Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of the First Arab

3: The Rabbis and Their Others

3 The Rabbis and Their Others And it is probably safe to say that among the groupings of people in every society are always some that distinguish people who are my people, or are more my people, from people who are not so much my people. The WeThey difference, in some form, arranges the human elements on the universal stage. —Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Tranformations T he idea that the Other is a creation of the subjective self and not a discrete, objectively existing entity has been the topic of several works in various fields and disciplines.1 Indubitably, the study of the conception of Other in its myriad manifestations has contributed inordinately to our understanding of literature, society, culture, politics, and religion. And, here, too, as a conceptual framework, the Other offers insight into modes of rabbinic thought. For the most part images of Ishmael, the children of Keturah, and Esau (when coupled with Ishmael) are neither violent nor vicious. This is not to say that all representations of non-Jews in early rabbinic literature are evenhanded.2 But even these are mild compared to what one encounters in early medieval Jewish texts. In addition, what our observation offers, then, is an understanding of the ways in which the rabbis expressed the election of Israel. With the exception of their treatment of Esau, who signi fied Rome and then Christianity,3 and whom they depict in harshly negative terms even in the earlier literature, the rabbis do not point to the inherent evil of a real other, but rather address the unique status of the Jewish people. That is, the focus is not on maligning the other nations, but on 47 separating Israel from them. Differentiation, not denigration, defines the character of these rabbinic texts. More to the point, the Other is used as the antipode of the selfconceived rabbinic notion of Israel. In these instances the Other is a means by which the rabbis establish self-identity. It would be misleading to approach these sources as if they were descriptive of real entities. Rather, by creating a contrast between Israel and the Other, the rabbis use such marginalized figures as Ishmael and the children of Keturah in order to make statements about Jewish identity in antiquity. As S. Stern rightly states: “The compression of the non-Jewish nations into a single, monolithic entity, the ‘nations’, serves the purpose of opposing a coherent—and equivalent—‘other’ to the single entity of ‘Israel’. This results in a balanced contrast between self and other, upon which Jewish identity can be predicated .”4 He writes elsewhere, “It should . . . be noted that the ‘nations’ in rabbinic writings do not represent an observable reality ‘out there’, but rather a logical opposite to the identity of Israel, thus defined in rabbinic writings in purely self-referential terms.”5 Indeed, Stern’s detection of the interplay between Jacob and Esau as reflective of the dialectical conceptual contrast between Israel and the nations is highly appropriate in describing many midrashic texts, but while G. Cohen reads the historical background into the foreground, Stern ignores nuances that indeed indicate the extent to which the rabbis were aware of “the vicissitudes of historical change.”6 Furthermore, as R. Goldenberg observes: This notion that the name of an ethnic group can be specific and generic at the same time, indirectly reflects the ambiguity in the covenant . . . Israel as a nation could recognize the distinctive character of each of its neighbors, while Israel as cult community saw all other peoples as alike in their worship of false gods. In its turn this double meaning gave rise to a corresponding duality in later rabbinic thought: when it served their needs rabbis could distinguish very carefully between one foreign nation and another, but at other times the whole non-Jewish world was homogenized into “the gentiles,” υummot ha-ζolam, the goyim.7 Goldenberg is abundantly correct in arguing that the rabbis could think typologically and realistically equally well; among everyone, “everyone” has multiple Others. To be sure, we cannot afford to make blanket statements that blind us to the rabbis’ awareness of the world around them, and to the ways in which they dealt with real peoples and places. Therefore in order to understand 48 Ishmael on the Border how they lived in and made sense of the world in practical terms...