IS JUDAISM UNIQUE?

Study finds Israel's religious foundation not so unique
By HAVIV RETTIG (Jerusalem Post)

"The Jewish-Israeli case is often said to be unique," begins an article by Dr. Alexander Yakobson, a senior lecturer in Roman history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, in the summer 2008 edition of Israel Studies, an academic journal on Israeli society.

The country's strangeness comes from the "'extra-territorial' character of the Jewish people, Israel's ties with the Jewish Diaspora and the strong connection between the Jewish religion and the prevalent notion of Jewish peoplehood," explains the author. Some celebrate this, "pointing to the uniqueness of Jewish history and culture," and some are critical of it as "inconsistent with modern civic democracy," but rarely is the "underlining premise of uniqueness" questioned, Yakobson believes.

But he's out to change that, with an argument that examines the constitutions of other democracies to show that Israel is neither officially nor in practice alone in this, well, uniqueness.

"There are numerous other cases where national identity and religion are officially connected in some way, and where there are official bonds between a nation-state and an ethnocultural Diaspora," he writes.

The Greek constitution, for example, makes some surprising provisions. ...

Yakobson's article, titled "Jewish Peoplehood and the Jewish State, How Unique? - A Comparative Survey," summarizes more extensive findings of a book he co-authored with Israeli constitutional thinker Amnon Rubinstein titled Israel Among the Family of Nations. The idea presented in the book, and the newly-published article, is an important contribution to the international discussion surrounding the Jewish state. It isn't merely that an Israeli scholar has located another freakish case - Greece - among contemporary democracies, but that religion-based ethnocultural identity is the social glue of a broad swath of the free West.

[...]

He relates the story of a visiting foreign professor who was asked, "Do you think that the Jewish people are unique?"

"Of course you are unique," he replied, "but you are not unique in being unique

[...]

Indeed. To say that something is "unique" is almost useless to the historian. As I like to say, everything is unique or it would be the same as something else. The interesting question is how each particular thing is unique.