New Horizons in Sephardic Studies (review)

118 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 Can something of the same be said ofJacobs' subjects? It is glib and misleading to say that the mature Marxism was a secular Judaism, but it is reasonable to say that it was consistent with the preconceptions ofJewish socialists of the Second International. Can a case be made that when Eduard Bernstein watered down his Marxism, he returned more and more to the ethnic original? Was Kautsky's affinity for Judaism a recognition of its kindred abstract and theoretical preconception, even as he expected its eventual dissolution in an assimilated socialist society? Oacobs does bring out this aspects of his views at one point.) Was Rosa Luxemburg's dogmatic insistence on the primacy of class divisions and rejection of ethnic-religious influences a reflection of her dogmatic approach to Marxism in general even as she fervently espoused its Judaic structure? Certainly these are individual people, as Jacobs points out so well. Rosa Luxemburg was brutal and vicious in her distaste for the "petty bourgeois" she saw in Jewish society. Others cringed at the servility and self-seeking of this class of society, which they identified with themselves as long as they saw both the petty-bourgeois and themselves as Jewish. Jacobs is certainly not wrong about all that. Yet I cannot help but wish that he had spread a wider net and been more completely right. Murray Wolfson CaliforniaStateUniversity-Fullerton and University of California-Irvine New Horizons in Sephardic Studies, edited by Yedida K. Stillman and George K. Zucker. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. 309 pp. $59.50. The initial impetus of this volume was a successful international Sephardic Studies Conference held in 1987 on the campus of SUNYBinghamton . The various chapters of this volume are in large part a selection of the proceedings of that Conference. The initial importance of the SUNY Conference is that it helped launch the agenda for the many such conferences that were to occur in commemoration of the fifth centennial of the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. Now that those (mostly) academic gatherings have occurred and the case of Sephardic studies has been convincingly renewed and advanced, the urgent question remains as to the future of such a discipline, both in scope and nature. I suggest that it is in this context that this book's importance is to be assessed. Book Reviews 119 The term "interdisciplinary" is put forth to describe the approach of this volume by both the editors and the author of the Introduction, Norman Stillman. In this volume interdisciplinarity functions at rather general levels of usefulness. At a first level, the term indicates a simple panorama of approaches, mostly those used to organize the book's three major divisions: History and Philosophy, Language and literature, Ethnography and Folklore. Secondly, the fact that some approaches infringe upon neighboring areas (e.g., using an Italian literary text by Segre as a substitute case-study for historical and anthropological documentation ) is put forth as another proof of the importance-indeed, the necessity-of interdisciplinarity. Yet the volume itselfprovides more urgent reasons for coming out of our academic ghettos. One notable example is Jacqueline Genot-Bismuth's "Reconsideration of Some Presuppositions of ContemporaryJewish Historiography," where she argues against the usual brand of "Jewish History" that views Judaism as sui generis and in isolation from larger historical and cultural trends. Another important contribution in this regard, Schmuel Trigano's "The Conventionalization ofSocial Bonds ..." on the Maimonidean controversy, is correctly claimed by Walter P. Zenner to "exhibit the interplay between history, sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences" (p. 233). The article's real importance, it seems to me, lies also in the analysis of Maimonides' two major innovations-the sweeping codification of Jewish Law in the Mishneh Torah and the allegorizing methodologies in the Guide to the Perplexed-in terms of their largely negative (in Trigano's view) impact on Jewish social consciousness and cohesion. When one attempts a survey as sweeping as this one, omissions are to be expected, since both the area of study and the academic disciplinesnot to mention the wide-ranging interdisciplinary methodologies-are vast and changing. Nevertheless, one is...