Jewish Identity Rests on History, Culture and Peoplehood Rather Than on God

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.

Wine trained and served as a Reform rabbi before founding Humanistic Judaism, and the break was public rather than gradual: the Encyclopaedia Judaica records that his congregation was startled when he began openly omitting prayers addressed to a God he no longer believed existed, replacing them with readings on Jewish history and ethics rather than pretending the theology still stood behind unchanged liturgy. From the single Birmingham Temple congregation the movement grew into a wider institutional structure, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, founded in 1969 to coordinate congregations across North America, and later a training body preparing its own rabbis and communal leaders for a form of Jewish life explicitly organized around peoplehood rather than theology. A Book Forged in Hell, on the seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza's own break with the theological claims of the Judaism he was raised in, situates Wine's twentieth century movement within a much longer history of Jewish thinkers who sought to preserve identification with the Jewish people while rejecting the tradition's supernatural claims, a lineage reaching back centuries before Humanistic Judaism gave that impulse an organized congregational home.