Elizabeth Shanks Alexander and Beth A. Berkowitz.
Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation. Routledge, 2018.
Even for those of us trained in rabbinics in religion departments (like myself), the fit in the field of Religion feels uneasy at times. For three decades now, scholars of religious studies have been coming to terms with the Protestant-Christian orientation of the field and the constructed nature of the category of religion. Meanwhile, academics in the social sciences have for the most part neglected consideration of religious factors in their study of human populations, operating as if the secularization theory were true and religious commitments as a social factor were decreasing in importance. The timing of these two trends was unfortunate, making it difficult to argue for the relevance of the study of religion, especially in the age of increasing distrust of religious institutions. My own affiliation with comparative religion, a practical necessity of my employment and an avenue for attracting enrollment to my courses on the rabbis, has aroused the bewilderment—if not suspicion—of some of my Jewish Studies colleagues (not to mention my colleagues in the social sciences). When I saw this volume’s title Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation, I was intrigued and hoped this volume could help me find my bearings both in terms of the methodological repertoire I use and to better explain myself to colleagues and students. This volume succeeds on all fronts, addressing both theoretical and methodological issues as well as our lived experiences as scholars with multiple constituencies.
As Shanks Alexander observes “scholars of Rabbinics are increasingly housed in departments of Religion or Religious Studies” (p. 3). Although exact data is not available for rabbinicists and their departmental affiliations, according to a 2015 study Profiling the Jewish Studies Profession in North America,[1] AJS academics more broadly are working primarily in History (20%), Religion (19%), and Jewish Studies (12%) followed by Literature departments, NELC, and other smaller specializations (p. 16). In 2015, Religion and History departments were the top two producers of PhDs for Jewish Studies (p. 18). This is a long way from the 1960s, when rabbinics was only studied in Jewish seminaries or philology departments (not to mention closed to women who could not access yeshiva training).
Elizabeth Shanks Alexander and Beth Berkowitz began a rich conversation about rabbinics and religion a decade ago, organizing a panel at the 2010 AJS panel where they asked whether “religion” was relevant to the study of ancient Judaism (the session was entitled “Interrogating “religion” in ancient Judaism”). They continued this conversation in a thought-provoking 2011 AJS Perspectives piece[2] and then by assembling scholars of rabbinics from religion departments in a conference in 2013, thus bringing this exemplary volume to press in 2018 and inviting the rest of us to join the conversation on what these fields may contribute to each other.
In an excellent and thorough introduction, Shanks Alexander elucidates what’s at stake in putting rabbinics and religious studies in conversation, providing a brief intellectual history of these respective fields and explaining why this volume is timely. Shanks Alexander observes that for “the most part, difference between the two fields gives rise to mutual benign neglect, though occasionally it produces more skeptical postures” (p. 3). However, the field of religion itself has changed in a way that now makes it more conducive to the perspectives and idiosyncrasies of the field of rabbinics. The volume makes the benefits of rabbinics for religious studies evident: rabbinics undermines the Protestant Christian-oriented category of religion, destabilizes universal ideals by upholding the value of the particular and local, and finally offers reading practices that are productive beyond the rabbinic corpora.
This volume’s twelve essays are divided into four parts which interact with each other productively. Since I cannot offer equal space to all contributions, I focus on the first two sets of essays organized under the titles of “The History of ‘religion’” and “Managing Commitments.” Part 1 opens with an essay by Randall Styers, on “Religious Studies, past and present.” His perspective on the American institutional and intellectual history of the field is illuminating and he shows the “study of religion provides a vivid window onto the cultural logics through the modern world has been structured” (p. 34). However much crafted, the category remains useful as an “occasion for analysis” (p. 34); an opportunity for reflection on the distance between the scholar and the phenomena she studies.
In the second essay by Berkowitz on “Different religions? Big and little religion in Rabbinics and Religious Studies,” Berkowitz reflects on the construction of the category of religion in relation to Judaism in the works of Shaye Cohen, Daniel Boyarin, Steve Mason, Adele Reinhartz, and Annette Yoshiko Reed. Berkowitz argues that these scholars’ approaches exemplify what she calls “little religion,” a restrictive perspective on religion. Taking a step back, she identifies three key moments in twentieth-century religious studies: “(1) Quest for origins, (2) the project of definition, and (3) and the genealogy of the category” (p. 46). The first two eras brought to the foreground the expansive category of religion, what she calls “the big religion of modern Religious Studies” (p. 47). She locates the origin of “little religion” in the genealogy of religion, which sought to deconstruct the category. She closes her essay with a practical call. A final essay in this section by K.R. Schaeffer on J. Z. Smith and the study of religion, accessibly discusses Smith’s contributions to the study of religion, the ways Smith’s have been misunderstood and closes with practical take-aways from Smith’s oeuvre.
I was impressed by the second section of this volume, titled “Managing Commitments,” wherein the editors affirm that absolute objectivity is a chimera and belies the fact that we all come to our subject matter with some lived experiences and preferences. In this context as they point out, the “goal becomes managing, rather than neutralizing, facets of the scholar’s identity that predispose her toward certain lines of inquiry” (p. 8). The first essay in this section by Paul Dafydd Jones rejects the dichotomous orientation of “criticism or “caretaking” that scholars supposedly take towards their subject matter (p. 69). Coming from the field of Christian theology, he shares his experience of balancing the joy he experiences in his commitments with the “methodological pluralism” of the academy. He disavows dogmatism and upholds the “incompleteness of all human knowledge, calling this posture “cheerful unease” and offering it as an approach for rabbinicists or scholars of religious studies in general if it resonates with them (pp. 78–79).
Relatedly, Deborah Barer essay on “Reading midrash as theological practice” confronts a challenging and crucial topic: as scholars of rabbinics, what role ought we serve for the general Jewish public and its leaders? Barer situates this question in the context of the 2013 PEW results that found many Jews defined themselves as “Jews of no religion.” Acknowledging that academics are averse to theological dogma, she argues that we nonetheless have important resources to offer. Using Sifrei Devarim as an example, she argues that “the hermeneutical techniques particular to rabbinic midrash can be constructively applied to contemporary theological engagement with classical Jewish sources” (p. 84), but importantly these “midrashic strategies” yield only “a systematic practice of theological engagement with classical sources that will not (and cannot) yield systematic doctrine” (emphasis in original, p. 97). While Barer is thinking of how rabbinics scholarship might be of service to deepening discourse among Jewish theologians, her questions are ones that are increasingly hard to ignore within the religious studies classroom. As non-affiliation with religious institutions is reaching an all-time high among millennials and generation Z, paralleling a decline in enrollment in religion courses across the United States, we scholars must grapple with the value of religious literacy and how to make our subject matter relevant to the lives of our students and the general public.
The final essay in this section and the most meta essay in the volume is written by Charles Mathewes, examining religious studies and rabbinics as humanistic endeavors. Mathewes frames a deep theoretical discussion of the normative aims of these fields with an analogy to the Alexandrian age, noting how our age, like that of ancient Alexandria, is “marked by tremendous gains in archival work and developing disciplines of inquiry” as well as “a certain intellectual, if not decline then decadence, or perhaps triviality…as the weight of the past pressed down upon the fresh thinking of the present” (p. 105). His outsider perspective on how rabbinics can contribute to religious studies and the humanities more broadly merits close reading.
Two excellent sets of essays close out the volume. In the section on “Comparative rubrics and rabbinic data,” three scholars show interdisciplinary religious studies theories are fruitfully applied to data from rabbinic texts: Chaya Halberstam’s “The legal language of everyday life in rabbinic religion” draws on Robert Orsi, James Boyd White, and Pierre Bourdieu to posit that “rabbinic law is as much religious as it is legal: it is a discursive activity that mediates a relationship between a human community and heaven” (p. 123). Sarit Kattan Gribetz’s essay on “Time, Gender, and Ritual in Rabbinic sources,” fleshes out Nancy Jay’s critique of Emile Durkheim’s theory of the ritual construction of time, which completely excluded women from meaning-making. Kattan Gribetz demonstrates how rabbinic rituals focused on “structuring men and women’s daily time” can offer a way forward on topics left undertheorized in religious studies (p. 143). Naftali Cohn’s essay on “Ritual failure, ritual successes, and what makes ritual meaningful in the Mishnah” develops the approach of Ronald Grimes (The Craft of Ritual Studies 2014) and shows how the rabbis perform rituals both because they’re obligatory and because they “have a variety of beneficial consequences for individual participant and community,” defying ritual theorists that seek to offer either symbolic or instrumental approaches to ritual (p. 159).
The final section, “Critical reading in Religious Studies” demonstrates how beginning with the academic methods of rabbinic studies can make contributions to religious studies. Jordan Rosenblum’s essay on “Thou Shalt not cook a bird in its mother’s milk? Theorizing the evolution of a rabbinic regulation” is not to be missed: comparing earlier with later discussions of one of the most famous and consequential biblical verses (Exod 23:19 and parallels), Rosenblum shows how “rabbinic redactors engage in an act of misrecognition, which serves to establish their own practice as normative and natural” (p. 182), a quintessentially religious move.
This section also includes Gregg Gardner’s essay “From the general to the specific: a genealogy of ‘acts of reciprocal kindness’ (gemilut Hasidim) in rabbinic literature,” recovering obscured earlier definitions of this concept, which are submerged by later Babylonian rabbinic discussions, and thus contributing to a larger discussion of social ethics, pertinent beyond religious studies. Gardner’s investigation of the meaning of acts of generosity is a fitting end to this generous volume, but I do not want to close this review without mention of Kelly West Figueroa-Ray’s essay “Learning how to read: how Rabbinics aids in the study of contemporary Christian scripture-reading practices,” which models how non-rabbinicists can employ rabbinic reading practices to illuminate other layered oral texts and expositions. This was a topic highlighted at the most recent SBL in San Diego in a workshop on Manichean Studies for rabbinicists, which could also have been titled how can rabbinicists further studies of Manichean texts, an event which bears out Figueroa-Ray’s argument.
One term which I was surprised not to find in this book was the word feminist, ironic given that this volume is the most feminist monograph I’ve encountered in a long time. Its framework seems to me to model feminist practices because it’s inclusive, non-hierarchical, demonstrating parity on multiple levels. Moreover, the volume acknowledges the subjectivity of scholars of religion, devoting a section to managing our commitments with commendable honesty. And finally, the book’s contributions are united by an outward orientation, its inviting conversational tone is highlighted in its title and felt throughout. The contributors invite us to engage with them at a high level, and yet avoid unnecessary jargon, and comment on our lived experience as scholars, teachers, and colleagues in diverse settings.
Mika Ahuvia, University of Washington, mahuvia@uw.edu
[1]With apologies for citing a sociologist who was careless in this treatment of human beings, see the last AJS survey available by Steven M. Cohen, Profiling the Jewish Studies Profession in North America Highlights from the Survey of AJS Members. 2015. https://www.associationforjewishstudies.org/docs/default-source/surveys-of-the-profession/ajs-2014-full-survey-report.pdf?sfvrsn=8
[2] Elizabeth Shanks Alexander and Beth Berkowitz, “A Conversation about Religious Studies and Rabbinic Texts,” AJS Perspectives: the Religious Issue (Fall 2011). “http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/the-religious-issue-fall-2011/