Like other volumes in the Keywords in Jewish Studies series from Rutgers University Press, Baker's book begins with a historical retrospective on the term Jew, which she italicizes throughout in order to insist on the contingent rather than natural work it does, and on the manifold ways that work remains contentious.
The stakes are high, as she explains: “The question of what Jew signifies, then, is embedded in very particular ways in the construction and negotiation of foundational categories and concerns of Western identities and cultures” (7). Although she grants that the term has played this role for a long time in the West, she insists that Jew and its cognates have been used over the course of the Christian era more by outsiders than by those whom it names.
The opening section, “Terms of Debate,” works to undermine the certainty apparent in an epigraph from Shaye Cohen's Beginnings of Jewishness: “Once upon a time we knew who was a Jew. … Now we are not so sure” (quoted at 16). Certainly, Baker grants that the term is contested now, but her detailed examination of recent debates about terms such as yehudi and ioudaios is designed precisely to throw the ancient situation into question: “Judaean would seem to signify … a native or resident of Judaea; an expatriate of that territory; a settler there; a member of an extended tribal group; a member of a religious subculture; a descendant or adherent of any of these” (19). Baker sees in both liberal Christian and other sources a trend toward distinguishing between Judean and Jew that may be an attempt to overcome anachronism and/or an attempt to remove the sting of gospel “anti-Judaism.” In either case, this trend is closely mapped onto an untenable dichotomy between “ethnicity” and “religion,” both of which are modern and post-Protestant terms that do not represent ancient categories. Baker thus calls into question the notion of a historical progression from a given and unreflective “ethnicity” to a chosen “religion” “that creates Jews from Judaeans” (28). For Baker, continuing to draw transhistorical distinctions between ethnicity and religion, and especially the notion that religious identity supersedes unreflective ethnicity, is itself reflective of a “patriarchal and androcentric worldview [that is] unfathomable outside a Christian theological perspective” (33). In other words, the supposed shift from particularist ethnicity to religion as “universal aspiration” echoes the Christian supersessionist narrative of progress from limited Judaism to universal Christendom (41).
Part 2, “State of the (Jew[ish]) Question,” identifies the modern debate known as the “Jewish question” as “in some measure, a question about the possibility and means of turning this name for other, a name that denies, delegitimates, and denounces, into a name for self, a pronouncement about identity, connection, and the contours of ‘legitimate’ difference” (49; emphases in original). Baker suggests, rather elegantly, that sometimes there may be much in a name: here, the possibility of adopting an interpellation from outside as a ground of group identity (the queering of the term “queer” comes to mind as partial analogy), and what that possibility or project might tell us about the historical dynamics in which it comes about. Our debates about “authentic” Jewish identity might, accordingly, benefit from her insistence that there is a “long history of usage of the name Jew for everything but an ‘authentic’ self” (50; emphasis in original).
Perhaps working against her own insistence on the limited extent to which cognates of yehudi were used as ethnonyms in the premodern era, Baker takes time to reflect on the slippage between yid and Jew. It is apparently important to her that the greeting “‘What's up, Jew?’ inhabits a linguistic universe decidedly different from Vos macht a yid?” (53). I do see her point, but I suspect the distinction is disappearing in practice. Perhaps this is especially true in New York City, where some twenty years ago, our son, delighted to find another yarmulke wearer in his generally secular school, greeted the latter with “Hey, Jew!” and received “Yeah, Jew!” in return. This may represent a movement toward an interaction of “plain civility” that Baker identifies with Vos macht a yid?, but not with the term Jew as uttered in an English-language discourse.
Further subsections of part 2 could fruitfully be used in a course on modern Jewish identity, although not all of them seem closely tied to the complex career of the term Jew per se. In an insightful discussion of “external bilingualism,” for example, Baker follows Michael A. Meyer's characterization of Mendelssohn as one of the first to consciously shape himself as a “Jew” in a “larger intellectual milieu” (cited at 58). Other provocative discussions in part 2 range from a consideration of the semantics of Jean-François Lyotard's Heidegger and “the Jews” to “Performing Jew” and “Zionism's Conflicted Claims on Jew.”
As the Keywords in Jewish Studies series likewise dictates, part 3 considers Jew “In a New Key.” For Baker, to some extent following the earlier book by Caryn Aviv and David Shneer (New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora [New York: NYU Press, 2005]), this implies a focus on what she calls “New Jews.” The focus on terms for identifying a particular group gives way to some extent to a mostly quite lucid and tightly written account of modern debates among Jews about what Jew should be. There are many real insights here as well, such as close attention to what it might mean to say that “Muslims are the new Jews.” Baker asks us to think about the kind of relation between categories that such an assertion implies. She uses the term “genealogics” to indicate “interconnected ways of formulating, thinking about, and articulating collective identifications and relationships among people(s) using conceptual categories such as ‘kinship, ‘legacy,’ ‘influence,’ ‘blood,’ and the like” (98). Accordingly, her concerns in this section turn on the Zionist attempt to refashion the Jewish people; recent notions of genetics as the surest guarantee and mark of Jewishness and its relation to earlier racisms; the relation between the image of “the Jews” and the image of Europe; and various formulations, including that of Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, of what Baker identifies as “what a lived diasporism—and Jews constituted by its practices—might look like” (128).
I have long understood that “a lived diasporism” describes the vast majority of Jewish experience over millennia, but one gathers that for Baker, it is yet to be achieved. And whereas I have also long understood that diasporic continuity requires its own mechanisms of group boundary maintenance, by the end of Baker's “New Key” she asserts that “Jews no longer look like the other, the not-self, that Jews so long remained” (148). With due respect for the new technologies of identity that Baker richly explores, I must demur: we're not there really, not yet, if ever we will be, if ever we should.
