Medievals Are Not Us

Medievals Are Not Us MEDIEVALS ARE NOT US by Kalman P. Bland Kalman P. Bland is an Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University. He is presently at work on a monograph titled The Idea of Jewish Art: Medieval and Modern. 35 Miriam Peskowitz seeks to amend Jewish historiography, and perhaps Jewish history, by engendering it.1 Her project evoked in my memory W. H. Auden's "Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem)."2 The poem ironically explores a predicament shared by thoughtful lovers and compassionate scholars: "Expecting your arrival tomorrow, I find myself thinking I love you: then comes the thought-I should like to write a poem which would express exactly what I mean when I think these words." Knowing that such precision is elusive and that silence begs the question, Auden reverts to paradoxical eloquence. Stanza XXV, for example: "... this poem I should like to write is not concerned with the proposition 'He loves Her' (where He and She could be fictitious persons whose characters and history the poet is free to idealize as much as he choose), but with my proposition I love You (where I and You are persons whose existence and histories could be verified by a private detective)." Traveling in the company ofAuden's lover, scholars also commute on the shuttle connecting freedom to constraint, universals to particulars, theories to evidence, abstract ideas to specific bodies, and political loyalties to ,'See Seyla Benhabib, "Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance," repro in Feminist Contentions, ed. by Linda Nicholson, (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 16. (The feminist counterpoint to the 'Death of History' would be the 'Engendering of Historical Narrative'.) 2See w: H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 489-499. 36 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 scientific disinterest. Scholars, however, do not resolve their predicaments by writing ironic "unwritten poems." Working toward precision, Peskowitz resembles Auden's poetic lover and "private detective": they demand actually embodied and situated "persons whose existence and histories could be verified." She is not deceived by "fictitious persons whose characters and history the [scholar] is free to idealize," patronize, demean, or make invisible. She prefers the reconstruction of a specific ancient Jewish society authenticated by archaeological research to the flattering and ageless self-portraits contrived by Judaism's patriarchs. She also resembles Foucault. Explaining what motivated him to write the history of sexuality, Foucault named "curiosity . . . not the curiosity that seekS to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free from oneself.... The object [is] to learn to what extent the effort to think one's own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently."3 With Miriam Peskowitz's exemplary essay in mind, "think differently," act differently, and for the better, one might add. "Engendering Jewish Religious History" also reminded me that, on our way to becoming professional colleagues at Duke, Miriam Peskowitz and I used some of the same texts in teaching that same intractable introductory course inJudaic Civilization. I still do, aimingfor similar goals with the same cross-listing in Women's Studies. We also share a "late twentieth-century" perplexity regarding "the proliferation of theoretical electives and scholarly performances . . . none of which are essentially or necessarily liberatory." Her invitation to consider "the terms arid categories of our feminist conversations" spoke to the philosopher in me. I therefore welcomed the chance to examine which of those terms and categories "have served well, but which need not always organize our inquiries." I became fascinated by the implications of the essay's technological metaphors: Tailor-made "seamless garments" and "threads"; architectural "constructs," "construction sites," "tools," and "excavation"; and their hybrid, "dismantling." Finally, being a bookish historian ofmedieval]ewish thought with a penchant for abstract metaphysics and an acquired taste for arcane epistemologies, I was unable to hide from the troubling questions raised by the essay's final sentence: As a scholar "engaged in the production of an always-already-politicized knowledge," what politics do I perpetrate?Although I too refuse the tokenism of "adding-women-and-stir...