The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures

Nadia Valman, Laurence Roth, Nadia Valman, Laurence Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781135048549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire juive

The Routledge Handbook to Contemporary Jewish Cultures explores the diversity of Jewish cultures and ways of investigating them, presenting the different methodologies, arguments and challenges within the discipline. Divided into themed sections, this book considers in turn:

• How the individual terms "Jewish" and "culture" are defined, looking at perspectives from Anthropology, Music, Literary Studies, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, Art History, and Film, Television, and New Media Studies.
• How Jewish cultures are theorized, looking at key themes regarding power, textuality, religion/secularity, memory, bodies, space and place, and networks.
• Case studies in contemporary Jewish cultures.

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With essays by leading scholars in Jewish culture, this book offers a clear overview of the field and offers exciting new directions for the future.

PART I

Defining terms

Disciplinary perspectives

1

ANTHROPOLOGY

Misha Klein

Roots

Like other fields defined by a geographical area or cultural group, Jewish Studies has developed primarily through the disciplines of history and literature, with contributions from sociology and demography. With a few notable exceptions, anthropological perspectives have been largely absent from the discussion. This lacuna is in part an effect of the way that area studies emerged within the academy, and partly it is a reflection of the interests and materials available within the field of Jewish Studies in particular. It is also an index of the way in which anthropology has developed. The history of anthropology, especially as it has developed in the United States, has long been entangled with Jews and the study of Jewishness and Jewish cultures. However, it is only at the turn of the twenty-first century that anthropology has directly embraced the study of Jews and with full recognition of the contributions that the study of Jewishness can make to a variety of subfields within anthropology. The resulting theoretical developments also have insights to offer the interdisciplinary field of Jewish Studies.

The foundations for this mutually beneficial relationship between anthropology and Jewish Studies were laid as anthropology emerged in the United States, and in the singular persona of Franz Boas. There is little doubt that Boas became attuned to the social consequences of cultural difference though his experiences as a Jew in his native Germany. Trained in physics, Boas came to anthropology by way of questions that eventually came to be known as “cultural relativism,” which in its broadest sense means that cultures need to be understood on their own terms, and not through the lens of another culture. The significance of this often misunderstood concept for the understanding of Jews really only came to full fruition in the later part of the twentieth century, as anthropologists undertook research on Jewish cultures around the world; prior to this time, Jews were not considered a fully legitimate object of study, partly because the historical legacy of anthropology meant that scholars tended to study primarily foraging and tribal peoples and those who had come to the attention of core nations through colonial and expansionist initiatives. While often accused of conducting “salvage anthropology” in order to create a record of rapidly disappearing cultures, Boas’ research agenda was far more complex than a frantic attempt to catalogue cultural variation. As a methodological stance, cultural relativism insists that there are worldviews that are not fully knowable from the outside, and that they consist of more than a set of distinctive practices and knowledge of local flora and fauna. Boas’ approach encompassed broader questions about the human mind and the nature of humanity. As such, the anthropological study of Jews and Jewishness must be understood as an endeavor to comprehend the full range of human experience within which individual research projects do not simply represent one more chapter in the catalogue of human variation, but shed light on larger questions about humanity as a whole.

As anthropology expanded in the post-war period, scholars took it upon themselves increasingly to research industrialized and familiar people. With the political upheavals in the U.S. and worldwide during the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists began to study urban peoples, ethnic groups, and those who could read and respond to what they had written. This forced greater accountability on the part of anthropologists, both in terms of the substance of what they wrote, and also in terms of the significance of their research questions and the outcomes for the study population. Changes in anthropology also required that anthropologists justify their research visà-vis the contributions to be made to our collective knowledge about humanity as a whole, a fundamentally comparative project. As such, the increasing emphasis on the study of Jews in anthropology is rooted in the recognition that these scattered populations who consider themselves to be related genetically, historically, culturally, and religiously, offer us a rich example of the tremendous adaptability of humans, as well as the power of ideology.

Who is a Jew?

Franz Boas conducted research and trained students in all four of the major subfields of anthropology – physical, archaeological, linguistic, and cultural – an approach that distinguished the development of anthropology in the US, in contrast to other national scholarly traditions. Boas and his students made use of these varied approaches in considering “the Jewish question.”

Physical anthropology, or the study of humans as a species through the framework of evolution and adaptation, gave Boas and several of his best-known students a platform from which to rebut the prevailing eugenicist ideas that enjoyed popularity in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere, and which also drew on physical anthropology. A significant goal of the anthropological project over the last 100 years has been to debunk the notion that the human species can be divided into “races,” or biologically distinct groupings. This project began with Boas and several of his students, who used the example of Jews to build a case against the existence of biological races. The perennial question of “who is a Jew?” led several of these scholars to begin to dismantle the concept of race, first by considering the interaction of culture and biology. Boas (1912) began with a consideration of immigrants in the U.S., using anthropometric analyses to demonstrate that the children of immigrants were demonstrably different from their parents – making clear that the environment (nutritional, hygienic, and cultural) has immediate and significant effects on how humans respond to their genetic potential. While the eugenicists argued that biology determined culture, and that cultural differences were therefore biologically encoded, Boas dismissed biological determinism, instead emphasizing that cultural differences “depend upon outer conditions that sway the fate of the people, upon its history, upon powerful individuals that arise from time to time, upon foreign influences” (Boas 1939: 13). For Boas, culture was something dynamic and responsive, not something rigid and predetermined. In the lead article in the inaugural issue of the journal Jewish Social Studies, Boas considered the relationship between “heredity and environment,” and cautioned that “the existence of a cultural personality embracing a whole ‘race’ is at best a poetic and dangerous fiction” (Boas 1939: 14). By “cultural personality” he meant a set of behavioral and attitudinal characteristics attached to a particular group, and called the idea “poetic” because of the tenacious desire to embrace so-called positive stereotypes as if they were inherent rather than learned, and to fail to see that they are merely the flip side of bigotry and violence. It is also worth noting Boas’ prophetic use of quotation marks around the word “race” because of how that concept was employed in his native Germany to distinguish Jews and other groups, laying the groundwork for the holocaust to come.

Some of Boas’ best-known students, including Alfred Kroeber (1917) and Melville Herskovits (1927, 1960 [1949]), used the example of Jews to think about the concept of “race.” For Herskovits the question of “race” in regards to Jews was compelling precisely because attempts to define Jews have included such varied and slippery concepts as “race, people, nation, religion, cultural entity, historic group, [and] linguistic unit” (Herskovits 1960 [1949]: 1491).

Recent developments in genetics have reinvigorated the “poetic and dangerous fiction” of race because of fundamental misunderstandings of genetic science on the part of the lay public (including some scholars and rabbis). The fantasy that Jews exist as a distinctive and biologically identifiable entity, in spite of what has been clearly documented historically and culturally, allows people to easily latch onto ideas such as the “Kohen” gene (Kahn 2010), and imagine that it is possible to trace ancestry back to a specific priestly population in Ancient Israel – in spite of the fact that non-Jews also carry this gene, and that the gene is only transmitted along the male line, while Jewish ancestry is matrilineal. The desire to identify a biological source for perceived Jewish exceptionalism entirely ignores a century of scholarship that unequivocally points to environment – cultural practices and access to resources – as accounting for the accomplishments of groups of people.

Given these many considerations, when anthropologists undertake to study a Jewish group, they are not arbiters of identity. Their role is not to evaluate the truth-value of claims to Jewishness, whether by descent, desire, or feeling. Rather than determine the objective validity of Jewish identity by descent, anthropologists look at meaning, belief, and practice. There is no firm answer to the question “who is a Jew?” beyond the eminently social and flexible definition offered by Melville Herskovits nearly a century ago: “A Jew is a person who calls himself a Jew, or is called Jewish by others” (Herskovits 1927: 117, original emphasis).

Communities

Franz Boas and a good many of his students were themselves Jewish, including Herskovits and the linguist Edward Sapir (Goldberg 2005). In his obituary for Sapir, David Mandelbaum suggested that Sapir’s work emanated from his Jewishness: “Jews are, in a sense, born ethnologists. By virtue of their dual participation in two cultural spheres, that of Judaism and that of their environing society, they are often made sensitive to differences in the forms of culture” (Mandelbaum 1941: 740). Similarly, drawing on W. E. B. DuBois, Gelya Frank explains that like other marginalized minorities, Jews developed a “double consciousness” (Frank 1997: 738), which Jonathan Boyarin explains as “an elaborately inscribed identity constructed in the awareness of difference” (Frank 1992: 66). While some among this early generation of anthropologists in the U.S. came from religious families, they positioned themselves primarily as secular humanists and avoided drawing attention to their own heritage. Nevertheless, it takes little imagination to see how their Jewish backgrounds, experiences of prejudice, and views from the social margins influenced their research interests (Frank 1997; Boyarin 1992). In the few instances in which these scholars directly mentioned Jews, it was in the service of answering larger questions. Indeed, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has suggested that this may have been an unintended consequence of Boas’ approach to combating anti-Semitism through dismantling the concept of race: “[i]f Jews did not exist as such, how could ethnographers describe their culture?” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995: x).

Until the latter part of the twentieth century, many of the studies undertaken by cultural anthropologists were defined by the communities where scholars conducted their research, usually villages or bands, that is, groups that were geographically or socially bounded (or at least were treated as such for the purposes of study). The resulting ethnographic accounts described social structures, ways of life, and worldviews of particular communities of people. Significant Jewish migration to the U.S. from Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century meant that the view of Jewish culture that took hold in the North American imagination was in fact one of Ashkenazi culture, for which the shtetl was the basis for an “authentically” Jewish life – a life that was impoverished and marginalized, and brought to an end by the pogroms and world wars. Under the guidance of two of Boas’ students, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog (Zborowski and Herzog 1995 [1952]) wrote a postmortem ethnography of the shtetl, an idealized account based on the memories of pre-Holocaust immigrants and Holocaust survivors, a document that can be studied as much for what it reveals about that “moment in American Jewish life” and anthropology, as it does about Eastern European Jewish culture (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995). Selective and idealized, it portrays pre-war Jewish village life as spatially bounded and socially isolated. This notion gave the book textual coherence but ignored the well-documented mobility of Jews between socially diverse shtetls and even more socially diverse urban centers (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1995). As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains, Life Is With People stands as an example of a particular kind of literature in dialogue with a grand tradition of Yiddish stories, and as a post-Holocaust memorial document, but not as ethnography.

A groundbreaking but less well-known study of Jewish life and culture had been completed earlier by a second-generation Boasian. A student of Herskovits, David Mandelbaum studied caste in India. In the course of his research in the late 1930s, he came across a Jewish community, and wrote “The Jewish Way of Life in Cochin” (Mandelbaum 1939), which was “probably the first ethnographic account to appear in print about a Jewish community by an American anthropologist” (Frank 1997: 736). He found that Jews in India reproduced the ideology of the caste system in their own community, which was bifurcated into “white” and “black” (or “Malabar”) historical caste-like divisions. After most Indian Jews had relocated to Israel, Mandelbaum found that new ideologies and factionalisms had taken over (Mandelbaum 1975). In both national situations, he found that Indian Jewish culture reflected the “legitimating ideology” (Mandelbaum 1975: 201) of the surrounding society, whether India or Israel, and he argued for the importance of studying Jews in relation to their larger cultural context. In other words, rather than considering the variety of Jewish cultures around the globe as manifestations of a singular Jewish culture, Mandelbaum insisted that these cultural groups could not be understood only as Jews. Instead, the particulars of their cultural practices had to be seen in the light of the societies in which they lived, since much of what was “Jewish” about them could also be found in beliefs and practices that they shared with their neighbors, most of whom were non-Jews.

Another pioneer in Jewish ethnography was Barbara Myerhoff, who (along with Peter Furst) became the first non-Huichol to participate in the peyote rituals in Northern Mexico; her book, Peyote Hunt (1974), was nominated for the National Book Award. Having established herself as both a risk-taker and a gifted writer, Myerhoff undertook a study of the elderly Jews of Venice Beach, California. In the resulting book (1978), she charted new territory in the anthropology of North America, cities, aging, and ethnicity, and paved the way for a contemporary anthropology of Jews. In the accompanying film, Number Our Days, as well as in her subsequent film In Her Own Time, about the Hasidic community in Los Angeles, Myerhoff also innovated in visual anthropology (Frank 1995). The first film garnered an Academy Award in 1976 for the Best Short Documentary, to date the only such award ever earned by an anthropologist. Following Myerhoff’s forays into visual anthropology, other contemporary anthropologists have also paired their ethnographic work with films, including Jack Kugelmass, whose ethnography of elderly Jews in a South Bronx congregation resulted in the book The Miracle of Intervale Avenue (Kugelmass 1996 [1986]) and a film of the same name, and Ruth Behar, whose film Adio Kerida gave further impetus to her ethnographic work on Cuba’s Jewish community (Behar 2007, 2005), and represents one of the few ethnographic treatments of contemporary Latin American Jewish life.

Myerhoff began her study of elderly Jews after being redirected by Latinos in Los Angeles, who suggested that rather than studying them she should study her “own kind.” In the early 1970s, U.S. minorities were gaining political and cultural ground in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, and Ethnic Studies programs were emerging in the U.S. academy. Anthropologists who studied their own cultures began to gain recognition as doing legitimate anthropology (this, even though Boas had trained native anthropologists because he well understood that they would enjoy access and acceptance in studying their own communities). However, even as Myerhoff stepped into this “new” idea of studying one’s own (knowing that she would be a “little old J...