Jewish atheism

A Jewish atheist or atheist Jew is a person of Jewish ethnicity who is an atheist, meaning they do not believe in God, yet still belong to the Jewish nation. Because Jewishness encompasses ethnic as well as religious components, it should be noted that the term "Jewish atheist" does not necessarily imply any kind of contradiction, unlike, for example "Christian atheist". Based on Jewish law's emphasis on matrilineal descent, Orthodox Jewish authorities would accept as fully Jewish an atheist with a Jewish mother.

Jewish atheism can take both organized and unorganized forms. On the one hand, there is a long tradition of atheistic and secular Jewish organizations, from the Jewish socialist Bund in early twentieth-century Poland to the modern Society for Humanistic Judaism in the United States. Many Jewish atheists feel comfortable within any of the four major Jewish denominations (Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist). Again, this presents less of a contradiction than might first seem apparent given even traditional Judaism's emphasis on practice over belief. Much recent Jewish theology makes few if any metaphysical claims and is thus compatible with atheism on an ontological level. The founder of the Reconstructionist movement, Mordechai Kaplan, espoused a naturalistic definition of God, while some post-Holocaust theology has also eschewed a personal God.

Other Jewish atheists remain deeply uncomfortable with the use of theistic language, however defined. However, for such Jews traditional practice and symbolism can still retain powerful meaning. For example, to an atheist Jew, the Menorah might represent the infinite power of the Jewish spirit. No mention of a divine force in Jewish history would be accepted literally; the Torah may be viewed as a common mythology of the Jewish people, not a faith document or correct history.

Many Jewish atheists would reject even this level of ritualized and symbolic identification, instead embracing a thoroughgoing secularism and basing their Jewishness entirely in ethnicity and secular Jewish culture. Judaism is arguably the paradigm example of the evolution of a culture and tradition that one can embrace without religious faith.

There are a number of people who, although they have Jewish ancestry, are atheists and do not consider themselves Jews. Some Jewish groups have expressed the view that Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity, stating that non-practicing Jews should be called simply "atheists" not "atheist Jews".

Famous Jewish Atheists

A number of well-known Jews throughout history have rejected a belief in God. Karl Marx was born to a Jewish family and rejected all religious belief. Sigmund Freud penned The Future of an Illusion, in which he both rejected religious belief and outlined its origins and prospects. At the same time he urged a Jewish colleague to raise his son within the Jewish religion, arguing that "If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew, you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else." The anarchist Emma Goldman was born to an Orthodox Jewish family and rejected belief in God, while the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, when asked if she believed in God, answered "I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God." And, in the world of entertainment, Woody Allen has made a career out of the tension between his Jewishness and religious doubt ("How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?").

See also

• Who is a Jew?
• Schisms among the Jews
• Jews in apostacy
• Conversion to Judaism
• Christianity and Judaism
• Haskalah
• Humanistic Judaism
• Secular Jew