The Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, in its nearly two-decade partnership with the Robbins Collection Research Center, hosted its seventeenth Annual Robbins Collection Lecture in Jewish Law, Thought, and Identity on February 24, 2026. Professor Leora Batnitzky of Princeton University delivered a compelling address titled “Defining Judaism: Religion, Law, Nation, and Our Current Moment,” following an introduction by Kenneth Bamberger, director of the Helen Diller Institute, who called her “perhaps the most influential academic voice in Jewish thought today.” Cosponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the event brought together leading faculty, including Helen Diller Institute Co-Director Ron Hassner, alongside a highly engaged campus and public audience.
Batnitzky initiated her lecture by invoking H. L. A. Hart’s landmark 1961 jurisprudential text, The Concept of Law, which frames law through the functional interplay of primary and secondary rules. She connected Hart’s classic query—“What is law?”—to an equally complex modern dilemma: “What is Judaism?” Rather than offering a static definition, Batnitzky argued that both concepts possess deeply intertwined histories shaped directly by the geopolitical space of the modern nation-state.
To trace this conceptual evolution, Batnitzky examined the linguistic transformation of the Hebrew word dat. Though contemporary lexicons define dat strictly as “religion” or “faith,” its ancient Persian origins—notably seen in the Book of Esther—denoted “law” or secular decrees. Medieval rationalists such as Moses Maimonides and Judah Halevi utilized dat (translating the Judeo-Arabic dīn) to signify a total divine order binding inward belief and outward legal action inextricably together.
This synthesis fractured during the early modern period. Batnitzky identified Baruch Spinoza’s 1670 Theological-Political Treatise as the conceptual turning point that established an absolute boundary between law and religion. Spinoza reduced law to “a rule for living whose only purpose is to protect life and preserve the country,” thereby leaving no space for a non-sovereign Jewish legal authority. Consequently, subsequent Jewish thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn and Samson Raphael Hirsch felt compelled to protect Jewish practice by recharacterizing it as an internal, individualized religious disposition rather than communal governance. Conversely, early Zionists like Moses Hess leaned into the political implications of Spinoza’s thought, defining Judaism strictly as a sovereign nation rather than an individual faith.
Batnitzky went on to explain that this historical splintering continues to constrain our contemporary “social imaginary”—a phrase borrowed from philosopher Charles Taylor to describe how we conceive of our “social existence.” To illustrate this ongoing fragmentation, she pointed to the polarization surrounding Donald Trump’s 2019 executive order on anti-Semitism, which interpreted Judaism as a race or national origin under Title VI. The conflicting responses from institutional leaders like Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League and activist groups like IfNotNow demonstrate a deep disagreement about whether Judaism belongs to the sphere of individual faith or collective nationhood. As Batnitzky illustrated, modern analytic jurisprudence mirrors this shift. This trend is evident in the work of legal philosophers like Ronald Dworkin, who described law not by territory, but as an internal “Protestant attitude” of personal conviction, demonstrating how secular legal theory similarly attempts to separate itself from the state’s political power.
To disrupt this rigid modern binary, Batnitzky turned to Mordecai Kaplan’s 1934 classic, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life. Written during an era of intense American nativism, Kaplan’s work advocated for “cultural hyphenisms,” asserting that individuals safely navigate multiple civilizations concurrently. For Kaplan, Judaism constitutes an all-encompassing civilization—blending religion, law, history, and culture—a view Batnitzky cast as a modern reclamation of the medieval understanding of dat.
The subsequent question-and-answer session further enriched the evening’s discourse, exploring whether Judaism’s multilayered, sociocultural nature finds parallels in other minority groups that must navigate the modern boundary between private faith and public political life. The participants considered the legacy of religious traditions operating as autonomous communal systems long before the rise of the modern nation-state, concluding that broadening our contemporary imagination is essential to reclaiming these historically suppressed dimensions of collective existence.
Through this intellectually rigorous evening, the Robbins Center and the Helen Diller Institute reaffirmed their vital role in cultivating deep, cross-disciplinary legal scholarship that continues to illuminate the complexities of global civil and religious traditions.