Ancient Judaism (book)

Ancient Judaism (German: Das antike Judentum) is an essay written by the German economist and sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. The original edition appeared in the 1917–1919 issues of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Marianne Weber, his wife, published the essays as Part Three of his Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie in 1920–1921. An English translation was made in 1952 and several editions were released since then.

It was his fourth and last major work on the sociology of religion, after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism and The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. In this work he attempts to explain the factors that were responsible for the early differences between Oriental and Occidental religiosity.^[1] It is especially visible when the mysticism developed by Western Christianity is compared with the asceticism that flourished within the religious traditions of India.^[1] Weber's premature death in 1920 prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with his planned analysis of the Psalms, the Book of Job, Rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity and Islam.

Weber wrote that

Anyone who is heir to traditions of modern European civilization will approach problems of universal history with a set of questions, which to him appear both inevitable and legitimate. These questions will turn on the combination of circumstances which has brought about the cultural phenomena that are uniquely Western and that have at the same time (...) a universal cultural significance^[1]

Weber notes that Judaism not only fathered Christianity and Islam, but was crucial to the rise of the modern Western world, as its influence was as important as those of Hellenistic and Greco-Roman civilizations.