Creating Judaism

Who can fail to like the memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln (1645-1724)? Her account, as rendered in the English translations of the Yiddish original, give a detailed, first-hand account of a pious Jewish woman (who had also raised 12 children and took over her first husband’s business after he died). Her memoir has a modern feel to it and stands as one of the very few extant literary writings by a pre-modern Jewish woman.

Well, it turns out that that if Gluckel’s memoirs have a modern feel to them, it is because the English translations give it to them. In his Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 155-175, Marcus Moseley demonstrates just how peculiar Gluckel’s Yiddish work is. The translators, he argues, selectively left out huge swathes of it that did not appeal to their own sensibilities of what a “memoir” should be. One such omitted passage, for example, tells a story of a learned Jew stranded on an island with cannibals. He marries a naked, hairy woman and father’s a child with her, but when he has the opportunity to flee the island on a boat of “civilized” people he leaves both wife and child, and watches with no emotion as the wife kills their child in rage. Gluckel puts this story close to her account of her own betrothal: What she meant by doing so might be anyone’s guess, but it is certainly not characteristic of the author we know through the popular translations. Gluckel has written a far more interesting and complex “memoir” than has been commonly taught and thought, and as Moseley points out at the end of his discussion a new, full translation is a desideratum.

Reading Moseley’s fascinating discussion also raised for me a secondary story. Gluckel’s manuscript was apparently copied by her children and passed down through the generations; her great-granddaughter, Bertha Pappenheim (’Anna O.’ of Freudian fame) published a German translation. The printed Yiddish edition was made by David Kaufmann in 1896. I suspect that there is an also an interesting story to be told about the transmission of this work - perhaps more on that in a later post.

I am pleased to report that I’ve been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (the press release from Brown University can be seen here).  The award will allow me to spend the 2008-9 academic year working on my next book project, on Jewish piety in late antiquity.  While the parameters of this project change daily (sometimes more than once), my basic goal is to try to tease out how most Jews, who may not have known or cared much for the Rabbis, understood and served their God.

I recently read A Kingdom of Priests: Ancestry and Merit in Ancient Judaism (Jewish Culture and Contexts) by Martha Himmelfarb. Himmelfarb, a professor of religion at Princeton University, highlights the tension between ascribed and attributed authority, that is, whether the claim to “authority” (that can also loosely be understood as including having the status as a covenanted people of God) is based in biological ancestry or by acts that remain open to all. Himmelfarb argues that Jews during the Second Temple period struggled with tension, and ultimately different groups “solved” it in different ways, although the preponderance of non-sectarian evidence points toward a preference for the importance of merit. She then suggests that the Rabbis, responding to early Christian claims that they, by virtue of merit, were the new Israel, reemphasized the importance of biology.

What interests me here is the inherent tension between these two modes of authority and the way that all later Jewish communities attempt to solve it. Is Israel a “kingdom of priests” based on their genes or their (present or past) actions? What are the material and historical conditions that tilt a community in one direction or the other? Most modern Westerners are inherently more comfortable understanding authority as theoretically open to all; the racial component can cause discomfort.

This makes me think about “Jews by choice.”  According to classical rabbinic and later halakhic texts, non-Jews can become Jews and in so doing are equivalent to Jews in every significant way; they in fact are said, legally, to lose their former identity and family ties (hence raising a question of whether a man who converted to Judaism can marry his mother or sister, who ceases to have this relationship to him post-conversion).  Yet in antiquity, Jewish converts typically marked their grave epitaphs with the designation “proselyte” - even in death they were not simply “Jews.”  (This might complicated Himmelfarb’s thesis that the emphasis on biology was a rabbinic response to Christianity; it might have been a more popular preference for other, unclear reasons.)  Today, quite unscientifically, I notice a similar trend in the tendency of Jews by choice to identify themselves as such, and Jews by birth to note (although not necessarily in any negative way!) the converts among them.  It would be interesting to explore further why this might be.