Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (review)

Daniel Boyarin's career is perhaps most remarkable for the sheer number of otherwise discrete conversations that he is able to engage—and advance—simultaneously. His most recent book, which traces the generative role that the twinned emergence of Jewish and Christian discourses of "heresy" and "orthodoxy" in Late Antiquity played in the formation of the category of "religion" in the Christian West, is no exception. In it, Boyarin deploys various linguistic and postcolonial theories to explore the dynamic and mutually constituting histories of Judaism and Christianity, interprets familiar New Testament and early Christian texts to expose otherwise neglected dimensions of rabbinic theology, and develops a fundamentally revised history of rabbinic hermeneutics using traditional talmudic redaction-criticism.

But beyond simply integrating disparate source materials and methodologies, this book represents a synthesis in a more profound sense as well. It caps—at least provisionally—Boyarin's larger project of tracing the dialectical nature of Jewish difference and sameness within Western history and culture.

The initial phase of this project (1990-97)¹ was largely predicated on an essential Jewish alterity vis-à-vis the hegemonic reading practices, habitus, and gender and sexual norms of the Graeco-Roman and (subsequently) Christian West. This account valorizes the subversive, even carnivalesque potential inherent in diverse Jewish cultural practices—from midrashic indeterminacy to the resistant discourse of Jewish particularism—which contest the seemingly self-evident authority of Western logocentrism, dualism, and pretension to universalism.

Yet, despite the elegance of this structural opposition between dominant and minority cultural regimes, Boyarin seems to have grown suspicious of his own romanticized portrait of the perennially countercultural Jewish "other." Increasingly informed by the thoroughgoing anti-essentialism of postcolonial theory, his more recent work explores the ways that the Jewish male subject inscribed his own "will to power" on the textual artifacts he produced. What exclusionary practices (e.g., regimes of gender differentiation) were—and continue to be—instrumental in the production and maintenance of rabbinic Judaism as a social and ideational system? And in what ways were and are these broader processes bound up in the history of Western and Christian hegemony in all its various phases, from the Christianization of the Roman Empire to (post)colonial globalization, including the Zionist-nationalist project?

While Boyarin's earlier work may have contained the seeds of this new line of inquiry, its underlying structure has been fundamentally transformed by the insight that differences between Judaism and Christianity are made and not given. His 1999 book, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford), presents Jews and Christians as participants in a shared religious landscape, in which social and theological demarcation—both internal and external—is continuously renegotiated. In its most extreme formulations, the book argues that Judaism and Christianity throughout Late Antiquity were not in fact discrete entities, as the familial metaphors that are so often used to characterize their relationship (mother/daughter or sister/sister) implicitly presuppose. Drawing from linguistic wave-theory, Boyarin instead proposes that they are better imagined in more local and provisional terms, as dynamic dialects of a single linguistic system in constant flux.

This model of socio-religious interactivity has proven enormously productive to the field of Jewish-Christian relations in Late Antiquity and beyond. But in privileging permeability, fluidity, and contiguity to the almost total exclusion of processes of differentiation, Boyarin converted the hybrid identities forged in the contact zone of "Judaeo-Christianity" from an (ethically neutral) product of asymmetric power-relations into an oddly static and, once again, highly idealized condition. In this revised account, a binary structure of difference has simply been replaced with a provocative, but equally perduring, structure of sameness.

In Border Lines, Boyarin seeks to resolve this impasse by setting the semantics of Jewish and Christian difference in an explicitly diachronic framework. While he reaffirms his earlier claim that the messy realities of late antique society often...