Dani Schrire, Raphael Patai, Pierre Bourdieu, and the Rest of Us

The following is a comment on Dani Schrire’s essay “Raphael Patai, Jewish Folklore, Comparative Folkloristics, and American Anthropology,” published in this special issue on Ethnological Knowledges

(Journal of Folklore Research 47/1–2, 2010).

Raphael Patai was born with a silver pen in his hand. He wrote and edited over fifty books, two of which appeared posthumously (Patai 1998, 1998a). He was a major scholar in the fields of Jewish and Near Eastern folklore and anthropology, yet—as Dani Schrire notes—his name has lately flared into public view largely in association with a scandal not of his own making (Hersh 2004). Schrire’s description of Patai’s intellectual history attempts an etiological explanation for what he considers to be a life enmeshed in a “habitus of rejection.” Habitus is a concept Schrire draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological discourse (1990), but rejection is Schrire’s own modifier. For Bourdieu,

the habitus is at once a system of models for the production of practices and a system of models for the perception and appreciation of practices. And in both cases, its operations express the social position in which it was constructed. As a result, the habitus produces practices and representations which are available for classification, which are objectively differentiated; but they are immediately perceived as such only in the case of agents who possess the code, the classificatory model necessary to understand their social meaning. Thus the habitus implies a “sense of one’s place” but also a sense of the other’s place.

(1990:131)

If, as Schrire argues, Patai experienced his professional life as a rejection, perhaps this habitus (and the extraordinarily productive life it generated) is understandable only within a framework that assumes a constant struggle for acceptance by the established institutions for knowledge production in Western society—the universities.

Dani Schrire provides ample support for such a thesis, as does Raphael Patai’s own autobiography (1992a). Patai was not offered a permanent academic position in Israel or in the United States. He taught at a number of institutions, including Dropsie College, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Columbia University, New York University, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University, but mostly as a visiting professor. Yet Patai did not buckle, nor did he regress into professional depression, but rather maintained an intense and productive intellectual life.

Interpreting Raphael Patai as personally resourceful allows us to better understand Patai’s own biographical musings; in addition, this perspective illuminates questions related to the history and sociology of knowledge. Patai himself offers ample assistance for pursuing both projects. Three out of his fifty volumes are of an autobiographical nature (1988, 1992a, 1992b). As they select and comment upon actions, events, and characters in his life, these books offer glimpses into Patai’s habitus, his “sense of [his] place” in society. By his own description Patai grew up as a prince of the Jewish intelligentsia. His father, József Patai (1882–1953), was a Hebrew and Hungarian poet and editor as well as a Zionist leader. His mother, Edith Patai (né Ehrenfeld; 1886–1976), was a lyric poet and novelist. Their home was a meeting place for Jewish-Zionist intellectuals: leading Jewish literary figures in Europe often stayed as houseguests (1988:175–76). Raphael Patai traces his maternal ancestry to Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040–1105), the most prominent medieval commentator on the Bible and the Talmud and, according to tradition, a scion of King David (1988:49–50). When Patai moved to then-Palestine in 1933 at the age of twenty-three, he moved among the elite circles of the Yishuv, as the Jewish population in Palestine was then called. In that year he was a guest in the home of Samuel Tolkowsky (1886–1965), a leader of the orange growers—an elite group in Palestine at the time (Karlinsky 2000:78–79). Patai married Tolkowsky’s daughter Naomi seven years later (Patai 1992b:105–7). Samuel Tolkowsky himself was a scholar whose books on the history of citrus fruit are as valuable today as when [End Page...