Jewish Shariah? Understanding Halakha, and Why Western Civilization Doesn't Want It.
There's nothing Western about it. There's nothing Christian about it. So, no thanks.
Fox News Americans know all about Shariah, the Islamic religious law operating in Middle Eastern nations. They’ve heard of is horrors, been assigned strong opinions about it, and consider it incompatible with Western values (which it is).
But have you heard of Halakha ? Halakha is Jewish religious law. It’s a comprehensive legal system governing ritual, civil, criminal, and personal life through rabbinic courts, structurally parallel to Shariah in nearly every way. In modern Israel, it operates with state enforcement power over millions of citizens.
This is Part 1 of this series, which came about from a conversation we had in the I2I Founders Zoom call last Sunday (which you can take part in by upgrading to a Founder subscription here). I’ve spent an extra hour or so each day this week, putting together this dossier on Halakha and the Noahide Laws at the request of Founding members to learn more. We won’t get to Noahide Law until Part 2, next weekend. But understanding Halakha is a great (and necessary) place to start.
When Westerners hear the word Shariah, they think of amputations, morality police, and theocratic tyranny. The word conjures images of Saudi religious courts, Iranian enforcers of modesty codes, and Taliban rule. For many American Christians, Shariah represents everything incompatible with Western civilization: a medieval legal system imposing divine commands on modern pluralistic societies through state violence.
What most people don’t realize is that Shariah is not unique in the religious world. It has a close structural cousin, one that rarely makes headlines, one that operates with state backing in a US-allied nation, one that American evangelicals actively defend without understanding what it actually is.
That system is called Halakha.
Now, before you start typing angry emails about how I’m comparing apples and oranges, or before you accuse me of antisemitism for daring to examine Jewish religious law the same way we examine Islamic religious law, let me be clear about what this article is and isn’t. This isn’t an attack on Judaism. This isn’t a defense of Islam. This is an examination of how comprehensive religious legal systems actually work, using the same analytical tools for both, because that’s what honest scholarship requires.
And here’s the uncomfortable reality: American Christians have been extensively educated about Islamic religious law while remaining almost completely ignorant of Jewish religious law. They know Shariah exists. Many consider it threatening. They’ve heard sermons about it, seen news reports about it, formed strong opinions about it. But ask them what Halakha is, and you’ll get blank stares.
That ignorance has consequences. Big ones. Because you can’t understand Middle Eastern politics, you can’t evaluate claims about “Judeo-Christian values,” and you can’t think clearly about the relationship between divine law and modern governance if you only know about one of these systems while remaining blind to the other.
Let me show you what nobody else will.
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