Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

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The Geonim: An Introduction

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I have been teaching for many years in the Me’ah adult learning program run by Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.  I’ve always enjoyed teaching in this program and having the opportunity to interact with the wider Jewish community.  Such teaching continually reminds me of the value in making what I, and other scholars, do accessible to a broader audience.  Toward that end, when Me’ah asked if I would be interested in developing some videos and other resources for them for a module on the Geonim (the rabbis who lived at the very end of the Talmudic period and the shift to the Middle Ages) for one of their online courses, I jumped at the opportunity.  I do not believe that online education (even when done well) will, or should, ever replace the live experience of learning, but at the same time I think that we have just barely begun to tap its potential and it is an area in which I would like to work more.

In any case, below are the videos, all now also available on YouTube:

And here is Study_Guide with some aids and suggestions.

Philo’s Definition of “Judaism”

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With the publication of Daniel Boyarin’s book, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion, “Judaism” is back on the scholarly agenda.  The book (for which I supplied a blurb) was recently the center of an interesting forum in Marginalia, and comes on the heels of a few books dealing with the usefulness of the term “religion” to denote anything in antiquity (including one that Boyarin also co-authored) and Cynthia Baker’s book, Jew, tracing the genealogy of that term as well (and which I reviewed here).

This is a topic that I’ve long thought about.  How do we define “Judaism”?  This actually breaks up into two related clusters of questions.  The first is whether, and how, Jews themselves have defined “Judaism,” whether they use that term (attested relatively late) or not.  The second is how outsiders – including academics – define “Judaism,” and the extent to which those definitions due useful work.  The former is known as an emic definition, the latter as an etic one.

My own work has been more on the etic side.  How can scholars create a non-normative definition of “Judaism” that is useful to our work?  I discussed this both in my book, Creating Judaism: History, Tradition, Practice and in an essay I published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.  While I actually prefer to avoid using the word “Judaism” in most of my own scholarship, I do think that when carefully defined it can be useful for scholars.  In those works, I develop a simply map for charting the different manifestations of what we might call “Judaism.”

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I have new article on this topic, called “Defining Judaism: The Case of Philo,” in a new, excellent collection edited by Nickolas P. Roubekas, Theorizing “Religion” in Antiquity (Equinox, 2019), pp. 245-264.  In this article I use the map that I previously developed to chart the contours of Philo’s “Judaism.”

The College Admissions Process

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In light of the latest college admissions scandal (now almost old news), I wrote something on how a simple but radical reform can improve not just the process at selective universities, but ripple down to make our world a better place (admittedly, in the larger scheme of things only a very slightly better place, but still….).  It was just published in in Inside Hiigher Ed.  The core of the argument:

I believe that there is a simple adjustment that we can make to the admissions process that could make a profound impact, not just advancing the goal of providing equal opportunity but also reforming several aspects of our higher educational system. In short, I propose that the admissions office focus solely on the question of whether a student would or would not thrive at the given college.

Many admissions officers have told me that even at the most selective colleges they could see 30 to 45 percent of the applicant pool meeting this standard. Simply going over this bar could put a student into the admissions pool. The pool can then be tested, and slightly adjusted, according to the demographic character of the college; criteria used for testing, and exactly how the pool was adjusted, should be publicly released each year. Actual admits are then determined by lottery.

For the entire piece, click here.

The general idea is not new, and has recently received some push-back here (unfortunately behind a paywall) in an opinion in the Chronicle.

Open Books!

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Over the past few years I have served as Managing Editor of Brown Judaic Studies (BJS), a scholarly monograph series.  I am very excited to announce that after a few attempts, we have succeeded in obtaining a grant from the Mellon Foundation, through the Humanities Open Book Program run by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to digitize and make freely available over the internet electronic copies (in different formats, of about fifty titles from our back list.  The press release is here.

BJS was established about forty years ago as an outlet for (mostly) high-quality, usually specialized, scholarly monographs.  Recently we began also to publish collections of scholarly papers, usually emerging from a conference or gathered as part of a Festschrift (a volume honoring an academic colleague).  Although we publish only a few volumes each year, over the years we have accumulated a significant backlist and many of our older volumes remain foundational in several different areas within Judaic studies.  We have also begun to develop projects that begin as invited lectured by distinguished scholars at Brown University (for our first publication as part of this initiative, see this book by Hasia Diner).

As a publishing outlet, BJS is unusual.  It is administered by the faculty of the Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University, who serve (without compensation) as acquisitions editors who can also help with the specialized contents of the volumes.  Once a volume is accepted, we outsource the copyediting and typesetting and then send then completed project to our partner, SBL Press, for printing, marketing, and distribution.  Since we maintain a lean budget, we are able to price our volumes relatively affordably, despite their specialized appeal.

We frequently receive requests, many from underfunded research libraries abroad, for free copies of our books, any of which had small print runs and are now out of print.  The primary goal of the Humanities Open Book Program is to begin to make these titles widely available.  Authors will have the option of making minor corrections or revisions to their volumes, and some will be invited to add retrospective essays.  It is our hope that opening access to these important and refreshed volumes will lower the barriers to access and allow their ideas to circulate widely.

At the same time, we also have other larger goals for this initiative:

  • We have partnered with the Association for Jewish Studies to make our digital titles accessible via their site as well.  Our mutual hope is that these titles will help to create an ecosystem that promotes and expands open access Judaica scholarship.
  • Is open access financial sustainable?  We hope to learn through this initiative whether we can feasibly extend our ability to incorporate open access routinely into the life-cycle of our publications.  Could we, for example, allow all of our titles to go to open access after some period of time (five years?) in print?
  • The world of scholarly publishing has long been in turmoil.  We hope that this grant will raise awareness of a model of publication that allows for publication of high-quality, peer-reviewed works outside of the structure of university presses, which might in turn productively further the conversation.

Stay tuned!

 

The Benefit of the The Doubt: Workshop Reflections

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The Combat of Mars and Minerva Joseph-Benoit Suvee 1771

I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop entitled, “The Benefit of the Doubt. Between Scepticism and Godlessness, Critique or Indifference in Ancient Mediterranean Religious Traditions” in February.  Sponsored by Humboldt University and Leipzig University, it took place in Berlin.  A short description and the conference program is here.

The workshop, in a sense, picked up where Tim Whitmarsh’s book, Battling the God: Atheism in the Ancient World left off.   Whitmarsh (who was not at the workshop) actually plays a bit loose with what he means by “atheism,” lumping into it other manifestations of doubting not only the existence but also the power of the deities.  The workshop organizers, Dr. Nicole Hartmann and Dr. Franziska Naether, followed this productive ambiguity, encouraging the participants to think broadly about how and why those in antiquity, from across a wide geographical and temporal distance, expressed and discussed this larger issue of “doubt” of the divine.

Before this workshop, even after reading Whitmarsh’s book, I never thought much about atheism in antiquity.  If it existed at all, it was, I thought, a fringe phenomenon; after all, wasn’t atheism really a modern phenomenon?  Thus, in thinking about the classical rabbis, my mind did not go much past the famous locus classicus of heresy in early rabbinic texts, Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1:

All Jews have a share in the World to Come, as it says, (Isaiah 60:21), “Thy people are all righteous; they shall inherit the land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified.” These have no share in the World to Come: One who says that [the belief of] resurrection of the dead is not from the Torah, [one who says that] that the Torah is not from Heaven, and an epicurios. Rabbi Akiva says: also one who reads outside books, and one who whispers [an incantation] over a wound, saying, (Exodus 15:26) “I will bring none of these diseases upon thee that I brought upon the Egyptians for I am the Lord that healeth thee.” Abba Shaul says, also one who utters the Divine Name as it is spelled. (Translation modified from Sefaria.org).

This passage has been discussed extensively.  It hints at issues of atheism and doubt (perhaps the meaning of epicurios) but never explicitly, and turns the issue to a presumably public act – “one who says” – rather than one of private belief.  Aside from this passage, though, it was difficult for think of much other rabbinic evidence for doubt.

Now, though, I see doubt everywhere.  While the term “atheist” is attested already most influentially in Plato, the concept of “atheism” as we usually mean it – the complete denial of the existence of supernatural beings or conscious forces – is very rare.  The label “atheist”, perhaps like the label epicurios in rabbinic texts, is only used as a term to insult others.  On the other hand, it turns out that within many ancient cultures there was much room to voice critiques of divine actions or doubt about their powers.  Hittites, for example, constructed an elaborate ritual procedure for oracular consultation of their gods because they were skeptical about the divine ability to communicate clearly.  They asked a series of questions that essentially badgered the gods: “Sure about that?  Let me rephrase it, just so that we know we’re on the same page.  So if I got you right, yes or now, you meant to say….”  In Byzantine Christian circles, an entire literature of “questions and answers” grew to largely concern issues of faith and doubt.  2 Peter 3:4 acknowledges (or rhetorically creates) the existence of those who doubted that Christ had come, and treats that skepticism quite seriously.

The workshop had only one (excellent) paper on rabbinic texts (by Reuven Kipperwasser), but it is clear that rabbinic literature can yield many of its own examples.  There are multiple discussions, for example, of God’s role in theodicy and doubts about God’s own justice, some of which have been nicely explored by Dov Weiss in his book, Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism (which, previously, I had never thought of quite in the context of “doubt”).  Messages from God are tested and God’s power is often questioned, even if only to be upheld on most occasions.  There is little if any evidence of true “atheists,” but there was certainly room enough in rabbinic culture for questioning much else about the divine.

There are plans to publish the revised papers and I anticipate an excellent volume.