In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

39 2 Encountering Tradition The Search for a Jewish Essence The previous chapter attempted to provide a general overview of some of the problems and possibilities associated with the modern academic encounter with Judaism. My principle concern, to reiterate , is with the interface between Judaism and religious studies, the larger unit in which the study of Judaism is customarily housed for various administrative and ideological reasons. The Bird/Heilman controversy functioned as a window through which to glimpse upon the complex intersection between authenticity, identity, and scholarship . The tension between the insider and the outsider, and how this relates to the larger issue of who possesses the authority to study Jewish data, as this controversy so poignantly reminds us, remains at the center of how Judaism is both imagined and situated. Perhaps the natural question to ask at this stage of the analysis is: How did things get this way? Why is it that, for the most part, Jews primarily teach Jewish studies at colleges and universities?1 In order to begin the process of answering this and related questions, it is first necessary to inquire into the origins of the academic study of Judaism. When did it begin, for example, and what were the various material and intellectual contexts that produced it? Discovering Jewish History From its origins in the nineteenth century, the academic study of Judaism has largely been bound up with the apologetical desire to show that Jews and Judaism were normal. From its inception, we see that the study of Judaism has not necessarily been an academic enterprise, but primarily an existential and a political one. This is significant 40 The Study of Judaism because, prior to the application of academic approaches to Judaism, both rabbinic chosenness and Christian supersessionism had tended, albeit for different reasons, to deny Judaism a history (Yerushalmi 1989, 84–87). Whereas the former located Judaism’s superiority in a set of timeless and sacred texts (e.g., Bible, Talmud), the latter sought to show its inferiority with the claim that after the advent of Jesus, Jews possessed neither a history nor a territory. Land, power, and providence—it is important to remember—were intimately connected to one another: to lack one was necessarily to lack the others. The fact that Jews possessed neither a home nor any political or other power could be and was connected to the later anti-Semitic notion that Jewish existence was parasitic, needing other nations and languages to sustain it. Not surprisingly, then, history, and its use of rhetoric and methods, became an important tool for both those who wanted to claim that Jews did indeed possess a history (and, thus, were normal) and for those who wanted to deny such claims. Those Jewish thinkers responsible for this new understanding of Judaism, writes Leora Batnitsky, did not so much secularize Judaism as redefine the tradition as a religion (2011, 36). That is, the individuals to be discussed below sought to mold Judaism into a set of claims that could easily fit within the modern, Protestant category of religion. Since Judaism was historically based on law and practice, it was largely public in nature and, as such, intersected with cultural, political, social, and legal concerns. This did not square, however, with the notion that religion was something private, an inner experience that had to be articulated and defined in terms of faith and belief. The nineteenth century was a time, then, in which Jewish scholars/ reformers sought to make Jews normal by transforming Judaism into a religion in this Protestant and European sense of the term. Before examining the rise of Jewish studies, which contributed greatly to this redefinition of Judaism, it might be worthwhile to make a few comments about the origins of our modern discipline of history (Geschichte). This discipline is largely the invention of the nineteenthcentury German university. This period, for example, witnessed the creation of histories of nations produced by German nationalist historians such as Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884), Heinrich Karl Ludolf von Sybel (1817–1895), and Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke (1834–1896). Such individuals, in both the service and employment of the state, used history as a way to imagine and shape national identity. This is certainly not to imply that history did not exist before this time period; however, it is to make the claim that the tools and methods used to discover it and the narrative techniques imagined [18.221.85.33] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 06:55...

Share