Part Three: The West and the Rest

In his preface to the entire volume, David Biale compares Cultures of the Jews to what he regards as its most closely related predecessors, Louis Finkelstein's The Jews: Their History, Religion and Contribution to Civilization and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson's A History of the Jewish People. While expressing his admiration for both of these works, Biale makes it clear that he considers them to be, in certain respects, ill conceived. He criticizes Finkelstein for the focus on religion "that dominates his understanding of Jewish culture" (p. xxix). "The Ben-Sasson volumes," he complains, "are characterized by a distinct, if muted, nationalist teleology" (p. xxx). In contrast to these earlier works, Cultures of the Jews utilizes an expansive definition of culture, one under which religion is subsumed. And it strives to escape not only from a nationalist teleology but also from any teleology whatsoever.

Needless to say, the demotion of religion from the main substance of the Jews' culture to one aspect of it does not result in the neglect of the subject. Biale notes in his preface that throughout Jewish history "the multiplicity of Jewish cultures always rested on the Bible and—with the exception of the Karaites and the Ethiopian Jews—on the Talmud and other rabbinic literature." These works, augmented in the Middle Ages by additional religious texts, were, Biale states, "as defining of Jewish identity" as any other cultural factors (p. xxiv). In keeping with these observations, most of the chapters in Cultures of the Jews are very largely concerned with different forms of Judaism that have evolved throughout the ages. Their uniform eschewal of a teleological approach to Jewish history does not prevent their authors from devoting considerable attention to those who were animated by contrary outlooks.

It is easy, in fact, to imagine the disappointment of a bookstore customer enticed by this volume's attractive appearance, title, and promise of novelty into thinking that here, at last, is a comprehensive history of the Jews that has a largely unholy tale to tell. For what is there in Cultures of the Jews that is not thoroughly bound up with religion? Here and there one finds subtitles such as "Private Life and Popular Culture" (which appears in Eric M. Meyers's chapter on "Jewish Culture in Greco-Roman Palestine") or "Gender Distinctions" (in Moshe Rosman's chapter on "Jewish Culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth"). But even the subsections so designated and others like them are usually more concerned with religion than anything else. What Cultures of the Jews really does, for the most part, is not so much to downplay Judaism's role in the cultural life of the Jewish people as to explore the multifarious ways in which the Jews' religion has developed in response to their contacts with other peoples and cultures.

Only when the narrative reaches early modern times does this begin to change. The first signs of a different emphasis appear in Elliott Horowitz's racy account of the lives of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian Jews. In Part Three, entitled "Modern Encounters," all of the authors adopt a more wide-ranging approach than those represented by the earlier works with which Cultures of the Jews invites us to compare it. But this shift in perspective has its problems. It is, to be sure, untainted by any trace of teleology, but it is not utterly devoid of tendentiousness.

Before dwelling, however, on what seem to me to be the shortcomings of Part Three, I would like to take note of at least a few of the ways in which the fresh and wide-ranging inquiries included in it offer new insights into a multitude of Jewish cultural phenomena. The natural place to begin would be with the very first essay, in which Richard Cohen focuses on the Jewish communities of nineteenth-century Western and Central Europe. Touring such capitals as London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, Cohen demonstrates the ways in which members of these cities' rapidly expanding Jewish communities affirmed their bifurcated identities through the construction of diverse and "imposing houses of worship." He shows how the...