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  • Response to Leon Wieseltier
  • Daniel Boyarin (bio)

Leon wieseltier's attack on what he dubs "cultural materialism" in Jewish studies neatly exposes the ideological stakes in his approach to the field. Jewish chosenness must be preserved at all costs. G-d forfend that the Jews should be subject to the same kinds of scholarly investigation as all other tribes. Someone might reveal the uncomfortable fact that Jews are members of homo sapiens, not disembodied spirits chosen by G-d to perform some the purely spiritual office of bringing light unto the world. Only thus could he write, as he does: "The historiography of the Jewish body leaves one hungry for a moment of re-spiritualization, for a revival of the old conviction, which is once again a new conviction, that Judaism's mind has been more interesting and more influential than Judaism's body. The scholarly study of Jewish life is the study of ideas and their adventures in reality, or else it is just the anthropology of another tribe." Just like Augustine so long ago, my adversary in this discourse has precisely understood the point. Only the values will be reversed. For me, the goal of my intellectual, spiritual, and scholarly life has been precisely the study of the Jews as "another tribe," finding ways to understand, articulate, and communicate the cultural production of Jews in such a wise that this production can be understood as one of the ways of being human, as part, therefore, of the humanities. I would go so far as to suggest, moreover, in direct contrast to Wieseltier, that—adopting his rather curious personification—Judaism's "mind" is not at all what has been interesting and influential historically, if by mind he means, as he seems to, systematic metaphysical philosophizing. Wieseltier seems utterly confident that he knows not only what "cultural materialism" is but also how arrant it is; by contrast, he offers not the least hint of how something called mind or spirit might work independently of the material world—which is to say, the world tout court.

I have never been a proponent of a separate sub-discipline of body studies within Jewish scholarship, although I have participated in various [End Page 443] fora in which such claims might have been made. I have thought, and still do, that insofar as Judaism was studied in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries theologically, something critical about the cultural practices of this particular tribe was seriously missed. At least for the vast majority of rabbinic Jewish writing and textual production, theology was for the most part beside the point. What was important was a constant relay between embodied practices and affective experiences, including highly intellectualized and highly spiritual affective experiences, such that practice informed theoria and theoria, practice. This relay is indeed best named "praxis." For Wieseltier, "the historian of Judaism and Jewish life is perforce a student of metaphysicians, because his subjects were, at the highest levels and at the lowest ones, in their theologies and in their superstitions, knowingly and unknowingly, metaphysicians; and so the historian of Judaism must concede, if not actually celebrate, the centrality, and the causal role, of Jewish ideas in the determination of Jewish customs." I beg to differ.

Wieseltier might call me a "praxis junky," and to that I confess gladly. Whether thinking about sexuality (as I did in some of my work), gender (as I did in other work), notions of "race," martyrology, the invention of Judaeo-Christian difference, or the interpretation of Scripture, what seems to me interestingly unique about rabbinic Judaism is the rich and nuanced interplay between specific material histories, including the condition of Diaspora with all that implies and the commitment to the authority of a shared textual tradition and a set of historically transmitted physical practices. This particular interplay; this particular set of embodied textual practices, including the study of Torah, is surely what makes the Jewish tribe unique, and, therefore, uniquely interesting. By studying Jews with the same intellectual tools with which other human "tribes" are studied, we can produce a discourse that both lifts up the particular and exhilarating in the cultural productions of the Jews, as well as...

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