Daniel Boyarin, “Medieval Jews Without Judaism: The Case of the Kuzari,” in Marie-Anne Vannier, ed., Judaïsme et christianisme au Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 13-27 (original) (raw)
2023
The essay provides an aerial view of selected key developments in recent academic explorations of Jewish religion, theology, and thought in medieval through incipient modern times. To provide an integrating perspective for so broad an overview in so brief a compass, it appends to the already bulky title a further specification: "with emphasis on the 'cultural turn.'" The aim is to evoke some high points, note conspicuous patterns and new departures, and venture a brief assessment of the state of the field (such as it is one) and its prospects.
A Jewish 'Early Modern Period' Avant la Lettre?
Classic Essays on Jews in Early Modern Europe, 2023
In this introduction to the volume "Classic Essays on Jews in Early Modern Europe," we show that while historians have applied the appellation "early modern" to Jewish history only in recent decades, a number of earlier scholars had recognized many of the distinctive qualities of the 15th-18th centuries in ways that anticipated later periodizations.
Judaism at the Turn of the Era
K. J. Dell (ed.), The Biblical World, Second Edition. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022
This chapter provides an overview of the institutions (the Jerusalem Temple, the festival calendar, synagogues, houses and households), theological concepts (belief in one God, restoration and eschatology, election and covenant), the importance of Jewish law (Torah and halakhah, as well as elite groups (“sects”: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, the “New Covenant”, the Yahad) and popular movements (anti-Roman rebels, messiah pretenders and sign prophets) in the Judaism around the turn of the era. – Published as Chapter Thirty-Seven in K. J. Dell (ed.), The Biblical World, 681–704, with five figures, endnotes instead of footnotes, and bibliography.
WHO AND WHAT WAS A JEW? SOME CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF NEW CHRISTIANS
The present essay argues that studies of early modern Iberian societies have too often been insufficiently grounded in the study of pre-modern Jewish culture, and that consequently historical scholarship on judeoconversos has reproduced medieval Christian notions of Jewishness in addressing the key question of identity. The article illustrates this phenomenon of erroneous categorization via a late medieval example as well as modern ones that echo and compound it. Finally, the article outlines dominant aspects of traditional Judaic culture as collective, public, and all-encompassing, that preclude the facile use of the category of “[crypto-] Judaism” to explain New Christian identities. RESUMO O presente ensaio argumenta que estudos de sociedades ibéricas modernas têm muitas vezes sido insuficientemente aterrados no estudo da cultura judaica pré-moderna, e que, consequentemente, estudos históricos sobre os judeoconversos tem reproduzido noções de judaicidade medievais cristãas cuando eles abordam a questão chave da identidade. O artigo ilustra este fenómeno de errada categorização através de um exemplo medieval tardio, bem como exemplos modernos que o ecoam e o complicam. Finalmente, o artigo descreve aspectos dominantes da cultura judaica tradicional, como fenómeno coletivo, público e abrangente, que impedem o uso fácil da categoria de "[cripto-] Judaísmo" para explicar as identidades novo-cristãs. Key words: Crypto-Judaism; conversos; historiography; Iberian Jews. Plavras-chave: Cripto-judaísmo; conversos; historiografia; Judeus ibéricos.
Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2004
From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period testifies to the great variety of religious practices that characterized Judaism in the twelve hundred years between approximately 600 C.E. and 1800 C.E. Although this vast span of time has often been regarded monochromatically, scholars have increasingly come to speak of this period's enormous complexity. The more that we learn about Judaism during this period of time, the more we recognize the dimensions of this complexity, as we will see below. One of the many ways in which this anthology differs from earlier collections of primary Jewish source materials is in its focus on religious practice and religious experience-in keeping with the series of which it is a part. Older sourcebooks have tended overwhelmingly to be interested in either the political, social, and economic history of the Jewish people as a minority community under Islam and Christianity, or in documenting the intellectual religious achievements of medieval and early modern Jewry. There are thus a number of anthologies having to do with medieval Jewish philosophy, mystical thought, and religious poetry, but virtually nothing of scholarly consequence that seeks to encompass the broad range and variety of Jewish religious practice. That this is the case is a matter of considerable irony, in light of the fact that Judaism has historically been regarded as essentially legal, that is, practical in nature. Yet, it is only recently that scholars have come to explore with increasing sophistication the embodied nature of Jewish religion. As the contents of this volume will demonstrate, the ways in which Judaism has been practiced can hardly be isolated from the historical and political experiences of Jews, or from their many different constructions of faith and theology. Nevertheless, a fuller appreciation of the dimensions of religious practice in Judaism requires that they be studied not merely as an appendage to treatments of Jewish history or Jewish thought but on their own terms, as well. The chapters in this book illustrate many different approaches to the analysis of ritual and practice, including literary, anthropological, phenomenological, and gender studies, as well as the methods of comparative religion. Rather than encompass the entire history of Judaism, this sourcebook focuses on the medieval and early modern periods. There are several vantage points from which to construe the emergence of medieval Judaism. From a political point of
Jew, Judean, Judaism in the Ancient Period: An Alternative Argument
Applying the terms "Jew" and "Judaism" in the ancient period has recently been challenged by a number of scholars. First, the terms translated as Jew and Judaism are rare in the ancient period, and second, it is argued that these terms retroject later understandings of Judaism as a religion back into a period when Israelites and Yehudim/Ioudaioi are rather understood as an ethnic group. "Judeans" is preferable as a designation to "Jews." Two challenges have arisen. Some argue that the ethnic meaning of Yehudim/Ioudaioi changed to a more religious meaning in about 100 B. C. E.. Others insist that "Jew" and "Judaism" have always communicated both an ethnic and religious meaning-and still do-and so to insist on an ethnic-only meaning ("Judeans") in the ancient period is misleading. Here I take up a number of the previous arguments and modify them to form an alternative proposal: Yehudi (feminine Yehudiyah) and related terms arose as assertive, emotive identity terms to reflect a strong affirmation of identity in an international situation. Much as "Quaker" or "American" can be assertive, emotive identity terms relative to the default Society of Friends or United States respectively, so Yehudi/Yehudiyah was used occasionally, then more often, as a strong identity term relative to the default Israel/Israelite. Every twenty years or so, scholars take up each of their most used terms and exclaim, "I can't believe that this term has accumulated so many unexamined accretions." The term is then thrown into the wash on the heavy-duty cycle to wash away the accretions, and when it is taken out again and held up, the term has shrunk, unable to do the work it once did. The goal is a sort of precision and linguistic purity, perhaps an inevitable result of the "linguistic turn" in theory (which, ironically, also includes a critique of the possibility of an objective precision). These terms sometimes bounce back, but sometimes they remain permanently shrunk and reduced in their use. Within Jewish Studies it has recently been argued that "Judean" should be used rather than "Jew" as a translation for Yehudi or Ioudaios, and "Judeans," understood as an ethnic group, rather than "Jews" or "Judaism" as a religion. 1 A correlative challenge is the question of when "Judaism" began, or when "Jew" should be used as the appropriate term for a member of the Jewish "religion." These interrelated questions have 1 See Paula Fredriksen's article, "Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 35 (2006): 231-46, although it is important to note that she does not suggest retiring "Jew" or "Judaism." The substance of this article was first delivered as the Presidential Address of the New England and Eastern Canada Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, April 24, 2015. I would like to thank those who responded there and others who helped me shape this argument:
Jews Judaeans Judaizing Judaism Problems of Categorization in Ancient History
Th e very title of this journal reflects a commonplace in scholarly discourse. We want to understand "Judaism" in the Persian and Graeco-Roman periods: the lives and religion of ancient Jews. Some scholars in recent years have asked whether Ioudaioi and its counterparts in other ancient languages are better rendered "Jews" or "Judaeans" in English. Th is essay puts that question in a larger frame, by considering first Ioudaismos and then the larger problem of ancient religion. It argues that there was no category of "Judaism" in the Graeco-Roman world, no "religion" too, and that the Ioudaioi were understood until late antiquity as an ethnic group comparable to other ethnic groups, with their distinctive laws, traditions, customs, and God. Th ey were indeed Judaeans.