Academic Approaches to Teaching Jewish Studies (review)

The contemporary inclusion of Jewish Studies within college and university curricula represents the convergence of several currents which have achieved a secularization of Jewish knowledge or, as Jacob Neusner may have been the first to describe it, a movement from Yiddishkeit to Wissenschaft. The original concept of “Jewish Studies” was something which one did; it was immersion in a traditional way of life, devoted to study of Torah, Talmud, the explications of Halakhah and the interpretations of holy text. One began “Jewish Studies” at age three, in heder, advanced to the Talmud Torah, and aspired to learn from the masters at a yeshiva. The languages of Judaica were Hebrew and Aramaic, Yiddish and Arabic and Ladino. The students were Jews, who studied Torah “l’shma,” for its own sake and the better to understand that which the Holy One expected of Am Yisrael. Non-Jewish (usually, Christian) examinations of Jewish texts were generally intended to satisfy a very different set of desires, questions, propositions, and expectations, often for purposes antithetical to the interests or well-being of Judaism.

The early nineteenth century witnessed the rise of Wissenschaft des Judenthums, part of the so-called “Enlightenment” movement intended to reshape Jewish life and understandings to forms acceptable by the modern Christo-secular world of Western Europe into which many Jews sought admission and acceptance. The results of this movement were manifold and varied; for our purposes, it is enough to say that the new academic disciplines sought to analyze and characterize Judaism through outside categories, whereas the tradition had demanded living and study from within.

This modern approach to aspects of Jewish life has often been highly selective; scholarly investigations followed the process of departmentalizing academics and compartmentalizing studies into specific disciplines. By the mid twentieth century, facets of Jewish history, texts, or music were studied only as subsets of more generalized topics. Bible was reduced to “Old Testament,” the realm of rabbinics was generally ignored, and Jewish history, if it existed after the crucifixion and/or the second hurban, had something to do with the State of Israel.

This reduction of Judaism to a fossil, having little post-Resurrection significance, was challenged in the late 1960s as a result of student demands for recognition of minorities within the academic world which led, in turn, to the creation of a panoply of courses and programs, including Jewish Studies. At first consisting largely of cursory survey courses, Jewish Studies developed from freestanding undergraduate classes to a graduate field and, by the 1980s, had gained legitimacy as a normative academic discipline.

Zev Garber provided a review and critique of that realm in his 1986 volume Methodology in the Academic Teaching of Judaism; his current volume offers an updating of that text as well as new essays examining specific facets of the discipline.

A text for scholars and graduate students rather than undergraduates or the general public, the essays—which are arranged in a chronological order of topics—include theoretical matters as well as classroom particulars. Charles Elliot Vernoff opens the volume with a theoretical discussion of Judaism’s place within the contemporary study of religion; the essay is followed by two of more practical nature, which succeed in drawing the reader into dialogue. S. Daniel Breslauer presents the reading of Jewish myth as a methodological device, while Bruce Zuckerman discusses his approach for teaching Hebrew Bible at the undergraduate level. Zuckerman’s conversational tone does not conceal his strong antipathy to “Bible as literature” courses and his demand that a secular position be maintained within the classroom. Marvin Sweeney follows Zuckerman’s discourse with a most readable and informative discussion of the growing field of Jewish biblical theology among Jewish scholars.

Herbert Basser’s essay on the study of Midrash is built, appropriately enough, on a series of questions and answers. It is unfortunate that his otherwise most interesting essay should suffer from confused and missing lines of text on pages 119–120, the primary physical difficulty within the...