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  • Jewish Bodies, Jewish Minds
  • Leon Wieseltier (bio)

In recent decades the American sense of life has fallen under the spell of matter. In realm after realm of our existence, our explanations more and more adduce material causes, particularly biological ones and economic ones. Riddles of psychology are solved with references to biology, especially to genes and to Darwin; riddles of politics and international relations are solved with references to economics; and so on. Science has been twisted and promoted into scientism, and economics into economicism. The mind has become the brain. A dizzy era of technological utopianism has inculcated Americans with the belief that the best account of anything is an account of how it works, as opposed to an account of what it stands for and how it stands for it. As we master more and more gadgets of spectacular complexity, we come to believe that there is no higher kind of mastery than this. We are praxis junkies and freaks of information. Add to all this the frantically consumerist ethos of American society, in which the most widespread instrument of self-expression is shopping, and it may be said that we are living in a new dark age of materialism, philosophical and unphilosophical. The belief in the mind, and in the autonomy of its productions, and in the power of its productions to act as irreducible causes, is regarded as an archaism—as a "master narrative," than which there is no greater malediction. Never mind that materialism is a master narrative if ever there was one.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that Jewish studies in the United States would sooner or later join in the anti-idealist fun. Jewish studies have always taken on the tincture of their surroundings, not least because critical Jewish scholarship has rarely managed to slough off the apologetic spirit in which it was born almost two centuries ago. Apologetics come in many varieties. And so cultural materialism has arrived at Jewish studies departments, with excited reports of important discoveries. (By cultural materialism I mean the view that mental expressions have their most significant or most interesting causes outside the mind, in its extra-intellectual [End Page 435] conditions and circumstances.) I propose to say a few intemperate words against this development.

The history of the Jewish body was established to dispel a certain stereotype of the Jews, the old image of them as essentially "the People of the Book." It is an exercise in what Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, a pioneering scholar in this enterprise, described ten years ago as "re-membering"1 the Jewish body. The history of the Jewish body, he announced, would serve as "a reminder that Jews do not simply read and write books. Like other people, they have bodies" (PB, 7). I confess that I have never encountered a Jew, or a historian of the Jews, who thought that Jews do not have bodies. But Eilberg-Schwartz persisted in his conviction that he was bringing news: "There is a danger that the description [of the Jews] as 'People of the Book' will enable the issue of bodily reproduction and sexual intercourse to slide out of sight behind the symbol of the Jew poring over the text" (PB, 2), he wrote. And he added: "By shifting attention from the image of the Jews as a textual community to the ways Jews understand and manage their bodies—for example, to their concerns with reproduction and sexuality, marriage and death—we hope to contribute to a different picture of what Jews and Judaism are and have been" (PB, 7). In this way, Jewish historians will succeed in turning back "a larger modern strategy that attempts to disembody Jews and Judaism in hopes of spiritualizing them" (PB, 3).

There are a number of objections that may be immediately offered to such a scholarly program. For a start, it is premised upon the very peculiar notion that the "textual" conception of Jewish identity, which it correctly regards as the normative conception of Jewish identity for most of Jewish history, lacked (or more likely repressed) any understanding of the corporeal dimensions of Jewish life. It projects an odd Victorianism, the image of its own fear...

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