Jew meaning

Meaning

Praiser, Hand-Holder, Network-Former

Etymology

From the verb ידה (yada), to praise.

Related names

• Via ידה (yada): Abihud, Abiud, Ahihud, Ammihud, Baale-judah, Ehud, Eliud, Hod, Hodaviah, Hodiah, Ishhod, Jaddai, Jedaiah, Jeduthun, Jehudi, Jehudijah, Judah, Judas, Jude, Judea, Judith, Ohad, Tidal, Vaniah, Yaudi

The name Jew is technically an adjective which literally means Judaic (which means that the English adjective Jewish is an incorrect pleonasm). But because this word is an adjective, its usages in the New Testament sometimes make for rather surprising grammar. For instance, one is not a Jew (which would be expressed with a predicative, nominative case) but one adheres to Jewish traditions (which is expressed with a dative).

In the New Testament, the name Jew (Ιουδαιος, Ioudaios) generally applies to an inhabitant of Judea (Ιουδαια, Ioudaia), but this generalization is rather leaky. The name comes from the Septuagint, in which it is applied to the people of the tribe of Judah (יהודי, Yehudi). These people were exiled to Babylon, where the name Jew was extended to anybody who came from any of the Israelite tribes. When the Jews returned to Palestine, the region where they settled became known as Judea, but the name Jew soon began to be applied only to those people who adhered to the reformed Judaism of the post-exilic era, whether they lived in Judea, still in Babylon or anywhere else in the world (Acts 2:10).

At the rise of Christianity as a school of thought distinct from Judaism (and see our article on the name Hebrew for a lengthy look at that), the name Jew became even more ambiguously applied. The apostle Paul writes that a true Jew is someone who doesn't simply adhere to Judaism outwardly but who lives and breathes the Spirit of the Law (Romans 2:17-29). But often the name Jew was categorically applied to those inhabitants of Judea who opposed and aggressed Christ, Christianity and Christians (John 19:12, Acts 9:23, 27:7, 1 Thessalonians 2:14).

In the New Testament:

• The name or adjective Ιουδαιος (Ioudaios), Jew or Jewish, is used 199 times in the New Testament, see full concordance, not counting the similar parent noun Judah, which is spelled Ιουδαια (Ioudaia), and the personal name(s) Judas and Jude, which are both spelled Ιουδας (Ioudas).
• The verb Ιουδαιζω (Ioudaizo), meaning to Judaize; to conform to Jewish law an practices (Galatians 2:14 only).
• The adjective Ιουδαικος (Ioudaikos), meaning Jewish (Titus 1:14 only).
• The adverb Ιουδαικως (Ioudaikos), meaning Jewishly, in a Jewish way or after the manner of the Jews (Galatians 2:14 only).
• The noun Ιουδαισμος (Ioudaismos), meaning Judaism (Galatians 1:13-14 only).

In our modern age, a Jew is someone who has the right to be a citizen of the State of Israel. But that state (or any national state for that matter) hasn't existed very long and throughout history, Jewishness has had very little to do with nation states, simply because Jews have always existed among other peoples (Chaldeans, Egyptians, Canaanites, Persians, Greeks, Romans).

In The Invention of the Jewish People (2009-2020), Shlomo Sand famously demonstrated the radical folly of equating the term Jew with a nationality. In The Jewish Century (2004-2019), Yuri Slezkine divided a properly functioning humanity into stationary and landowning Apollonians and peripatetic and landless Mercurials, among whom Jews. And in At Home in Exile (2014), Alan Wolfe discussed why diaspora is "good" for the Jews (and why nationalism, and thus the state of Israel, is typically un-Jewish and a form of assimilation rather than emancipation).

Jews have had nations (David's united kingdom, Ethiopia under Menelik first and then possibly Candace, the Hasmonean kingdom, the Kingdom of Adiabene, the Himyarite kingdom in Yemen, the Khazar empire between the Black and Caspian Seas, the modern state of Israel), but mostly they have lived within nations that were not theirs and which they served, and sometimes helped to govern (Persia, most notably).

Like the notion of nation states, the idea of race is also relatively new (race theory roughly originated in the 16th century and is certainly not Biblical). In the recent past, some have believed that Jewishness is a race (Hitler thought so, while a majority of German scholars at the time already didn't). More modern investigations have abandoned the idea of race all together. Genetic examinations have shown that although there is a Levitical haplogroup (i.e. markers that appear with statistical significance more often in self-identifying Levites), Jewishness is certainly not a genetic thing.

In our article on the Gospel of Impurity, we argue that although Jewishness was always very serious about its identity and definitions, it was also always an entity with wide open doors: Rick's tumultuous "Café Américain" within the violent human κοσμος (kosmos). Recent studies have demonstrated that the massive presence of Jews in the Greo-Roman world, as well as the permanence of the Jewish identity up to modernity, cannot possibly be ascribed to natural and biological proliferation but can only be explained by large scale proselytizing: of vast numbers of non-Jews becoming Jews. Now why would all these none-Jews have wanted to become Jews? In the Book of Esther we read that "many among the peoples of the land became Jews, for the dread of the Jews had fallen on them" (Esther 8:17). And the prophet Zechariah foretold that "ten men from all the nations will grasp the garment of a Jew, saying, 'Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you'" (Zechariah 8:23, also see Genesis 12:3, Isaiah 2:2-3, Ezekiel 38:23).

The joke among new Atheists is that they don't believe in 2,700 gods while monotheists don't believe in 2,699 gods. And while demonstrating his dazzling learnedness and unequaled insight, Shlomo Sand declares in wonder: "Unfortunately, monotheism did not make for greater biological fecundity, and the spiritual sustenance it gave its believers could not feed their hungry infants" (Sand.Inv.3).

Now imagine the sound of a sweaty hand slapping a sweaty forehead, and a voice crying: "O my God! These people think we're religious! Of course monotheism gives its adherers a crucial edge. That's why there are so many of us! And that's why we lasted so long!"

OK, let's take this from the top, patiently. The world we live in is a technological world, not a philosophical world or a make-believe world. Look around you. Every brick, every bit of metal or plastic, every piece of furniture, every book, every cell-phone, every piece of clothing you wear — all of it was made deliberately by human technicians, not by philosophers or priests. Physically we are identical to our cave-dwelling ancestors. The only difference between our world and theirs is that we have technology. If they could see our world they would think it is Paradise. Our technology makes it so.

Our generation is blessed beyond the comprehension of previous generations. We have access to all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. We have doctors and medical centers in every city. We have houses and bridges, roads and cars. We have clothes, food, communication networks. We have jobs, we have entertainment; and all of it has been made possible because engineers were informed by science, and science pursued consensus. Science seeks descriptions of the observable world that nobody opposes — which means that "truth" is the last man standing in an OK-corral sort of way, and science can only shoot bad guys. Science can only falsify, and "truth" is still out there in a mixture with nonsense that's getting less and less nonsensical and more and more pure.

That means that science works exactly like a language: very early pre-speech humans would vocalize their feelings while pointing at an observable object and imitate each other until the collective expression finally settled upon a true word. Language consists of words and grammar that exist in all minds equally. That means that language is like the collective air we breathe, and our conversations and thoughts (we think in words) are like taking flight in a heaven that consists entirely of consciousness. Doves and sparrows and such are reptilian birds; we humans are mammalian birds (dogs probably see us as big chickens, who frequently leave their stationary body behind to go flying in an invisible heaven. When we return to the body, our body begins to move, our eyes look at the dog and our hands begin to throw balls and such).

In evolutionary terms, birds surely took a while to evolve their wings, but a half-finished wing can't be flown with. This conundrum is probably best explained by the assumption that wings did not evolve to fly with but to protect with. Long ago, four legged reptiles probably began to sacrifice the use of their front limbs in order to better shield and protect their young. Better shielded young had the evolutionary advantage and birds inadvertently evolved wings that they suddenly appeared to be able to fly with. And this suggests that flight is a side-effect of the desire to protect.

It likewise takes a while to develop speech, and then script, and then the art of science. The entire story arc from the Exodus to the making of the temple of YHWH (this still by the whole of Israel) rather obviously tells of the formation of the alphabet (the Hebrew alphabet that "domesticated" the Indo-European languages: without the alphabet there would have been no Greek Golden Age or Roman Empire or modern world; see our articles on Aeneas, Troas, YHWH, Hebrew). Judah was one of the twelve tribes of Israel, and while Israel embodies the greater economy of information exchange, Judah specifically embodies the accumulation of information and, crucially, data compression.

Judah found a way to compress the whole of human thought into pocket format, and from Judah came Jesus who embodies the Logos, which is the formal understanding of the laws of nature. Understanding the laws of nature begins with understanding that these laws are always One: they emerged from a state of perfect Oneness (the Big Bang's singularity), they evolve toward a state of Oneness (which is why we humans are so eager to find agreement among ourselves), and they govern all goings on in the universe today (which is why what goes up must come down, why things like energy and baryon number are always preserved, why life is so diverse while evolutionary archetypes fill evolutionary niches).

Theism has nothing to do with religion. The word "theos" essentially means "that which makes observable reality like it is, whatever that might be". This word "theos" is related to words like "theatre" (a place in which to see things), and "theory" (a way of seeing things). This word "theory" occurs only once in the Bible and describes the crucified Christ (Luke 23:48; see our article on the verbs θαομαι, thaomai, to suckle & to marvel at). Our word "theos" relates to "theme" (a central principle of a text or piece of music), or "thesaurus" (literally: treasure). Our word "theos" does not explain anything but is the X that marks the spot of whatever it is that we are looking for: how it all works: "For since the creation of the world [it's] invisible attributes, [it's] eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made" (Romans 1:20).

Everybody agrees that it once brought forth the universe, which puts it on a par with all things material — hence we say that the singularity contained all the energy that would ever exist in the universe, plus all the natural law compressed into One. But others among us additionally understand that life began in the Heat Death of the utter antisocialness of the very first living creatures. And then life began to evolve sentience, then communication, then colonies. Then it became multicellular and evolved speech. It built cities, drew law and finally discovered science: the study of the law of nature. And life begot a slow but sure understanding of the Oneness of All Things (i.e. how all things relate in an evolutionary sense), and began to self-organize upon that Oneness, so that it became One and thus, ultimately, began to partake in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4, John 17:21-23, Ephesians 4:1-6). And that makes it also an Attractor, on a par with all things living, intelligent, social and spiritual (John 12:32).

God is a single being who both pushes creation on one end and pulls it on the other, who is simpler than utterly simple (has negative entropy, if you will) but also more complex than utterly complex (i.e. trans-finite entropy). God is both a Prime Moving sub-it but also an Ultimate Attracting, living, thinking, loving Super-He (actually, technically He is a Super-She, but that's beside the point right now).

The difference between polytheism and monotheism is that polytheism doesn't see the Oneness of Al Things while monotheism does. The difference between any religion and Judaism is that Judaism yields technological fruits (the alphabet, the postal service, science, the Internet, the weekend; the entire modern world, basically), whereas any "religion" just makes a lot of noise and confusion and no useful technology (and to be even more specific: the tabernacle was an engineering marvel; see Exodus 31:1-11. Jews "worshipped" text: not only the alphabet but also ink and paper are technological marvels, whose ultimate purpose is to capture and contain the fire — see our article on Beelzebub).

Long story short: Judaism is proto-science, the thing you do with wings before you can fly with them. In our modern world, a human individual may discover her scientific leaning and progress directly from the stage of childish play to the stage of scientific rigor, skipping the Judah phase (entirely alike folks in modern Africa, who go from speaking drums straight to cell-phones, whilst skipping the landline phase). This also means that modern Jewry does not have the same purpose as the Judaism of the First and Second Temple period. That doesn't mean that modern Jewry is superfluous (although much of it has regressed into a fruitless religion), but rather that it still governs the monotheistic core of science.

Only a very small subset of all hominids actually developed speech. And only a small subset of those developed script (or learned to work with it). But just like one needs an entire global economy to produce one single pencil (Milton Friedman's famous example), so the winning subsets always require the entire spectrum of participants to develop, rather alike a child (the subset) in the womb of its mother (the spectrum at large). That means that "winning" does not equal the making of losers, but rather the making of one great reality in which all elements, including the winning subset, can exist in a permanently stable symbiosis.

Entirely likewise, only a very small subset of templar Judaism actually began to produce science, but required the whole of Judaism to actually do so. Modern science, and the modern world it supports, however, is pervaded by beliefs that bear no fruit. Most people today aren't even monotheists, and believe that their world is the effect of warring parties (which is polytheism). The purpose of modern Judaism is to "pray for the world", and so maintain a core of pure monotheism that centers global humanity like the sun does our solar system. Judaism is the lens that focusses science.

If an aspirant wants to become a Jew because she wants to be recognized as one, and enjoy the perks (like living in Israel) and the great many honors that our grateful modern world bestows upon the Jews, she should certainly formally convert to Judaism. But if she wants to be a Jew at heart and for God and the betterment of the whole of mankind, then she should just start. Nobody is a human being because they have a document that proves it. Likewise, nobody is a Jew because they have a document that proves that. Being human is about being, and being a Jew is about being.

A Jew is someone who is naturally and whole-heartedly dedicated to the single and unified network of rational information exchange. A Jew teaches anything to whomever, always emphasizing the topic's relativity to the oneness of it all. A Jew is someone who understands that in the absence of dictionaries and compendiums of formative tropes, the Bible is identical to the language it is written in. Language, in turn, equals consciousness. A Jew is someone who reads the Bible the way one loves another person: without looking for dogma, without succumbing to creed, a Jew is engaged in a lifelong attempt to align her nature and deepest thoughts with those of the other (and not rarely, this results in the bearing of fruits). And a Jew is someone who understands that the winning subset requires the proper functioning of the greater world, and that either the entire world survives or the entire world succumbs. A Jew prays continuously for the entire world, including enemies.

Judaism is proto-science but science-and-technology itself isn't going to save humanity (in fact, humanity is well on its way to blow itself up: the apocalypse envisioned by John will be technological). Still, the world to come will surely be technological, because technology is the manifestation of a mastery of natural law. But handling technology without that proper mastery (without having a firm understanding of monotheism) will have the exact same effect as Uzzah touching the Ark.

Instead, the One God will save humanity when humanity intimately comprehends and respects and self-organizes around uncompromised monotheism, and is endowed with a wisdom based on pure rational science, and produces technology that leaves no wastes and is perfectly efficient — because that's how monotheistic tech is defined. The world is polluted because of polytheistic tech. And AI is going bonkers because our world's best and brightest don't have the sense to teach it monotheism. But the gods that did not make the heavens and the earth will perish from the earth and from under the heavens. And the God who did will live among his people (Leviticus 26:11, Isaiah 7:14, Revelation 21:23).

The Jews famously proclaimed the blood of Jesus to be on them and their children (Matthew 27:25 only and see Acts 5:28) and that has been explained to horrible convenience in order to justify persecution of Jews for millennia. But insofar this convenience can be traced back to actual exegesis, it shows a serious lack of understanding of Biblical Law. Sins of the fathers can only affect descending generations when these sins have to do with the worship of false gods, and that for only four or five generations deep (Exodus 19:5). In all other cases, no son was to be condemned for the sins of his father (Deuteronomy 24:16, Jeremiah 31:29-30, Ezekiel 18:19-20; although some gray areas can be readily identified and the gray-scale attuned at will: 2 Samuel 12:14, Isaiah 14:21, Joshua 7:24, and of course Romans 5:19).

Christians cannot legally condemn Jews because only Matthew witnesses of their statement and that's one witness too few (Numbers 35:30, Deuteronomy 17:6). On top of that, YHWH says "vengeance is mine" (Deuteronomy 32:35) and Jesus says "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). Jesus also prayed for forgiveness to the people who crucified him (actually, he prayed God to forgive their ignorance, not their actual deed; Luke 23:34), and it should be remembered that he didn't pray for forgiveness of the people who killed the people who crucified him.

And even if, in the most corrupt court in the world, the Jews would be held collectively accountable for the statement made by Matthew, they would be endowed with the greatest blessing ever bestowed mankind, namely that of the cleansing blood of the Lord (Ephesians 1:7, 2:13, Hebrews 9:14, 1 Peter 1:2, 1:19, 1 John 1:7, Revelation 1:5, 7:14 and 12:11).

The name Jew is an Anglicized version of the French name Gew (something similar happened with the name James), and that can be traced back to the Latin Iudaeus, which in turn comes from the Greek adjective Ιουδαιος (Ioudaios), which literally means "Jewish" or rather "of Judea". The name Judea in turn comes from the Hebrew name Judah (in Greek Ιουδα, Iouda), which belonged to the fourth son of Jacob and Leah, who became the patriarch of the tribe of Judah, which settled in the land west of the Jordan. The name Judah comes from the verb ידה (yada), meaning to praise:

By the time the name Jew was invented, the original meaning was not recognized as much as its cultural significance. But it literally means Praiser. And so that everybody knew what the deal was and nobody could make a mistake, Jesus himself stated without metaphor or complicated parable: "Salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22).

Paul later explained that salvation comes via grace (Ephesians 2:8), and this is rather spectacular because grace is not a static gesture bestowed upon unfortunate lessers by someone greater, but instead grace is social felicity: joy experienced and expressed rationally by a community. The word for grace is χαρις (charis), which closely relates to our English word "choir" (which is a community that expresses joy within the rational covenant of a musical composition).

An additional pun comes with the similarity between grace's parent verb χαιρω (chairo), to rejoice, and the noun χειρ (cheir), meaning hand. That same similarity exists between the verb ידה (yada), to praise, and the noun יד (yad), hand — with which to gently caress, hence the verb ידד (yadad), to love, hence the name דוד (dawid), David, meaning Beloved.

The pun continues in the word jewel, which has formally nothing to do with the name Jew, but instead comes from the Latin jocale, meaning "that which causes joy" (hence also the word "joke"), but ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root "yek-", to speak.

Jews are not simply individual "praisers"; they are hand-holders. Jews form living strings of precious "stones". Like jewels in a crown, Jews are networkers, highway-smooth-makers, weavers of men — it's their carpet upon which the entire world stands, and which ties the whole human space together; as was explained by the great Gaon Lebowski. Their network is a pure republic, without formal ranks or offices, organized solely according to competence and servitude. And it's open for everyone, and solely purposed to create resonance and synchronicity in the rest of mankind (hence also the Sabbath).

The formidable Edward O. Wilson once famously declared that an individual ant does not exist, because the ant is the entire colony (Proverbs 6:6). Likewise an individual Jew does not exist: the Jew is the entire network — not only the obvious religious Jew, but all Men In Black (or Blues Brothers; same famous mission, slightly different angle) and anything that creates global synchronicity. The Jew prays for the world the way the brain prays for its own body. The Jew is the brain of humanity; the Logos is the knowledge in the brain.

In the following table, every ethnonym except the first is a subset of the preceding one. That means that all living things on planet earth are "sons of Adam" (and the characters in the Bible are not historic but algorithmic, so whatever goes for Adam goes for every living being), but the "sons of Noah" are a mere small subset of the "sons of Adam", and the Noahites live among the Adamites (and the Noahites know the difference but the Adamites don't).

The final generation mentioned in the Bible is the generation of Christ, and one is either in Christ (meaning that one went with Christ through the window of Golgotha onto greater things), or one is under Christ, which means that one exists in the following table somewhere north of Christ. When one is under Christ, one is not in Christ, which means (at best) that one is still on one's way to Golgotha, in order to indeed enter Christ and be in Christ and join in his resurrection (Philippians 3:8-11).

The rare Greek "-ianos" suffix means "under" in an authoritative sense. Greek for "under Christ" is Christianos, from which comes the term Christianity. That means that a Christian is someone who has not yet entered Christ but is learning how to do that. Someone who has entered Christ, has died on Golgotha and has resurrected in Christ. Such a person is a Christ, not a Christian (see our article on the name Christian for more details).