Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

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Course: How the Bible Became Holy (Again)

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I have taught an introductory level undergraduate course, “How the Bible Became Holy,” several times at Brown and will be doing so again this fall.  The course gives (but does not insist on) a loose narrative to the history of the biblical text, but is really intended to introduce students to biblical literature and history and to think more deeply about the intersection between the two.  Every time I teach the course I tinker a bit, and this time is no exception.  My ideal would be to teach this course using my own book, but that feels too weird to me.

The current version of the syllabus (in pdf format) can be found here.  Suggestions for improvements in future renditions are always welcome.

The Poor and Their Relief in the Mishnah

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Last month there was a workshop in Jerusalem on charity in rabbinic literature that I was sorry to miss.  There has been a great deal of scholarly interest lately on the topic of charity generally in antiquity, among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  While Peter Brown’s book, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD takes a broad approach to issues that involve charity and aid for the poor in antiquity (while scarcely mentioning Jews), recent books by Alyssa Gray, Gregg Gardner, Yael Wilfand, Noam Zion, and Rivka Ulmer all make solid contributions to thinking about rabbinic attitudes toward the poor and our responsibility to them.  A book that I edited, Judaism and the Economy: A Sourcebook contains contributions that further advance our understanding of Jewish ideas and practices of charity from antiquity to the present.

I recently published another essay that deals with this topic from what I think is an unusual angle.  It is titled, “The Poor and Their Relief in the Mishnah: An Economic Analysis,” Studies in Judaism, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences 2 (2019): 61-72.  I do not have an offprint to share, but below is the Abstract:

The Mishnah, it has long been argued, assumes an economy in “stasis”; the economy is eternal and never-changing. If this is indeed the case, then the Mishnah should neither acknowledge nor promote economic mobility, even among the poor. This paper, which views the Mishnaic portrayals of the poor and of poor-relief through from an economic perspective, largely confirms this conclusion. The Mishnah, I argue, acknowledges a binary class system, “the poor” and everyone else, and sets the poverty line quite high by modern standards. It is assumed that only the situationally poor (i.e., the formerly rich) will move between classes. While, following the Torah, the Mishnah prescribes relief for the poor, it minimizes the amount necessary to be left for the poor while also changing the mechanism of poor relief in a way that reinforces social hierarchy.

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.