The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship

Chapter Six: Future Prospects

119 6 Future Prospects In this last chapter, I would like to move from Jewish studies’ past to its future, from what was to what might well be. The history of Jewish studies—caught up in the desire for emancipation, inclusion, and normalization —has left its indelible mark on the present. The previous five chapters have tried to understand and contextualize these desires, showing how they still play a large role in how Judaism is imagined and encountered within the ebb and flow of other disciplinary contexts. Jewish studies is perennially caught, as witnessed time and again in the previous pages, between the forces of particularism and universalism, between ethnic studies with its emphasis on insularity, and disciplinarity that, at least in theory, is not interested in issues of special pleading. Jewish studies’ present must look to its past in order to redress certain of its more apologetic features for its future vitality. If the past has largely been defined by the desire for recognition and inclusion into the mainstream university curriculum, its future must be one of increased interdisciplinary relevance based on the twin principles of extroversion and autonomy. The former means the acknowledgment that Jewish data is neither unique nor special, but constructed and contested in the same manner that any other dataset is. The latter means that it is necessary to counter the rise of private foundations that seek to shape the field based on various ideological agendas. Within this latter context, the previous chapter recounted one possible future, one wherein such foundations determine what counts as “Jewish” (and even what gets to count as “Jewish studies”) and what does not. In times of economic instability and the increasing diminishment of university resources, the financial largesse of such foundations set, simultaneously, a financially attractive yet very dangerous precedent. This situation, I argued, reveals the parallels between past and present and their repercussions for the future. Replicating both the insularity of Wissenschaft des Judentums and the 120 The Study of Judaism role of outside money in the development of Jewish studies, such foundations risk making scholarship beholden to a set of interests that are decidedly nonscholarly. This meddling—and it is certainly not unique to Jewish studies1 —undermines the entire foundation upon which scholarship is at least in theory based. Even though the beginnings of Jewish studies may well have been in apologetics and pleas for Jewish inclusion, it need not end in an introspective agenda that refuses to acknowledge the fluid boundaries between what is “Jewish” and what is “nonJewish ,” a refusal grounded as it is in larger ideological frameworks that seek to use scholarship for their own uses and abuses. Instead, it becomes necessary for the academic study of Judaism to disengage from the financial support of such ideologues. The future, in other words, must be open to a set of mutually beneficial conversations with other humanities disciplines.2 The insularity and introspection of Jewish studies can be laid neither solely nor simply at the door of Jewish studies, however. Here, it is important to keep in mind the history of Jewish exclusion both in Germany in the nineteenth century and in America during much of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that it was largely self-financed in this country for much of its history, Jewish studies was able to flourish largely on account of its academic integrity based as it was on the ability to keep private monies and academic pursuits separate from one another. Now, however, the forces for exclusion are centripetal, not centrifugal . There is a tendency to encounter Judaism—in addition to constructing it as responsible for all that is good in the West (e.g., its “moral and spiritual direction,” to quote David Gelernter)—as if it existed in isolation and then appreciating and understanding it as somehow ontologically or taxonomically distinct from other cultural and/or religious forms. Rather than be integrated into the university curriculum, Jewish studies is now potentially conceived as standing apart, as somehow unique, by those who engage in its study. The result is that we have almost come full circle: whereas in the beginnings of Jewish studies, non-Jews sought to keep the study of Judaism (with the exception of ancient Israel and its spiritual fulfillment in Jesus) in Jewish seminaries, we now witness the study of Jewish data—self-constructed as sui generis—in self-imposed departments or centers that function as quasiseminaries. The question that Jewish studies...