EAJS Conference Grant Program in Jewish Studies
Report
Tefillah and/as Jewish knowledge
Irene Zwiep, University of Amsterdam
The EAJS-funded Tefillah and Jewish Knowledge conference, organized by Arjen Bakker (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) and Irene Zwiep (University of Amsterdam), and held at the University of Amsterdam on 27 March 2024, was organized with a dual purpose in mind.
First of all, the meeting served as the annual conference of the Dutch Association of Jewish Studies (Nederlands Genootschap voor Joodse Studien), and thus as a platform for presenting and exchanging the latest Jewish Studies research among national colleagues. In recent years, under the chairmanship of Jan Willem van Henten (University of Amsterdam/University of Stellenbosch), the DAJS has gone through a profound professionalization process. As a result, it is now again fulfilling its role as a forum for (inter)disciplinary exchange and networking in academic Jewish Studies, with the annual conference as its main event. To ensure a lively, productive exchange, the conferences combine an innovative thematic focus with a broad appeal to scholars across periods, fields, and disciplines. The previous conference explored The Middle Eastern turn in Jewish history; this year’s lens on Jewish prayer and liturgy as knowledge systems aimed to offer a similar common point of reference.
Prayer has always been a key phenomenon and a prominent concept in Jewish Studies. Sooner or later every topic in the field will bring researchers into contact with liturgy and/or prayer. Yet the omnipresence of prayer in Jewish history is as discrete as it is enigmatic: precisely what is tefillah, what does it do, when, and for whom? These questions are not always easy to answer but have significant implications across the field of Jewish Studies and beyond. What is prayer and how does it work? Is Jewish prayer conceived as a substitute for Temple sacrifice, or as a format for communicating and/or striking deals with the divine? Is it a vertically inspired form of social contract, a political instrument, a philosophical format, or an elementary educational tool? What types and kinds of knowledge have been embedded in Jewish prayer? How does prayer in its turn structure and convey—Jewish and other, religious and secular—knowledge? And how do processes of transmission, translation, displacement, and neglect impact its dynamic and effectiveness?
The conference proposed a multidisciplinary approach to these questions by looking at tefillah, piyyut, the siddur and the machzor as carriers of Jewish knowledge from the perspective of materiality, textuality, history, philosophy, and theology. Speakers were encouraged to connect their case studies to questions relating to methodology, aesthetics, and the history of ideas. The idea was to generate fresh perspectives and trigger new conversations by looking across textual corpora, across historical periods—from antiquity to the present day—and across Jewish Studies disciplines.
A broad range of speakers responded to the call for papers. The result was a widely varied but neatly focussed programme. It included textual examples from the Hebrew Bible to Instagram, from Aramaic Targum to Yiddish folk medicine, and from Qumran liturgy to German biblical drama. Among the speakers were senior Jewish Studies scholars, MA and PhD students, as well as professionals and lay-people working with liturgy in Jewish communities. The short-paper parallel sessions were chaired by leading scholars from nearly all Dutch universities. All in all, seventy people attended the conference in person, among them colleagues from Belgium, Germany and the UK, and a surprisingly large number of BA, MA and PhD students. An additional ten participants, many of them in Israel, were able to follow the conference per live stream.
Three internationally renowned key-note speakers provided the theoretical framework for the short-paper presentations. Hindy Najman (University of Oxford, Oriel College) started the conversation by trying to uncover the essence (and limits) of prayer as a medium for human knowledge in her lecture Knowing God and the Cosmos: Facets of Jewish Liturgy in the Second Temple Period. In his key-note Poetry as Prayer: The Role of Poetry in Jewish Liturgy, Wout van Bekkum (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) reflected on Hebrew prayer and liturgy in relation to aesthetic and poetic knowledge systems. Drawing on her vast knowledge of medieval Ashkenazi liturgy, Elisabeth Hollender (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main) wrapped-up the presentations by discussing Jewish prayer and liturgy as sources of contemporary academic knowledge (Liturgy as a Mirror of Jewish Cultural History).
Flanked by these fundamental methodological surveys, the four parallel sessions were arranged thematically rather than by genre or chronology. Panel one (on Sacrifice and Prayer), which included Jonathan Stöckl (Universiteit Leiden), Mirjam van Willigen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) and Victor Kal (Universiteit van Amsterdam), concentrated on the division of roles between prayer and sacrifice in Jewish antiquity, a question that has been much debated in recent scholarship. Its implications for the ancient spiritual and political agenda was explored in papers on, respectively, Psalm 23:6 (I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever), on the rabbinic concept of ‘avodah she-ba-lev (service of the heart), and on the ordering of the mo‘adim in the priestly calendar as an early tractatus theologico-politicus.
Panel two, on ‘Prayer and modernity’, was devoted to the development, use, and disuse of siddurim and machzorim in contemporary Jewish communal life and thought. Here academic scholars and professionals from the Dutch Reform and Orthodox communities shared their experiences with transmitting, translating, and preserving traditional Dutch liturgical materials within changing cultural and political contexts. Judith Frishman (Universiteit Leiden) offered a critical survey of linguistic, stylistic, and theological choices made in the recent Dutch Progressive machzor for the High Holidays. Ruben Vis (Nederlands Israëlitisch Seminarium) gave insight in his work on the new prayer book for the orthodox Dutch-Ashkenazi prayer services Investigations of the Heart. Independent scholar Channa Kistemaker dwelt on The Jewish prayer book as a ritual object. As the owner of the ‘Mokumse Genizah’, she shared with the audience a selection of discarded prayer books in her collection to illustrate the material dimensions and highlight the personal meanings of liturgical materials for ordinary people in everyday Jewish life.
The third panel on ‘Prayer and Plight’ focussed on the role of prayer in times of crisis and catastrophe, and put the spotlight on processes of cultural transfer, the interplay of high and low culture, and the importance of mediality for the shape and efficacy of Jewish prayer. Marcel Poorthuis (Universiteit Tilburg) traced the changing form and content of an early paradigm prayer across a broad range of Jewish and Christian sources. Daniella Zaidman-Mauer (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discussed a medical parody on the Eighteen Benedictions in The Eighteen Rules for Surviving the Plague:Prayer as medical knowledge in the Yiddish Plague tractate Seyfer le-atsiret ha-mageyfe (1770). Katharina Wendl, who is pursuing a PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin, concluded this session with a richly documented paper on Instagramming inspiration and support: Deracheha’s social media discourse about women’s prayer in light of war and terror.
Panel four concentrated not on written textual evidence nor on the interplay of medium and message, but on prayer as performance. Ranging from the religious to the secular, this session also covered a vast temporal and linguistic terrain. Jan Willem van Henten (Universiteit van Amsterdam/University of Stellenbosch) explored The nexus of prayer and sacrifice in 2 Maccabees. Willem Smelik (University College London) shared a series of thought-provoking reflections on Chanted Targum. Joining from New York where he is currently conducting research at the Leo Baeck Institute, Ezra Engelsberg (Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam) explored the meaning of Kneeling as stage direction in four middlebrow German biblical dramas dating from the mid-1800s.
Looking across corpora and historical periods, the papers presented in the parallel sessions showed how throughout history different types of knowledge (theological, philosophical, historical, medical, spiritual, linguistic, and political) were embedded in Jewish prayer, and analysed what happened to these cognitive forms and contents once they were restructured as prayer and ordered as liturgy. The concluding round table, chaired by Judith Frishman and featuring the key-note speakers and Annette Boeckler from Bonn University, offered a rich recapitulation of this cultural dynamic. Perhaps the most significant conclusion, however, was that Jewish prayer and liturgy have co-shaped Jewish identities through a combination of fixity and flexibility, and by pairing cultural autonomy with cultural porousness. Jewish prayer, in other words, is both open and closed, fluid and constant. And it is this subtly shifting permanence that allows the Jewish liturgy to counter new situations and absorb new ideas while preserving old formations of knowledge and ritual. Because of the shared focus and quality of the presentations, the organizers intend to develop a selection of the papers into a joint publication on Jewish liturgy as a dynamic knowledge order.
Prayer, however, is more than a knowledge system, a spiritual exercise, or an embodied act; it also takes the form of a written text that is preserved in manuscripts and printed books. These items often gain a personal emotional value through everyday use, when given as a present at certain moments in the Jewish life cycle, or when passed on to the next generation. To illustrate this vital material, often deeply personal, aspect, the staff of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana organized three separate viewings of liturgical highlights from their collection, during which participants could browse and discuss liturgical books and manuscripts under the guidance of curators Rachel Boertjens and Anna de Wilde. In the basement of the Allard Pierson building where the conference was held, participants could also visit an exhibition on contemporary art and early modern minhagim books, see https://allardpierson.nl/bezoek/van-nijl-tot-amstel/iconische-joodse-houtsneden/ .
Secondly, besides helping the DAJS inspire and consolidate Dutch academic Jewish Studies, the conference aimed to help lay the foundations for a European network of scholars working towards new Jewish Studies paradigms through the combination of classical sources and new questions. To this end, the organizers and key-note speakers met on Tuesday 26 March for a brainstorm on new directions and parameters for the study of Jewish history. This resulted in the planning of a joint follow-up workshop, to be hosted by Oriel College Oxford in June 2025, on ‘Deconstructing fixity: rethinking prayer and the history of Judaism.’ The workshop aims to include additional colleagues and build a consortium, with Cambridge, Oxford, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt as its principal hubs. Its main objective is to try to generate new paradigmatic research via one or more collaborative grant applications that will bring together PhD students, post-docs and senior researchers. This part of the venue was co-financed by the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (UvA-ASH).
The first step towards this proposed collaboration was taken at the 12th EAJS conference, which took place at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in July 2023. In a panel devoted to Reflection on/of sacrifice in/and prayer, the two conference organizers had joined forces with Noam Mizrahi (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Michael D. Swartz (Ohio State University) to start a diachronic conversation on the nature and function of Jewish prayer in relation to historical change. The rationale behind the collaborative follow-up project is that prayer and liturgy are an obvious, yet often neglected part of the Jewish canon and a continuous constitutive part of Jewish life and identity, one that is often overlooked in favour of external or secular challenges. As the cumulative product of numerous minds, centuries, regions, denominations, and mentalities, it cannot be studied in local or temporal isolation but requires a diachronic, multi-perspective, synthetic, in short: a collaborative approach. By tying together eternal divine truths, finite human frailty and ephemeral concerns, prayer has a unique modus operandi: it epitomizes the historical Jewish condition by fusing these incompatible temporalities and turning them into a comforting daily routine. By re-accessing Jewish history through this singular form of temporality, the project hopes to reconceptualize its dynamic and perhaps even rethink some of its well-worn oppositions, such as tradition and change, unity and fragmentation, autonomy and polysemy, and, lastly, cognition versus spirituality.
The conference was sponsored by:
Dutch Association for Jewish Studies
European Association for Jewish Studies
Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (ASH)
Stichting Vrienden van het Juda Palache Instituut
University of Amsterdam, Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies