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Is it Anti-Semitic?

June 10, 2024 by admin

Growing up in one of the few Jewish families in suburban Boston, I experienced antisemitism. A couple of fights; some taunts (“Mike the kike” stands out as one of the more creative); a few pennies pitched at my feet. It was far less common and intense than my parents experienced, which in turn was less than their parents experienced, which was an order of magnitude less than their parents experienced. I saw it as the kind of chronic, low-grade price for being Jewish. Not really a big deal, especially when compared with the pogroms and the Holocaust.

Another reason it wasn’t a big deal was because of the role that Israel played in my psyche. Israel was a safe haven. Imperfect to be sure (I visited for the first time when I was in college), but a country where there was no price for being Jewish. It was also a country that actively stood for the defense of Jews across the world. There was something that was deeply empowering about that. I never felt like I was in physical danger due to my Jewishness, but its very existence made a real difference. There was a secure place from which to counter threats, and a place of refuge should things go horribly wrong in doing so.

That said, in terms of Jewish history the United States is a remarkable country that has allowed Jews enough breathing room and legal protections to thrive. In college, I do not remember experiencing any antisemitism and I began to increasingly feel a disconnect between my own sense of safety and opportunity and the constant drumbeat coming from the institutional Jewish community about the dangers of antisemitism. Surely, antisemitism was much less of an issue than it was being made out to be.

I was not the only person who felt this. Professionally, I entered Jewish studies in the heyday of the movement against the “lachrymose” historiography of the Jews. Earlier academic histories of the Jews focused on their persecution. Jewish history was portrayed as a never-ending tale of woes. In the middle of the twentieth century, though, historians (led by Salo Baron) pushed back against this narrative. Jewish history should be seen as tale of repeated creative adaptations. This was an upbeat narrative that told of Jewish thriving, even under sometimes adverse conditions. This approach to Jewish history became increasingly popular in the United States, although it took longer to penetrate into Israeli historiography. My point is simply that I was, and remain, a product of my time, with my eye toward that which was shared between Jews and their neighbors rather than that which drove them apart.

Although I was trained to recognize and analyze the anti-Judaism that permeated early Christian texts and the difficult relationships they generated, and to a more limited degree how these sentiments were expressed in early Islamic texts, I never really thought about teaching a course on antisemitism per se. I did not want to be in the camp of the alarmists. It seemed more important to me to promote a more “realistic” narrative in which Jews were active agents and not passive victims.

Paris came first. And then Pittsburgh. And Charlottesville. And suddenly all did not seem well in America or the West anymore. So a few years ago I decided to teach a course that I called Antisemitism: A History. It seemed to go well. What it did not prepare me – or my students – for, though was October 7 and its aftermath, particularly on college campuses.

As I begin to prepare for teaching this class again in the fall, I continue to reel from the events of this academic year. How do I understand and frame them for myself, no less for my students? How can I help to generate critical understanding, and not simply fuel partisan rancor?

I do not yet have answers, and do not expect to have fully figured things out by the fall. But I do have some preliminary thoughts that might help me find the way through the confusing thicket of claims about contemporary antisemitism. I offer them here to invite you to think with me.

Definitional Approaches

Is Zionism a form of racism? Is a call for divestment from Israel antisemitic? Is Israel genocidal? Is calling calling Israel “genocidal” a form of antisemitism or racism? Framed in this manner, these questions at hear boil down to definition. What do we mean by each of these terms? Thus, any discussion of antisemitism must begin with a reflection on definitions.

It is imperative that we recognize that two of the terms being commonly bandied about, “antisemitism” and “racism”, are intrinsically weaponized terms. There is nothing objective about them (despite the attempts of some writers to make racism in particular a descriptive rather than value-laden term). They are bad words that we use to characterize, rightly or wrongly, people we determine are evil or espousing ideas that deem evil. The history of these terms in complex and may not always have had the nuances that they do now, but in this case origins are largely irrelevant. Except in some very odd and perverse circles (catch the weaponized, vague use of language here?), we never call someone a racist or antisemite as a compliment.

“Zionism,” though, is not intrinsically value-laden. Nor, though, does it always have a clear meaning. Like most “-isms” and other political movements, “Zionism” comes in a huge range of forms. Most people would probably not debate its basic meaning, as “the [modern political] movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.” Some Zionists have an expansive definition of “the land of Israel,” some do not. Some Zionists connect the political movement so particular economic forms (e.g., socialism), while others do not. Zionists debate the meaning of “self-determination” and “statehood.” Just as there is no single form of communism or democracy, so too there is no single or canonical full expression of Zionism. There is nothing inconsistent, in theory or practice, to being a committed Zionist who believes that Palestinians should live in dignity both within Israeli society and in their own state alongside Israel.

Racism is a tricker “-ism” because it relies on an a priori belief that there are “races.” Yet we know now that while “race” may have some genetic underpinnings (especially in terms of phenotype, or some physical characteristics), it is mostly a social construct. The first step of racism is to create a race, a group of people usually classed together according to certain arbitrarily selected phenotypical markers. To make this a bit more concrete, we know that left-handedness, propensity to heart disease, and the experienced flavor of cilantro are all genetically marked. With the limited exception of left-handedness, though, people who share these markers are usually not grouped together into something called a “race.” We create a race only to discriminate against it. The movement is from racism to the creation of race, not from the existence of race to racism. In 1975, the United Nations passed Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” They then clearly had second thoughts. In 1991, they repealed the resolution by an overwhelming vote. They never clarified what had changed.

Antisemitism, racism, and Zionism have no meaning in the law. “Genocide,” on the other hand, does. Both U.S. and international law offer definitions that pin the term to a deliberate attempt “to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.” To date, while some international groups have flirted with the idea that Israel is committing “genocide” in their current war in Gaza, the International Court of Justice has specifically and pointedly refused to label Israel’s actions as genocide. Genocide, though, can bear a second usage, one that like “antisemitism” and “racism” is intrinsically weaponized. To call Israel “genocidal” is a smear meant to offend and isolate, not a statement of fact.

Finally, most of the international bodies that apply legal terms such as “genocide” are not moral bodies, they are political entities. Bodies like the U.N., the U.S. State Department, and the International Court of Justice, are all political entities working to promote the interests of their members and backers. The fundamental purpose of the U.N., for example, is to help us all avoid nuclear annihilation, at which it has done a top rate job. Secondarily, it helps enemies to avoid war, a goal it which it is significantly less successful. Finally, it facilitates our ability to address larger global issues, a goal that it only rarely accomplishes. When the U.N. declares that an act is bad, it is first and foremost advancing the political agendas of its member states. Non-profit groups are rarely more objective, as they all tend to hue closely to the positions of their own self-selected constituencies.

The end result is that we are left in a definitional thicket, in which language is often used precisely because it is imprecise. Recognizing the problem, This particular charge is addressed in a policy document known as IHRA. In 2005, a European agency created a working, non-legally binding definition of antisemitism, to be used to provide guidance for governments and agencies charged with and legislating on issues relating to bias toward Jews. According to their definition:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

This definition was formally adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016, which further fleshed out the definition with eleven examples that were meant not to be definitive, but to offer guidance. About half of them concern the State of Israel. A group of scholars, concerned that the focus on Israel might dampen legitimate debate about the actions of the Israeli government, formulated a competing definition known as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Outside of a few limited academic and small left-leaning circles, the Jerusalem Declaration – which in my reading is quite similar to the IHRA definition – is largely ignored. The U.S. Department of State, for example, draws on the IHRA definition.

The IHRA definition is well-meaning and helpful, but it continues to work in the cramped definitional approach. Its purpose is to help us to determine what acts and speech we can “legitimately” (although not legally) label as “antisemitic.” There is some value in this approach, but the events of the last year have also show that confining the discussion of acts concerning Jews to definitions is, by itself, insufficient.

Antisemitism and Expressive Harm

Racism and antisemitism can be overt, aggressive, and undeniable. Such acts and words, though, constitute a tiny fraction of racism as it practiced in the real world today.

Today’s racism is more subtle. It is often couched in a set of loose symbols and memes that point toward rather than naming a position. It is cloaked in deniability even as it spreads its evil tentacles. How do we think about speech or other acts that make us uncomfortable when the perpetrators deny any ill intent?

It is in this very question that I think that we can see a way out of the definitional thicket. In his book, How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi reflects on how we identify racism. His focus is on policies: any policy that disproportionately negatively affects a particular demographic group is racist, whereas those that drive toward equality are antiracist. This approach shifts our lens from definitions to affects. If one demographic group is disproportionately affected by an action or discourse, those actions or words might be described as “racist.”

Kendi’s approach dovetails with the framework of expressive harm. Actions and words can undermine a person’s dignity, perpetuate stereotypes, or do other social and psychological damage. As individuals, we might experience expressive harm in “microaggressions.” As groups, we might see them as discrete expressions of racism.

One example of this dynamic is the controversy over the removal of Confederate statues. When set up about a century ago, they clearly were meant to assert White Supremacy. That, though, was a century ago. Now, for many of the defenders of these statues, they are morally neutral historical markers that should be preserved. On the other hand, most of the statues’ detractors thought that they were examples of expressive harm that continued to work on the African-American population in particular. There is no objective or definitional way to adjudicate this disagreement. Ultimately, many municipalities removed these statues (correctly, in my view) because they recognized that they were exerting a disproportionate expressive harm on a certain demographic group.

Academic arguments gave way to, or at least were settled by, real life experience.

Contexts

Language exists in contexts. For the purpose of this reflection, there are three contexts that are particularly important, intent, effects, and the mob.

Intent. Language that is unobjectionable in one context can become harmful in others. The issue here is usually the intent of the speaker/writer. A joke in one context can be a hostile attack in another. We are all sensitive to this, particularly when we are on our guard. Does the speaker mean us well or ill? Harsh language can be generated out of love as well as hate.

Take Israeli news. Like the United States, Israel has a robust free press that routinely, and sometimes quite harshly, criticizes policies and politicians. Within an Israeli context, such language, although sometimes contested, is understood as coming from a good place: the desire to create a better society. That same rhetoric, though, when used by those who oppose the very existence of Israel means something very different.

Effects. One of the scary things about Charlottesville and President Trump’s odd comment on it were not exactly the words themselves, which were often vague enough to offer their speakers some wiggle room, but the work that such language did on the general atmosphere. It “normalized” certain kinds of language that then pushed the boundary closer to truly aggressive language and violent behavior. Often, although not always, that is in fact the very intent of such language, whether consciously or not. An intimidating environment can encourage one’s opponents to self-censor, for fear of provoking violence.

Mobs. Over the past several months, we have seen protests against Israel. These protests were mostly peaceful, but they also sometimes used aggressive and deliberately imprecise language expressed in a hostile tone. There is nothing illegal about doing this, although once in a while the emotion and language does spill over into actual violence or it encourages some in the crowd toward violence.

Even putting the actual violence aside, mobs are context to which Jews (and others) can be particularly sensitive. Most Jews, from their childhood, have learned about the danger of mob; it was through impassioned mobs of people who thought themselves well-meaning and morally justified that multitudes of Jews were murdered. In any context in which Jews are “others,” mobs are potentially scary. This might be analogous to the way that many African-Americans feel about law enforcement. The vast majority of encounters between law-abiding African Americans and police officers are peaceful, but some are deadly. It is the threat of the deadly ones that generates distrust. Ta-Nahisi Coates writes eloquently of “the talk” that parents have with their children about how to deal with the police during a traffic stop in order to avoid a dangerous confrontation. Such a talk might be necessary, but it also reinforces distrust. For most Jews, the mob – no matter what it is aggressively shouting – is like that.

Frameworks, Not Definitions

I have attempted here to sketch out a general framework for understanding some of the speech that has pervaded college campuses (and beyond) this year. My goal is not to eschew definitions entirely, but to show how anti-Jewish, like other “racist” speech, goes beyond words. Even well-intentioned language can have terrible impacts. This post has already gotten too long, so I will save my thoughts for a future post on how this approach helps us to understand what is happening more broadly now, and the dramatic spike of “antisemitism” in the United States.

Arizona, Abortion, and Culpability

May 29, 2024 by admin

Over the past month, an 1864 law in Arizona was in the news. Rendered moot for decades by the Federal right to abortion, but never repealed (and in fact affirmed by an Arizona Supreme Court ruling), the law punishes those who assist with abortions:

A person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years. (Arizona State Law, 13-3603)

The law is relatively sweeping, carving out only an exception for saving the life of the mother.

What caught my attention was that the mother is nowhere mentioned. Her role is, in fact, discussed in another law:

A woman who solicits from any person any medicine, drug or substance whatever, and takes it, or who submits to an operation, or to the use of any means whatever, with intent thereby to procure a miscarriage, unless it is necessary to preserve her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than one nor more than five years. (Arizona State Law 13-3604)

But here’s the curious thing: 13.3604, which deals with the mother, was repealed in 2021.

The first law, punishing the one who brings about an abortion, was finally repealed, after a bruising political battle. But the case highlighted a critical legal distinction that is often obscured in the highly charged political discussion about abortion. The person performing an abortion is not simply an agent of the mother. The two fall into separate categories, and their culpabilities, in the case of an illicit abortion, can be distinguished.

Abortion is a serious issue, and there has been a lot of commentary about this particular case. Most of the discussion whirls around the question of what makes an abortion “illicit.” Nearly every legal code throughout history, including those in the United States even when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, has regulated abortion. I do not wish to minimize the issue of access to abortion, but I was intrigued by a much narrower question: Once we define an abortion as illicit – in whatever system, for whatever reason – how do we think about the roles of the mother and those actually terminating, or abetting the termination of, the pregnancy?

This question led me to consider how Jewish law, known as halakhah, deals with this problem. Jewish legal sources, particularly from the sixteenth century on, extensively discuss abortion. They tend to be focused on the same questions that animate us today: Is a fetus a “life”? Under what circumstances is abortion permissible? Due to what might be seen as a quirk in the Jewish legal system, they also consider potential differences between how these questions are to be resolved if the parties were Jewish or not.

It turns out, though, that they rarely consider the actual matter of culpability in the case of illicit abortions. In 1964, for example, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (considered one of the greatest experts in Jewish law in his generation) composed a long and strongly-worded, basically polemical, opinion on abortion (Hoshen Mishpat, 2:70). In it, Feinstein argues that in almost all cases, except when doctors can testify that the mother’s life is definitely at risk, abortion is forbidden. It counts as murder, pure and simple. Toward the end of the responsum, though, Feinstein becomes uncharacteristically tentative. Yes, a doctor who performs an abortion is guilty of committing murder. But it is not actually “murder,” which would entail the death penalty. The reasoning here becomes strained, and the voice less sure. Doctors should not perform illicit abortions, but doing so is not exactly “murder,” even if it is technically classified as such.

When it comes to the mother, though, there is no discussion at all of culpability. Logically, a woman who pays a person to commit a murder might be considered an accomplice, with all the legal penalties that that might entail. Feinstein, though, avoids the question completely.

The reason he avoids this legal question becomes clearer from other halakic sources, but to understand how I need first to explain briefly how halakhah works. According to the traditional halakhic system, individuals are expected to consult with their rabbis about how they should behave in particular cases. The rabbi is then able to parse and weigh the issues in order to determine which factors are more or less halakhically relevant, before issues a ruling. The person asking for the ruling – but only that person – is then obligated to follow that ruling. Outside of a few very Orthodox communities, in practice this is becoming increasingly uncommon. Most observant Jews today turn to books or the Web for guidance. Be that as it may, though, this is how the system is supposed to work.

The bottom line of the halakhic literature is that a woman considering an abortion is expected to consult with her rabbi. At this point, the issue has clearly broken out of the strict contours of law. In addition to considering previous learned writings on the topic, the rabbi now has a human being in front of them, with her own unique set of difficult feelings and circumstances. The law, with its binary way of thinking, can only go so far. A rabbi might well tell her that while a decision to abort is against Jewish law, she herself is not necessarily committing a sin. Illogical? Perhaps, but also typically human.

Law has limits, and we come up against those limits fastest and hardest when we confront difficult issues like abortion. When we seek to shoehorn such issues into the “law,” we are asking too much of law and too little of our own abilities to have serious and meaningful discussions.

Ms. or. fol. 1220, or: A Walk through Jewish History

May 15, 2024 by admin

I am sitting in the new building of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin with the Erfurt manuscript of the Tosefta (Ms. or. fol. 1220) in front of me. I have consulted the text of this manuscript (described here) – as transcribed by M. Zuckermandel and used by Saul Lieberman (more on them below) – countless times and have looked at the pictures and digitized version. I have read about the manuscript and its history. But having this volume in front of me and being able to gently page through it is a different experience altogether.

The philosopher Bruno Latour has suggested that we take seriously the possibility that objects have their own agency. Aside from the fact that only a few centuries ago we were much more likely to ascribe actual power to objects, even today our interaction with objects is much more reciprocal than we normally believe. When we interact with objects, we can respond to them. The ozone hole is a classic example (we cause it; its existence forces us to react), but even a ball in motion in a sporting event forces us into an active relationship with it.

I leave to the philosophers the question of whether Latour’s conception of objects is philosophically useful. What has always been clear to me, though, is the pedagogical power of objects. I have long been attracted to the practice of teaching with objects. In the Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project, we attempt to show how objects can open up into wide and interesting stories (see, for example, this one on Jewish gladiators). I confess that in most of my classroom teaching, I have not done enough with objects. Yet as I look at this volume, it seems to encapsulate an entire course on Jewish history.

The Erfurt manuscript is the earliest and best witness to the Tosefta. Yet the Tosefta is itself a somewhat mysterious document. It reads much like the Mishnah, largely following its order. Some parts of it are identical to the Mishnah; others presuppose and comment on passages found in the Mishnah; and yet others seem to precede the Mishnah. While the Mishnah became the base text for two Talmuds (Palestinian and Babylonian), we do not know where, when, or why the Tosefta was redacted as a single document, nor how it was used. The Erfurt manuscript is our earliest manuscript that people were actually reading the Tosefta as an independent document.

That, though, is only preface to the story of our manuscript, which dates to the 12th century. The manuscript itself is hefty, heavy, and must have been expensive to produce. It is made of large parchment pages dotted with pinholes on the margin, to help the scribe keep a straight line. The scribe was also thrifty enough that when a page ripped, he stitched it back together rather than start a fresh one.

The one of many unknown, highly skilled scribes of Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages.

Who commissioned it, and why? There may be a clue at the end, where a note records that the manuscript was pawned by a man named Rabbi Jacob son of Rabbi Simcha Ha-Levi (along, perhaps, with another man who seems unrelated). We do not know if Rabbi Jacob was the original owner or a later one, or the date of the pawn. This raises its own fascinating questions about the pawning of manuscripts between Jews in the Middle Ages. Curiously, the pawn broker here promises to return, upon receipt of the money, “this or a chumash [Hebrew Bible, or part of one] or a machzor [high holiday prayer book].” A manuscript was a manuscript; it seems not to have had any particular value to Rabbi Jacob.

Many heavily read Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages are full of scribal notes correcting and emending the text. Some of the more heavily annotated manuscripts, such as the Sassoon Bible, have notes in multiple hands. Not the Erfurt Tosefta. There a few notes here and there; rarely more than one a page. It is possible that the manuscript, which is still in excellent condition, was actually hardly used.

The Tosefta was one of fifteen extant Hebrew manuscripts used by the Erfurt Jewish community. Some of these manuscripts, such as an enormous Bible, are significant works, and there is a long, complex, and bloody history behind their survival. That story, with pogroms, property seizures, and ultimately the seizure of these manuscripts into Christian libraries, encapsulates the story of German Jews in the Middle Ages.

By the nineteenth century this entire collection of fifteen manuscripts made it to the Royal Library in Berlin (which would become the Prussian State Library, and now the Staatsbibliothek). In the 1870s, it was rebound, oddly, by Paul de Lagarde, a notorious antisemite, at (he drily notes on the first leaf of the manuscript), his own expense – Lagarde apparently thought it was actually the Jerusalem Talmud, although I do not know that it would have made a difference. It then came to the attention of two critical figures in the history of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, or academic study of Jews and Judaism. In his 1878 catalogue of Hebrew manuscripts in the Royal Library, Moritz Steinschneider notes it in his second volume as item 159, and claims that the handwriting is “between German and Italian.” Steinschneider was perhaps the preeminent bibliographer of Hebrew books in his day, and his catalogues both in Germany and at the Bodleian Library at Oxford opened a new era of scholarship. Although of modest means, he amassed his own collection of 4,500 books that ultimately ended up in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. His archive is also there.

Steinschneider mentions in his catalogue the work being done with the Erfurt Tosefta manuscript at the same time by Moses Zuckermandel. Zuckermandel‘s primary scholarly contribution was a critical edition of the Tosefta, using both the Erfurt manuscript and one in Vienna. Unlike Steinschneider, Zuckermandel was a rabbi and is an excellent exemplar of the German rabbi-scholar at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Like Lagarde, he was also allowed (?) to write in the Erfurt Tosefta manuscript. His note(s) in German at the end of the volume (transcribed here) comment primarily on the last bound page of the Tosefta, which is actually a half-page from a different work altogether. The Tosefta manuscript is incomplete, for unknown reasons.

During World War II, the librarians of the Prussian Royal Library divided their entire manuscript collection and shipped them, for safe-keeping, throughout Germany. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind what was shipped where, probably because there really wasn’t any – they scrambled to do what they could with the time that they had. One of the Hebrew manuscripts from Erfurt, for example, ended up in Marburg. For most of the other manuscripts, we simply do not know where they spent the war before somehow making it back to Berlin. Our Tosefta manuscript may well not have left Berlin. We know that some manuscripts were storied in the armored basement of the Reich Ministry for Economic Affairs, which was next to the library. The basement suffered damage from bombing and a fire, which may account for the soot marks on the edges of the manuscript.

Why the Erfurt manuscripts were saved at all is an intriguing question for which we don’t have a clear answer. Perhaps it was part of the deliberate Nazi plan to preserve Jewish artefacts, remembrances of the race they had pledged to exterminate. The Nazis saved and catalogued many Jewish items, both books and ritual objects. We know that the Nazis collected some Jewish books for “research,” to demonstrate the inferiority of Jews. There is also a theory that they planned to open a “Museum of an Extinct Jewish Race,” but there is little evidence to support it. More likely the survival of the manuscript was due to the work of dedicated librarians who were loathe to part with valuable manuscripts, even if they were Jewish. That’s simply how librarians roll.

Beginning in the 1930s, Saul Lieberman became interested in the Tosefta. Lieberman, born in Belaraus in 1898, was a Talmudic prodigy. He attended the Slobodka yeshiva – the Harvard of yeshivahs – and then got a secular education. By 1928 he went to Palestine where he received a Masters at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He began his academic career at Hebrew University (curiously, without a PhD, which he never earned) but after being laid off, moved in 1940 to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, which both trained Conservative rabbis and, at the time, was one of the few centers for the academic study of Judaism in the United States. It is hard to overemphasize the impact that Lieberman had throughout his career (he died in 1983) on the development of Jewish studies in the United States and on the nascent Conservative Movement. His crowning academic achievement was his critical edition of and magisterial commentary on the Tosefta. He began publishing this in 1955, and left the work incomplete. Lieberman thought that the Erfurt manuscript is our best witness for the Tosefta, and while he respected Zuckermandel’s work, he thought it had too many errors. So working from photographs, Lieberman redid the transcription, comparing it with other manuscripts and witnesses. It appears that Lieberman never saw the manuscript itself.

The next chapter of Jewish history has yet to be written, but I wonder what role, if any, this otherwise obscure manuscript of the Tosefta will play in it.

My sincere thanks to Petra Figeac and the staff at the Orientabteilung for allowing me access to this exceptional manuscript on short notice.

The Business of Astrology

May 1, 2024 by admin

This was originally published on my Substack here.

There is a psychic/astrology storefront near my office. Some of my students have used her services and suggested that I check it out, as a lark. I have yet to do so.

Adam Grant recently devoted a Substack post to destroying any last remaining shred of credibility of astrology. Not only is astrology a bunch of malarky – as the science proves! – but it is a “gateway drug” to other strange and unmoored ideas. I’m not sure about the “gateway drug” bit (more on that below), but I totally agree with the rest. Even as entertainment, I recoil at the idea of giving my money to a charlatan.

Yet if I am being completely honest with myself, I also am afraid of what she will say. Who knows what kind of odd and potentially disturbing thoughts she will give me? I rationally know that I should not feel this. Yet, there is, perhaps, something seductive about the idea that someone can tell your future, combined with the belief that your fate is intertwined with the movements of the heavenly bodies. Whatever drives that feeling, I know that many others share it. Even in our scientifically-centered world astrology is a billion dollar business.

The practice of astrology is, of course, ancient. So too is criticism of it. Like today, most politicians and intellectuals throughout antiquity thought astrology to be, at best, a dubious activity. At worst, it was a way to manipulate the masses to oppose the State. At the same time, these same intellectuals largely subscribed its basic tenets.

Astrology is grounded in three basic beliefs. First, that time has quality. That is, moments of time are intrinsically different. Second, that this quality is linked to the movement of the constellations and the planets. Of special interest to astrologers is where the constellations are in the sky and the planets in relation to them. Third, that the there is a connection between the quality of the time as indicated in the heavens and what happens here on earth. This connection is sometimes referred to as the doctrine of correspondences. (The later theologian Emanuel Swedenborg would later apply this idea to his own spiritual and religious world.) The truth of these propositions was hardly questioned through antiquity, or for that matter, until the early modern period.

The nature of the correspondence was, however, a topic of ancient debate. Was the movement of the astral bodies (in which, according to some, were embodied the gods themselves) the cause of events, or signs of the future? This philosophical problem, of course, is at the heart of all future-telling activities: Are signs of the future deterministic and unalterable? One of the more famous ancient examples that leans toward determinism is that of Oedipus, whose family tried to do everything they could to alter a bad reading of the future only to discover that they facilitated that very outcome. Jewish and Christian intellectuals in antiquity never denied that there were meanings in the movement of the stars but they did largely shun deterministic interpretations. The future could be foretold but knowing its course could also be altered, especially (when bad) through acts of piety.

As with dream interpreters, there were learned and less-learned astrologers. Expert astrologers would have known not only how visually to recognize what was happening in the heavens but also how to compute the movement of the constellations and stars. One Hebrew manual from Late Antiquity, Sepher Ha-Razim, describes how one can ascend through the seven firmaments of heaven, what one will see at each level and how one should respond. According to its preface, the angel Raziel originally gave this information to Noah who learned from it the movement of the constellations and what they mean. Sepher Ha-Razim is not an astrological manual as we might usually understand the term since it does not detail the correspondences between the quality of time and the meaning of events. It does, though, link astrological phenomena to adjurations of angels and the firmament in which those angels reside. For example, if a man wants to win the heart of a rich woman (the manual entirely assumes a readership of men), then during the full moon he should invoke the angels of the first firmament by putting a piece of tin inscribed with an adjuration into a flask containing one’s sweat and bury it on her doorstep. The manual assumes a ritual expert who has many abilities, including at least some facility with astronomical observations, the names of angels, and scribal skills.

The rabbis very rarely mention astrologers, and when they do, they use a Greek loan word and reduce the position to a pedestrian and frequently incorrect predictor of the future. Despite frequent Roman claims that astrology is “Chaldean”, and thus originally practiced in Aramaic, rabbinic literature never uses an Aramaic or Hebrew term that we might translate as astrologer. The astrologer, even more than the dream interpreter, is mocked, even if the rabbi acknowledges that he (always he) does have the power to accurately predict the future. Even the rabbis never seem to condemn them outright or reject their expert knowledge and it is likely that other Jews did not have scruples about consulting them. Whether there were specifically Jewish astrologers (as there may have been dream interpreters) is unknown.

Christian authorities had a dimmer view of astrologers. Already beginning in 357, Roman imperial legislation astrologers get lumped together with soothsayers, diviners, augurs, seers, Chaldeans, and wizards – anyone who consults one is liable for the death penalty. (How often, or even whether, this was ever enforced is a different question.) The teaching of astrology was banned in 373 and in 409 all astrologers throughout the Roman Empire were to be banished unless they “transfer their faith to the practice of the Catholic religion and never return to their former false doctrine.” While the legislation becomes increasingly severe over time, it is quite possible that astrologers continued to work, with some catering to Christian customers. (For more on Christian astrology, see this excellent, open-access book.)

Astrology is a nice example of the complicated intersection between science, theology, philosophy, “official” religion, and actual human practice. That practice is often driven by deeper, ubiquitous psychological impulses. Scientists, philosophers, theologians, clergy, and lawmakers can work around the edges of those impulses, but our desire to know the future and to feel connected to a world beyond ourselves is here to stay – and thus too, the market for astrology and astrologers.

The Business of Astrology on Substack

April 17, 2024 by admin

I just made my first substantive Substack post. You can check it out here.