Bondage of the Mind
Most of us involved with issues of critical thinking are accustomed to dealing with what we think of as fundamentalism, which implies specifically Christian fundamentalism. Bondage of the Mind deals, specifically, with Jewish fundamentalism. Just as evangelicalism, and particularly evangelical fundamentalism, is a potent force in Christianity, so too is modern Orthodox Judaism a potent force among Jews today.
Orthodox Judaism, like fundamentalist Christianity, claims to be the only valid form of Judaism. In the process of evangelizing Jews, particularly Jewish youth, it refers to Jews who switch their allegiance from Reform Judaism to Orthodox Judaism as returnees. For those unacquainted with the three ideological branches of Judaism — Orthodox, Reform and Conservative — the origins of the split lie in the Jewish Enlightenment of the 19th century. Until the Jewish Enlightenment, most European thinkers viewed the Jews of Europe as hopelessly backward both intellectually and culturally. The encapsulation of the Jews, their segregation from the surrounding Christian society (resulting from centuries of intermittent persecution) had resulted in their intellectual isolation. While European society at large had been effectively secularized in the 1700s, in part as a reaction to the horrors of the religious wars (particularly the Thirty Years War), Jews had largely remained what they were in the Middle Ages.
