed with which his contrast between the Jewish version of monotheism and the Christian one breaks down. Quite true, men and women who regard themselves as Jewish deny Jesus’s divinity. They do so, in fact, vehemently. On what grounds? The stated tenet of the Jewish version of monotheism that “one cannot see [God]” can be used to cobble up a piece of reasoning. “God cannot be seen. Jesus was seen. Ergo, Jesus ≠ God.” But if, as the validity of the reasoning requires, God’s assertion to Moses, “you cannot see my face” (Exodus 33:20), is an assertion of impossibility, why would God go on to state “for no one can see me and live,” implying as it does that what is asserted can (at great cost) be violated? Denby’s discussion thus leaves the reader with the impression that the denial of Jesus’s divinity is largely a reflex conditioned by ongoing anti-Jewish hostility from the Christian quarter. This puts one in mind of Philip Roth’s short story “The Conversion of the Jews,” in which a rabbi, loth though he is to do so, is obliged to concede that God could engineer a virgin birth.

And here’s another sign of the need to dig further than Denby does.

Men and women who identify as Jewish say that monotheism teaches the existence of a single god, God. But apart from the self-blindfolders in their number, these men and women know full well that many atheists live lives as fulfilling as the lives of the most fulfilled believers, and that upstanding members of society are found no less frequently among the idol worshippers than among the devout. Doesn’t this show the one god theology to be a cog in the Jewish self-identificatory machine that is disconnected from the part of the mechanism that does the work? If it makes no difference to one’s life, why fuss about the direction of worship?

Religiosity is distant from the lives of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer, the eminent Jews of Denby’s book, as it is from the lives of the majority of Jewish self-identifiers. Denby must therefore secure the status of all of these as Jewish, be they eminent or be they anonymous, independently of the religion called “Judaism.” But isn’t monotheism the core ism of Judaism? Isn’t the covenant with Abraham a covenant to accept “a single, indivisible, overpowering God”? Wouldn’t it have been more accurate for Denby to title his book “Eminent people who happen to be Jewish”?

What, then, is acknowledged in the assertion that one is Jewish? Acknowledged is the working part of the monotheistic view that Abraham binds himself to by entering into the covenant. As this formulation implies, the monotheistic view also has a non-working part. Once the two parts are separated, we will see why secularity is consistent with Jewish identity; why the assertion of Jewishness is available to those to whom theological terms are Greek.

The working part of the Jewish version of monotheism can be located in the ism’s founding episode: God’s appearance to Abraham and the pair’s concluding a covenant.

His being appeared to by God is the biblical narrative’s way of representing Abraham having a life-altering insight. In my interpretation of the Bible, it’s an insight about the categorization of reality’s contents. Specifically, Abraham comes to recognize a compartment of being whose reality passes unrecognized in the pagan belief-system in which he was acculturated, the compartment to which men and women, alone among creatures, belong; the compartment, then, to which he belongs. Abraham comes, that is to say, to a new understanding of himself and, hence, of those like him. Question: What’s God got to do with the insight? Answer: Think of the religiously neutral adjective “God‑awful.” From Abraham’s perspective, the aperçu is momentous. The shift in his self-understanding sets him on a path different from the one that up to then he had trodden, a path along which justice is done to what he has come to understand himself, and those like him, to be. Abraham has, so to speak, been born anew. It’s God-wonderful. Revealingly, “Abram,” the name that his parents bestowed on him, gets elevated due to the covenant to “Abraham,” a name that contains in it a sign of his new affiliation – with God. And so, in the biblical narrative, the description of him as departing his native land and his kindred and his parents’ house takes a deeper ride on its surface geographical meaning.

I’ll assign God a non-adjectival contribution below. For now, those who see God’s interaction with Abraham’s as a revelation in the religious sense might be eased towards the more down-to-earth truth of the matter by considering parallels with another text from roughly the same period as the Bible.

Athena’s appearance to Achilles in the opening book of Homer’s Iliad, like God’s appearance to Abraham, is a life-altering event. The major difference between the two narratives is on the dramatic plane. God says “Go” (12:1). Abraham “went” (4). The Bible gives no details about the process of Abraham’s enlightenment. By contrast, the whole of the Iliad is devoted to the wrenching of the epic’s protagonist from his previous way. Having gone from the field of battle, Achilles, fuming in his tent, reflects on the way of life lived on that field, the warrior way. The result of the reflections comes to partial expression in the for-him uncharacteristically philosophical sermon to the ambassadors (this is in Book 9). The death of Patroclus described in Book 16, a death for which he, Achilles, is responsible, and the meeting with the grieving Priam described in the last book, Book 24, a grief for which he, Achilles, for having killed Priam’s son Hector, is responsible, and a grief, moreover, of the same sort that he himself suffers due to the death of Patroclus at Hector’s hands, are vital to the progress of his change.

It’s because Athena in Greek mythic lore is associated with the end of generational strife on high that she figures in Homer’s story as speeding down from the heavens to deflect Achilles from his strife-filled course. Mutatis mutandis, the same goes for God, who is associated with the change that Abraham makes – though in this instance the mythic lore, if there is any, is lost to us.

Discovering something momentous does not always require abandoning the status quo ante. What is discovered could be added to the repertoire. But in Abraham’s case the discovery is a replacement. Not only does he come to see something that he didn’t see prior, but the something, he comes to appreciate, conflicts with what he saw before.

What is Abraham’s insight? Up to now, I’ve spoken of it in allusive terms as a shift in how he understands himself. For the novelty’s substance, the place to look is the account, in the Book of Exodus, of Moses’s interactions with God.

In answer to Moses’s request for his, God’s, name, to give to the Israelites should they ask in whose name he speaks, God says. “Thus you shall say to the Israelites. ‘I am has sent me to you”’ (3:14). God, that is, identifies himself as I am. Connect this now with the first line of the promulgation of the Ten Commandments. “I am the Lord your God” (20:2). The claim is not:

I, God, am your god, not Baal.

It’s:

I am, God, is your god, not it is, Baal.

The biblical deity, “God” by English name, is the principle of I’s and you’s and she’s and he’s – of individual persons. The biblical deity is the principle of individual persons in the same sense that unique factorability into primes is the principle of integers greater than 1, or that increasing disorder governs all physical systems. The conclusion of the first line, “you shall have no other gods before me,” is not the claim that there are no other gods. It’s the claim that none of these is the god of you, of me, of her, of him. Individual persons have, each one has, a different principle of being than every other thing in the creation, and this difference is unavailable in pagan thought. For the pagan gods are not I’s and not you’s and not he’s and not she’s.

We’ll understand better what it means to say that God is the principle of individual persons if we focus on the character of the things of which the other gods are the principle. The latter things are parts of an integrated whole. This – an integrated whole – is what we have at the end of the first creation story. In this story there is talk of many things, of their emergence, of their situation, but there’s no talk of individual men and of individual women, only of humankind, a species among the myriad species. The identity of the parts, the human part included, is bound up with the whole. A place for everything; everything in its place. To think of the parts as independent requires identity-distorting abstraction. This makes clear the depth of the change wrought in the world by God’s act of artificial respiration in the second creation story, an act that, to vary Milton’s phrase, “brought a distinctive kind of being into the world.” What kind of being? A genuine individual. Genuine individuality – autonomy – is imparted through the act to what would otherwise have remained an integral part of a wider whole.

Why does the Bible represent God as doing this? Being essentially one, God has one-ness to impart. That, in the Bible’s way of characterizing what something is by describing how it comes about, is the teaching at the core of the distinctively biblical view. The operative point, then, is not that God imparts the one‑ness. The operative point becomes clear once we correct for the Bible’s genetic mode. It’s that some part of the world has the one-ness. That is Abraham’s insight. It’s what his acceptance of God means. What he has recognized himself to be requires a principle – a god – that the cultures of his time do not recognize.

Persons are independent beings the trampling of whose autonomy is therefore, in the representation that the thinkers behind the Bible give to it, an undoing of what God’s presence in the world of Genesis 2 represents. (Thus, the objection to the world-building enterprise at Babel; an attempt to re-collectivize.) Jewish people who know nothing of theology, and indeed know little of the Bible, understand this, those of my parents’ generation with special intensity, having witnessed the near successful attempt to do the undoing.

The chief creedal formula of Judaism is the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4). “Hear O Israel! The Lord is our god. The Lord is one.” Although many translators contrive to express it that way, and though many paraphrase it that way, the Shema does not state:

There is one (and only one) god, God.

It states:

God is one.

For this one god position, “monotheism” is a God-awful label. One‑ness is something that the gods of the other belief systems do not have. They are essentially not one. They constitute, essentially, a system – a pantheon. No Hemera without Nyx. No Aeolus without Apollo. Both theologically and, more importantly for us, anthropologically, the Bible speaks Hebrew, not Greek. The trinitarian monotheism of Christianity sinks persons into God in a way that makes it appropriate that the New Testament is written in Greek.

The English language offers resources whose mobilization can reduce confusion in the treatment of the matters that Denby discusses. A person can be Jewish. A person can be a Jew. A person can be an adherent to Judaism. These are not the same. By contrast, “being Christian,” “being a Christian,” and “adhering to Christianity” are synonymous. Being Jewish, a broadly cultural matter, comprises customs and usages, comportment, interpersonal arrangements, etc. Most Jewish people are not adherents to Judaism. The thing that Denby wishes to clarify is being a Jew. A Jew is one who can meaningfully assert, as a truth that they accept, the Shema – its working part. This goes to what they are, their mode of being, not to how they are or to the way in which they orient themselves eschatologically. It is not restricted, therefore, to the Jewish context.

Which explains the conjunction in my title.

How is it that being Jewish gets associated so closely with being an adherent to Judaism, the religion, that non-observant Jewish people often self-characterize as “culturally Jewish,” as if they have some kind of second-class status in the Jewish world, the Bible sketches the process in its story of the founding of the nation of Israel? Often it is prudent, even necessary, for the originator of a new way to focus the mission on a small, tight-knit, group. Unless nurtured for a time in a hothouse, the delicate shoots might shrivel. Abraham, (represented as) encountering resistance in his early attempts to spread his new self-understanding, does in fact turn kinwards. As is only to be expected, in the extended family compound customs and usages develop that bind dwellers together and distance them from outsiders. Rather than giving way or being relaxed when the pressures abate, the means turn into the end; the hothouse becomes the permanent domicile.

As for Denby’s title, it is, fortuitously, appropriate. Each one of his quartet is both eminent and, in the sense that I have explained, a Jew.

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Mark Glouberman, now of the Montreal diaspora, grew up on Mountain Sights Avenue, one of the few streets in Snowdon from which one cannot sight the mountain! From this Mount Scopus he did however get his first glimpses of the Hebrew Bible, on which, in mixed interpretive/philosophical terms, he has been working for several decade. Glouberman’s most recent book on the topic, Persons and Other Things: Exploring the Philosophy of the Hebrew Bible, appeared in 2021. Two earlier installments, also published by University of Toronto Press, are The Raven, the Dove and the Owl of Minerva: The Creation of Humankind in Athens and Jerusalem (2012), and “I AM”: Monotheism and the Philosophy of the Bible (2019).

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