Judaeo-Christian (updated)

To me, it has long seemed that the term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ expresses the view that Judaism exists only as a prelude to or rough draft of Christianity, which is, as far as I understand it, approximately the standard Christian view, but which ought to be expected to be offensive to sincere Jewish believers and which from an unbeliever’s point of view is simply a factual error. I don’t suppose that most people who use the term are consciously endorsing this Christian appropriation of Judaism — they probably just haven’t analysed it — but where’s the flaw in the analysis once performed?

Please don’t use the term “Judeo-Christian”. It is very hateful.

I know many people use it with all good intentions, thinking it constitutes some sort of pluralistic broad-minded acceptance. Sorry, but they’re wrong, or at least they don’t know the full score. There may be legitimate academic uses where it’s more appropriate than “Abrahamic”, but those are rare and largely moot. The vast preponderance of the term’s use (ccertainly in American public life) is by bigoted Christians who know nothing of Judaism, care less, and are using the term to falsely mimic high-mindedness and to subsume and supplant Jewish identity, to dictate to Jews what their history and purpose is and what their ideals should mean. Not coincidentally, many of these same people harbor Millenialist convictions that tell them the purpose of the Jewish people is to congregate in Israel and get annihilated in holy warfare in order to hasten the return of the Christian messiah.

The very term “Judeo-Christian” is of a piece with popular assertions and assumptions that the Christian religion is primarily descended from Judaism (rather a suspect idea) and that Judaism’s purpose was to incubate Christianity and then either to be frozen in amber or to disappear. Pretty much the only Jews you hear using the term are Quisling lapdogs like Daniel Lapin, using it to curry favor from powerful Christian bigots. And you’ll note that you never, ever hear the terms “Christeo-Mormon” or “Christeo-Islamic”.

In short: please, please don’t use the term “Judeo-Christian”, at least not without serious awareness of what you’re doing and the way others use the term, the horrid beliefs they have that will necessarily freight your use of it.

Isn’t Christmas a hijacked holiday anyway? Surely no self-respecting Christian believes that Jesus Christ was during the season of the winter solstice. Surely the melding of the pagan winter festivals with the feast of the celebration of the Son of Man could have nothing to do with whether one says “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas.”

Surely this all posturing, whataboutmeism, that the persecution lays not with others by with themselves.

Have a spooky Halloween!

That’s why I prefer ”Happy Hanukkah” – or ”Merry Hanukkah” then nobody can tell you that you are waging war on “Merry Christmas” – and if I may let me compliment @1 –
I always get such a kick out of such comments especially if they are sooo ”on topic”!

I’ll just agree with most of the commenters here by saying that I have always experienced the term “Judaeo-Christian” viscerally as soft antisemitism. In fact, until now I never thought much about whether other people might not experience it that way. It feels to me like an ideological equivalent of the infamous posthumous Mormon conversions: We show our respect by suggesting that, on some level, you are good enough to become one of us, whether or not you choose it, or even are aware of it. Jews are being drafted onto the evangelical Christian side of the culture wars. By speaking of Jewish religious values as though they were merely an incomplete predecessor of Christian values, Jewish autonomy is erased. This is an important power play in a culture that assigns special importance to “sincerely held religious beliefs”. Jewish perspectives are disqualified from this special respect (and freedom from scrutiny), because only the moral traditions that align with Christianity are recognized as religious.

@8 so many Christmas carols refer to the Nativity occurring in winter, despite it having occurred in a climate that at least in modern times rarely goes below freezing in midwinter. There is really not a lot of deep reflection on this point in Christian communities I’ve engaged with. I don’t think I heard the notion that the Church had coopted a pagan holiday by tying it to the winter solstice until I was in my late teens, and I was hanging out with some serious skeptics at that point.

I’d be fine with the “soft polytheism” of Christianity turning into the hard variety. As Nietzsche is always noting, the Classical gods aren’t moralizing gods, neither with respect to humans nor to themselves. (Some gods of the older generation, e.g. the Furies, are moralizing busybodies.)

The “War of Christmas” ™ is just an extension of white evangelical persecution complex in the US. Which is finally waining a bit since its top cheerleader (Bill O’Reilly) was fired. And I’m amused that someone is attempting to find logic in the “values” espoused at the Values Voters summit.

For me, “Judeo-Christian” is the type specimen 0f a modern idea, i.e., a superficial, largely empty concept that is somehow regarded as a tenet of faith for right-thinking people. Unearned edification. It had its uses in the day when Jews were becoming white people; but the formula, like the fins on a vintage Chevy, hasn’t aged well. “Abrahamic religion” makes more historical sense, though I tend that some people object to it, especially if you include Marxism as its fourth branch.

@8

Isn’t Christmas a hijacked holiday anyway? Surely no self-respecting Christian believes that Jesus Christ was during the season of the winter solstice.

Pretty much the standard modus operandi of the early Christan religionin it’s various conquering evangelical phases: grab a local pagan holiday, file off the serial numbers, slap a ‘christian’ name on it and in the immortal words of Firesign Theatre ( Track:Temporarily Humboldt County, Waiting For The Electrician, Or Someone Like Him):

Oh! By the way, Domini Domini Domini, you’re all Catholics now! God bless you!

Look closely at most, if not all of the more obscure ‘church’ festivals in mesoamerica, and you see a direct line to Aztec, Mayan and Incan rituals and holidays.

Easter gets it’s very name of Oestre, a germanic fertility goddess whose festival is in the springtime, and Christmas is essentially a Christian theme slapped onto Saturnalia, the roman mid-winter festival.

“Well, we don’t celebrate Christmas, but we do have Tu b’Shvat.”

In the spirit of 1960 Robert Heinlein in the USSR, winding up his Intourist guides by firmly opposing “the democracies” to Russia at every rhetorical opportunity, I make it my habit, upon hearing “Judaeo-Christian” anything, to consistently drive “monotheists” into the conversation as a synonym for “Jews and Muslims (and a few others), as opposed to Christians, Hindus, animists, etc.” If further provoked, I turn to Deuteronomy 13 as a conversation stopper.

The stance of Sincere and Slightly Persecuted Jew cuts through an amazing amount of bad-faith moral-majoritarian piety; I commend it to anyone who can pull it off. Roy Moore? Take two tablets and call me when he keeps the sabbath. Chick-Fil-A? A treyf chicken joint run by bigots, what’s not to love. When does life begin? Start from Genesis 2:7 and the sotah ceremony in parshat Naso; we’ll get to Sanhedrin 72b in the Bavli when you’re a little older.

I found myself thinking of Alan Watts’ Myth and Ritual in Christianity, where there is a sort of offhand remark that Protestantism, with its emphasis on learning from the Bible, is not so much Christianity as a sort of “Hebraism.” So there is that, as a possible defense of the notion that “Judeo-Christian” means something, even if in practice it has contempt for Judaism.

The book often cited on this (I haven’t read it) is Mark Silk’s 1980s Spiritual Politics. Silk is still around, a Professor at Trinity College, and has a blog. There, he recently wrote:

During the 1930s, “Judeo-Christian” came into American public discourse as a way of opposing Fascist anti-Semitism. After World War II, it became the watchword of an America standing for human freedoms against Communism.

With the rise of the religious right, it was transformed into a synonym for traditional sexual mores. In the Bannon-Breitbart world view, it has been reduced to the underpinnings of economic nationalism.

Call this the degradation of the Judeo-Christian dogma.

“Judeo-christian” is a bullshit term no one used before the 1930s, the point of which is to elide the contradictions between the components.

I’ll go further and say that any compound of “xyz values” is BS – but hey, I’m a Kantian…

bianca steele: I’m not sure there aren’t people (Christians, obviously) who honestly don’t understand that Jews have different beliefs.

It seems like a lot of people who call themselves Christians have only the most tenuous connection with their own supposed beliefs.

15-steven t johnson. What you call the “conservative case” is based on fiction or ignorance of American history. The so-called War against Christmas is a thoroughly Christian – indeed, protestant (originally, Puritan) affair.

Decorating churches at Christmas was forbidden by law in Massachusetts Bay Colony; taking the day off was a finable offense. The Pilgrims themselves made a point of working on Christmas Day, 1620. As late as 1870, classes were being held in public schools in Boston on Christmas Day” and children who stayed home to celebrate were punished.

“Prior to the Victorian era, Christmas in the United States was primarily a religious holiday observed by Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and Lutherans. Its importance was often considered secondary to that of Epiphany and Easter.” [Note: this means a minority of Christian Americans celebrated Christmas.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_controversies#cite_note-34

Britain suppressed Christmas celebrations throughout the Cromwell era – and reservations about, if not hostility to, Christmas continued for centuries, being alleviated only in the mid-19th century through the efforts of Dickens or Prince Albert (a German, remember) or even, perhaps the influence of American culture, depending on whom you read.

Arguably, our sense of the holiday owes more to the publication in 1822 of The Night Before Christmas and the work of other artists and authors in New York state, than to old Christian traditions…. The US Congress proclaimed Christmas a national holiday in 1870 – 250 years after the Pilgrims arrived and almost 100 years after Independence. ..

https://books.google.com/books?id=EUc13_ourtYC&pg=PA44&dq=Christmas+Puritan+New+England&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html

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Michael Connolly@36 is quite correct about the foolishness of conservatives in regards to Christmas. About the only quibble I would make is to add the importance of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to establishing Christmas as a favorite holiday. Truth is no more a value for political conservatism than consistency. (Popular versions of Burke in which “conservatism” has something to do with respect for tradition, caution, prudence, what a philosopher might call epistemic humility are purely apologetic. Respect for tradition never impelled a political conservative to acknowledge the facts of history.)

Tim @18
The “War of Christmas” ™ is just an extension of white evangelical persecution complex in the US. . . And I’m amused that someone is attempting to find logic in the “values” espoused at the Values Voters summit.

Yeah. And why not say White Christians’ Values summit instead of Values Voters summit? Aren’t liberty, equality, fraternity values? F’rinstance. Large groups are attracted to those values too (it is said).

Christianity by way of euphemism? Just as the Republican Party isn’t referred to as the White Christians’ Party.

Just like the ones I used to know

(Maybe the White Christmas Party) (Do you hear Bing warming up?)

‘Judeo-Christian’ describes a hypothesized culture, not any extant religion. It’s an attempt to secularize the moral content of fundamentalist Christian (not particularly Jewish) values (such as heterosexual purity of a certain kind), with the goal of legitimizing codification in secular law.

Hard to see how Holy-Days is not Christian.

I invite you to consider the origin of the word “shibboleth” in english, and the import the concept carries in its original context.

Judeo-Christian is the religion that worships egg-laying bunnies because the Bible says so.

J-D @ 45

Fair point, though I’ve seen Judeo-Christian-Islamic, and most histories I’ve seen mention Ibn Rushd, Avicenna, and Maimonides as important thinkers. But that isn’t really what middle Americans meant 1950s – 1970

As for Christianity as “appropriation” of Judaism, I’m surprised to see anyone saying it isn’t (unless you date “Judaism” from the period when the Talmud was written down, I guess). I have to wonder where people are getting such an idea, though I know better than to ask on the Internet. It does seem a little late to be worrying about it.

Banned commenter deleted

Bloix @ 52: With regard to “Happy Holidays!”, dismissing the etymology is somewhat disingenuous. The U.S. and other nations also have secular holidays now, but generally when people say “Happy Holidays!” they are not referring to Presidents’ Day or Veterans’ Day (or Victoria Day or Canada Day), etc., but to that melange of religious festivals of light surrounding the winter solstice, such as Saturnalia and Hanukkah… and derivatives.

Speaking of Saturnalia, I do think it ironic that one of the biggest starring characters in the biggest commercial ‘Christian’ holiday these days is originally… not a Germanic, but a Mediterranean god, variously named Saturn (by the Romans), Kronos (by the Greeks), Dagon (by the Phoenicians), and Ba’al Hammon (by the Carthaginians), not then recalled as a nice cuddly grandfather to children, alas, but as a devourer of children.

Z @49
In fact, I would go further and say that in many cases the Jewish component has been incorporated in the Western intellectual tradition, and the Greek component persevered in it, because of interactions between the Christendom and the Arabo-Persic cultural world.

I take this to mean texts of classical civilization, destroyed by (early) Christians, was preserved by “Arabo-Persic” scholars. . . Similarly, intolerant Protestants destroyed Catholic sacred music in a purifying phase during the Renaissance. As usual they, and they alone, knew Truth.

Recently, given things as they are, I thought I had better be learning more about the Nazis, especially their initial appearance as they came marching up the road, so I began reading Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness. This remarkable document mentioned another work from Professor Klemperer’s hand (literally — the Nazi state was afraid of his typewriter and seized it) called Lingua Tertii Imperii, that is, ‘language of the Third Reich’ in Latin — the Professor guessed correctly that the Nazi police would not be able to read Latin, and so they failed to seize it. I sent away for this book and have just obtained it (in German). I opened it in the middle somewhere, and what should pop out but a discussion of the Nazi problem with Christmas, to wit, that it celebrated the birth of a Jew who promoted values rather at odds with theirs, and yet was thought of with great affection by the Volk. Part of the Nazi solution was to denature the person and the holiday. The Nazis had some help from the language in that the German word for Christmas — Weihnachten — doesn’t mention Christ or a mass, but means something like ‘holy night’, so it was possible to pretend that it was a sort of vague tribal celebration. Just so, Judaeo-Christian, as some of you have noted, denatures at least Judaism and possibly Christianity as well. In my youth it was just some more bland, boring plastic furniture from the Established Order, but Mr. Trump seems to know how to seize on such things and make them into weapons for his armory. All right, so much for this little semi-relevant coincidence. I do recommend Professor Klemperer’s work to you, though. Try AbeBooks; there are lots of copies of his work floating around that nobody wants to read.

Maybe the 100% lockstep doctrine of elite media and political discourse that the two most worthy nations on Earth are the USA and Israel might have something to do with the widespread use of the term “Judeo-Christian”? Just a thought. And if you consider the term problematic maybe you should look beyond Trump and the evangelicals and consider the legions of social liberals in government and media who fervently disseminate this doctrine? Just spitballing here.

Am I alone in finding this christmas vs. holidays thing completely weird? I admit I’ve been out of the west for 11 years now so maybe I’m just out of touch but wtf? As far as I know in Australia we always just said merry christmas and nobody was bullshitting with happy holidays when I was in the UK in 2009. Here in Japan christmas is super popular (though completely alien to christianity), and most muslims I’ve ever met celebrate it so they can give their kids presents (it’s not like Jesus isn’t one of their most loved figures, after all). Of course the virgin birth is at the centre of the dispute between Muslims and Christians but you don’t see that in the nativity scene (at least I’ve never seen any depictions of God raping Mary anywhere ever), and I can’t conceive of any Muslims I’ve ever met finding such a thing offensive – is there really anyone in the world who thinks they would? (I know now someone is going to give a link to some weirdo Muslim group that does, but they will have almost zero relevance to most Muslims living in Christian countries). I really don’t understand how this became A Thing, and I don’t understand why right-thinking (or for that matter, thinking) non-Americans care about it. It seems to me like another example of a pointless, petty American cultural spat getting international significance because Americans talk too much. (Which isn’t to say I disapprove of blog posts about it, I just want to have my 2 cents worth about what a foolish sideshow the US war on christmas shenanigans are).

@62. Last “winter holiday season”, the shop near me -which has a Muslim owner – was advertising halal turkeys for Christmas. The owner wished me a merry christmas, then paused to say of course christmas wasn’t a muslim holiday, but whatever.

In my experience, Christmas has become thoroughly secularized and crosses religious boundaries. The government is careful not to say christmas in official leaflets (being mindful that the citizens are of many religions), but hardly anyone else cares.

And the part of my family that is Methodist would say that the real Christian festival is Easter, while Christmas is a slightly suspect pagan remnant. So we’re all agreed that its not a religious festival, whether we’re jewish, muslim, or protestant, so it kind of works…

65: Why would anybody object to a decorated tree? Here I can’t follow the purist stance of US-liberals. As an atheist I don’t see any reason to feel offended by that custom, except that I would join many Christians in denouncing the commercial debasement of what was once a rather quiet, reflective holiday.

J-D @ 49

Yes, I think we agree. What I didn’t think was offensive, or much in question, was the idea that even if Christianity isn’t seen as superseding Judaism, it can still be seen as continuing Judaism, and bringing the Law, knowledge of the one God, or however you’d like to describe it, to non-Jews. I was surprised to see people who think this is both untrue and offensive to Jews; as a Jew, I never saw it that way, and I think I could even scrounge up written sources in support.

I did not mean to imply that all the writers who are read as contributing to the “Western” tradition should be described as persons who are “Western”, obviously. You seem to be objecting to a specific practice, which you allude to but don’t name; would you mind clarifying?

Shop sign seen in Goa many tears ago:

Mohamed Qurayshi – Purveyor of Christian Religious Artifacts

Suzanne @65: Why is “Happy Holidays” bullshitting? Would you send a Jewish friend, or a Jewish working colleague, a “Merry Christmas” card?

I would hope so. My new year’s cards go out each September to friends of all faiths in the hope that Christmas and Diwali and Festivus cards will come back in due season. (It’s convenient that we’re a few months ahead, giving our correspondents ample time for a festive reply.)

“Merry Christmas” in the street from strangers is a different matter. I always reply brightly with “and a happy Kwanzaa to you!” which is taken well by some and very badly by others, in both cases just as I intend it.

Suzanne, observant Jews – indeed non-observant ones – are fairly rare in Australia. As a consequence while we have plenty of racial and religious sensitivities we don’t much have that one.

It is of course hilarious to anybody who knows anything of the history of Xmas to see Christians taking it seriously. It was originally invented as a plugin replacement for Saturnalia, Constantine not being foolish enough to take a public holiday away from the plebs and a shopping spree away from the merchants when he converted the empire. It is of course the wrong solstice given the biblical account. And all those ancient traditions are either pagan in origin, not ancient, or, as with the Christmas tree, both pagan and not ancient (Prince Albert – Victoria’s husband – popularised it in Britain and from thence in the US). Then of course there is the commercial aspect to the festivities:
“Angels we have heard on high
Telling us go out and buy”
– apologies to Tom Lehrer

I actually have a fundamentalist sister who refuses to celebrate Xmas on these grounds. Her cult has plenty of wacky beliefs, but is at least logical and consistent on this one.

@ #66 “Why would anybody object to a decorated tree?”

In a private business, it’s probably fine, though possibly inconsiderate to non-Christian employees and patrons who may feel they’re being excluded from a company activity. Part of this depends on how strongly it’s emphasized and whether other events are celebrated.

In a public institution, it’s Establishment Of Religion. We’re supposed to have rules against that, and for good reason.

@ #68 I simply don’t get how you can’t understand that the notion that Christianity can “be seen as continuing Judaism, and bringing the Law, knowledge of the one God, or however you’d like to describe it, to non-Jews” is profoundly offensive. It’s like those jackasses who dress up in fake Indian headdresses in baseball stadiums. It’s claiming ownership of someone else’s identity, and doing so in almost complete ignorance of the source material. And the central notion of it – that Christian belief or theology is in any important way closely related to Judaism – is fairly silly once you start looking beyond Christian appropriation of the Tanakh, which in any case they read very differently. Evangelism, a focus on the afterlife, even an affection and respect for the deity – all of these are fundamental to Christianity and are missing or strongly deprecated in Judaism.

WT 76: But it’s just a decorated tree (as opposed to, say a crucifix or a Ten Commandments engraving). It’s a custom that appeared in the 19th century in parts of Europe. What about Thanksgiving and Halloween, should non-Christians feel excluded by those customs because they do have a Christian component?

bianca steele @51 [Americans in the 1950s] meant that Jews and Christians […] could naturally understand each other, and lived by pretty much the same principles.

I agree they meant that, but then again I always wonder “Jews and Christians […] could naturally understand each other, and lived by pretty much the same principles” in opposition with who exactly it is not natural to understand and who does not live by pretty much the same principles?

If they were really talking about Jews and Christians generally, then the latter had just exterminated the former on a scale never seen before in History a mere decade away, an experience which would I think entail not naturally understanding each others so well and not quite living by pretty much the same principles. If they were talking about American Jews and American Christians, then why choosing such a religiously loaded terminology? Wouldn’t it better to say that by and large Americans more or less got along together (with rare and notable exceptions)? Doesn’t the religious terminology at least implicitly suggest that maybe American Atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Chinese, Natives (inter alia) are not naturally understood and do not live by pretty much the same principles?

alfredlordbleep I take this to mean texts of classical civilization, destroyed by (early) Christians, was preserved by “Arabo-Persic” scholars

I think my (completely unoriginal) thesis is even stronger. I think I’m saying that if a structure were to be put on the broad Western canon, then the Arabo-Persian world would in many cases appear as the central nexus without which no joint understanding of (say) Aristotle or Hipparcus on the one hand, the Golden Age of medieval Jewish thinking on another and the late Middle-Ages and early European Renaissance on yet another could be achieved. So I think I’m saying that a cultural universe which includes (again, for instance) Ptolemy and Archimedes as well as Leonardo de Pisa, Thomas of Aquinas and Copernicus as well as Maimonides makes absolutely no sense if it doesn’t include Ibn al-Haytham (Al-Hazen), Al-Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam or Ibn Khaldun.

bianca steele
I haven’t answered your question because I don’t understand it. Can you quote a particular statement of mine whose meaning was not clear to you?

Z @ 80

Yes, this is the famous “privatization of religion,” to which so many religious conservatives object, and in 2017 may well be on the verge of overturning. I don’t know what we might get after that. Some religious conservatives object to the idea of a secular “public sphere,” and might even claim it’s inherently Christian, somehow, in predominantly Christian countries, but even if this is true in some ways–and I think it would have to be proven case-by-case–most religious people have found ways to cope with this without losing their religious identity, given some amount of time to adapt. Most liberals, I think, believe all religions can pretty much accomplish this adaptation, and wouldn’t exclude Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. They might not use “Judeo-Christian” themselves, but not object to it–they might see it as a (weak) attempt to overcome a tradition of antisemitism.

I think most Americans over 50, in most places, hear “Judeo-Christian” in this way and would resent its cooptation by the fundamentalist conservatives mentioned so frequently in this thread (who are, I assume, also Americans, so is the problem one the US is imposing on the world?). I see a choice between this liberal privatization of religion, a theocracy, and the entire banning of religion.

@22

I note that in most languages, Easter derives its name from the Aramaic word for Passover.

@74

I’m not sure what it means to say that a particular Christian custom, German in origin, is both pagan and non-ancient. Given that paganism in Germany was basically wiped out in the reign of Charlemagne, then any non-ancient German Christian custom must, by definition, be non-pagan.

bianca steele
Aha!

In the modern contexts in which the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ is most typically used, it has, for many people, implications similar to the implications of ‘telling Jews how to interpret their own religion in line with Christianity’.

Katsue @ 86: “I’m not sure what it means to say that a particular Christian custom, German in origin, is both pagan and non-ancient.”

“The modern Christmas tree is frequently traced to the symbolism of trees in pre-Christian winter rites, wherein Viking and Saxon worshiped trees.” Cf. Donar’s Oak.

The revivals would in this sense be “neo-pagan” with a Christian gloss.

An additional data-point:
Carl Schmitt (a proclaimed anti-Semite) used the term “Judeo-Christian,” and did so during (rather than after) the Nazi era. It occurs at least twice in “The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes” (1938). I have not seen the German text but hardly think this could be a mistranslation (University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 11,14).

Katsue 86: Since the numbers got messed up, I’m not sure what you are responding to. The Christmas tree is a 19th century folk custom. It has no specific Christian meaning, it is not supported by any scripture or church teaching (likewise the Easter bunny and Easter egg – they are pre-Christian fertility symbols and if anything, conservative Christians should oppose such Pagan claptrap). It is not a Christian symbol at all; the evergreen tree symbolizes life and the candles stand for light in the dark. Such symbols appear in all (or at least many) cultures.

I think it would help to distinguish folk custom from strictly religious rituals. That folk customs developed in the context of the religious calendar, in a time when the church had more dominion over people’s lives, doesn’t mean that any custom vaguely related to religious tradition must be banned from a secular society. We don’t consider Halloween and Thanksgiving a threat to secularism, then why Christmas decoration?

The Pagan thing is a bit more complex. Traditions that are clearly Pagan in origin are still alive in Alpine regions, especially around Carnival (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percht). Carnival itself was a Christian appropriation of earlier Pagan spring customs but has long since gotten a life of its own. Perhaps it makes a difference whether you grew up in a culture where folk traditions are still part of people’s lives.

bianca steele who are, I assume, also Americans, so is the problem one the US is imposing on the world?

I don’t think it is strictly a US problem. Judeo-Christian, Judeo-Christian values, Judeo-Christian roots of civilization are frequently heard in Europe; often to point out even if only implicitly the supposedly problematic place of Islam.

Most liberals […] believe all religions can pretty much accomplish this adaptation […] They might not use “Judeo-Christian” themselves, but not object to it–they might see it as a (weak) attempt to overcome a tradition of antisemitism.

Well, I applaud the attempt to overcome a tradition of antisemitism by emphasizing how close Jews and Christians can be, but I deplore that the same movement that makes two population closer seemingly push others further away.

bianca steele @ 95: The first — and, as I write, only — hit on “hatchet” in this thread is in your #95 (find-function says that’s 1 of 1)… so: ????

Sorry JQ for not responding to your reply to my @1 earlier. And, again, kudos to all for a great thread. Reluctant as I am to question your source, I will.

I’d never heard of Ngram and was pleased to give it shot. Given the sampling of Google texts it kicked up. You rely (it seems) on a single secondary source, rather than exploring used to generate his droll column. Please correct me if that is the case. Regarding Jack’s methodology I have two comments. The first is general: google books ability to retrieve text reliably remains somewhat uneven. As good as the OCR is/was when the books were scanned, I’ve encountered enough anomalies and inconsistencies to do the OCR again on any pdf I download using Acrobat Pro. Even then documents need to be reviewed page by page for omissions, depending on the importance of the task. The second and more particular question concerns Jack’s decision to search Ngram using only the upper-case search parameters, which kicks back a very different set of dates and data than a lower-case search. I appreciate the link, however. Thanks! Doubtless Google will improve the software. I stand by my original comment, btw.

As for Jack, here he is in his own modest words:”Jack Neely is the director of the Knoxville History Project, a nonprofit devoted to exploring, disseminating, and celebrating Knoxville’s cultural heritage. He’s also one of the most popular and influential writers in the area, known for his books and columns. The Scruffy Citizen surveys the city of Knoxville’s life and culture in the context of its history, with emphasis on what makes it unique and how its past continues to affect and inform its future.” Cheers!

J-D:

That’s what I said myself, right? Apparently you, Z, and Warren are objecting to “I wouldn’t go as far as Warren does,” and ignoring what I did say.

bianca steele

That’s what I said myself, right?

I don’t know. Was it? I don’t think you said it in those words, and it wasn’t clear to me that what you did write was equivalent to:

In the modern contexts in which the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ is most typically used, it has, for many people, implications similar to the implications of ‘telling Jews how to interpret their own religion in line with Christianity’.

However, if you do agree with that statement, then there’s no other point I know of on which we are in disagreement. Does there appear to you to be any other point on which we are in disagreement?

100@ Good point. And then there’s the use of the term in other languages, eg. French.

Lots and lots of examples of judéo-chrétien turn up when filtering for the 19th-century in Google books.

A discussion of the etymology plus variations: http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/jud%C3%A9o-chr%C3%A9tien

DD@93

The people who perpetuated the Holocaust considered themselves very explicitly NON Christian, and were certainly not considered Christian by other ‘Christians’. Are all those identifying as Christian supposed to carry some sort of blood guilt for the Holocaust even unto the seventh generation?

Ah yes. We all know how true Christians, like, say, Catholics in Poland, resisted the Holocaust and, even before 1939, were protective of the rights of Jews.

We all know how strongly the Vatican objected, and refused to have anything to do with the Nazi regime, and how it excommunicated (not a single one of the many) priests who cooperated with the Nazis.