ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the relationship between Judaism and the Jewish people and non-Jewish “languages”. It explores the contemporary Jews speak several languages fluently and, largely, as insiders, so that all talk of “Jewish insider language” constantly skirts a thin line between self-understanding and preaching. Contemporary Western theology has worked steadily throughout the centuries of modernity to make room, even in the mansion of traditional culture, for science, both theoretical and applied, so that for most Jews too, the insider-outsider conception appears irrelevant to scientific research. Traditional Jews and teachers of Bible in all but outspokenly secular schools often express antipathy to biblical research or criticism, at least to its use in teaching. Higher biblical criticism makes the Bible into a corpus of historical, literary, and the philo-logical artifacts.
