Constructing and Deconstructing Jews' Others

Review Essays 173 and cryptic in the Qur'an: "It is as if it were." But Tha'labI's account, with lassner's interpretive effort, yields an utterly convincing meaning. Solomon' has jumbled parts of her throne to fool her, and asks her an impossible question: if she says it is not hers, she will be asked to produce her throne and embarrassed when she cannot. Should she admit it is her throne, "she will have acknowledged that the prophet possesses the very object that gives her license to rule" (p. 82). BilqIs, not to be bested, understands the trap, and so answers evasively, "It is as if it were." lassner goes on to present several satisfying turns of the screw, including a 1702 Yemenite Jewish retelling .that clearly betrays influence of the Muslim story of BilqIs. lassner's look at the "stratigraphy" of these legends (his felicitous term) raises a host of pertinent questions about Jewish and Muslim cultural appropriation and reappropriation. Parallel accounts are a scholar's best friend in retrieving textual history, and, lassner emphasizes, cultural history as well. While early Orientalists tended to focus on what they ungenerously assumed to be qur'anic bastardizations of Jewish themes, Lassner examines Islamic legends on their own terms and asks what they tell us about the medieval Muslim cultural milieu. Constructing and Deconstructing Jews' Others by Oren Baruch Stier Department of Religious Studies University of California, Santa Barbara The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions ofJewish Culture and Identity, edited by Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn. New York and London: New York University Press, 1994. 467 pp. $20.00. laurence J. Silberstein begins his introduction to this collection by arguing that the rise of Zionism caused a shift in the definitional centers of Jewish culture and identity, away from theological and metaphysical spheres and towards more cultural and social ones. This attention to a new center,of gravity in the constellation of Jewish identity, along with the -,~~ ." -.., ~ 174 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 simultaneous concern for the processes of creating that identity, positioning it at the vortex of narratives about the past, brings out a structure essential to the organization of this volume and relevant as well to thinking about "engendering Jewish knowledges" in a relational and contextual manner. That structure ofcenter and periphery pervades much of the best new thinking about culture and identity, illuminating not so much the now outdated notion of identities as ftxed, stable, and constant, but rather the more critical view of identities as shifting, negotiated, and culturally and socially constructed within ftelds of power and conflict, in opposition to those "others" on the periphery. Silberstein highlights aspects of these often discursive processes of identity-construction, pointing out how important such an anti-essentialist approach is for feminists and others interested in the contested nature of any cultural identity. He also stresses that, without such a dynamic approach, those who claim any speciftc cultural identity "run the risk of perpetuating the acts of violence and exclusion about which critics like Derrida, Said, and Foucault have warned us" (p. 15). The collection thus focuses on various moments in Jewish history and culture concerned with the construction of identity, and each essay addresses the problematics of such identity within a particular context. The ftrst few chapters address the origins of Jewish identity in the biblical period, particularly the formation of Israelite identity against Israel's "Others," such as the Philistines. Interesting here is Robert L. Cohn's essay on Canaanite otherness, in which he shows how the Canaanites as a group are identifted both as morally depraved and justly dispossessed of their land (in what Cohn calls the "conquest arche," or myth of origins, found in the legal material of the Pentateuch and in Joshua and Judges) and as decent hosts and neighbors (in the narratively earlier Genesis accounts, what Cohn calls the "ancestor arche"). Cohn argues that such myths function to help justify a particular view of Israelite identity and posit different kinds of Canaanite "others" in the process: the former more threatening to a political myth of communal identity, while the latter more threatening to a family arche. In...