Judaism and Buddhism

Abstract

Until recently, the field of Jewish-Buddhist studies had been neglected. The dearth of proper academic literature on the relationship between Judaism and Buddhism remains a problem, and despite many meritorious and pioneering studies in recent years, many aspects—historic especially—remain insufficiently researched. Scholarship on Judaism and Buddhism can be divided into three waves. The first wave proliferated from the mid-nineteenth century with speculation on links between Judaism and Buddhism in antiquity, especially regarding the influence of Buddhist ideas on the Hebrew Bible. However, this line of research subsequently lost some amount of clout among scholars during the twentieth century, and its publications are of limited value today. Comparative approaches gained popularity in a second wave during the 1960s and 1970s with the growing interest in Buddhism and Buddhist-inspired meditation during the counterculture movement, when North American Jews in particular developed a strong affinity to Buddhism that persists today. This has been widely known as the JuBu (or JewBu) phenomenon since Rodger Kamenetz’s classic The Jew in the Lotus (1994), which gave birth to a generation of scholars of Jewish-Buddhist studies who were part of this trend as much as they shaped it. Since the 1990s, the current and third wave of scholarship has used sociological, ethnographic, and historical approaches around three main foci: the so-called JuBu phenomenon remains of paramount interest, the first and second waves of Jewish-Buddhist Studies have begun to be historicized by scholars as a research subject in itself, and Jewish-Buddhist interactions not only in North America but also in Europe and Israel have garnered increasing attention. All this has recently brought new methodological qualities previously missing in Jewish-Buddhist studies to the forefront. Future tasks for the field include the study of syncretistic practices that blend Buddhism and Judaism; the exploration of Jews in Buddhist contexts in South and East Asia, a focus that has been lacking most often due to linguistic and disciplinary limitations; and developing all these geographical aspects into a global history of Judaism and Buddhism.