What Is a Jewish Classicist?

Essays on the Personal Voice and Disciplinary Politics

Simon Goldhill

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350322554
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: Ancient History

In recent years, there has been no issue that has convulsed academia and its role in society more stridently than the personal politics of its institutions: who has access to education? How does who you are change what you study and how you engage with it? How does scholarship reflect the politics of society – how should it? These new essays from one of the best-known scholars of ancient Greece offer a refreshing and provocative contribution to these discussions. What Is a Jewish Classicist? analyses how the personal voice of a scholar plays a role in scholarship, how religion and cultural identity are acted out within an academic discipline, and how translation, the heart of any engagement with the literature of antiquity, is a transformational practice. Topical, engaging, revelatory, this book opens a sharp and personal perspective on how and why the study of antiquity has become such a battlefield in contemporary culture. The first essay looks at how academics can and should talk about themselves, and how such positionality affects a scholar's work – can anyone can tell his or her own story with enough self-consciousness, sophistication and care? The second essay, which gives the book its title, takes a more socio-anthropological approach to the discipline, and asks how its patterns of inclusion and exclusion, its strategies of identification and recognition, have contributed to the shape of the discipline of classics. This initial enquiry opens into a fascinating history of change – how Jews were excluded from the discipline for many years but gradually after the Second World war became more easily assimilated into it. This in turn raises difficult questions for the current focus on race and colour as the defining aspects of personal identification, and about how academia reflects or contributes to the broader politics of society. The third essay takes a different historical approach and looks at the infrastructure or technology of the discipline through one of its integral and time-honoured practices, namely, translation. It discusses how translation, far from being a mere technique, is a transformational activity that helps make each classicist what they are. Indeed, each generation needs its own translations as each era redefines its relation to antiquity.

1

The Personal Voice: Six Fragments of a Sentimental Education

And, oh!

The difference to me!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

If I am not what you say I am, you are not who you say you are.

JAMES BALDWIN

You are what Grammy Hall would call a real Jew.

Annie Hall in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977)

i Sleepless in Seattle

A few years ago, I was invited to speak at the Classics Department of the University of Washington at Seattle. The choice of invited speaker, in this particular programme, was delegated to the graduate students, who, under the terms of the programme, also invited me to an opening question-and-answer forum with them, scheduled for the evening before the formal lecture. This was an event around a table and over a bottle of wine (my stipulation), and the first question – alas, I do not now remember the graduate student’s name – was brilliantly provocative, a great way to open such an intimate occasion: ‘What do you most dislike about the field of classics?’ In my panicked mind, I immediately stumbled through a tumble of thoughts – the nasty senior academics who had tried to block my research when I was starting out, the horrid reviews I had received, the lack of intellectual generosity and openness of some scholars, the negative conservatism that sometimes marred the field, its unwillingness to lead the humanities as it had so often done in the past – and I tried, with a jangly mixture of personal anecdotes, verging on the narcissistic, and some rather bland general political points about exclusion and openness, to hazard an answer. It wasn’t very coherent or satisfying – to me, or, I suspect, them – and left me quite flustered. It has bugged me ever since, and I have occasionally imagined better answers, without quite cracking it. This essay is my attempt to find a better answer to that smart graduate student’s question, finally.

The unexamined discipline is not worth living in. When classicists of pretty well any level and in pretty well any institutional setting get together, complaints about the discipline flow easily enough. These complaints can grow not just into changes of intellectual perspective and understanding, but also into insistent political awareness and articulated moves toward change. Current debates about the curriculum and about access and diversity are part of a long history of what a discipline must do if it is to breathe and live – as well as speaking compellingly to today (as I will get to in Chapter 3). The place and practice of classics have been argued about since at least the Renaissance, often bitterly, sometimes murderously. It is not passionate caring about the discipline that is bad for the field, but the desire not to examine itself sharply. What left me flustered and sleepless in Seattle, however, was not just how best to engage with such disciplinary self-analysis. It was rather the place of the personal voice in such a process. What I heard upfront in the question was the invitation to begin an answer with ‘I’ and to frame it as a ‘dislike’ – not so much a political analysis as an emotional response. How far out on a limb was I prepared to go? What – I worried – did they want to know?

Imagine if the question had been, ‘Who do you most dislike in the discipline of classics?’ Easier to answer, but immediately the question looks invidious at best, and, at worst, an invitation to rant in a self-centred way through a slew of personal hurts and insults (we all have them). Or perhaps to confess to an all-embracing love, like Mr Rodgers. Unconvincingly. But how to talk about the ‘I’ in terms of ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ without going into some such self-exposure? The question would not have felt answered if I had retreated behind the generalities of prosopography – we need to change the make-up of the field – or the blandness of curriculum talk – we need more theoretical awareness, or more work in late antiquity or … For sure, such generalities are significantly motivated by, and experienced, as individual and personal narratives. They must be. But how are such personal narratives to be mobilized? Especially when I was invited as a professor from one of the grandest – most privileged – universities, to speak to a group of graduate students starting in the profession, I was fairly sure that any tale of early struggle, however instructive, would reek of amour propre, and any account of my current institutional work aimed at changing what I disliked, would smack of self-justification.

What’s more, I was brought up as a scholar under two different competing trajectories – like Liber and Venus, durus uterque deus. On the one hand, I had been trained, as you would expect, to argue from evidence presented in a way that is disciplined (carefully chosen term, that), and either to resist or to mark carefully where judgement veered towards a personal opinion or a speculation. On the other hand, for many years, I had studied and absorbed theoretical discussions in classics and elsewhere about the personal voice. As a young academic, I had revelled in Jane Gallop’s bravado expositions of how the personal and the professional intertwined; I deeply admire Sara Ahmed’s analysis, based on her personal experience and curated anecdotal evidence, of institutional sluggishness about institutional racism and sexism.¹ I knew that it was impossible to talk about the field without talking about oneself – and how tricky a task that is.

I also knew that where the voice is, the voice that is personal, that speaks of the speaker as a person, cannot be located solely in explicit autobiography. It is also in the strategies of self-presentation that are projected by any writing, including silences. It is in the anticipation of reception that the exchanges of writing, teaching, talking embody. It is in the situatedness of the scholar, and the self-consciousness, admitted or denied but always performed, in speaking from somewhere.² Not just partiality, but, as Rita Felski insists, attachments.³ The three essentials of successfully persuasive rhetoric, declared Demosthenes, who knew, are hupokrisis, hupokrisis, hupokrisis: ‘self-presentation, self-presentation, self-presentation’ (or ‘delivery, delivery, delivery’, if you prefer, a weak translation, which leaves out the essential aspect of êthos).⁴ The desire for objectivity in the scholarly voice, with its corresponding terror of being judged subjective or, worse, emotional, creates academic prose, but also the academic person(a). This êthos of spectacular distance all too often makes it hard for academics even to express why and how they care about their subject: what is at stake in it for them, how they are implicated in their argument (or not). Even harder to do with sophistication, nuance and adequate self-awareness. My dear lamented friend Teresa Brennan, great feminist, psychoanalytic scholar and activist,⁵ in witty despair diagnosed so many of her academic colleagues as ‘sado-dispassionate’ – they enacted the desire for objective distance by a form of perverse aggression, a wilful disregard of the personal. But you can’t hide from the personal, only displace it. Good word, sado-dispassionate.

All this crippled my answer in Seattle. I was both hesitant about how to place my answer – politically, socially, intellectually (three different registers) – and, more distressingly, unable to disembarrass myself from the fact that, for all the theoretical understanding of the issues I reckoned I had, I still wasn’t ready really to talk personally, not like this, not here, not now.

‘I’ should be a hard word to use. That’s one challenge of this book, and, now, the specific challenge of this chapter. What I most dislike in … discussions of the personal voice is when it is assumed, too readily, that the person and the voice are easy or self-evident categories. So, let me try to proceed otherwise.

ii Confession

I currently run a large-scale research project, funded by the Mellon Foundation, entitled ‘Religious Diversity and the Secular University’, which is focused on how the university, committed as it is to secular values, can find a place for the religious commitments of the communities from which it draws its students. One of the most pressing contemporary problems not just for the academic community but also – and more disturbingly – for the political order of the world, is how to understand and respond to the current toxic combination of religion and politics. It is a fundamental concern for the issue of diversity, currently top of the political agenda in the institutions of classics. How should the liberal ideal of a tolerant and mixed society comprehend claims to exclusive and totalizing visions of truth, which set themselves against such liberal ideals? We may recognize that there is now, nationally and globally, a new and complex map, which has more than one monotheism, and polytheism, competing alongside secular standpoints. The challenge may be expressed like this: how can we take account of theological difference without going to war for belief? Quite simply, diversity in modern society cannot be adequately broached without an engagement with religion.

The most immediate prompt for this project, however, is a piece of British legislation, ‘the “Prevent” strategy’, which requires teachers at all levels of the educational system to report to the authorities any student they believe to be at risk of radicalization. It is a strange shift in discourse. For many years, to be radical – a radical new idea, a radical breakthrough – was a positive term in academia: now, the government and press declare,...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction: Fitting in
• 1 The Personal Voice: Six Fragments of a Sentimental Education
• 2 What Is a Jewish Classicist?
• 3 Translation and Transformation
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright