Before The Middle Of The Seventeenth Century, The Han Chinese People And The Religion Of The Jewish National Character Study

"Religion" and "religious belief" are two concepts of great importance in the academe of religious study. The common view on "religious belief which refers to a certain faith in religion is beyond controversy, however, the definition of "religion" differs from person to person with varied characteristics and focuses and discussions about this have not reached a conclusion yet. The widely adopted definition of "religion" in China is the "Four Elements Theory" of Lv Daji.The most distinctive feature of this theory is to deal religion as a standardized and institutionalized social and cultural system.This theory has long been seen as the milestone in religious study in China.The main topic of this thesis is not giving individual comments on this theory, but rather to explain religion from a new perspective, which is to consider religion as a specific social phenomenon.By me, "Religion" is defined as a particular social phenomenon refering to a worship and faith toward the supernatural in vitual world or the deified objects in real world by a specific group in a certain historical period, for a special purpose. Accordingly, the unique function of religion is to give spiritual comfort to people during their lives and upon their death.On this basis, I proposed the concept-"character of religious belief", which means " the character and style a group reflects in religious aspects through a long-time evolution". Therefore this thesis is mainly based on the re-interpretation of the definition of "religion" and the unique defining of the phrase "character of religious belief".As for the situation in domestic academic research field of religious study, There exits no systematic and in-depth comparative research between the religious believes of Han nationality and Jewish people of a limited historical period. Other related researches basically focus on two major aspects:the Han nationality religious studies and Judism studies. and from my perspective, there are two main limitations of these studies: on one hand, these two studies have their own directions and are less crossed, on the other hand, most of the scholars put emphasis on ethinic minorities rather than Han nationality, which means they do not single "Han people" out for special study.Moreover, as long as the concept of "Han people" is involed, it often appears in the form of some vague notions like "Chinese nation" or "Chinese".In fact, even though the Han nationality is the main body of the Chinese nation and accouts for the majority of Chinese people, the fact that China is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country should not be ignored. Han people is just one specific ethnic group and enjoys totally different believes from other people. So it is more scientific and reasonable to single out the "Han people" for study,Based on this, this thesis compares and deconstructs the different faiths of Jewish people and Han people before the middle of the seventeenth century. The reason why I chose this specific period of history is that during this time, the character of religious belief of Han people and the Jewish people was far more stable and easier to master than it was afterwards due to the social instability. Adopting the literature research method, this paper sets forth the Han's "prose style"character and the Jewish "concentrated " character of religious belief in five historical stages divided as "emerging, germinating, establishing, fortune adjusting, maturing and stabilizing", compares both content and extension, and trace the final source from aspects of cultural traditions, geography and national identity.The thesis explains that two styles of Jews and Han not only differs from each other in both extension and evolution, but share some commonness as well and the fundamental reasons lie in different cultural traditions of"happy culture" or "guilty culture", living environment of stability or instability and multiple and inclusive or single and exclusive national identity.There are three main innovations brought by this thesis: (1)to define "religion" from a whole new perspective and to propose a new concept--" character of religious belief " on this basis; (2)to put forward and study the "prose style" of religious belief of Han people and concentrated character of religious belief of the Jewish people respectively; (3)to single the "Han nationality" out of the general idea of "Chinese" and to study their own religious character. All of these ideas are original and therefore can make up for lack of research in this area.