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)
Related papers
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:
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.
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.
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.
Judaism: From Heresy to Pharisee in Early Medieval Christian Literature
Traditio, 2002
During the Middle Ages, Christians largely accommodated themselves to the small number of Jews who lived amongst them. Augustine (354-430) explained that God had punished the Jews after their rejection of Jesus by destroying the Temple and sending them into exile. Their survival was divinely guaranteed, however, because the presence of the Jews, Augustine believed, testified to the authenticity of Scripture and the fulfillment of the prophecies upon which Christianity built its faith.1 The Jews themselves, of course, argued that God had never truly rejected his chosen people. By claiming the Jews as their witnesses, Christians inadvertently accepted the Jews' identity as the descendants of the biblical children of Israel. This proved to be increasingly irksome to many Christians. Christians had appropriated the text of the Hebrew Bible by reading into it allegories of Christianity's ultimate truth (which included seeing themselves as the true Israel). As I hope to show in this article, Christians during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages tried other ways to counter the Jewish claim of enduring "chosenness." They did this by trying to present contemporary Judaism as unworthy of being the heir of the Judaism of the Bible. In other words, contemporary Jews could not claim to be the true descendents of the Israelites and the preservers of the biblical tradition. Some Christian intel lectuals, largely in the Greek tradition, sought to make contemporary Juda ism into a collection of heresies in contrast to the unity of biblical Judaism. Others, mostly Latin writers following Jerome's lead, sought to cast the Judaism of their day as a monochromatic but corrupt Pharisaism equally alien to the nature of biblical religion. The evidence for portraying Judaism both as a fragmented array of here sies and a tradition undermined by Pharisaism can be found, of course, in the New Testament. The authors of the Gospels presented Judaism as di vided into several main groups with the Pharisees, Sadducees, Samaritans, 1 Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York, 1986), 4.34, p. 178. I would like to thank the editors and referees of Traditio for their very helpful comments and criticisms, as well as the audiences at Hebrew University and Trinity College where earlier versions of this paper were delivered. Dr. Jeffrey Kaimowitz, the curator of the Watkinson Library at Trinity College, also provided welcome assistance.