An Other Love

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 1–2 N O T E S : “ R E C O V E R I E S ” An Other Love1 DANIEL BOYARIN AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER I have been in love with some manifestations of Christianity (not always ones that my Christian friends would themselves love, or even approve). Tennessee Ernie Ford singing on television the hymn ‘‘The Garden’’ moved me to tears when I was a child (I won’t pretend to remember how old). For an oddly gendered teenager, St. Francis the Sissy proved an incredibly tantalizing figure of a man. Later on it was medieval Christian art and architecture, the cathedrals of Europe, the spirituality of Meister Ekhardt and Jacob Böhme. Still later, and most significantly, it has been the writings of the Fathers of the Church (and their excluded others, the Christian heretics) that have been most riveting to me, pulling me into a world so close to that of my own beloved rabbis of late antiquity and yet so foreign as well, a world in which oceans of ink (and rivers of blood) could be spilt on questions of detail in the description of the precise relationships between the posited persons of a complex godhead—a world, as well, in which massive numbers of men and women could choose freely and enthusiastically to live lives without the pleasures of sex and the joys of family. I find this world endlessly moving, alluring, even at its most bizarre to me. For the last decade or so I have devoted much of my time and spirit to learning the languages of and understanding something of the inner and outer worlds of those early Christian men and women who wrote such texts and lived such lives. Some Jews, it seems, are destined by fate, psychology, personal history , or whatever to be drawn to Christianity.2 My research won’t be 1. Another version of this, much more self-critical, will appear as the preface to my new book. 2. If I am at all plausible in my reading, this category of ‘‘some Jews’’ may go historically very far back indeed. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, The Lancaster/Yarnton Lectures in Judaism and Other Religions for 1998 (Stanford, 1999), 26–41. My own, perhaps The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 2 JQR 94:1 (2004) honest, or so it seems, until I come clean and confess that I am one of those Jews. I cannot, of course, deny the problematic aspects of that desire; desire is frequently unruly and problematic. Christians, needless to say, have been bloody rotten to Jews through much of our histories, and Jews, when occasionally given the chance, have taken their turn at being rotten to Christians as well. This desire seems sometimes to be not entirely unlike the ‘‘love’’ that binds an abusive couple to each other. Nevertheless, it is there. The question, then, is what creative use can be made of problematic desire—not only what pleasures can it engender but also what use can it be for scholarship? Some Jews who are so absorbed by Christianity have been induced by that affection to convert and become Christians. I have not, held back by an even more powerful libidinal commitment to the religion, the memories , the thick history, the literature and liturgy of diasporic rabbinic Judaism as practiced for nearly the last two millennia. In earlier work, I attempted to express and make some sense of that greater Jewish love.3 In my most recent work, I have been trying—although frequently enough with less than full consciousness—to make some sense of my other love and use it as a way to make different sense of history.4 Perhaps better than ‘‘greater’’ or ‘‘lesser’’ in characterizing these investments, I should distinguish between a love of who I am, diasporic rabbinic Jew, and a desire for a different other, the subject of Christianity. The question...