ABSTRACT
Religion is only one among a range of vectors of "identity" produced in colonialist projects and usually uncritically, to categorize human beings. One account of the invention and construction of the category of religion—and therefore of the construction in turn of Judaism, Christianity, and the other religions that populate the category—comes from Tomoko Masuzawa. The striking observation becomes even more so when put into conversation with the emergence of a distinctive Christianity and a distinctive Judaism in antiquity, and the ways the creation of those "religions" were marked by the discourse of ethnicity. Todd S. Berzon is mostly concerned with Christianity's pagan and heretical Christian interlocutors, but this description might fit just as well or better with Christianity's first, most immediate, and most intimate context, Judaism. The idea of hybridity comes out of postcolonial theory, describing the ways colonized peoples adopt and appropriate aspects of the colonizing culture.
