One of the most significant facts about Judaism is that Jewish religion and Jewish peoplehood are inseparable. According to Jewish tradition, Abraham had prophetic qualities; yet the history of Judaism does not start with a prophet but with a father, Avraham avinu, our father Abraham. That is how he is referred to through the entire course of Jewish history, and that is the name that will remain with him till the end of days. When God called Abraham to his world-historic mission, one of the promises He made to him was: “And I shall make you into a great nation” (Gen. 12:2). Again, when after the sin of the golden calf God was inclined to destroy that sinful people and asked Moses to accept the task He once entrusted to our father Abraham, He addressed him in almost exactly the same way: “and you I shall make into a great nation” (Exod. 32:10). Immediately prior to the revelation at Sinai, God’s message to the children of Israel was: “And you shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The identification of Judaism with Jewish peoplehood is evident in the words of the prophet Isaiah, who quotes God as saying: “This people I have shaped for Myself; let them tell My praise” (Isa. 43:51). The medieval philosopher Saadia Gaon summed up this aspect of Jewishness in his statement: “We are a people only through the Torah.”
Yet nothing could be further from the truth than to see in the interrelatedness of Judaism and peoplehood evidence of particularism, exclusiveness, or racism. Judaism is not a missionary religion. Nothing could be more alien to it than slogans like “Compel them to enter” or “Baptism or death.” Judaism is obligatory only for Jews, and no one else. This truth was clearly formulated by the prophet Micah when he declared: “For all the nations, each one of them shall walk in the name of his God, and we shall walk in the name of the Eternal One, our God, forever” (Mic. 4:5). But no one is automatically excluded because he or she is a stranger. Anyone who, out of sincere conviction, wishes to convert to Judaism is welcome, whatever his or her race, national origin, or religious and cultural background. Becoming a Jew like any other Jew, the convert is referred to as “Ben/Bat Avraham Avinu,” son/daughter of our father Abraham, and thus enters that “great people” which God promised Abraham.
The interrelatedness of religion and peoplehood is unique to Judaism. Whereas other religions focus on the relationship between God and the individual, Judaism is the covenantal relationship between God and a people. The Jew never stands before God alone, but always within the communal reality of the Jewish people, its teaching, experience, and historic continuity. Outside of Judaism, individuals belonging to different religions may belong to the same people; their religions do not determine or require peoplehood. But a gentile who converts to Judaism automatically enters the Jewish people.
Furthermore, Judaism’s concern is not primarily the salvation of individual souls but the comprehensive spiritual, socioethical, economic and political reality of human existence. Thus Judaism is best characterized, not as a religion, but as the covenantal civilization of a people.
The interdependence of Judaism and peoplehood dictates the unity of the Jewish people. In the words of the Talmud: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel: You have made Me one in the world, so will I make you one in the world. You made Me one, as it is written: ‘Hear Israel, the Eternal, our God, the Eternal is One’ (Deut. 4:5). So will I make you one in the world, as it is written: ‘Who is like Your people Israel one nation on earth’ (2 Sam. 7:23).” The singularity and unity of the Jewish people has lasted for many centuries. Surely it is remarkable that a people dispersed in the world, without a government, without a country of their own, managed to remain one people. Jews from various backgrounds, various cultures, speaking different languages, even differing in their religious observances, immediately recognized and acknowledged each other as Jews. Indeed, we have been one people on earth, and more intimately attached to each other than have been the members of any other nation.