Peoplehood, Not Theology, as the Ground of Jewish Identity

Rabbi Sherwin Wine founded Humanistic Judaism in 1963 at the Birmingham Temple in Michigan on the claim that Jewish identity rests on a shared history, a shared literature and a shared peoplehood rather than on a relationship to God. Judaism Beyond God, Wine's own statement of the movement's position, sets the question of God's existence aside rather than answering it in either direction, so that belonging to the Jewish people and sharing in its culture does not depend on holding any particular theological conviction, a stance that let openly atheist and agnostic Jews claim full membership without disguising their views. The Encyclopaedia Judaica situates this move as building on, and going further than, Mordecai Kaplan's earlier Reconstructionist description of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, since Kaplan reinterpreted theistic language rather than removing it, while Wine's movement dropped supernatural claims from its own practice entirely rather than merely explaining them differently. The result is a Jewish identity built to survive the loss of theistic belief altogether, treating history, culture and peoplehood as sufficient grounds on their own rather than as a fallback position for Jews who no longer accept the tradition's theological claims.