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Religion Compass 2/4 (2008): 674–688, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00092.x
Anthropological Perspectives on Judaism:
A Comparative Review
Marcy Brink-Danan*
Brown University
Abstract
How has the discipline of anthropology studied Judaism? This review provides a
brief overview of the variety of approaches the discipline has taken to the subject
of Jewish religion, society and culture. By situating these approaches in their
historical, political and geographic locations, I offer a comparative look at the
development of a sub-discipline of the anthropology of religion. In addition to
providing a comparative review of the sub-discipline, I also highlight theoretical
issues which remain central to the anthropological study of Judaism. These include:
reflexivity in the writing of Jewish ethnography, the conceptual problem inherent
in using ‘religion’ as the category through which many scholars define Judaism,
the place of Judaism in anthropological theories of Diaspora and, lastly, the
overemphasis on the notion of ‘memory’ in so many Jewish ethnographies.
Introduction
This review offers an introduction to the history, methods, and theories
that have shaped anthropological engagements with Jews and Judaism.
I call these anthropological ‘perspectives’ in the plural to draw attention to
the fact that approaches to the study of Jews and Judaism are historically,
politically, and geographically disparate and, as such, have produced a
multiplicity of reckonings with and representations of Judaism. This article,
in good anthropological fashion, brings some of these national and
historical trajectories into comparative view. I also discuss the following:
reflexivity in the writing of Jewish ethnography, the conceptual problem
inherent in using ‘religion’ as the category through which many scholars
define Judaism, the place of Judaism in anthropological theories of Diaspora,
and a critique of ethnographies of Jewish memory.
Anthropology of Judaism: The Early Years
Early nineteenth-century anthropology, both European and American,
took as its object of study so-called ‘primitive cultures’ (Tylor 1871), but
after rejecting evolutionism, American anthropologists introduced a relativist
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Anthropological Perspectives on Judaism
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comparative approach. Since anthropology’s early years, the comparative
study of religious practices and beliefs has taken center-stage in debates
about culture and societies worldwide and over time (Lambek 2002). Of
particular interest to non-specialists, Harvey Goldberg provides excellent
overviews of the anthropology of Judaism in the introductions to Judaism
Viewed from Within and Without: Anthropological Studies (Goldberg 1987)
and Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life (Goldberg 2003). Goldberg points
to influential social theorists such as Frazer, Durkheim and Weber who
consistently treated Jewish themes in their work; nonetheless, he notes
that the study of Judaism has remained marginal in broader anthropological
thought. Goldberg offers three reasons for this marginalization: anthropology’s
early (nineteenth-century) focus on ‘primitive’ religions (and the awkward
result of modern Jews refusing to be seen as ‘backwards’ or uncivilized),
lack of linguistic or textual skills for the study and interpretation of Jewish
texts, and a scholarly reluctance to deal with the intangibility of Jewish
belief over the structure of more objectively observable phenomena, such
as inscriptions or behaviors (1987, pp. 2–3). Boyarin has also explored the
reasons for Jewish marginality in anthropology as rooted in the Christian
theological heritage of anthropological thought, in spite of the Jewish
genealogy of so many of the discipline’s founders, a topic to which I now
turn (1991a).
American and European anthropology claim, among their founders, a
notable number of intellectuals with some Jewish ‘roots’ (see Boyarin
1991a, 1992; Feldman 2004). Mauss, Malinowski, Durkheim, Boas, and
Levi-Strauss (intellectual giants of anthropology) all came from Jewish
families. Some have argued that, as members of a minority group necessarily reckoning with the beliefs and social norms of larger society, Diaspora
Jews experience ‘double-consciousness’ and are born anthropologists.
Boyarin has cleverly argued that, for Jews, ‘double-consciousness’ is
evident in the origin myths of the Jewish textual tradition, starting with
Abraham who abandons his father’s religion:
( . . . ) Judaism contains the Other in its own genealogy, that is to say, its own
imaginary. This does not mean, of course, that Jews are inherently any more
(or any less) tolerant or empathetic than any other given group of people, nor
that the potential I am pointing to is exclusive to Jews. Yet it is extraordinary
as a model of an elaborately inscribed identity constructed in the awareness of
difference. (1992, p. 66)
Indeed, in memoirs and interviews, Jewish founders of American (e.g.,
Franz Boas) and French anthropology (e.g., Levi-Strauss) argued that their
double position made them sensitive to comparisons of structural differences between their Jewish families’ traditions and those of the majority
societies around them; because of this increased sensitivity, they claim to
have approached what were considered ‘primitive’ or distant cultures with
relativist values and anti-racist politics. Nonetheless, the question of studying
© 2008 The Author
Religion Compass 2/4 (2008): 674–688, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00092.x
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676 Marcy Brink-Danan
Jews was problematic; an uncomfortable tension existed between studying
Jews as primitive and claiming modernity for them at the same time (see
Eilberg-Schwartz 1990). Furthermore, Boas’ liberal efforts to show that
Jews were not a race created an ironic situation in which ‘( . . . ) the
strategy that (he) used to counter anti-Semitism – by denying Jewish
particularity – left little for anthropologists to study. If Jews did not exist
as such, how could ethnographers describe their culture’ (KirshenblattGimblett 1995, p. ix)?
In addition to these reasons, Bunzl (2004), Dominguez (1993), Feldman
(2004), Frank (1997) and Glick (1982) have chronicled in their respective
accounts of the ‘Jewish question’ in anthropology, how, in the anti-Semitic
intellectual climate of early twentieth-century academy, Jews were not eager
to draw attention to the ‘Jewishness’ of their endeavors (or themselves). Thus,
it should not be surprising that some of the first major anthropological
accounts of Judaism were instigated by non-Jewish anthropologists.
Stemming from a World War II-era, US government-sponsored research
project on national cultures instigated by Margaret Mead and Ruth
Benedict, Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl (1952), is today
considered the first major authoritative anthropological account of Eastern
European (Ashkenazi) Jewish life. In her study of European national
cultures, Mead noticed that Jews shared social patterns and traits across
geo-political borders. The ensuing work was the product of a group of
researchers based in New York, among them Mark Zborowski as lead
author, and funded by American Jewish Committee’s Department of
Scientific Research.1
In a new introduction to Life is With People, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
notes that Mead, perhaps the best known American anthropologist, saw
this as cutting edge anthropological research in multiple senses: its focus
on ‘contemporary culture and complex society,’ its study of off-limits
(because of war or political embargo) or destroyed communities through
interviews and recreations of ‘culture at a distance’, its popularization of
ethnography as a genre accessible not only to specialized scholars but to
the very people who were depicted therein and, finally, as a kind of
‘insider anthropology’ (many contributors were Jews originally from Eastern
Europe) (1995, p. 4). At the same time, despite the early anthropological
focus on the centrality of fieldwork as a methodological cornerstone, the
first ethnography of Jewish life written in the USA was based not on
participant observation but on interviews, media analysis, and biographical
accounts.
A decade later, British anthropologist Mary Douglas analyzed the
Jewish dietary laws dictated in biblical and rabbinic law as a fundamental
part of her research on taboo in Purity and Danger (Douglas 1966). This
work has become classic; nonetheless, like Life is With People, it is not
based on ethnographic fieldwork but takes instead the textual evidence of
Jewish law as its subject. In this sense, it is perhaps the most ‘Judaic’ of
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anthropologies, if not the most anthropological study of Judaism. One
does not get a sense, in Douglas’ work, of how these laws are maintained
(or rejected) by Jews outside of the texts’ prescriptions (which, as is often
noted, are different than ethnographic descriptions) (cf. Bahloul 1995).
Rather, Douglas interprets Jewish dietary and pollution laws as a symbolic
incarnation of Israelite preoccupation for maintaining the cultural purity
of the group that, for Jews, entailed historically unwavering hardships as
minorities, writing, ‘(t)he Israelites were always in their history a hardpressed minority’ (1966, p. 153).
Anglo-American anthropologists have documented the history of
anthropology of Jews and Judaism as part of their own national tradition
with little attention to how other intellectual traditions have seen the
project through local political desires and social goals. I do not propose to
review each national approach here, but rather offer a few counterpoints
that demonstrate the diversity of local anthropological perspectives on the
study of Jews and Judaism. As such, I turn to German and Israeli anthropology and their respective treatments of Jews and Judaism.
The Study of Judaism beyond Anglophone Anthropology: Germany and Israel
German anthropology has perhaps the darkest and most complicated
relationship to the study of Jews and Judaism. Racial theories in early
German anthropology were deeply enmeshed in Nazi ideologies of Jewish
inferiority and Aryan supremacy. As such, I will focus briefly on the
history of anthropology in Germany and its historical concern with the
study and interpretation of Jews and Judaism, especially given that it is this
very problematic (and its disastrous results) that consigned German
anthropology to a near-century of marginalization (Hauschild 1997, p.
747). Early German anthropology, exemplified by the work of Adolf
Bastian (1826 –1905) and his disciples Richard Thurnwald (1869–1954),
Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), and Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), drew
its intellectual inspiration from a combination of German romanticism
mixed with nationalist folk pride (Hauschild 1997). According to
Hauschild, the discipline went ‘off-track’ when it rejected the American
and British turn to cultural relativism in exchange for turn-of-the-century
German nationalism and anti-Semitism, from which Franz Boas, and
other marginalized German-Jewish academics, fled (see, also, Bunzl &
Penny 2003). Perhaps more troublesome in the comparative understanding
of Judaism in anthropological perspective was the division of German
anthropology into two parts, the study of the Christian German (volkskunde)
and the study of the foreign ‘other’ (volkerkunde). Jews, in the German
anthropological tradition, were neither foreign nor local (this held true for
other Europeans and Mediterranean cultures as well), leaving the study of
Jewish culture in an intellectual ‘no-man’s land’ exemplified by the need
to create a separate society for ‘Judische Volkskunde’ in Hamburg in 1898.
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German anthropology, from the 1930s onward, pursued not the description
of an ethnos but the creation of one – a pure, German nation that would
eliminate traces of otherness among the true Germans, for whom the Jew
was the not the ultimate other (which was reserved for the true – and
remote – primitive) but, due to his local connections and mixing with the
local population, perceived as the most dangerous (Hauschild 1997, p. 748).
If American anthropology (and anthropologists) long avoided studying
Judaism and German anthropology justified the denigration, expulsion,
and extermination of Jews, Israeli anthropology took a very different
approach to the study of those people whom the country’s political and
intellectual leaders felt were part of – and, at the same time, apart from – its
national collective (see Boyarin 1992). Israeli anthropology has produced
voluminous ethnographic and folkloric material on Diaspora and Israeli
Jewry. For a comprehensive review of Israeli anthropology, including an
extensive bibliography that includes many works of Jewish ethnography,
see Handelman and Deshen 1975.2 A more concise review of the trends
and historical features of early Israeli anthropology is offered by Goldberg
(1976), in which he highlights the ancestors of Israeli sociology, ethnography, and folklore, including such diverse characters as Arthur Ruppin
(an economist/sociologist interested in Jewish demography in pre-state
Palestine), Haim Bialik (a Hebrew poet and ethnographer), and Martin
Buber (of the early Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at
Hebrew University). Goldberg documents how many of Buber’s students
studied in London; as such, the fields of sociology and anthropology in
Israel maintained intellectual ties to British social anthropology of the
1950s, an emphasis that remains strong in Israeli social science (Goldberg
1976, p. 119). The influx of immigrants that doubled the state’s population
within four years of its establishment opened up a debate, still ongoing,
about the value of social integration and ethnic difference. At the time,
as Goldberg mentions, not only was the state and public actively engaged
in this debate, social scientists and other intellectuals (especially at the
Hebrew University, the only institution of higher learning in Israel at the
time), chose to advocate for assimilation to the Europeanist-Jewish model
that had been established in the early years of statehood (Goldberg 1976).
Ben-Ari provides an account of Israeli anthropology (some, though not
all, of which continue to research Jews and Judaism) since the 1970s
(1997). He notes that while research on Jews in Israel began with an
intensive focus on ‘oriental’ (in Hebrew ‘mizrahi’) or ‘non-Western’
immigrants to Israel (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa), later
investigations into Jewish ethnicity (such as that of Georgian or Ethiopian
Jewish immigrants to Israel) reflect a change in theoretical orientation in
anthropology from a focus on assimilation to broader questions of power
and legitimacy. He highlights research by Goldberg, Rubin, and Deshen
on contemporary Judaism that investigates the varied relationships
between Israeli identity and the Jewish Diaspora. He also remarks that
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Israeli anthropology remains an ‘anthropology of home’, which, in recent
years, has turned its gaze to the ‘mainstream’, which in Israel is still
considered by many to be middle class Jews of Eastern European descent
(Ben-Ari 1997).
Most recently, Israeli anthropology (and the Israeli academy, in general)
has incorporated continental and American post-colonialist theory, leading
to a debate about the role that Israeli anthropology – like American and
European anthropology – played in the ‘othering’ of non-Europeans (in
Israel’s case, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern and North
African descent). Starting in the 1990s, post-colonial theory began to gain
currency in Israel and was applied not only to the ‘Arab question’ but to
the ways in which Jews from non-European backgrounds were imagined
in relationship to the Zionist project. Shokeid writes, in an impassioned
essay called ‘The Sin We Did Not Commit Against Middle Eastern
Jewry’, ‘(i)n contrast to their colleagues in other countries, Israeli academics
in these fields were enlisted, almost from day one of the country’s independence, to document and assist in the historical moment of national
revival. In the following years, however, they were castigated for it and
have been paying a high price ever since’ (2001, p. 16). Anthropologists in
Israel have publicly engaged in a debate about the place of anthropological
inquiries into the traditions and cultures of Jews from the Middle East and
North Africa as well as their standing in the Israeli anthropological tradition
(see, especially, Lavie & Shubeli 2006 and Levy 2006).
As the above pages underline, national anthropological traditions (and
their engagement with Judaism) have followed distinct trajectories. At the
same time, there is no denying the academic ‘imperialism’ of European
and, increasingly, American anthropology as well as the exchange across
state borders of ideas (El-Or 2004). With this understanding, let us return
to the United States, which has produced some of the most recently noted
ethnographies of Jews and Judaism.
Meanwhile, Back in America . . . Anthropologists Go ‘Native’
Goldberg argues that shifts in anthropological theory toward a focus on
symbols, combined with a reflexive turn of the 1980s American anthropology, created an opening for a productive re-evaluation of Jewish themes
through an anthropological lens (1987, p. 3).
As Myerhoff writes in the introduction to Number our Days (1978), in
the 1970s Americans were looking for their roots and became increasingly
involved in ‘ethnic pride’ movements. At the time, her informants challenged her to study her ‘own people’. In a well-cited passage, Myerhoff
becomes a harbinger of the reflexive anthropology that would hold sway
until the present: ‘Years before, in doing fieldwork with the Huichol Indians
of Mexico, I had similar experiences. However much I learned from that
was limited by the fact that I would never really be a Huichol Indian. But
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I would be a little old Jewish lady one day; thus, it was essential for me to
learn what that condition was like’ (1978, p. 19).
Since this reflexive turn, American anthropological studies of Jews and
Judaism remain, with few exceptions (e.g., Buckser 2003; Dominguez
1989, 1993; Mitchell 1978), the work of those anthropologists who themselves claim a Jewish identity. This has been a point of some concern to
these practitioners who wonder, ‘Why aren’t Jews interesting subjects to
non-Jewish anthropologists?’ In an introduction to a special volume of the
journal Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly (February 1989, Vol. 14, No.
1), editor Walter Zenner and other contributors offer an important foray
into the issues of doing ethnographic fieldwork among Jews, including a
reflexive look at the relationship between anthropologists and their Jewish
subjects, the issue of difference as a way of understanding Jewish cultures
and traditions, as well as the specific problems of the participant observation
method that arise when studying Jews.
Another resource for the study of Judaism in the United States is
Kugelmass’ Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry (1988),
a collection of essays notable both for their quality of description and for
their overall reflexive stance. From the American-Jewish view, Kugelmass has
argued that ‘(f)or most American Jews, Judaism is practiced less as a religion
than as a cultural lifestyle and a social affiliation’ (Kugelmass 1988, p. 5). What
holds true for ‘secularized’ American Jews is applicable to large numbers
of Jews in various parts of the world, an issue to which I now turn.
Categorizing Judaism as ‘Religion’?
Despite Kugelmass’ assertion of secularism as a defining factor for Jews
worldwide, a popular branch of anthropology of Jews and Judaism is
composed of ‘synagogue ethnographies’ whose narrative and theoretical
questions center on life in houses of worship and their attendees concomitant
committees and ceremonies (Heilman 1976; Prell 1989; Shokeid 1995;
Kugelmass 1996; Goluboff 2003). While these inquiries fit neatly into a
classic anthropological model in some sense, in which the field and subjects
of study are geographically bound in physical space (see Boyarin 1991a, p.
61), we must ask ourselves what is lost in such a focus. Goluboff ’s ethnography, for example, seems to be missing women, despite the gender of the
anthropologist embarking on the study.3
In my classes whose content aims to teach about Jews from an anthropological perspective, I am uncomfortable when students talk about
‘people of the Jewish faith’, which, I assume, is an attempt to avoid the
term ‘Jew’ with its historically anti-Semitic residue, but, I think, is symptomatic of a bigger problem in the study of Judaism as a ‘religion’ per se.
In Buckser’s ethnography of Danish Jews, he provides numerous examples
of self-proclaimed atheists proudly participating in ‘religious’ rituals and
ceremonies, including synagogue attendance, life-cycle rites, and holiday
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celebrations (2003). He notes that Danish society itself is marked by an
anti-religious posture while maintaining deeply held beliefs that emerged
from religious worldviews of previous eras. Examples such as these abound:
when we ask Jews themselves to define Judaism, the categories of nation,
practice, culture, society, class, peoplehood, language (as well as blood
and soul) all emerge as meaningful ways – at times metaphorical – to
understand membership (see, especially, Markowitz 2006). Some of these
definitions map neatly onto what religious studies scholarship would
classically define as ‘faith’ or ‘religion’, but many decidedly do not. In this
vein, Sered argues that Eliade’s definition of holiness as something
apart from the everyday lacks grounding in ethnographic observations of
women’s participation and interpretations, in which the sacred and
profane, in such examples as Jewish cooking, remain blurry and not
well-defined (1988).
Indeed, the question of what to call such ethnographic pursuits (anthropology of Jews, of Judaism, and of Jewish-ness?) bespeaks a fundamental
theoretical challenge to the conceptualization of Judaism as a religious faith
or set of ritual laws. Of course, Judaism equals ‘religion’ to many Jews,
especially those who most strictly adhere to a prescriptive Judaism. At the
same time, anthropologists have shown that even in the most ‘religious’ of
Jewish communities, the practical often trumps the ideological in everyday
activities (see El-Or 1994). Nonetheless, to many self-designated Jews,
Jewishness, or Judaism, it is of course much more than a religious faith,
and includes (among other things) a national sense, a people, belonging to
a race, a dietary inclination, a (multi-)linguistic proficiency, a political
orientation, a sense of difference, a source of pride, a curse, a blessing and
so on. In this light, one critical contribution that anthropology has made
to the study of Judaism is to hold fast to the approach of aiming to
understand local knowledge and meanings from the participants’ point of
view (an ‘emic’ view) rather than imposing their own interpretive or
hermeneutic categories (an ‘etic’ view). This has resulted in the eschewing
of claims about what normative Judaism is in favor of a more open-ended
search into what Judaism means to those who claim it as an identity. In
this sense, anthropologists have refused, at times, to accept definitions of
Judaism that emanate from rabbis or community elites, looking instead to
the variety of ways people relate to (or reject) tradition and change.
Anthropologists allow these categories of belonging to surface from their
informants, which sometimes leads to decidedly non-elite (especially
non-Rabbinic) definitions of Judaism and Jews, as evidenced in the cases
of black Hebrews, some reform Jews and others (see Goldschmidt 2003;
Markowitz 2006). This does not mean that anthropology necessarily rejects
the concept of Judaism as a tradition (or the importance of tradition to
Jews). Anthropological method and theory neither rejects nor diminishes
the continuities in Jewish thought and practice across time and space
(Zenner 2000, p. 27). What it does suggest is the need for research which
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illuminates the discursive means through which definitions of ‘traditional’
Judaism are established, defended, and debated (see Asad 1993).
From Synagogues to Theories: Recent Trends and Concerns
At the 2007 American Anthropological Association (AAA) conference in
Washington, DC, a group of 20 scholars met for their annual meeting of
the Committee on Anthropology of Jews and Judaism. Rising president-elect
of the AAA, Virginia Dominguez, who has written about Israeli identity
and about the history of Jews in anthropological thought, addressed the
gathering with some provocative questions: Is the anthropology of Judaism
breaking new theoretical ground? Is it politically informed? Have those
who study Jews become ‘mainstream’ anthropologists?4 I will remark below
on how, over the past two decades, ethnographies of Jews and Judaism have
figured in anthropological discussions by focusing on the questions of area
studies, Diaspora and memory.
Dominguez has argued that Jewish difference somehow remains outside
the anthropological purview; Jewish ethnographies have been ‘ghettoized’
as pertinent only to a Judaic studies audience or ‘folkloric’, offering
nostalgic views of Jewish tradition and moribund communities (1993). The
sense that Jews still exist, in so many cultural variations throughout the world,
remains absent from critical anthropological discussions. Theorists tend to
see Jews and Judaism as a reference point from the past against which to
measure current-day dilemmas of Diaspora, minority rights, and integrations.
If anthropologists once anchored their trade in area specializations,
recent critiques have challenged the ability to categorize peoples as coterminous with their present localities (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1989; Appadurai
1996; Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Herzfeld 1997). If Judaism’s supra-state
reach once troubled the analytical categories of area studies so basic to
anthropological study (as we saw in Mead’s mid-twentieth-century realization
that Jews sometimes share a culture across state borders), in today’s
academically and geographically border-crossing world, Jews should be an
anthropologist’s dream subject. A handful of anthropological studies indeed
analyze the ongoing process of Diaspora formation among Jews (see, for
example, Shokeid 1988; Boyarin & Boyarin 1993; Haskell 1994; Levy
1997, 1999; Habib 2004; Levy & Weingrod 2005). However, as mainstream
anthropology increasingly reckons with subjects who are ‘Diasporic’, the
Jews are (sometimes) cited dismissively as historical precedents; their relevance
is often argued away as they are found to be only one of a number of
groups that might now claim such a title (see Clifford 1994). Perhaps, as
Habib has suggested, the term Diaspora has been stretched beyond its
theoretical capacity to include such a vast range of migratory experiences
as to no longer be useful (2004, p. 17).
While, on one hand, to argue that Jews are the classical – and therefore
only legitimate model – of a Diaspora would be intellectually limiting, the
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rapidity with which they seem to have been forgotten reads as a rejection
of their historical and ongoing experience: ‘enough of the Jews, whose
time as subject is over (just as it began), let’s talk about new diasporas and
new minorities’ (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994). The effect of this rejection
of Jewish experience as unique (and as a model) negates the contemporary
relevance of Jews in a way reminiscent of early anthropological studies of
Judaism, which saw it as an exotic remnant and useful for comparison but
remained uninterested in the practices and beliefs of still-living Jews. In this
sense, Jews and Judaism come to symbolize a ‘way of being’ or a theoretical
orientation rather than an embodied, contested, and ever-changing cultural
group (see Lyotard 1990; Boyarin & Boyarin 1993). However, I believe that
another trend in anthropology is responsible for representing Jews as a passé
– and past – object of analysis: the prolific anthropology of ‘Jewish memory’.
Bunzl has argued that Jewish studies can benefit from a triad of anthropological foci: comparison, ethnography, and a focus on the present (2003).
Despite anthropology’s typically presentist focus, a dominant segment of
ethnographies of Jews and Judaism fall into a category I might call ‘the
anthropology of Jewish memory’ in which the stories, customs, and lifeways of ‘lost’ or dwindling Jewish communities are catalogued and
recreated. Bahloul (1996), Boyarin (1991b), Haskell (1994), Deshen and
Zenner (1996), Kugelmass et al. (1998), Solomon (1999) and, most recently,
Behar (2007) have crafted beautiful ethnographies memorializing the life
of Jews from Algeria, Cuba, and Poland, to name just a few. The fact that
the distribution of Jews in the world has dramatically changed in the past
hundred years (whether that should be through changing political scenarios,
through expulsion, or through genocide) indeed demands a reckoning of
what was lost in ‘the old country’. Despite the craft and theoretical sophistication of each of the ethnographies noted above (and many others), the
anthropologists’ focus on memory over the present paints an impressionistic
picture of loss, of nostalgia, and, perhaps of most concern to me, Jews as
remnants or as symbols of something irrevocably lost (see Fabian 1983).
As much as I respect the project of memorialization, I am struck by the
sense that although the ethnographers of such works are exquisitely sensitive
to the politics of memory and the poetics of recreating the past, their
representations resemble, as a genre, the ‘salvage anthropology’ of the early
years of American anthropology (see Gruber 1970). Salvage anthropology
involved the pursuit of knowledge about cultures assumed through assimilation, colonialism, or political change to be in the process of disappearing.
In the words of Kugelmass et al., ‘The dead have a power over the living’
(1998, p. 1). The question I pose here is How much power should the
anthropology of Judaism give the dead? How can we balance the need to
commemorate loss with an ongoing commitment to describing the living,
their particular needs and desires, their plans, and their visions? Already two
decades ago, Goldberg drew our attention to the limits of anthropological
methods limited to oral narratives and observations of the ‘now’. He was
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684 Marcy Brink-Danan
especially concerned that these methods did not suit the ethnographic
study of literate societies (and here he focused on Judaism as a prime
example) (1987). Since then, anthropology has expanded its methodological
toolkit to incorporate historical texts, images, and discourses. While I view
this as an overwhelmingly positive development, I retain certain skepticism
for accounts that value the past at the price of describing the present.
For example, Bunzl’s recent forum in American Ethnologist brought
together the question of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe
(2005), proclaiming that ‘Islamophobia, in this sense, is a genuine political
issue, part of a wide-open debate on the future of the Muslim presence in
Europe. Anti-Semitism, by contrast, is not. This is not to downplay the
dangers of the new anti-Semitism but to recognize that it operates on a
completely different level’ (2005, p. 506). The ‘dating’ of the Jewish
question in Europe to a historical fact versus a future concern strangely ties
in with an ‘othering’ of Jewish difference to a historical past.5
If Jews (in the academy and in the world) have made consistent efforts
to seem less different from those around them [be it through the creation
of a nation-state (Israel), assimilation, anti-racist activity, intermarriage,
etc.], perhaps the result is an anthropology that has deemed them, well, not
different in the interesting anthropological sense through which comparisons
are fruitful. When I first went on the academic job market in 2005, I
applied to departments whose call for applications described their ideal
applicant’s specializations as the following: Diaspora, transnationalism,
urban anthropology, and minorities. I was told, more than once and rather
bluntly, that Sephardic (Spanish) Jews in Istanbul (my first ethnographic
research population) were not the kind of ‘Diasporic, urban minorities’ a
department sought for its research agenda. When, at a meeting of the
AAA, I ran into Karen Brodkin [who has written extensively about the
reclassification of Jews in America as ‘white folks’ (1998)], I joked with her
that her work had sealed the coffin on Jews as multicultural and Diasporic
citizens. Jews, for all their historical claims to Diaspora, transnationalism,
minority status, persecution, and yes, difference, have lost some standing
in broader anthropological discourse.6
One suggestion I might offer for bringing Judaism to the center of
anthropology is to retain what distinguishes our approach from others,
namely, we ask the living to speak for themselves (and their pasts) as we
engage with them through participant observation and interviews. Jews today
continue to tell a theoretically relevant tale of cosmopolitanism, minority
politics, and survival; anthropologists would do well to start listening once
again and to shift our focus from Jewish pasts to Jewish futures.
Conclusion
This article has provided a historical background of anthropological studies
of Judaism and a brief look at current trends as a resource to those who
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Anthropological Perspectives on Judaism
685
aim to incorporate an anthropological approach to the study of religion in
general. By outlining the history of anthropological engagements with
Judaism, I have attempted to sketch the diversity of approaches taken over
time to the question of Jews and Judaism.
Perhaps from the viewpoint of a religious study disciplinary approach,
this diversity of interpretive stances would seem to confound the unity of
the subject under analysis (see Goldberg 1987). By way of conclusion, I
pose the question: What does an anthropological perspective have to offer
those who study Judaism in its many forms and variations?7 In his recent
call for a non-essentialist approach to religious studies, Satlow advocates an
ongoing engagement (after Neusner 1993 and Smith 1998) with ‘thick
description’ and a reflexive turn to the process through which we understand
religion, and, as academics, interpret and create definitions of Judaism (2006).
‘Thick description’, a Geertzian term (1973), which evokes anthropological
theory and method, suggests the importance of detailing and contextualizing
meaningful social acts and interpreting those using local values. The tension
between ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ views of religion is well-studied in anthropology
and speaks to Satlow’s concerns about the blurring of first- and second-order
definitions of Judaism in the academic study of the subject (2006, p. 841).
Anthropological theory and method, grounded in participant observation
and the resulting ability to draw thick descriptions, continues to offer
religious studies a framework for ‘comparison, ethnography, and a focus on
the present’ (Bunzl 2003, p. 15). Comparison, especially when it is produced
through ethnographic fieldwork, shows us that there are indeed, as Satlow
and others recognize, many ‘Judaisms’ both past and present.
Short Biography
Currently, Dorot Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and Assistant Professor
of Anthropology at Brown University, Marcy Brink-Danan studies the role
of language and symbol in the formation and maintenance of urban social
groups. With regional specialization in the Middle East, North Africa, and
the Balkans, she most recently conducted ethnographic research among
Jews in Istanbul, Turkey. She is currently preparing a manuscript based on
this research, tentatively entitled ‘Cosmopolitan Ethnography: Writing
Jewish Difference in Istanbul’. She serves as co-chair (with Matti Bunzl) of
the Committee for Anthropology of Jews and Judaism in the AAA.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Marcy Brink-Danan, Brown University, Program in Judaic Studies,
Box 1826, Providence, RI 02912-1826, USA. Email: [email protected].
1
It is also worth mentioning here, from the same era of American anthropology, Spiro’s Kibbutz
(1956), the work of a Jewish anthropologist that celebrates the early years of the Zionist
endeavor and its collectivist yearnings.
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686 Marcy Brink-Danan
2
Israeli anthropology departments are generally combined with those of sociology; for a
treatment of Israeli sociology of religion, see Deshen et al. 1995.
3
To her credit, by focusing on what seems to be a unified space, Goluboff in fact shows how
ethnicity and race create and reify divisions within the synagogue membership.
4
In some ways, this is a perennial question of Diaspora Jewry: ‘Are Jews like the majority?’ In
the academic context, however, it would be worth comparing the situation of anthropologists
who study Jews with those who study other groups with similar socio-political standings – a task
beyond the scope of this article, but an important one nonetheless.
5
This is ironic, given that Bunzl wrote the new introduction to Fabian (1983), a text that treats
exactly this topic.
6
One arena in which anthropology of Jews and Judaism continues to make waves is that of race
studies and medical anthropology (tied together by new genetics and mapping of genomes) (see
Azoulay 1997; Brodkin 1998; Kahn 2000; Goldschmidt 2003). By engaging with a theoretical
concept (race, biology, or genetics) that uses Jews as an example to illustrate an anthropological
concern, this kind of ethnography about Jews and Judaism promises to bring Judaism and
Jewishness into the larger academic debate in a way that others, in my opinion, have not
managed to do.
7
This does not mean, of course, that I advocate wholesale appropriations of anthropological
tools to other – sometimes tenuously related – disciplines. This can prove a very contentious
and, I believe, unproductive tactic. However, what this article does argue is that certain questions
being asked over the past few decades in religious studies circles (about reflexivity, definitions,
and representation) are reminiscent of theoretical debates in anthropology and therefore we might
benefit from a cross-disciplinary engagement. For further discussion of the application of anthropological theory in Biblical studies, see, for example, Goldberg 1987, Lawrence and Aguilar
2004, and Olyan’s critique of retrospective projections based on current ethnographic findings
(forthcoming 2009). Thanks to my colleagues at Brown University, Saul Olyan and Michael
Satlow, for discussing this issue with me.
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