The Call museum has struck again, this time with a Purim post that I thought was maybe a joke, maybe playing on the instruction that one should drink until he does not know the difference between Haman the villain and Mordechai the hero. They posted a 19th-century Italian megillah (the Scroll of Esther, read for Purim) with one of the detail photos upside-down and backwards.
I posted a comment letting them know, suspecting that it was not a joke but prepared to take it in good humor if they came back at me with a “haha, you missed the humor!” They’ve deleted the post with my comment and re-posted it exactly as it was.
I’ve decided to try one more time, and as I promised them, I’ll leave it at that:
One of the ways that organizations have tried to maintain some kind of social connection during the shelter-in-place order is by creating Zoom book clubs. This is it!, I thought to myself. I can finally socialize in a way that is based around something I’m comfortable doing — reading!
But going to a book club as an academic is hard. I analyze text for a living. I read for a living. I ask questions about what I’m reading and explain it to people for a living. And all of those facts of my life mean that it would be very easy for me to dominate a conversation about books and talk over people’s heads. It’s not that I’m necessarily smarter, just that I have the tools to do this kind of thing a little bit more refined and in a little bit more regular use than most people. I make it a goal to blend in, but it doesn’t usually work. Even before the shelter-in-place order, I attended a book club meeting in person at a local bookstore. I shared at thought about the structure of that month’s novel, a thought I considered to be totally innocuous. I guess it wasn’t. Everyone was blown away by my insight (imagine me rolling my eyes here as I retell the story), and I had blown my cover.
The offending brow.
This week I tried a Jewish book club for people in their 20s and 30s, run by the synagogue I’m thinking about joining. Even though I found the book to be hopelessly superficial, I was resolved to behave myself like a civilian and try blend in. But my eyebrows betrayed me when one of the women in the group, during a conversation about lashon hara as discussed in the group’s book, said that she knew it was a solidly Jewish value because she hadn’t met any Jewish religious leaders who would ever engage in the practice. When the rabbi insisted that I verbalize what my eyebrows were already evidently saying by jumping about six inches above the top of my head (they do that of their own accord — traitors!), I said, “Well, it’s just that I was thinking about Ovadiah Yosef…” The woman looked kind of embarrassed. I felt terrible. I don’t think my eyebrows cared.
The offending book.
This exchange happened after a first one: The rabbi leading the group talked about imitatio dei being a Jewish value and I cringed. Apparently enough for it to be visible on Zoom. My overactive eyebrows are fairly substantial and therefore hard to miss when they jump up my face, even on a tiny screen and across a bad internet connection. The rabbi asked why I reacted so strongly to that, and I said that it just seemed like a very Christian way of formulating things. He insisted that it isn’t, that a phrase at the beginning of this week’s parsha — קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃ — is proof that imitatio dei is also a Jewish concept. We ultimately left it alone.
But I didn’t like it. The phrase, to me, evoked the idea of behaving in a god-like way within a salvific framework that is not operative in Judaism. So I did what any academic who has just been a total pain in the arse in a book club would do: I found a couple of articles and read them. Both are Jewish Studies-related and both use the phrase imitatio dei without comment. The second one I’ve linked to here, the one by Harvey, a noted historian of Judeo-Islamic philosophy, is published in an academic/Orthodox Jewish context, namely in the journal of the Rabbinical Council of America.
I realized that it was the very Latin-ness itself of the phrase that was what was bothering me, which is strange. Rationally and in every instant of my professional life I know very well that languages aren’t inherently confessional: Jews in the MENA speak Arabic, Arabic-speaking Christians use the word Allah to mean God when they pray, a large swath of the population in medieval Spain were native speakers of a Romance language, regardless of their faith tradition, etc. I’m often aware of the King Jamesiness of contemporary Jewish liturgies in English and it catches my attention, but ultimately I see it as an example of Anglophone Jews using the language that has evolved for us to talk to and about God.*
So what to make of this reflexive jolt of Latin = Christianity? It was valuable for me to read and react to things that I think about a lot professionally, but as a completely non-academic reader who wasn’t expecting much out of the book or the discussion. My low expectations let me just react without thinking about it, because I wasn’t expecting to be thinking about anything. I don’t know that we can ever deliberate sit down and try to read like a civilian, but there is something to be said for being surprised into it or by it. Reading reflexively is reminder of something that sometimes gets lost in textual criticism: that pure reaction is a part of reading that provides another path by which to seek meaning in a text.
All the same, I’d like the lockdown to be over soon. I think I prefer my old, familiar ways of being terrible at socializing. And honestly, a social life conducted entirely the internet has been pretty rough for my eyebrows.
*I have a review essay forthcoming in which I discuss the use of phrases from the KJV to describe medieval Jewish communities in contemporary English-language scholarship. I’m critical of it there, but to me there’s something different about Jewish liturgists making a deliberate, intellectual choice to integrate through theologically non-problematic words and phrases and non-Jewish academics imposing theologically very problematic words and phrases on their Jewish subjects. I mention this here because I’m expecting a lot of criticism for the review essay and I don’t want inconsistency on this position to create extra room for more; the two contexts are quite different.
The poet Hayim Nahman Bialik is reported to have said that the nascent state of Israel would take its place amongst the nations of the world when the first Hebrew thief and the first Hebrew prostitute would be arrested by the first Hebrew police man. Updated for 2018, perhaps Israel joins the ranks of the nations of the world when Hebrew football fans make Hebrew wildly inappropriate Holocaust references in Hebrew graffiti.
I saw the above graffito, which reads “Holocaust Against Maccabi,” this past June when I was in Tel Aviv doing research at the Bialik house-museum. Now just a few months later I’m at the end of my own wildly inappropriate Holocaust reference also coming from a Jewish and Hebrew source. It’s part of an accusation that’s nonsensical on the face of it
There’s a guy with an M.A. from my graduate department and a Google Groups newsletter. He seems to think he’s a bit of a macher in the Brooklyn Sefardi/Mizrahi community. Or something. And he is known for being quite convinced that he is the keeper of the One True and Correct Interpretation of Sefardi Culture. His most recent newsletter addressed the well-documented problem of the primacy of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) culture in the Jewish world at the expense of attention and value given to Sefardi and Mizrahi (Spanish and Near Eastern) cultures. (For scholarly takes on this, see the work of my NYU colleague Ella Shohat, among others.) However, he addresses the problem by accusing Jewish Studies departments in U.S. universities of making themselves “Sefardirein,” or free of Sefardim, invoking Nazi-era terminology in which places that had been completely cleansed of Jewish “contaminants” were referred to as “Judenrein.”
And I am a part of the problem:
First and foremost it strikes me as wildly inappropriate and utterly lacking in any sense of proportion to describe the hiring and curriculum decisions of any academic department, let alone Jewish Studies departments, in terms of mass murder and genocide especially in a political climate that presents real neo-Nazi threats to American Jewry.
Second, the attitude reflected in this presentation of the problem is a bit short-sighted and helps to reinforce academic structures that don’t serve medieval or Jewish topics especially well. Modern disciplinary boundaries are bad for the study of the Middle Ages, which is a period when there was far greater interplay between literature, philosophy, religion, and history than there is in the modern conception of those modes of thinking and writing, and when the role of religion in culture and society was drastically different than it is in the modern world. As such, separating fields of study according to modern standards often makes it difficult to deal with medieval texts and other forms of cultural production holistically and on their own terms. The same applies to modern countries. Particularly with regard to the study of literature in modern university departments, the work is typically divided along national-linguistic lines. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century quests for national origins in the various and relatively new countries of Europe led to the confinement of literary traditions and cultural programs to within the boundaries of the modern nation state when in fact they were far more expansive, fluid and mobile. Ultimately, the Middle Ages became a tool for the nationalisms of Spain, France, and Germany, amongst others. This meant that the contributions of religious, linguistic, and cultural minority populations were often ignored and even suppressed in the interest of curating a particular image of the nation and its history; this trend naturally found its place in the Americas, too, and it is only very recently that it has been possible to talk about things like Jewish and Muslim, Hebrew and Arabic contributions to Spanish literature. In terms of securing the place of the Sefardim in Europe in particular and establishing a true panorama of medieval literature in general, it is far more unusual and important that my appointment be in a Department of Spanish than in one of Jewish Studies. It’s all so obvious to me that I kind of can’t believe I have to keep saying all of this, but it’s equally obvious that the outside world has not yet gotten the message.
And finally: Sure. I’m not in Judaic Studies at NYU, at least partly because I’m not convinced of the utility of Jewish Studies as a framework.* That said, I’ve served on half a dozen doctoral committees and a search committee in that department. And within in a period of five years before I’m even a decade out of graduate school, I will have held both major US-based Jewish Studies researchfellowships. So whatever my own ambivalence about Jewish Studies as a field and about disciplinary/field boundaries in general, and regardless of my not being appointed in that program at my home university, it’s not like I’m not participating in Jewish Studies conversations and making a name for myself there.
The takeaway: Am definitely a part of the Jewish Studies establishment even if that’s not where my NYU appointment lies. Disciplinary boundaries don’t help Sefardi Studies anyway. And this is definitely not a genocide; don’t ever lump me in with Nazis just because you think my intellectual life isn’t Jewish enough.*
(*Each of these sentences could be the start of a blog post in its own right. Perhaps for another moment.)
