Past and present perspectives in Jewish Studies. Eighth EAJS Congress, Moscow, 23rd-27th July 2006

This congress was the first international event of that size in Jewish Studies to take place in Moscow. Never before had an East European country enjoyed the signal honor of hosting a Jewish Studies Congress. Hosting the Congress in Moscow was part of an effort of the Association to promote Jewish Studies in Eastern Europe.  The International Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies was the local organizer of the Congress, as well as the Moscow Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, SEFER. Partners and the donors of the Congress included the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations and Associations, the Russian Friends of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Center for Oriental Literature of Russian State Library, and the Gishrey Tarbut Association (our partner in the book exhibition).

The Congress attracted 480 delegates, of whom 280 presented papers on Jewish history and culture ranging from Biblical to modern times and from linguistics to sociology to Israeli studies.

The theme of the Congress was “Past and present perspectives in Jewish Studies”, and sought to draw attention to both the philosophy and the prospects of Jewish Studies. There has been no lack of ideas and research in recent decades, but the feeling is that there is now room for change and renewal. A central aim of the Congress was to answer the questions:

*        Are we moving into the age of Postmodernism?

*        Are we returning to old patterns?

*        Do we need meta-history once again?

The schedule of the Congress included 26 sessions in both traditional and new fields of Jewish Studies. There were also two plenary sessions. The first, Hegelianism, Orientalism, and the prospects of Jewish Studies, was devoted to philosophical and methodological matters, and included papers by Ivan Davidson Kalmar (University of Toronto, Canada) and Arkady Kovelman (Lomonsov Moscow State University, Russia). The second plenary session, Jews and Others in Russia, dealt with the socio-historical questions of Russian-Jewish History, and included papers by Oleg Budniskii (Academic Director of the International Center for Russian and East European Jewish Studies, Moscow, Russia) and John Klier (University College, London, UK).

In the first plenary session, Professor Kalmar concentrated on the joint depiction of Judaism and Islam, and their peoples, in Hegel, and on the influence of Hegel’s thought on modern European conscience. While Hegel does not value Judaism very highly, he at least thinks it a spiritual post on the way towards Christ. Islam, on the other hand, rates very low for the German philosopher as a nightmarish non-Christian detour from Judaism’s true path leading to Christ. But, lest we grow confident that such attitudes enshrine what we now call the Judeo-Christian tradition as ours and Islam as the outsider beyond it, it is worth remembering that such an attitude would have caused Hegel great surprise. To him, Islam was not a separate religion from Judaism. It was Judaism gone mad.

Professor Kovelman devoted his paper to Hegelianism and Multiculturalism in Classical Jewish Studies. In his opinion, Jewish Studies started two centuries ago as a search for progress and the universal dimension of Jewish culture. Two centuries later Jewish Studies arrived at the rejection of the notion of cultural progress and the proclamation of the uniqueness of Jewish culture in a multicultural world. To a certain extent Jewish Studies shared the fate of other areas of the Humanities in the age of Post-Modernism. Old Hegelian, Positivist and Romantic meta-histories were rejected. Counter-histories, colonised, feminine, and marginal cultures were exonerated. The parting and interaction of different cultures were taken as the major incentives for cultural changes. The price of the rejection of meta-histories would be the fragmentation of history, including the fragmentation of the history of Jewish culture.

In the second plenary session, Oleg Budniskii deliberated on the causes of the Jewish pogroms in the Civil War period (1918-1920). He argued that one should remember the deeply rooted Orthodox image of the Jews as a treacherous tribe that betrayed Christ, and that given the chance would be prepared to betray Russia and collude with the heathen and alien. This image of traitors was colored with additional hues during World War I. Throughout the war years, the army was subjected to the most intense anti-Semitic propaganda, and for the first time attained a de facto license for violence specifically against the Jews. It is not surprising that the seed fell on fertile soil. Professor Klier explored the phenomena that established the Jews as an “ethnic other” in the towns and villages of the Empire’s western borderlands in pre-revolutionary Russia. He contrasted the social, economic, cultural and religious life of the Jews and their Orthodox, Catholic and Uniate neighbours.

The number and variety of papers presented at the Congress renders it impractical to describe or even list them all, so only a selection follows.

The paper of Israel Knohl (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) “Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan?” combined inner biblical interpretations and early post-biblical interpretations with regard to one motif: the birth of Cain. According to Knohl, the portrait of Cain as forefather of the evildoers, and the sharp polarity between the sons of Cain and the sons of Seth, was rooted in the final edition of the Pentateuch that was edited by the priestly circle of the “Holiness School”. This polarity is close to the conception of another the priestly circle, the Qumran sect that focused on the polarity between the “Sons of Light” and “Sons of Darkness”. The author of Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer also sought to portray Cain as the son of Satan and the forefather of the “Sons of Darkness”. Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer is thus the culmination of a hermeneutical process that turned Cain from its original status in the J story, as Son of God and forefather of all humanity, to his final status as son of Satan and the forefather of the “Sons of Darkness”.

Professor Daniel Boyarin (University of California at Berkeley, USA) spoke on the topic of Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia. It is commonly held among scholars that while the Palestinian Rabbis were in dialogue (and dispute) with Christians and other Hellenists, the Rabbis of Babylonia only contended with such secondarily through the medium of their interaction with Palestinian Rabbis and their literature and traditions. In his paper, Professor Boyarin proposed that we need to revise significantly our understanding of the role of both Christianity and Hellenism more generally in the formation of the Babylonian rabbinism of the Sasanian realm, especially with respect to matters not known from Palestinian rabbinic traditions and which, at least arguably, only enter the rabbinic textual world at a period and in a stratum of the Babylonian Talmud in which impact from Palestine is considerably less likely than interaction with the local milieu of trans-Euphratian Christian Hellenism.

Pieter W. van der Horst (University of Utrecht, Netherlands) in his paper “Moses’ Father Speaks Out” traced the post-biblical traditions about Moses‘ father, Amram, from documents of the 2nd century BCE (Jubilees, Dead Sea Scrolls) through Pseudo-Philo and Josephus to the later rabbinic midrashim and haggadic traditions in the Bavli. The title refers to the fact that, whereas in the biblical story Amram never opens his mouth, in the post-biblical tradition he begins to speak out at length, both in prayer and in addresses to his fellow Jews.

Two papers were devoted to the categories of time and space in Jewish culture. Ohr Margalit (Ben Gurion University, Israel) delivered a paper “The Land of Israel as Sacred Space: In Search of a Meaningful Perspective in Halakhic Thought.” Margalit suggested that in order to properly understand the rabbinic conception of the Land, one must take into account the vast difference between holiness in biblical thought and holiness in rabbinic thought. According to the rabbis, holiness is not necessarily dangerous, separate or ‘completely other’; it can be an integral part of daily life. The tannaitic conception of the Land of Israel is neither that of a ‘locative’ nor ‘utopian’ sacred space, it is ‘territorial-halakhic’. Alexander Samely (University of Manchester, UK) in his paper “Time in rabbinic texts: a new type of diachronic difference” suggested the idea that the “layering” messages in rabbinic texts, insofar as it can be discerned by the modern interpreter, constituted specific hermeneutic, quasi-conversational, and conceptual moves of discourse, as much as it testifies to historical processes. These discourse operations seem to call for a different kind of “diachronic” analysis than traditional text criticism.

Aharon Shemesh (Bar Ilan University, Israel) in his paper “The Penal Code from Qumran and the beginning of Legal Midrash” deliberated on the question of whether, and to what degree, the sectarian literature from Qumran contains Halakhic Midrash. He argued that the sectarian Penal Code was based on two specific biblical passages which dictated both the content of the list and the order of the sins included in it.

In his paper “Rabbinic Texts: Construction or Deconstruction” Avraham Walfish (Bar Ilan University, Israel) attempted to demonstrate that the “deconstructive” techniques of the Mishnah aim at a “classical” method of resolving textual and spiritual aporias. He further examined how Talmudic texts analyzed and reread the tannaitic sources.

In her paper “Seekers of the Shekhina: A description of an Unknown Era in the History of Jewish Mysticism” Ronit Meroz (Tel Aviv University, Israel) concentrated on the question of the beginnings of Kabbalah.  In her view, two different branches of esoteric teaching were developing fro the 9th century to the end of the 12th. Their main focus of interest was in the myriad of angels surrounding God.

Martin Goodman (University of Oxford, UK) delivered a paper “Names of the Jewish Nation in Late Antiquity: ‘Jew,’ ‘Israel’ and ‘Hebrew’ in the First Two Centuries CE.” Professor Goodman tackled the issue of whether the difference between the names selected by Jews to represent the Jewish state during the revolts and the names used to refer to the region is significant in establishing who and what the leaders of the rebel states believed that they represented; how the names chosen by the rebels may relate to the new name, ‘Palaestina’, chosen for the region by the Romans after 135 CE; and how both these choices are reflected in the parting of the ways between Jews and Christians in the first two centuries.

Aharon Oppenheimer (Tel Aviv University, Israel) deliberated on the subject of Purity of Lineage in Talmudic Babylonia. Babylonian Jews saw themselves not only as responsible for the imparting of the Oral Torah as materialized in the Babylonian Talmud, but also as the guardians of pure Jewish lineage. This guardianship entailed extreme care in the ordering of marriages, including rejection of people defined as genealogically disqualified. Delineating the purity of lineage originated in the need of Diaspora Jews to beware of mixed marriages in particular, and marriages where there was the slightest suspicion of disqualification in general. However, it was also intended to demonstrate that Judaism at its best, even better than in Palestine, was to be found in the Babylonian Diaspora. This haughtiness of Babylonia towards Palestine led to tension between the two largest Jewish centers of their time.

In her paper “Boundaries and orthodoxy in Hellenistic Judaism” Tessa Rajak (University of Reading, UK) treated both the internal character of Jewish communities in the Greek cities and the relationship between Jews and others.  She defined Diaspora Judaism in terms of text-centredness, i.e. self-definition in terms of scripture. This allowed considerable flexibility and variety, but at the same time, in a situation where there was as yet no prevailing orthodoxy, it provided a core set of reference points.

Michael L. Satlow (Brown University, USA) delivered a paper “Charity and Piety among Jews in Late Antiquity” in which he sought to reconstruct the rabbinic understanding of charity and its relationship to piety.

Alexei Sivertsev (DePaul University, USA) deliberated on the notion of a Byzantine Judaism, seeking to establish this notion as a new category. That category would include the rise of new ideals of religious piety (such as priestly piety, martyrdom, mysticism, and apocalyptic messianism) and the development of new pietistic and “sacramental” trends in the interpretation of halakhic regulations. Even literary genres were changing with religious poetry (piyut), accounts of mystical experiences, and narrative literature becoming increasingly more important. Byzantine Judaism developed in the context of mature Byzantine Christianity (during the period between the Council of Chalcedon of 451 and the end of Iconoclastic debates in 843) and reflected the same blend of interests in individual mystical piety, apocalyptic expectations, and sacramental ecclesiology as Byzantine Christianity of the time.

In his paper “Calendars in Antiquity, or: Jewish Studies versus Ancient History” Sacha Stern (University College, London, UK) considered the legitimacy of the two approaches, ‘Jewish’ and ‘ancient historical’ to the subject of Jewish calendars in Late Antiquity (the 364-day calendar of Qumran, and the rabbinic lunar calendar).

Jeremy Cohen (Tel-Aviv University, Israel) contemplated on Jewish reactions to the crucifixion, from the Gospels to Gibson. As he reviewed Jewish responses to the crucifixion story from ancient to medieval to modern times, he noted a striking degree of continuity. Even as Jews struggled to refute the Christ-killer myth, they found themselves attracted by the crucifixion, which somehow they tried to appropriate for themselves.

Steven Bowman (University of Cincinnati, USA) delivered a paper “Mechanism and Mediaeval polemic in Sefer Yosippon.” In his view, the tenth-century Italian Sefer Yosippon was a reverse polemic of the anti Jewish theological tract written by a convert to Christianity known as Pseudo-Hegesippus. The author and his copyists added numerous references to the messiah tradition which are interspersed among Sefer Yosippon’s reworking of Pseudo-Hegesippus into a nationalist history of the Second Temple Jewish experience and their unyielding battle against the Romans.

Glenda Abramson (University of Oxford, UK) delivered a paper “Disrobing the body and soul: U. Z. Greenberg’s Idea of ‘Nakedness’.” She suggested that the trope of “nakedness” or “revealing” reappears in many ways throughout the poetry of Greenberg: as a revelation of the unclothed human body, as spiritual failure, as the nature of the self, as an abstraction and as an aesthetic device.

In his paper “Jewish Traditions of Translation – from The Golden Age to the Age of Haskalah: A Comparative Description” Aminadav Dykman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) sought to offer a comprehensive descriptive model for the specific Jewish tradition of prose and poetry translations, as it emerged during the Golden Age in Spain, and was later elaborated. His claim was that from the very beginning of the surge of translations in the Golden Age, a sharp distinction was made between translations of poetry and prose, and also between different translations of prose works, depending on the degree of their “sacredness”. In this view, a comparison between the texts of the Hebrew translators of the Golden Age and European poetics of translation in the 17th and 18th centuries demonstrates that there actually existed a distinctive “Jewish way of translating” (mainly poetry), which is indeed inherently different from other known western modes and practices of translation.

The paper of Tsila Ratner (University College, London, UK) posed questions about the complex relations between the military and identity constitution in Israeli women’s writing. The perspective she chooses for discussion is not the exclusion of women from military narratives and their derivates, but rather its absence, or at least avoidance, in the fiction written by women in Israel. This phenomenon is quite surprising considering the rising profile of women’s writing in Israel since the 1980s, which has been anything but compliant and docile.

Albert I. Baumgarten (Bar Ilan University, Israel) is working on an intellectual biography of Elias Bickerman (1897-1981), focusing on him as a historian of the Jews. In his lecture he concentrated on Bickerman’s presentation of himself, and his repeated insistence that he was a classicist and not interested in Jewish History. Several explanations for Bickerman’s avowal that he was a classicist can be offered.  As a cosmopolitan, it was difficult for Bickerman to admit the extent of his curiosity about the Jewish past. Next, Bickerman was acutely aware of the gaps in his learning when it came to the history of the Jews. Furthermore, as counterpoint to seeing him as a cosmopolitan embarrassed by his work on the Jews, Bickerman may have asserted that he was a classicist as a reaction to commonly held prejudices of the time, according to which cosmopolitan and rootless Jews should not study or teach the great works of the classics, on which the national civilizations of western culture were based. Finally, Bickerman explicitly argued that as a classicist he had the proper broad ranging perspective in which to place ancient Jewish experience more meaningfully.

In his lecture “Between Sensual and Heavenly Love. Franz Rosenzweig’s Reading of the Song of Songs” Paul Mendes-Flohr (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) explored why it was precisely the ‘sensuality’ of this song of love that renders it in Rosenzweig’s view the most eloquent statement in the Hebrew Bible on the meaning of revelation.

Giuseppe Veltri (University of Halle, Germany) deliberated on Jewish “rituals” as a concept of Jewish political thought in the Renaissance and early modern period. Starting with the scholastic definition of “praecepta caeremonialia”, he analyzed some Christian and Jewish treatises of the 16th and 17th centuries involved in the discussion of defining Judaism as a religion.

In conclusion, the Congress demonstrated that new approaches in the research of Jewish civilization have been developed over last decade. Yet more is still to be done if we are to make a qualitative leap to new methods and research techniques as well as to new philosophical generalizations in the field of Jewish Studies.

Mauro Perani (Italy) was elected the next President of the EAJS on July 26, 2006. The ninth Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies will be held in Ravenna, Italy in 2010.

Arkady Kovelman