section_path: Etymology
section_name: Etymology
paragraph_text: Etymology
  
  The term Judaism derives from Iudaismus, a Latinized form of the Ancient Greek Ioudaismos (Ἰουδαϊσμός) (from the verb ἰουδαΐζειν, "to side with or imitate the "). Its ultimate source was the Hebrew יהודה, Yehudah, " Judah ", which is also the source of the Hebrew term for Judaism: יַהֲדוּת, Yahadut. The term Ἰουδαϊσμός first appears in the Hellenistic Greek book of 2 Maccabees in the 2nd century BCE (i.e. 2 Maccabees 2:21, 8:1 and 14:38). In the context of the age and period it meant "seeking or forming part of a cultural entity" and it resembled its antonym hellenismos, a word that signified a people's submission to Hellenic (Greek) cultural norms. The conflict between iudaismos and hellenismos lay behind the Maccabean revolt and hence the invention of the term iudaismos.
  
  Shaye J. D. Cohen writes in his book The Beginnings of Jewishness:
  
  We are tempted, of course, to translate as "Judaism," but this translation is too narrow, because in this first occurrence of the term, Ioudaïsmós has not yet been reduced to the designation of a religion. It means rather "the aggregate of all those characteristics that makes Judaeans Judaean (or Jews Jewish)." Among these characteristics, to be sure, are practices and beliefs that we would today call "religious," but these practices and beliefs are not the sole content of the term. Thus Ioudaïsmós should be translated not as "Judaism" but as Judaeanness.
  
  Daniel R. Schwartz, however, argues that "Judaism", especially in the context of the Book of Maccabees, refers to the religion, as opposed to the culture and politics of the Judean state. He believes it reflected the ideological divide between the Pharisees and Sadducees and implicitly, anti-Hasmonean and pro-Hasmonean factions in Judean society.
  
  According to the Oxford English Dictionary the earliest citation in English where the term was used to mean "the profession or practice of the Jewish religion; the religious system or polity of the Jews" is Robert Fabyan's The newe cronycles of Englande and of Fraunce (1516). "Judaism" as a direct translation of the Latin Iudaismus first occurred in a 1611 English translation of the apocrypha (Deuterocanon in Catholic and Eastern Orthodoxy), 2 Macc. ii. 21: "Those that behaved themselves manfully to their honour for Iudaisme."