What Matters Now to archaeologist Prof. Yonatan Adler: The origins of Judaism

Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploration into one key issue shaping Israel and the Jewish World — except this week.

Ahead of Passover, as some Jews all over the world change sets of dishes, blowtorch their stoves and, of course, cover every last counter and corner with aluminum foil, we wonder: when did the practice of this crazy religion get its start?

So I invited Ariel University's head of the Institute of Archaeology Prof. Yonatan Adler to our Jerusalem office to speak about his new book, “The Origins of Judaism.”

In our lengthy conversation, we hear how he treats the origins of the practice of Judaism as an archaeological excavation, working backward in time to gather physical and textual proof of the observance of the laws and commandments charted out in the Torah. This is a topic that has engaged Adler for well over a decade -- including his doctoral research for "The Archaeology of Purity" -- and he continues to explore it through his Origins of Judaism Project.

Adler, who obtained rabbinical ordination through the Israeli chief rabbinate in 2001, treats this question through a scientific assemblage of data points collected throughout the centuries and the guiding archaeological principle that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

While Adler hasn’t yet found evidence for foil-covered kitchen counters, at the end of our discussion he does speak about the earliest evidence for the observance of Passover, and that matters now.

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Image: Ariel University's Dr. Yonatan Adler. (courtesy)

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