Then and Now
I have been in Rome this semester, which has been an extraordinary experience. I have been working especially hard on my new book, which should be finished soon. I’ve been invited to speak about it in Paris on December 12 (in English!)- if you are in the area, I’d love to see you!
I am just emerging from a colloquium that earlier this week I co-organized with Ishay Rosen-Zvi on “Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity.” As such things go, it was a bit unusual: we focused on five “meta” issues (state of the academic field; undergraduate education; graduate education; the relationship between Israeli and American scholars; and our place in and response to the wider societal sources in which we work), discussing them as a group rather than having formal presentations. I made brief opening remarks, Ishay made brief closing remarks, and Shaye J. D. Cohen delivered a keynote, but otherwise the group participants took turns facilitating the discussions. I may have more to say later about what I got out of this colloquium but in the interim below are my slightly redacted opening remarks:
My name is Michael Satlow, from the Program in Judaic Studies and Department of Religious Studies here at Brown University. Ishay Rosen-Zvi and I are delighted to be able to welcome you to our colloquium on Jews and Judaism in late antiquity.
This idea for this colloquium arose out of a happenstance. The Program in Judaic Studies at Brown University administers a fund, the Ruth and Joseph Moskow Endowment, used to sponsor a colloquium or symposium most every year. A bit over a year ago at a program meeting, I discovered that the symposium for which the funds had been earmarked for this year had been canceled and I somewhat impulsively volunteered to organize one for this year. To be honest, my ideas were rather vague at that time. I knew that despite my ability to have many wonderful intellectual conversations here at Brown, I have very few opportunities on a day-to-day basis to have ones that are very field specific. So what I really wanted to do at that time was to bring together a group of people who share a passion for this topic as well as a basic vocabulary. (Try explaining the stam to a theorist of French literature.) What exactly we would talk about I was not at all clear about.
At that point I contacted Ishay. Brown and Tel Aviv developed a memo of understanding some years ago, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to put it to use. Together we settled on a topic and format that if not unheard of, are unconventional. We thought that what would be most useful – what we don’t, as a collective, have enough time to do – is to reflect together on the big picture, the meta-issues of our field specifically. Where are we and where are we going? In order to accomplish this goal, we also decided to forego paper presentations in order to foster a more serious discussion. At the larger professional conferences, after all, what many of us enjoy most, and what we find most productive, are the side conversations that occur between paper presentations and over meals. It made us wonder if you could design a whole colloquium around loosely structured conversations.
Given the unconventional nature of this gathering – and our inability to fund travel or honoraria – it was far from clear to either of us that anyone would actually want to come. And yet, to our great surprise, almost everyone we invited accepted. Maybe, it made us think, we are onto something here. I hope that by the end of the day tomorrow the exact nature of that “something” will be much clearer, but in advance of that let me say how grateful we are that you are here to join us in this endeavor.
Let me add some personal comments to give some context to these upcoming conversations. I entered graduate school in 1987 and received my Ph.D. in 1993. Over the past few years I have been becoming increasingly aware of how the field, and maybe the profession, has shifted, and concerned about my own ability to respond to these shifts. I have thought about these shifts under the four major rubrics of our conversations – the state of the field; undergraduate education; graduate education; and the relationship between scholars working in the United States and in Israel, and I want to say some very brief words about each.
First, the state of the field. When I got my first job, it was a field that was animated by a few core issues. These issues – such as the reliability of rabbinic reports and the authority of the rabbis – at times got a bit tedious, but they did serve as an intellectual axis mundi that helped to create a common conversation. At the same time, the study of Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity – which we often, if incorrectly, simply labelled “rabbinics” – was exciting. The field was seen as the virtual core of “Jewish studies.” Even if the reasons for this mostly arose from the incomplete separation between traditional and academic approaches to rabbinic texts, the field still pushed to make contributions to the wider academy, particularly in classics, religious studies, and literary theory.
Today, I’m not sure if I can say any of those things about our field. Are there core issues around which we have common conversations and around which larger research agendas form? Or is what unites us simply our shared interest in a common dataset, and perhaps a methodology here or there? While it is clear to me that our status within the world of Jewish studies has severely eroded with the growth and acceptance of other fields within Jewish studies, it is unclear if we are making the same impact in the wider academy, or, indeed, if we even want to.
Second, undergraduate education. My experience teaching undergraduates has also changed and I’m not sure to what extent that has been the result of wider shifts or of the different cultures at the institutions at which I’ve worked. Interest specifically in the rabbis has never been very high, but there was some undergraduate recognition of and interest in the Talmud (in English translation) and until recently enrollments in such courses were usually healthy. That has changed and in my own experience undergraduate interest in anything that smacks of being “too Jewish” or “too old” has severely weakened. This, of course, is consistent with general trends in the humanities and Jewish studies, at least in the United States, and both students and educational institutions increasingly emphasize STEM fields and relevance. I know that I can get students into my classes if I offer easy grades – and once they are in the course, they do work, learn, and enjoy. But I struggle with trying to balance student interest, my own areas of strength and weakness, and my old-fashioned sense of rigor.
Third, graduate education. From my first tenure track job in 1994 I have been involved in graduate education. My approach to graduate training combines the traditional with the practical. On the one hand, students need to be prepared to do scholarship that is on a high-level and impactful: they should have good linguistic skills; solid methodological capabilities; and broad acquaintance with the major issues of the field. On the other, though, they also need always to be aware that graduate training is first and foremost professional training, a certification that will help one get a job. There is a delicate balance to be struck here as we try to train students in five or six years. Given the wider shifts occurring throughout the academy, should we continue to train in the same way, or do we need to think differently about what a PhD in the field really means? Complicating these decisions, of course, is the job market. For years, I’ve told graduate students that the market in our field is robust enough that most – not all, but most – graduates who have been diligent about their works will get tenure track jobs. While our graduates continue to get good jobs, I have been shaken enough by the market – which is downright scary – that I no longer use this line on our students. It is no longer the case the every JS program feels it needs someone trained in rabbinics.
And, finally, the relationship between scholars in Israel and the United State. During graduate school I spent two years studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. For me, this was a critically formative experience, especially perhaps because it came at a time when American and Israeli scholars were explicitly discussing their different approaches. Prior to the 1990s, it was indeed expected that American scholars in the field would have some significant connection to Israeli colleagues, a connection that might mean actually studying there or at least knowing Modern Hebrew and attending the World Congress. At the same time, there was a recognized tension between the approaches and goals of American and Israeli scholarship in the field. Here I wonder if we have seen a major change, almost a reversal. American scholars increasingly have asserted their independence and, implicitly, have placed Israel toward the margins; it has become easier to ignore Israeli scholarship and the value of engaging with scholarship in Modern Hebrew has lessened. Instead, I see far more Israeli scholars spending time in the United States, whether as graduate students or post-docs, and that is changing what Israeli scholarship looks like. If this observation is correct, what does it mean and how do we respond to it, especially as we train our own graduate students?
I want to emphasize that I am not claiming that the field has changed for the worse, and that somehow I lived in a golden age. Nor am I claiming the reverse, namely that all is glorious now and that we are marching into a better, kinder world. It’s just that things have changed and continue to do so, and we – indeed, this is generally true of all academics – respond slowly in the face of change. Maybe we need to tweak things; maybe we need to completely overhaul our assumptions and approaches. I’m not sure, but I am convinced that these new challenges and opportunities that are worth at least exploring.
As you have noticed, in sending invitations we have focused on what loosely might be described as the “mid-career” demographic. This was intentional; most of us have already experienced some of the changes that I’ve flagged, and others, but we are still in a position to act on whatever insights and suggestions we take out of these discussions. These are discussions that I hope don’t dwell on the reasons for the changes, particularly those that we cannot control. They should look forward: how do we respond to, change, and take advantage of our new landscape.
I expect, and hope that the discussions we have will be open, honest, and respectful. This is not exactly a case of “what is said in Providence stays in Providence” – because I do hope that we’ll all bring back nuggets that we want to share with others – but I do want to create a space in which we all feel free to articulate half-baked thoughts without fear that we will be judged or held accountable to them. A safe-space, if you will. We are a group of equals and the role of the facilitators is to help keep a discussion moving and orderly, not to sit as the resident experts of their sessions.
The goal of these discussions, at least as I see it, is rather simple: to emerge from these discussions, as individuals, with a better sense of what can be done to grow professionally. If, in addition to this, we emerge with a group consensus about certain issues, or even larger collaborative projects, that would be a great but added bonus. We are here primarily to learn from each other.
Ishay and I welcome you once again to this colloquium and look forward to our conversation.
A couple of months ago I attended a meeting of the Enoch Seminar in Camaldoli, Italy. The conference, which included an extraordinary range of scholars, grappled with the meaning of the word and concept of “Torah” from the biblical period through Late Antiquity. There were a mix of session topics and formats and I have no intention of trying to summarize the many papers and areas of disagreement. The publication of the papers is being organized by William Schniedewind and Jason Zurawski. I will focus here on my own contributions to the conference and one important area of what I thought was consensus.
My paper was entitled, “Torah: The Material Evidence.” In it, I posed a simple question: If we did not have the literature of the rabbis, what we would know about the Torah and its role in Jewish communities in Late Antiquity? Based on my survey of the artistic, archaeological, epigraphical, (meager) papyrological, and literary (law codes and patristic literature) I developed three main conclusions:
As to the first conclusion – well, duh. This is amply attested in rabbinic literature, so no surprise there. The second and third conclusions are more intriguing. At least some Jews saw the Torah as a “magical” text; its actual content could have little to do with this. The absence of mention of Torah learning among the epithets used in epitaphs was also striking, especially when seen in contrast to Jewish epitaphs from the medieval period. These conclusions do not (at least yet) add up to an answer to the question of what “Torah” meant to these Jews but they set some important areas to consider.
I also served as a respondent to a paper by Lutz Doehring called “Torah and Halakhah in the Hellenistic Period.” Lutz’s paper made the case that many Jews during this time used the Torah as a source of “halakhah,” and thus was important, in some sense, to the larger Jewish community. I was skeptical, not only of the entire notion of “halakhah” in the Hellenistic period (the term is used for the first time by the rabbis, who wrote in the Roman period) but of whether almost every case cited by Doehring cannot be explained at least equally well by appealing to traditional Jewish practices that exist independently of Torah, even if they are also attested there. So it is clear that Jews (many? most?) observed the Sabbath in the Hellenistic period but that does not mean that they justified or authorized their practice by appeal to a text. Maybe they did, but there is almost no explicit evidence to this effect.
Now for the agreement: On the narrow philological question of what did the word “torah” mean throughout antiquity, we all agreed that it shifted depending on the author and time. “Torah” never had a stable referent. For most people today, the term is usually taken as referring to a set text (i.e., the Pentateuch). That usage is attested in antiquity, but this is one of its least popular meanings. Early Jewish writers frequently used “torah” in the loose sense of wisdom or teaching (its literal meaning) usually having some connection to the divine or to Moses. For me, some of the more interesting papers argued that in antiquity the word Torah often served as a gerund, denoting a process of transmission rather than its stable contents. In some cases, it was the Sage whose behavior embodied Torah (a notion that can be found in rabbinic literature as well). The conference thus successfully destabilized “Torah,” leaving me with the take-away that there is no linear development in how it was understood but rather that it is a core concept whose exact meaning was (and is?) continually renegotiated in each and every Jewish community.
What is a “ball”? Does a ball exist when there is nobody around to see it?
Over the past couple of months I have been exposed to the thought of Bruno Latour. Latour tries to thread the needle between seeing all of reality as a social or rhetorical construction and a strictly realist or objective approach. For Latour, a ball is a “quasi-object.” In the sense that it is a sphere made of some material and has a certain set of physical properties, it is an object. But it is only in its interaction with humans that this sphere becomes a “ball.” At the same time, as soon as a person interacts with such an object they are themselves transformed into a condition of “play.” The relationship between person and object (or by extension, place or activity) is a reciprocal and interconnected one. (I have much more to learn about Latour, and the example of the ball is not really his, but for a summary see here.)
Latour first came up for me this summer while I was attending a conference entitled “Shared Ritual Practices and Divided Historiography: Media, Phenomena, Topoi” sponsored by the Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present Research Centre at the University of Erfurt. It was an interesting conference, not simply because it was full of excellent scholars discussing interesting ideas, but in a strange way also because I think few of us – or maybe I speak primarily for myself – knew exactly what we were supposed to be discussing. What is a “shared ritual practice” and how are we to think about it in the context of “dynamics”?
Most of the participants took this to be a conference about Jewish rituals in a Christian or Roman environment (the program was heavily waited toward Late Antiquity and, somewhat less so, the Middle Ages). Most of the papers that took “shared” as referring to such “trans-religious” rituals followed a historiographic trope that probably can be called the dominant one today in such studies: namely, that Jews tended to appropriate the rituals of the dominant cultures in which they lived and adapt them for their own use. Probably convincing enough, but also a little flat.
Not all the papers took “shared” in this way, however, Some (including my own) were more interested in understanding “shared” as referring to the rituals of rabbinic and non-rabbinic Jews. How might we describe the “dynamics” of such rituals? While nearly all scholars would reject a top-down explanatory model, in which rabbis advocated for new rituals and non-rabbis blindly followed, it is clear that we still have not developed a good and well-accepted model to replace it.
I was asked to talk on historiography and I had to flail around a little to avoid the well-trodden topic of the am ha-aretz, the group that the rabbis construct as a kind of contrast to themselves. So instead I went for the other end of the spectrum, focusing on the hasidim ha-rishonim, the “pious men of old.” There are six distinct traditions about them in classical rabbinic literature and scholars have usually argued that whether organized or real or not, the rabbis present them as a model to emulate. In reviewing the traditions I argued that the evidence is actually far more ambiguous; in several cases, especially among later rabbis, the hasidim ha-rishonim seem to be intentionally dismissed as good role models for contemporary Jews. They are the constructed “super-pious,” with whom the rabbis can think through whether it is possible to be too pious. Previous scholars, I think, did not see this ambiguity in large part because through the Middle Ages and early modern periods Jews took the term hasid and hasidim as positive expressions of piety. There was a bit of anachronistic projection.
This is where I am intrigued by Latour. A person doing a strange set of practices isn’t pious; he (or she) is only pious when we call him (or her) that. So too, some practices are denoted as “rituals” and laden with meaning and (most) others are not. Can we treat practices, or “doings,” as quasi-objects and, if so, does that get us anywhere beyond traditional theories of ritual? I’m not sure, but if you have any ideas I would be delighted to know.
Now back home it will take me a while to process what I’ve learned at The Big Ancient Mediterranean Conference, and even longer to work through my new, vastly expanded, to-do list. Here I want only to sketch out a few thoughts. I don’t think that any of them are particularly original but having the intellectual space and dialogue to focus on them helped me to work through and articulate them for myself.
First, I think that it is heuristically useful to think of digital humanities (DH) projects as being of three types: data creation, processing tools, and aggregators or linkers. The data creators (some of the more impressive representatives at the conference were Nomisma, Open Philology, Corpus Scriptorium, and the emerging and impressive Digital Latin Library) make digital data. The tools, such as those that do social network analysis (e.g., Gephi), natural language processing (xrenner), or plotting make that data not just accessible but also useful. And the linkers (Trismegistos, Pleaides) link different sorts of data, most often from different sites, for a variety of purposes. I find that thinking about DH projects this way is useful even if some projects fall between these cracks and most do more than one of these things.
While I think that the “linkers” are some of the more exciting DH sites, it all starts with the data. Data creation isn’t sexy. It also is of limited use if they are created for only one site or purpose. If one is going to go through the laborious process of creating digital data, one may as well try to make them not just accessible but useful. That requires structuring data in a way that existing tools can, with minor modifications, process them; including URIs so that linkers can reuse them; creating APIs to give computing access to them; and encoding them in an open rather than proprietary format so that they will be accessible when software standards change. This also applies, mutatis mutandis, to tools and aggregators. Tools should be designed to apply to a wide swath of structured data and aggregators function at their best when they can harvest or scrape data from a large number of sites.
For Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine, the road has been long and slow in large measure because the site was created ahead of the standard structures and the very existence of URIs. Over the two decades of the projects existence, we have had to transform our data several times. The transformations from SGML to XML and from our schema to EpiDoc were some of the more traumatic ones. Each required not only the custom development of an automated process but also manual cleaning and refining of the data (some of which we are still doing). Now we must add URIs to allow geographical and chronological linking. Each of these transformations was costly and I predict – despite assurances that we now have stable standards – that there will be more to come. These projects, even the data collections, are never fully complete or stable. I’m not sure how one prepares for this but it is an inevitable, and for the scholar frustrating, part of any DH project.
This brings me to a second thought. In the past DH often fell somewhere between the administrative cracks of IT and the library. In recent years the weight has shifted to the library and it has become increasingly clear to me that that is a good thing. Each of these projects – whether a data collection, a tool, or an aggregator – carries within it new knowledge. Hence, it requires preservation. We preserve in an accessible format almost all printed scholarly materials, no matter how useless or bad. The same principle needs to apply to digital projects. With the creation of digital repositories and the low cost of storage this should not be overly difficult. This includes software: Github, now a favorite place to store code and DH data, will eventually disappoint us. Similarly, just as libraries preserve new knowledge so too do they have methods for cataloging and finding it. There are already a bewildering array of digital projects and they are not systematically cataloged, whether they are active, on the “way back machine”, or mothballed. Cataloging and the development of finding aids are desiderata. In the interim, for those who work in classical antiquity. two lists, here and here, are useful although incomplete and imperfect are useful.
A third issue is the very definition of scholarship. Although I am now part of several overlapping conversations that are wrestling with the nature of DH scholarship I cannot say that I am much closer to an answer. Data collection, on its face, shouldn’t be “scholarship” – but then isn’t the creation of print critical editions of texts, which largely involves collation, considered scholarship? Digital tools – programs – are at heart intellectual models: just as in a monograph, you input data and you emerge with a synthesis or intellectual product. One of the key differences, in fact, is that scholars writing books are often not as rigorous or explicit about their assumptions and methodologies as is a computer program. Linkers bring together, even if they don’t synthesize, data in new ways that create research questions and drive our conversations – doesn’t theory do this? I am not claiming that these should all count a priori as “scholarship”, but it points to a critical need for scholars (especially those in positions of power who hire and tenure) to wrestle seriously with possibility that the meaning of scholarship is shifting in a sharp but recognizable way, and that that is not necessarily bad.
A final thought in an already too-long blog post. The issue of audience needs to be taken seriously. A scholarly DH project might justifiably be directed at just a few hundred kindred scholars, just as journal articles or monographs are. I think for most scholars engaged in DH, though, that seems unsatisfying. We recognize the enormous potential of these projects not just to speak to specialists but also to teach students and engage a wider public in intellectual pursuits in which we are deeply invested. The challenge is realizing that potential. Sites need to be designed to address and engage multiple audiences and that is no easy feat. It usually involves creating separate views or portals which is a costly endeavor – the cost of a good accessible interface could run between $15,000-$40,000. Moreover, we do not yet have good usability studies for such projects or often the infrastructure or resources to conduct them. Here perhaps we can better draw on the intellectual resources of our academic colleagues in the business schools and psychology who study and teach such things.
I owe special thanks to the organizers of this conference, Professors Sarah Bond and Paul Dilley. They created a conference that was of high intellectual value, paced humanely, with a collegial environment that facilitated useful interactions, all the while using remote technologies judiciously and effectively. As one who has organized several conferences, I know that this is no mean accomplishment.
The conference tweets have been storified and can be seen here, here, and here.