ABSTRACT
The word Judaism is of relatively recent coinage, not to be found in the Bible, rabbinic literature, or very often in medieval literature. The dominance of religious identity, however, is largely a consequence of the fact that most writings about Jews' earliest history have been by religious Jews. Of the various new types of denigration of Jews that arose after religious anti-Semitism lost its legal underpinning, perhaps the most influential was that of the socialist movement. Parallel with the anti-Semitic redefinition of Jews as a race rather than as a religious community, there had been the Zionist redefinition: Jews are a people rather than, or as well as, a religious community. One avenue of escape has been to adopt a non-Jewish name, and the Judaic tradition itself provided many precedents. Jews in America had long been divided by their national origin, which was closely associated with the period of their immigration.
