This brief, but densely packed, volume by Jonathan Boyarin interrogates contemporary scholarship concerning concepts of Christendom, Europe, and modernity. Although the Library of Congress catalogues The Unconverted Self as “Christianity and other religions—Judaism,” the book addresses much more than questions of inter-religious dialogue. In fact, it provides important new ways to reconsider ideas about identity, especially in light of postcolonial studies.
Boyarin uses Spain and its treatment of Jews, Muslims, and Indians as a case study to examine the claim that 1492 and Christopher Columbus's voyage to the New World signaled the beginning of the modern world. Indeed, the coincidence of the expulsion of the Jews, the fall of Muslim Granada, and the departure of Columbus is both “compelling and misleading” (17). He argues that a number of discourses of difference attempted to establish geopolitical and theological boundaries long before that fateful year. In fact, the colonization of the New World was “part and parcel of the efforts to expand, rationalize, and unify Christian Europe that had been going on for centuries” (14).
The Unconverted Self reprises some of the themes Boyarin developed in The Ethnography of Reading (Berkeley: University of California, 1993) and Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994). The current volume continues to reflect Boyarin's background as an anthropologist and his interest in the social dimensions of history and geography, as well as his work as a scholar of Jewish thought and culture.
The author knows the scholarly literature on Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages (although he doesn't always agree with it), and relies upon anthropological and literary-critical studies of colonial Latin America to shape his analysis of Indians in the New World. He is particularly indebted to the work of Anthony Pagden, Inga Clendinnen, Rolena Adorno, and Sabine MacCormack in this latter regard. Postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Enrique Dussel are also cited, even as Boyarin critiques postcolonial studies that assume a hegemonic Christian Europe ethnocentrism. Many important points and arguments appear in the endnotes, and one wishes for footnotes—or even hyperlinks!—to facilitate shifting between text and notes.
After an introduction that outlines the argument, the book turns to the unresolved nature of Christian identity. According to Boyarin, the separation of Christianity from Judaism was never completed, and thus the continuing existence of Jews contributed to self-doubt among Christians. In medieval Spain, the addition of Muslims to the mix—as well as Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity—served to heighten Christian anxiety about what it meant to be a Christian. Polemical tracts served to define the Christian self, rather than to convert or engage in dialogue with others. A clash between internal personal struggle and external political conflict gave way to a “battle for Christ,” in which missionary activities were described in martial metaphors, and friars became soldiers for Christ.
The book then takes a close look at Muslims, a group which differs from Jews in its historical and theological connections to Christianity. Nevertheless, many of the same tropes used to characterize Jews—such as their carnality and literalism—were used to describe Muslims. Just as the survival of Judaism as a religion weakened theological assertions, Muslim control of the Iberian Peninsula undercut the political claims of Christendom. Boyarin poses the grammatically and historically provocative question: When is Europe? He answers: “To a considerable extent, Christian Europe came into being simultaneously with the rise of the new and aggressively expansive Islam and as an overt response to that expansion” (43).
The idea of Christendom was also challenged when colonial ventures attempted to extend Christianity throughout the globe and the colonizers encountered Indians and Africans. These meetings with the Other abroad tested the Christian impulse toward universalization, that is, the unification of race and religion into a single identity. By relating Christianity to rationality, and disbelief to irrationality, Christian missionaries and conquistadors could justify mistreatment of Jews, Indians, and all others since these persons seemed to lack a rational soul. Boyarin tacks back and forth between Jews and Indians to see how Christian fear of change, obsession with identity, and desire for stability led them to seeing Jews and Indians as either non-humans or humans possessed by the devil. The “body of Christ,” that is, the church, became the measure of humanity, and a variety of efforts—including torture and inquisition—occurred to maintain its purity.
Boyarin problematizes a variety of ideas about “Christian Europe” by describing the ways that Jews, Muslims, and Indians were “shadows of the divided Christian self ” (112). The desire for purity within Christendom led to genocidal actions against Indians in the sixteenth century, and to the Holocaust of the Jews in the twentieth. “The project of Christian Europe,” he concludes, “continues to shape our conditions—our imagination and constraints, our crises and our dreams” (118).
It is difficult to neatly pigeonhole The Unconverted Self within a particular time period or according to a specific theme. The book appears in the library next to a number of books about Jewish and Christian relations, including Constantine's Sword by James Carroll, a book that argues for a more or less unbroken history of Christian anti-Semitism. Boyarin rejects the idea of “a seamless narrative of Christian consolidation and conquest” (56), and thereby undermines some of Carroll's presuppositions. I am glad that both books are on the same shelf, however, for the contradictions between the two are illuminating in themselves. As Boyarin writes on the last page of his book, the past remains open “only if we work at setting aside the hard encrustations of our differences without falling prey to the illusion that we can all become one” (118).
