Ancient Judaism is a text by Max Weber from 1921. It is one of the last writings of the German philosopher, closely linked to his previous works on the sociology of religion, particularly the sociology of Christianity. The origins of Jewish culture were by no means an unexplored field in German scholarship and the question of the relationship between religion and the Jewish people had been raised multiple times. However, it was precisely this work that inaugurated, within German culture, a mode of inquiry that examined religion not only in its structuring within society but also in its role in shaping that society as such. Considering the West as the result of a process of rationalization, in fact, assigns Judaism a privileged role; according to Weber, from its very inception, Judaism was able to strip religion of its magical elements and instead clothe it with an ethical and political structure capable of building a society on its own. A later but equally significant text will be examined alongside Weber's positions, both in terms of its methodological approach and, in part, its conclusions. In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida describes Jewishness as a worldly space situated between memory and the future, a memory of an original and mystical gesture that has always already been mediated and rationalized through writing. In other words, a separation in the form of rationalization, which closely aligns with Weber's theory of Judaism as a religion founded on a theodicy capable of guiding life according to a human ethic. Through a comparative reading of these two texts, an attempt will be made to demonstrate how what Weber defines as Jewish prophetic activity and the originally religious gesture later rationalized into an ethical-social archive, as seen by Derrida in the construction of the Jewish people, can be considered an early manifestation of an intellectual attitude, opening a new path in the study of religious phenomena in a broader sense.