Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

Jewish History

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.”

Resources for the Digital Study of Jews and Judaism in Antiquity

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At the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Meeting in 2018 I delivered a kind-of “state of the field” talk with some reflections on applying digital humanities to the study of Jews and Judaism in antiquity (really, Late Antiquity).  I am still working on this paper and will eventually post it, but in the interim I thought it would be useful to make the handout available here, in the form of a page that can be updated.  Please contact me if you know of other useful sites!

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.

 

Telling the Story of the Holocaust in Germany. Or Not.

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German soldiers reacting to footage of the Holocaust
http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/german-soldiers-forced-watch-footage-concentration-camps-1945/

It must be a daunting task to memorialize the Holocaust. The fact is, there is no real way to do this right. No matter how good your representation, in whatever medium, you know that you will face harsh, withering criticism. There is simply no way around this. The Holocaust is too raw and has too many dimensions to capture and there will always be people – a sizable number of good, well-intentioned people – who stand read to take you to task for what you miss.

I recently had the opportunity to see the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The above ground monument is powerful. Consisting of an undulating field of stone pillars that progress from shorter to taller, it first evokes the tombs of Jerusalem graveyards before giving way to a Kafkaesque set of higher pillars that is disorienting as you walk through them. When I was there a group of children were playing hide and seek among the pillars, which I totally understood (might I have done the same at that age?) even if at the same time it made me slightly nauseous. And the placement, so close to the government buildings, the Brandenburg Gate, the old dividing line between East and West, the additional monuments to those slaughtered by the Nazis, and the government buildings gives it an additional punch.

I went downstairs into the exhibition, located in the area of a the Nazis’ bunker system. The exhibition mixes emotional power with unvarnished fact. There is a straightforward, unapologetic narrative of the efforts at extermination and a powerful exhibition of written fragments of Jews who would soon be killed by the Nazis. A room devoted to the doomed fates of Jewish families from across Europe also put a human face on the Holocaust.

What I missed, though – and here I wonder if I just am asking for too much – is the how and why. Not how the extermination was carried out; there was plenty about that. How did the Germans, for whom this exhibit was built, come to treat their own (as well as Jews elsewhere) so murderously? While I know that there is no single “right” answer to this question, this is the question at the heart of the Holocaust (and perhaps the division of Germany into East and West) and I doubt anyone could leave the Memorial without asking it.  Yet I don’t know if anything in the exhibition would help anyone to answer it.

Earlier in my trip to Germany I visited the city historical museum in Potsdam. There was a panel dealing with the treatment of the Jewish community there. That exhibition was totally appropriate. It was factual and unapologetic. As far as I could see, though, it was also the first and only mention of Jews as part of the city’s narrative. Jews, and the relationships they had with Germans, just seemed to float unmoored, alien to the essential history of the city.

The Germans that I meet are extraordinarily sensitive to this issue, in a good way. They are not responsible for what happened, or at least not any more than many Americans are for the way that their ancestors treated their slaves. Both cases bring to mind the slogan “truth and justice”, and make me wonder what that really entails.