In this voluminous edited work, Boustan, Kosansky, and Rustow have highlighted the rapid erasure, in Jewish Studies, of the intellectual and theoretical boundaries between history and anthropology. Traditional distinctions between the diachronic and synchronic, textual and ethnographic, elite and popular, western and eastern, and so on, are breaking down. Boustan, Kosansky, and Rustow stress new directions toward polythetic methods for the study of “Judaisms” and “Jewish traditions,” to counter the problems of intellectual essentialism. These changes in Jewish Studies, the authors argue, are the result of three major shifts which include: (1) “textual hegemony” which calls for rethinking Jewish authority by focusing both on “textual materials and material texts” (5); (2) “postcolonial theory” which increases the focus of Jewish Studies on less-studied diasporic Jewish experiences; and (3) “discursive tradition” which offers a new way to rethink “Jewish tradition.”
Historically, the field of Jewish Studies has been dominated by philology, history, and religious studies. University departments have until recently maintained this intellectual tradition within the field. The editors argue that because of recent theoretical developments in Jewish Studies, new disciplines such as anthropology and comparative literature have helped to open up perspectives that are not textual, masculine, and western. In their introduction, the editors note that the recent focus on Jewish heterogeneity highlights not only the diversity within Jewish traditions and geographies, but also the need to borrow theoretical frameworks from other disciplines for a better understanding of different Jewish existences.
The book is structured around the concepts of authority, diaspora, and tradition, which the editors see as dominant themes in Jewish Studies. Adopting these conceptual frames, Boustan, Kosansky, and Rustow argue that their treatment requires new theoretical perspectives and analytical categories. Normative Jewish discourse, they note, provides limiting analytic tools to study the pluralities of Jewish experiences, societies, identities, and cultures. A “new Jewish Studies” is necessary in order to deal with these plural and heterogeneous texts, which this volume illustrates with case studies by a number of scholars organized under the rubrics of “authority,” “diaspora,” and “tradition.”
The “authority” section delves into the issues of the nature, constructions, and transformations of Jewish authority. In Chapter 1, Riv-Ellen Prell looks at a religious controversy surrounding a group of black Jews who spent a Sabbath at a Ramah camp in the summer of 1965. The dispute over halakhic positions and religious interpretation between lay and religious authorities highlighted tensions over Jewish socialization as conceptualized by educators and rabbis. In Chapter 2, J. H. Chajes discusses the nuanced intellectual navigation of “illicit” and “dangerous” magical practices in rabbinic Judaism. In Chapter 3, Yoram Bilu shifts the debate from rabbis as the locus of authority to the religious audience, examining the relationship between the personal and the collective in a study of a saint's shrine in contemporary Israel. Bilu's contribution underscores how different sources of legitimacy have affected the life-course of this shrine from its origins to its demise. Finally, Shalom Sabar studies Jewish marriage contracts as bearers of religious authority. Sabar regards material cultural as a reflection of the exercise of religious authority, and illustrates with a discussion of the iconography of marriage contracts, key objects in the religious performance of marriage.
The “diaspora” section invites the reader to consider Jewish subjectivities and communities outside traditional Jewish topographies and national boundaries. Ra‘anan S. Boustan's piece focuses on one layer of the material aspect of Jewish culture by looking at the “spatial dislocation” of the Temple vessels after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. Boustan highlights the diaspora interpretation of these material objects, the power of visual experience, and the material expression of authority. In Chapter 6, Lucia Raspe discusses “the graves of the righteous” as material texts that play a key role in the formation of Jewish identity in the diaspora. Chapter 7 is an essay by Andrea Schatz that illustrates Jewish life in the distant East with the example of Samuel Romanelli. Romanelli wrote a travelogue that is is filled with “contradictory affiliations and commitments that both constitute and derive from the networks of Jewish communication and interaction in the diaspora” (168). In Chapter 8, Tamar Katriel concludes this section by discussing Israeli discourses about African and Asian communities. Using the concept of “the ingathering of exiles,” Katriel highlights the differences between Jewish state discourses that seek the rescue of distant communities and the perfect realization of Jewish unity, on the one hand, and the voices of members of these communities who long for “homes” outside Israel, on the other.
The final section highlights the notion of tradition not as static or fixed but as “syncretized and reproduced,” in Michael Gilsenan's term. In Chapter 9, Albert Baumgarten and Marina Rustow consider Jewish discourses from ancient Judaism to the modern period. Arguing from the theoretical standpoint of the invention of tradition, the authors highlight the ways in which authority in Judaism “legitimizes innovation and sacralizes traditional practice.” Following a similar line of thought, Sylvie Anne Goldberg deals with the issue of calendar calculation in medieval Judaism by discussing the contexts and rules of religious interpretation. In Chapter 11, Ephraim Kanarfogel looks into prayer as a pivotal context in which interpretation of traditional practices takes place. In Chapter 12, Tamar El-Or examines the manifestation of a new Jewish “spiritual experience” in the public domain by describing the ways in which women in the Sefaradi community in Israel return to halakhah as well as negotiate its application outside the domestic sphere. Finally, Michael Swartz concludes the section by looking at ritual as “historically situated discourse,” examining changes in sacrifice rituals as well as challenges to religious authority.
The editors have done a fine job in arranging the volume's many essays under three clear rubrics (though the essays sometimes go beyond the themes of the categories in which they were included). But this volume is given coherence and academic validation by the final assessment, written by Harvey E. Goldberg. In a clear synthesis of the book's ideas, Goldberg, a major figure in Jewish Studies, highlights the need for further scholarship in Jewish Studies that crosses disciplines and regions. I believe this volume should serve as stimulus to scholars of ancient and modern Judaism to undertake the challenge of integrating different thematic, theoretical, and methodological approaches, eliminating, among other things, the intellectual boundaries between anthropology and history.
I would like to stress the value of this work for students and scholars of anthropology, history, Jewish Studies, and religion. Hopefully, the approach it elaborates will be adopted by scholars in Jewish Studies (as well as other disciplines), beyond the U.S. and Israel.
