The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship

Notes

139 Notes Introduction 1. For a disturbing case of an individual who did take this as part of his official job description, see the account of Howard Eilberg-Schwartz in Mahler 1994. I certainly do not wish to imply that this is the fate of all those sympathetic to the political beliefs of Eilberg-Schwartz; however, it is disturbing enough to merit mention. This policing of borders will be the subject matter of chapter 5 below. 2. In her How Judaism Became a Religion (2011), Leora Batnitzky is also interested in the issue of how modern Jewish thinkers felt compelled to resolve the tension between Judaism and the modern, Protestant category of religion. Her interests, however, reside more in the story of modern Jewish philosophy—indeed, her monograph is subtitled An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought—than in more recent developments in critical discourses of religious studies. 3. Perhaps slightly more scientifically, a perusal of the list of endowed chairs in Jewish studies on the AJS website (http://www.ajsnet.org/chairs. php) reveals that all holders of such chairs are Jewish. 4. Today, however, even this is problematic. One of the recent trends in Talmudic scholarship, for instance, is to try to contextualize the Babylonian Talmud, which was codified in the sixth century CE, within its immediate Iranian and Zoroastrian milieu (see, for example Bakhos and Shayegan 2010). 5. Although as I have tried to demonstrate in another context (Hughes 2010a), this does not so much show the cross-pollination between Jewish and other cultures as much as it does the collapsing of the artificial distinctions between them. Chapter One 1. “Talmudic” is an adjective coming from the Talmud, which refers to a central text in rabbinic Judaism. There exist two Talmuds: the Yerushalmi, which was codified in the fifth century, and the Babylonian, which was codified in the sixth century. 140 Notes to Chapter One 2. The exception, of course, was the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. However, this was not constructed as “Jewish” per se, but as the general spiritual backdrop that produced Jesus (see, for example, Heschel 1998, 17–22). 3. His account of the ordeal and his attempt to recover from the physical and emotional scars may be found in his Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (1997). 4. In addition to the work under discussion here, see Gelernter 2005 for another example of Hertog’s patronage. As it states at the end of this article: “The present article, in different form, was given as a lecture sponsored by Susan and Roger Hertog in New York in October of last year.” In the article in question, Gelernter wrote: “Can you be an agnostic or atheist or Buddhist or Muslim and a believing American too? In each case the answer is yes. But to accomplish that feat is harder than most people realize. The Bible is not merely the fertile soil that brought Americanism forth. It is the energy source that makes it live and thrive; that makes believing Americans willing to prescribe freedom, equality, and democracy even for a place like Afghanistan , once regarded as perhaps the remotest region on the face of the globe. If you undertake to remove Americanism from its native biblical soil, you had better connect it to some other energy source potent enough to keep its principles alive and blooming.” 5. Roger Hertog, Gelernter’s benefactor, has also been the chairman of the board of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Although I shall have more to say about this institution in chapter 5, fellow neoconservative Irving Kristol remarks that it was founded as Israel’s first neoconservative think tank, with the aim of giving “the Israeli right a better foundation in history, economics, archaeology and other topics” (Erlanger 2005). 6. This is why, for example, I have such a hard time with local rabbis teaching courses in Jewish studies at universities. While they are qualified to administer a congregation, they are not qualified—unless, of course, they also have a PhD in Jewish or religious studies—to teach the material using a larger disciplinary frame. The result is that such classes often amount to little more than catechesis and a setting in which Jewish students can take “academic” courses with their local rabbi for credit. Such courses, I submit, have no business being taught in a secular university. 7. This, of course, is not unique to Jews and Judaism. Every ethnicity and nationality ultimately constructs itself by defining itself in light...