Introduction

Summary

“God is one” has been called Judaism’s “primary testimony of faith.” In this book, I examine what these specific words, taken as a kind of religious slogan, mean in this Jewish context. Readers will likely already understand, of course, that these words do not have a single meaning and probably never did. The history that this book will narrate is about the surprisingly many meanings they can bear and how they come to take on some of these meanings at various periods. I will concentrate on important turning points in the history of Judaism and its intellectual progenitors and interlocutors – ancient Near Eastern religiosity and its Egyptian, Israelite, and Judahite varieties; Hellenistic and rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity; medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy and early Kabbalah; and modern Jewish thought – to bring a long historical perspective to this question. The structure and tone of this book is therefore as a narrative history from antiquity to modernity.