Toward an integrative approach in jewish studies: A view from anthropology

I approach the task of writing this epilogue with gratification and humility: gratification because this book makes it clear that cross-fertilization between anthropology and Jewish studies is taking place; and humility in the face of the quality of work that historians and scholars of religion who look beyond texts, and anthropologists who incorporate textual analyses and diachronic perspectives into their ethnographic work, have begun to produce. In this epilogue, I reflect more generally on the challenges of linking anthropology to the study of Jewish history and texts. That link has, until recently, proved particularly elusive, since the discipline of history and the field of Jewish studies take as their primary methods the study of written texts, an approach that does not always share much with the ethnographic methods at the heart of anthropology. With some trepidation, I turn to what once was a catchphrase of anthropology in the United States: the holistic approach. The notion of viewing cultures as integrated "wholes" now often raises eyebrows. But much about this volume conjures up what is best about a holistic approach, which can still raise questions and challenges that are worthwhile for Jewish studies. The chapters in the book at hand span the expanse of Jewish space and the range of Jewish history. Placing them in a single volume overrides epochs, embraces expressions of Judaism over four continents, and defies regional definition. Implicitly, the volume assumes some sort of Jewish "wholeness" that allows such studies to be brought together and compared. Before turning to the utility of holism as a starting point for advocating an integrative approach to Jewish studies, let me discuss what it has implied within the discipline of anthropology. There have been at least three levels of anthropological holism, none completely distinct from the others. The first stresses that social facts - institutions, practices, symbols - cannot be understood in isolation; rather, they are interlinked and have to be placed in their local contexts. This approach was associated with functionalist theory, which posited that societies should be viewed as "functioning wholes" within which individual practices help to maintain the entire system. The second level focuses on culture and highlights "meaning," whether cognitive, affective, symbolic, or embodied in practice. This kind of anthropology insisted that cultural traits are organized into "patterns" and "configurations," beyond meanings attached to isolated acts. A third, somewhat different, type of holism is characterized by a comparative approach that entailed an encompassing view of human experience in its striking historical and regional variety. Anthropology in the United States and Great Britain was divided into four subdisciplines: physical (biological) anthropology, archaeology (mostly prehistoric), linguistics (stressing spoken language), and cultural or social anthropology.¹ This third type of holism sought to bring all four kinds of anthropological analysis together into a single discipline focused on the comparative study of mankind across its entire temporal and geographic existence. These intersecting types of holism have significant implications for the Jewish case. I first came to understand some of these implications early in my career as an anthropology student interested in Jews from the Middle East. In 1961, during my first year of graduate work, I audited a course required of all students in Middle East Studies at Harvard University. The course was taught by several historians, none of whom pretended to be able to handle all the different historical periods the course covered (Hellenistic, Arab-Muslim, Turkish-Ottoman). I wondered how the holistic approach, used by anthropologists who studied small-scale societies ethnographically, might work in the historically documented Middle East. The one existing attempt to provide a comprehensive anthropological view of the Middle East, a region that remained under-explored in the discipline, demonstrated the limitations of a holistic approach that ignored history. Carleton Coon's Caravan: The Story of the Middle East skipped rapidly from prehistoric archaeology to recent times, omitting much of the intervening historical evolution and variation documented by textual scholars with the requisite linguistic and archival skills. If anyone could supply a holistic view of the region, I felt, it was more likely to be a historian than an ethnographer. The experience made me simultaneously aware of the limits of ethnography when applied to textual societies and the necessity of a holistic approach that ranged across historical periods.² In the same course, I was struck by a question raised by Hamilton A. R. Gibb, one of the leading authorities on the Arab world, during his lecture on the emergence of Islam and its historical setting. Why, he asked rhetorically, did the course assignments not include excerpts from the Qur'ān? Gibb answered that there were two ways of reading the Qur'ān: that of a devoted believer or that of a scholar equipped with philological and historical methods. Since most participants in the course fit neither category, he reasoned, it was better not to study the text at all. This stance puzzled me. My prior Jewish education had convinced me that knowing classical or canonical texts was the principal means by which one came to understand a tradition. Admittedly, such knowledge could not be gained in a single course. But to keep students from gaining some familiarity with classic Islamic texts did not make sense to me. Given that an imperative in anthropology enjoined the ethnographer to begin with the "native's point of view," it seemed odd to bypass texts in cases in which the people under study regarded them as central to their tradition. As these initial observations settled into what became my research agenda, I came to appreciate that if anthropology's vaunted holistic approach was to be applied to the study of Jews, that approach must be historical and textual no less than ethnographic. ³ In what follows, I spell out how the chapters in this book illustrate two reorientations in research on Jewish studies that I see as feeding into an integrative view of Judaism. The first is the movement away from the exclusively textual focus that has long characterized Jewish studies. This shift requires scholars to possess a wider methodological repertoire in order to examine the very phenomena of textuality, literacy, and the entire range of everyday practices and institutions that textual prescriptions have never entirely determined. One important implication of this methodological expansion is that it facilitates investigation into the experiences of the non-rabbinic elite, including women. The second reorientation is the move toward greater attention to the range of Judaic historical experiences beyond the European context. This comparative approach remains open to placing records of Jewish life from the remote past side by side with those from subsequent eras in order to see how they illuminate one another, or to allow one to venture workable generalizations. To be sure, an integrative perspective harbors potential limitations and dilemmas, related not least to the kind of naïve essentialism for which the older holistic approaches have been criticized. But an integrative perspective need not begin or end with a totalizing view of Jewish life as a systemic whole that can be placed on permanent exhibit. ⁴ To the contrary, a tempered holistic approach provides an analytic scaffolding that can enlarge our perceptions of what is included in Jewish culture and history. This scaffolding can be taken apart and reassembled as modifications to our understanding of the ever-shifting structures of Jewish life become necessary. An integrative approach to Jewish studies, then, delves into texts while attending equally to the full range of activities in which Jews of all social rungs, genders, and provenances have been involved. Such an approach fits well at the crossroads of disciplines and subfields as they are articulated across the academy. Anthropologists have paid increasing attention to texts and historical concerns. At the same time, the core humanistic disciplines of Jewish studies - history, literature, and religious studies - have adopted approaches that, to quote Lawrence Hoffman, go "beyond the text."⁵ The present book succeeds in moving in both these directions.