Jew

Cynthia M. Baker

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813573861
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Jew.  The word possesses an uncanny power to provoke and unsettle. For millennia, Jew has signified the consummate Other, a persistent fly in the ointment of Western civilization’s grand narratives and cultural projects. Only very recently, however, has Jew been reclaimed as a term of self-identification and pride.     With these insights as a point of departure, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew —a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but indeed at the core of Western civilization. Examining scholarly debates about the origins and early meanings of Jew, Cynthia M. Baker interrogates categories like “ethnicity, ” “race, ” and “religion” that inevitably feature in attempts to define the word. Tracing the term’s evolution, she also illuminates its many contradictions, revealing how Jew has served as a marker of materialism and intellectualism, socialism and capitalism, worldly cosmopolitanism and clannish parochialism, chosen status, and accursed stigma.   Baker proceeds to explore the complex challenges that attend the modern appropriation of Jew as a term of self-identification, with forays into Yiddish language and culture, as well as meditations on Jew -as-identity by contemporary public intellectuals. Finally, by tracing the phrase new Jews through a range of contexts—including the early Zionist movement, current debates about Muslim immigration to Europe, and recent sociological studies in the United States—the book provides a glimpse of what the word Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, precarious nationalisms, and proliferating identities.  

1

Terms of Debate

“Ethnicity”: memory, response, attitude, mood, coded into the soul, transmitted through generations. Defined this broadly, I suspect, ethnicity is only a public metaphor, like sexuality or age, for a knowledge that bewilders us.

Richard Rodriguez, “An American Writer”

Race is religion. The evidence lies in the Semites.

Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature

Once upon a time we knew who was a Jew. . . .

Now we are not so sure.

Shaye J. D. Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties*

A decision regarding the juridical status of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, handed down by the Imperial Court in Vienna in 1909, based on legislation from 1867, states:

Notwithstanding the views and aspirations of the Jews in Galicia and Bucovina concerning their juridical status in the state, the entire historical development of Austrian legislation with reference to their juridical status is that they are regarded and treated not as an ethnic group [Nationalität] but as Sons of the Mosaic Faith, a religious community [Religionsgesellschaft].¹

The plaintiffs in the case argued that, as Jews (Juden), their distinctiveness and relation to the state ought to be legally construed as that of a Nationalität or Volksstämmer—a “nationality” or “ethnic group”—a standard bureaucratic category in the multinational empire. In dismissing this claim, the judiciary brought to bear “the entire historical development” of the legal tradition in maintaining that Jew names instead a “Son of the Mosaic Faith.”² To categorize Jew otherwise, the court implied, would be to innovate.³

In addition to highlighting and historicizing the juxtaposition of “ethnicity” to “religion” in the naming and positioning of Jew in the modern West, the Austro-Hungarian ruling underscores the ways in which narratives of “historical development” are frequently called upon to adjudicate claims of later ages. In this sense, debates about original meanings and the historical development of terms are never merely academic or theoretical. The terms of these debates and their outcomes both are shaped by the larger sociopolitical contexts in which they occur and in turn help to shape those larger contexts. A close examination of current, ongoing debates about the origins of Jew(s) precisely illuminates these dynamics. It reveals the extent to which the earliest Jew(s) become mirrors of modern identities and aspirations and, as well, the ways in which our modern understandings and attributions are themselves a function of ancient discourses about Jew(s).

Specifically, this chapter explores the formation and formulation of—as well as debates over—the key sociological categories currently employed to define Jew(s). Chief among these categories are “ethnicity/race” (commonly presumed to name “secular” phenomena) and “religion” (a much-contested concept, commonly presumed to describe phenomena distinguishable from the “secular” that represent a universal human impulse expressed through particular systems of belief and practice labeled “religions”). Jew plays an essential part in the historical development of these (theological/sociological) categories such that meanings attributed to Jew are inextricably bound up with these categories and the various manners and contexts in which they are combined or juxtaposed. Such categories as “ethnicity/race” and “religion” shape current knowledge about the origin of Jew(s) in ways that can obscure and exclude as much as they illuminate.

First Jews

The word Jew, like its cognates in other medieval and modern languages, derives from the ancient Greek Ioudaios and the Latin Iudaeus, which, in turn, are related to the Hebrew yehudi and Aramaic yehuda’i. Although this derivation is clear, well established, and uncontested, there is ongoing scholarly debate over whether the word Jew is, in fact, the appropriate or best translation of these ancient terms in the earliest writings in which they appear. The terms of this debate concern the nature of early identity categories and whether or not the ancient, pre-Christian subject in question (singular or plural) can be fairly and adequately named by much later terms like Jew, Jude, juif, judío, and so forth, which arose within explicitly Christian contexts and which remain tightly enmeshed in Christian theological paradigms. Jew(s), it is argued, is a “religious” designation and must be reserved for naming members of a “religious” community. A different term and a different narrative must, then, be generated to distinguish this “religious” meaning from a supposedly earlier “ethnic” or “national” one.

Yehudi (pl. yehudim) hearkens back to the biblical tribal name Yehudah/Judah, which designates the Israelite tribe whose territory became the bulk of the southern Israelite kingdom, according to the biblical narratives of the First and Second Books of Kings. Following the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom (Israel) in the eighth century BCE, Yehudah/Judah became the only remaining Israelite kingdom. Yehud, as this territory was subsequently known under the Babylonian and Persian Empires, became the Judaea (Judea) found in ancient Greek and Latin texts.

At first blush, it would appear that the appellation yehudi and its ancient derivatives refer, then, simply to an inhabitant of this particular geopolitical locale situated in the far-eastern Mediterranean (or far-western Arabia). Judaean is the noun coined to signify this regionally inflected personal identity. Such a straightforward regional signification is complicated, however, by a number of factors. For one thing, in some of their earliest occurrences, the terms yehuda’i and yehudi(m) refer to persons outside that locale, not within it, and often with indication of ancestry elsewhere (e.g., in the Elephantine papyri from fifth-century BCE Egypt, whose yehuda’i are, according to Joseph Blenkinsopp, almost certainly from northern Israel and Aramea).⁴ In other early occurrences, the terms are employed by a minority elite settled—or resettled—in Yehud under Persian imperial auspices (as in the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah). Furthermore, even when applied to persons or groups within the region of Yehud/Judaea, the term is explicitly reserved for only some inhabitants and settlers there, and not others. In fact, oddly, the “people(s) of the land” is a phrase employed in biblical texts expressly to exclude other inhabitants of the land of Yehud/Judaea from among the ranks of the yehudim or yehuda’i. Yehudit (the feminine form that corresponds to the masculine yehuda or yehudi) is the name of one such “daughter of the land” who marries Jacob’s brother Esau, a full generation before Yehudah/Judah, son of Jacob and Leah, becomes the designated, eponymous founder of the “tribe of Judah.”⁵

Yehudim appears as a tribal/national designation in II Kings 16:6, and Assyrian Akkadian inscriptions refer to the defeat of the “iauda’ai king.” Apart from a few such instances, the Hebrew and Aramaic terms of collective identification first begin to appear in measurable numbers in literature and inscriptions related to the Babylonian conquest of the kingdom of Judah (c. 587 BCE) and its aftermath. Elites of that kingdom, according to biblical accounts, were forcibly transferred to cities in the heart of the Babylonian Empire; others fled to Egypt. As a small, displaced minority, these deportees and refugees may have come to identify themselves—or to be identified by those around them—as yehuda’i, Aramaic for “those from Yehud.” When the Babylonian Empire fell to the Persians in the late sixth century BCE, colonization of the province of Yehud was overseen by the Persian imperial administration and included the apparently voluntary transfer—or repatriation—of a population from Babylonia calling itself the yehuda’i, yehudim, Yisrael, and bene ha-golah or bene galuta—“children of the exiled.” Among these colonists were many who asserted descent from the earlier deportees but who denied any association with or relation to those who had remained living in Yehud (much less to those who might have come to reside there after the destruction by the Babylonians).⁶ We do not know whether or not these latter also began to—or continued to—call themselves yehudim despite apparent claims to exclusive ownership of the term by the “children of the exiled.”

According to this reconstruction, the terms yehudim (in Hebrew) and yehuda’i (in Aramaic) named a population transferred to the heart of Babylonia (or fled to Egypt) as a result of imperial conquest and destruction. The dynamic of displacement and constitution as a minority culture, then, may account for the adoption or attribution of an appellation—yehudim or yehuda’i—not otherwise utilized outside such a context. Likewise, the displacement of a minority group from Babylonia and its reconstitution in Yehud as local intermediaries with (or colonial representatives of) the Persian imperial government may account for the appropriation of a provincial identity—yehudim or yehuda’i—by the new arrivals/returnees as an assertion of local standing and legitimacy. Hence, yehudim or yehuda’i might first have been coined as part of a foundational narrative of kinship, geography, and piety by this settlement (or resettlement) movement at the same time that it might already have been in use by inhabitants of the colonized Persian land called Yehud.

If these earliest Hebrew and Aramaic, and later Greek and Latin, terms were to be translated as Yehudean/Judaean rather than as Jew (as is becoming widespread practice among those who study antiquity), then Judaean would seem to signify any or all of the following: a native or resident of the region of Judaea; an expatriate of that territory; a settler there; a member of an extended tribal group; a member of a religious subculture; a descendant or adherent of any one of these. Yet if Judaean is not coterminous with Jew, then the question still remains as to who and what constitute the earliest Jews and what is the nature of their relationship to Judaeans, Israelites, and Hebrews.

Answers to these questions vary widely among scholars.⁷ Different bodies of scholarship point to different time periods and different sociopolitical forces or events to pinpoint the emergence of Jews onto the world stage and to propose a variety of related distinctions and comparisons. The vast majority of studies, however, share quite similar frameworks, analytical terminology, and fundamental assumptions. Three concise formulations by three prominent scholars serve nicely to illustrate both the divergences and the underlying conformity:

In the Babylonian and Persian periods [sixth to fourth centuries BCE], the term “Judean” added to its former tribal and territorial meanings, the new religious one of “Jew.”⁸

All occurrences of the term Ioudaios [as well as yehudi and yehuda’i] before the middle or end of the second century BCE should be translated not as “Jew,” a religious term, but as “Judaean,” an ethnic-geographic term. In the second half of the second century BCE the term Ioudaios for the first time is applied even to people who are not ethnic or geographic Judaeans but who . . . have come to believe in the God of the Judaeans (i.e., they have become “Jews”).⁹

Some scholars in recent years have asked whether Ioudaioi and its counterparts in other ancient languages are better rendered “Jews” or “Judaeans” in English. This essay puts that question in a larger frame, by considering first Ioudaismos and then the larger problem of ancient religion. It argues that there was no category of “Judaism” in the Graeco-Roman world, no “religion” too, and that the Ioudaioi were understood until late antiquity [approximately the fourth century CE] as an ethnic group comparable to other ethnic groups, with their distinctive laws, traditions, customs, and God. They were indeed Judaeans.¹⁰

Two things are striking about this series of formulations. First is the fact that the three accounts locate the same watershed phenomenon—the emergence of Jew(s)—in three very different eras, several centuries apart: one in the so-called Babylonian and Persian periods of the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, another in the so-called Hellenistic period of the second century BCE, and still another in the so-called late antique or early...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Jew or Jew? A Note on orthography
• Introduction
• 1. Terms of Debate
• 2. State of the (Jew[ish]) Question
• 3. In a New Key: New Jews
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author