Creating Judaism

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.

This week I had a chance to see the exhibition, “Glass, Gilding, and Grand Design: Art of Sasanian Iran (224-642)” at the Asia Society in New York. The exhibit was particularly interesting in helping to understand the cultural context in which the Babylonian Talmud took shape. I was struck by the (already well-noted) similarity of some Sasanian art and mosaics to those in the Greek and Roman worlds, as well as several motifs that are not to be found in the art of the west. This is well worth a visit before it leaves on May 20.