Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

religion

Jews, Coronavirus, Digital Humanities, etc.

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This semester I am teaching two new courses, “Antisemitism: A History” and “Introduction to Digital Humanities.”

Except, of course, I’m not anymore.  Better: I’m paused.  I’ll pick the courses back up, online, in a bit over a week.

The pause has been highly unnerving, but has also given me a little space and time to play around with an idea that came up in the last couple of meetings of my “Antisemitism” class.  The idea of Jews as contagious and spreaders of disease is a very old trope (strongly connected to notions of a “pure” corporate body threatened by invisible outside forces).  With no empirical evidence whatsoever to blame Jews for the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, is such a theory nevertheless afloat, and if so, what does it look like?

While looking at the usual antisemitic websites can provide some insight, I thought it might be interesting to explore Twitter.  My original approach was indirect: If we simply counted the number of times Jews were mentioned in tweets over the course of the last few months, do we see any significant upticks?  I posed that question to my class, played around for a couple of hours to see if I could answer the questions, and then – frustrated by my inability to get anything to work – was engulfed in the usual stuff, and then mayhem.

Over the last couple of days, though, I’ve had some time to return to this question and sharpen my digital humanities skills as well.  This post is deliberately exploratory, meant to help beginners – like me – think about and apply analytical approaches to Twitter while also exploring the emerging discourse around the novel coronavirus.  Does this exploration really yield anything useful?  Maybe.

Step-by-step:

  1.  My original plan called for simply counting all tweets that mention Jews over the last few months.  Given the limits of Twitter, though, that proves harder than it sounds.  One software packages, though, does promise to be able to do this: TWINT (found here).  So I just needed to install TWINT and run it.
  2. That turned out to be easier said than done, and it is what originally frustrated me.  I have some facility in using the command line on my Windows machine and with running Python, but it is pretty basic.  Installing TWINT required me first to install “pip3” and “git” (I already had an Anaconda build of Python installed, although it took me forever to find where it was in my directory since it installed into “hidden files”), and to mess with the file paths so that everything can communicate with everything else.  But I did get it installed and working!
  3. I then ran TWINT from the command line with the simple instruction to find all tweets that mention “Jews” from January 1, 2020, to today and to output the results to a csv file.
  4. About 20 minutes later, TWINT crashed with error messages.  It had downloaded about a day-and-a-half’s worth of tweets that fit with my criteria (starting with the most recent), some 25,000.  Investigating the error messages, it appears that that is about all Twitter allows at a single time.  But it did generate the csv file!  The file contained a mass of data about each of the tweets, including not just the tweets but all kinds of information about the tweet.  There were, in fact, 34 columns of data.
  5. So my next thought was to keep running TWINT for each day or two and then amalgamating the data into a single file.  I may yet do that, but first I thought it might be interesting to explore what a single day of tweets about Jews looks like.
  6. I found a great tutorial for working with Twitter data here, opened a new Python 3 Jupyter notebook, and worked my way through it, using my csv file.  I can’t say that I understood every command (especially when it comes to navigating dataframes) but I knew enough to get it to work and to get a general sense of my data.

And some analyses:

Top ten tweets, by number of times that the tweet occurs (the count is the number on the right):

26 https://songwhip.com/artist/137-music-tribe … 43
10211 Jew 21
10328 Jews 12
4631 Conspiracy theory that Jews created virus spre… 12
9377 Islam permitted the marriage of Muslim men wit… 9
13757 Portugal declares official commemoration day f… 8
17417 Trump Declares Sunday ‘National Day of Prayer’… 8
15495 Thank you x 7
9215 Inside luxury resort run by Israeli spies to s… 7
23870 ???????????? 7

Some of these are a bit peculiar, but digging back into the data helps.  The first one is a link to a Christian ministerial music group.  The fourth is, interestingly enough, about how others are antisemitically linking Jews to the spread of the coronavirus.  What we do not have in this list is evidence that people are actually making this connection (but see this article, which is linked to one such tweet and is linked in my data).

Next, I did a hashtag analysis.  Top ten hashtags (count on the right) in this group of tweets:

hashtag
0 #Jews 152
1 #Bible 131
2 #God 125
3 #coronavirus 81
4 #Jew 75
5 #Israel 61
6 #Love 56
7 #COVID 56
8 #COVID19 45
9 #Faith 40

This is somewhat more interesting and concerning.  Jews seem to be linked most commonly to issues of religion, but hashtags dealing with the coronavirus (numbers 3, 7, and 8) comprise a significant percentage of the total.  Note, though, that this is out of a total dataset of about 25,000 tweets, so the relative total is actually quite low.

Next, I did an analysis of mentions, that is, twitter entities marked with an “@” sign.  Top ten, with counts on the right:

0 @realDonaldTrump 56
1 @YouTube 51
2 @BernieSanders 46
3 @timesofisrael 33
4 @Rosenbergradio 24
5 @JayElectronica 24
6 @POTUS 22
7 @JoeBiden 15
8 @UKLabour 14
9 @CNN 13

Numbers 4 and 5 relate to a spat over a potentially antisemitic song (for more, see this).  The large number of mentions of media outlets is probably typical (stories from such sources are often tweeted); the large number of political figures and parties, though, seems curious.  Digging a bit deeper into this aspect of the data – which I did not do – might help us to better understand it.

Back to hashtags.  Which ones appear together with others?  Only hashtags used ten or more times in my datafile are included:

Remember that this is a snap of just one day’s hashtags and so reflects a single, fast news-cycle.  Hashtags relating to Jews are associated most frequently with hashtags relating to religion (with something is going on with #Hawaii and #Einstein in this news-cycle).  Maybe reassuringly, hashtags about the coronavirus are not co-appearing with hashtags referring to Jews (although all, by definition, are in tweets that somewhere mention the term “Jews”).  Of some concern, though, is the more frequent appearance of hashtags relating to the virus with #Muslims in these posts.

Finally, I subjected the data to topic modelling.  Topic modelling is an analysis that shows which words most commonly group together.  The code in the tutorial works (somewhat imperfectly, as you can see below, but good enough) to tidy the data before applying the LDA algorithm (the same one, I believe, used by MALLET).  And, using 10 topics, the results:

Topic 1 words Topic 1 weights Topic 2 words Topic 2 weights Topic 3 words Topic 3 weights Topic 4 words Topic 4 weights Topic 5 words Topic 5 weights Topic 6 words Topic 6 weights Topic 7 words Topic 7 weights Topic 8 words Topic 8 weights Topic 9 words Topic 9 weights
0 jew 2315.0 jew 2898.2 jew 875.2 jew 780.7 jew 2940.3 twitter 2158.1 … 2704.0 love 576.9 jew 1077.2 jew 1617.9
1 peopl 638.1 israel 1096.4 white 673.2 like 601.6 christian 958.5 pic 2056.1 jew 2099.4 jew 467.5 ’ 502.1 ’t 1470.1
2 nazi 491.2 arab 644.1 get 377.5 i 585.5 muslim 842.7 com 2054.1 anti 304.1 god 358.8 trump 296.5 ’ 810.4
3 million 350.9 jewish 480.5 fuck 257.6 ’ 446.6 hate 659.0 jew 406.7 go 299.5 thank 325.1 day 226.6 don 565.1
4 kill 346.7 palestinian 369.3 de 241.6 ’m 442.1 peopl 616.6 ???? 177.1 say 257.1 need 284.6 berni 222.0 jesu 443.4
5 jewish 343.5 land 341.3 peopl 214.8 time 320.8 like 503.8 #jews 104.4 know 240.9 … 263.5 vote 219.0 ’r 404.1
6 mani 322.2 isra 340.7 black 191.5 make 289.4 kill 421.9 é 72.1 coronaviru 199.2 u 234.7 biden 186.2 it 347.5
7 want 294.9 state 327.4 lo 186.3 ” 264.5 believ 326.2 march 63.9 semit 191.5 realli 207.6 na 186.1 you 327.1
8 like 292.5 right 267.4 u 178.4 thought 216.3 religion 316.4 #israel 52.9 berni 185.4 tweet 207.1 man 169.4 know 312.3
9 us 279.0 live 250.3 like 168.7 give 182.0 us 306.9 e 48.8 via 177.0 see 176.5 got 164.8 say 306.8

(I had a problem with the column headings; the first two columns actually belong to Topic 0 and the last two to Topic 9.)

Some of these topics, reading down, are pretty easy to decipher: Topic 1 (after adjusting, as noted above), is about the Arab-Israeli situation.  Topic 2 deals with Jews and race.  Topics 7 and 9 come back to Jews and religion, particularly from a Christian perspective.  Topics 4 and 6 are darker.  The coronavirus is mentioned only in Topic 6, and even there has a low weight.

I originally set out with the hypothesis that Jews would be connected to the coronavirus.  There are websites and people that make such a connection, but this preliminary exploration into a bit more than a day of Twitter data suggests that it is less common that we might expect.  While it would be interesting to look at equivalent data over a longer period of time, and to track the topics over such a period as well, it looks like my hypothesis is largely incorrect.

That, at least, is a small bright spot in these very strange times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.”

What is “Money”?

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The Supreme Court recently heard a case that turns on the meaning of “money”: What counts as “money compensation” for the purpose of a particular kind of taxation?  The case seems abstruse and the write-up at Scotus Blog is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the issue – or at least the real heart of the issue – goes back to antiquity.

The Hebrew Bible prohibits the charging of interest.  There are a few versions of this prohibition (Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:36-37), each of which defines its scope differently.  The version in Deuteronomy 23:19 reads:

You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. (Translation NRSV)

This verse seems to clear up a problem that pops up in the other versions, which is what the prohibition of interest actually applies to.  According to Deuteronomy, not only am I prohibited from charging interest on monetary loans that I make, but even on food.  I am to get back exactly what I lent, with no profit or recompense for the opportunity cost that I pay for the time during which I cannot use the money or stuff I lent.  So far so good, but this opens another question: What, exactly, is “interest”?  Is it only money?

In a complicated chapter in the Mishnah, the rabbis of antiquity sought to answer this question.  Mishnah Bava Metzia, chapter 5, begins with a straightforward case of what we would consider monetary interest: I lend you money on condition that you return to me more money than I lent you.  It is not sufficient, though, to stop there.  The Mishnah goes on to discuss cases in which a lender may benefit in other ways from the loan.  Can a lender, for example, live for free in the house of the borrower while the loan is outstanding? (No.)  Can I take a down payment from you on a field but continue to use it until you bring the balance of the payment? (No.)  Can one set a price for a future delivery of a commodity? (No – because the market price might rise prior to delivery of the goods and thus the seller has profited in a way that the rabbis consider to be “interest.”)  They even consider the case of a loaf of bread:

And Hillel would say thus: A woman may not lend a loaf to her friend until she sets a price for it, lest wheat become more expensive [in the interim], and it turns out they have come to [transgress] usury. (Mishnah Bava Metzia 5:9)

To the rabbis, there are many forms of “compensation” and the law demands for an accounting of each.  Next to their discussion, the one recorded by Scotus Blog looks almost quaint.

The Meaning of “Torah”: A Report from the Enoch Seminar

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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:

  • Scrolls of the Torah were stored, and most likely read, in the synagogues;
  • Writings from the Torah served an apotropaic role for Jews (and maybe non-Jews) in Late Antiquity;
  • There is no evidence that being learned in Torah was valued by most Jews

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.

 

Naming Rabbis: A Digital List

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A little over five years ago I posted an idea about creating a social network analysis of the rabbis found in classical rabbinic literature.  In the interim I have thought a lot about this project but have done very little on it.  I still believe it is worth doing, though, and I have finally taken a concrete step forward.

First, a brief justification for the project.  According to several scholars, most of the rabbis we find in classical rabbinic literature (e.g., the Babylonian Talmud) worked in small disciple circles rather than larger educational institutions (e.g., the yeshiva) which only began to emerge at the end of Late Antiquity.  These small circles formed a loose network.  Students, for example, could move back and forth between circles, transmitting knowledge.  It is unclear how often or in what contexts individual rabbis would have contact with their colleagues.

Rabbinic literature, particularly the reports of cases and individual sayings (as opposed to the less reliable stories, or aggadah), mentions interactions between these rabbis.  Sometimes these statements note simply that “rabbi x said in the name of rabbi y,” others mention biological or pedagogical relationships between them.  The idea is to use social network analysis to visualize these networks.  How did knowledge move within and between the nodes (circles of rabbinic disciples) of this network?  Who are the rabbinic connectors, leaders, and isolates?  How did information move between circles in Palestine and Babylonia?  Where do we locate “center” and “periphery”?  Does a visualization help us?

The first step to creating such a visualization, not to mention other larger scale projects that involve rabbinic literature, is to create a digital list of all of the rabbis mentioned in the literature.  Next, with the help of a collaborator, we will seek to identify the “connecting words” that describe all the different relationships between rabbis and to code these relationships into a software package that will perform the visualizations.

The first step is finally complete.  We created a spreadsheet of all the names of rabbis as enumerated in the three volume Hebrew work by Aaron Hyman, Toldot Tanaʾim ṿe-Amoraʾim : mesudar ʻa. p. a.b. ʻim beʾurim ṿe-hagahot ṿe-girsaʾot shonot (London, 1910).  Since this list can be used in other digital projects as well, I am making it available here (Rabbis_Names) in Excel.  We broke out each of the components of the name into a different column and indicated where more than one name can be referring to the same individual.  The spreadsheet should be easy to use for those who know how to work with such things.

And for the rest of you, in case you were wondering, there are somewhere in the range of 5,000 individual rabbis named in the literature surveyed by Hyman.