Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction by Andrew Bush (review)

Jewish Studies is the first volume in a series titled Key Words in Jewish Studies, and its author is one of the three series editors (along with Deborah Dash Moore and MacDonald Moore). The series editors plan to issue volumes that explore fundamental terms—i.e., key words—in the field, terms with layered, protean, and sometimes politicized meanings. These are terms scholars (and the general public—observant and secular, Jewish and non-Jewish, across time and place) use widely, consider to be significant, and struggle to appropriate for their own purposes—or to replace or transform. In short, these key words are powerful metaphors associated with Jews, Judaism, and the scholarship of these. The first key word(s) in the series is Jewish Studies, a term, we will find, that is by no means simple.

Bush points out that, in academic settings, Jewish Studies diverges from rabbinics as well as from the study of Jewish knowledge “for the purpose of enhancing a sense of belonging” (4). For the author, Jewish Studies in Western universities means “taking Jews and what they do as an object of study” (1)—including Jewish women and non-Ashkenazic Jews—yet “begging not to pose” (9) that studying Jews is a clearly delineated disciplinary subject.

Even more, studying Jews, for Bush, means employing the “conceptual tools . . . [and] analytic methods” (5) of the Jews themselves. Three examples of this that Bush puts forth include: First, Marla Brettschneider’s notion that “the internal logic of the Talmudic text challenges its own named categories as discrete and separable entities and makes it impossible to develop a linear presentation of power relationships,” unlike usual practice in the Western academy (66). Second, Elliot Wolfson’s kabbalistically informed consideration that time’s motion includes both “procession and return,” unlike Kantian logic (81). And third, the implication from Jacob Neusner’s works that history may be undertaken as an exegesis, organized into tractates, and as a “metaphorization of the mishnaic procedure” (87), instead of as a scientific and unitary corpus. These are intriguing methodological prescriptions, albeit prescriptions that—like any attempt to discern meanings, unexpressed assumptions, and understandings—will be difficult to implement.

Jewish Studies is a volume that cannot be digested in a single sitting or reading. It is an erudite work by a mature scholar, a rich, multilayered (at times poetic) disquisition. It also is an assemblage of characterizations, digressions, and self-reflections expressed in lengthy sentences, with few straightforward conclusions. Bush wants, for the most part, to invite readers into a discussion, rather than to argue a point. Jewish Studies is a wide-ranging presentation of significant themes in the field during the past 250 or so years, along with Bush’s observations on the teaching of Jewish Studies.

Jewish Studies is a work of “translation” in the tradition of Walter Benjamin. Bush (briefly) describes Benjamin’s approach to the representation of “original” experience this way: “The jagged line of translation is an alternative to the straightforward logic of the essay” (102). Bush’s translations take narrative form; he tells stories by weaving together a tapestry of themes, quotes, and perspectives that are drawn from historical figures, authors who can be associated with Jewish Studies, and with others whose conceptual frameworks add coloring to the tapestry. Along the way, he frays and knits anomalies into this narrative/tapestry. For example, Bush juxtaposes past writers (such as Hannah Arendt), the writer’s subject (Rahel Vernhagen), and a contemporary commentator of themes relevant to the previous two individuals (such as Ruth R. Wisse’s exposition of the term shlemihl) to construct one somewhat ephemeral positionality—one abstract tapestry, if you will—in the intellectual history of the field of Jewish Studies (11–20). In this instance the tapestry’s subject is the ways in which Jewish Studies, in its transition from a “covenantal obligation” (20) to an academic field, has responded to the conditions of modernity. A number of additional such expository tapestries incorporate poets, artists, novelists...