Judaism

The Genealogy of a Modern Notion

Daniel Boyarin

• Éditeur: Rutgers University Press
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813572642
• Sujet: Teología y religión
• Sous-sujet: Religión

Judaism makes the bold argument that the very concept of a religion of 'Judaism' is an invention of the Christian church. The intellectual journey of world-renowned Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin, this book will change the study of "Judaism"—an essential key word in Jewish Studies—as we understand it today. Boyarin argues that although the world treats the word "Judaism" as appropriate for naming an alleged religion of the Jews, it is in fact a Christian theological concept only adopted by Jews with the coming of modernity and the adoption of Christian languages.

Part I

The Terms of the Debate

1

The Debate of the Terms

The Western construction of religion creates a world beyond which it cannot see.

—Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology1

Whoever uses terms like transcendence, capitalism, superstition, imperialism, heresy, slavery, and liberty without considering what they mean in a particular time and place (or whether they are even legitimate categories in certain times and places) is already a shoddy historian.

—Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Rules of the Game in the Study of Ancient History”2

Teaching English to Speak Hebrew; or, the Key Word Issue

Very far from a shoddy historian—indeed, a superb one—Seth Schwartz defends the necessity for such scholarly usages condemned by Momigliano: “Finally, our modern western language is necessarily inadequate to describe the realities of a radically different culture.” I concur completely, and it will be noted that I refrain, more consistently lately than formerly, from bandying about terms such as “ethnicity” or “culture” as well. He goes on, however, to add, “But our job is precisely to translate and explain, which necessarily requires that we make use of inherently misleading modern language to describe our subjects. There is simply no choice.”3 Agreeing with Schwartz in principle that we must translate, I would suggest that it is our concept of “translation” itself that needs reforming.4 Rather than trying to “translate” into our language, we must seek unceasingly to learn their language(s) and find the words, as many as it takes, in our language to describe what we have learned.5 That is translation, as Talal Asad imagines it. Attacking anthropologist Ernest Gellner, who had claimed that those who wish to describe the “coherence” of “primitive cultures” do so out of “tolerance,” Asad writes, “He appears unaware that for the translator the problem of determining the relevant kind of context in each case is solved by skill in the use of the languages concerned, not by an a priori ‘attitude’ of intolerance or tolerance. And skill is something that is learned—that is, something that is necessarily circular, but not viciously so. We are dealing not with an abstract matching of two sets of sentences, but with a social practice rooted in modes of life.”6 As Walter Benjamin, citing Rudolph Pannwitz, writes, “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English.”7 Lilith Acadia has put her finger on the issues at stake: “Viewing non-Western society through the lens of a Western concept is misleading and reveals an epistemological power asymmetry: the West sets the terms of the debate, becomes the norm, unreciprocatingly expects others to assimilate to the West, and belongs everywhere while others are ‘uprooted’ when not in their historically limited ‘local place of origin.’ The western concept of religion’s power in history-making skews the narrative.”8

Asad’s essay, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,”9 provides one of the most significant recent interventions in this question. Early in his paper, Asad quotes approvingly a statement of Godfrey Lienhardt:

Eventually, we try to represent their conceptions systematically in the logical constructs we have been brought up to use; and we hope, at the best, thus to reconcile what can be expressed in their languages, with what can be expressed in ours. We mediate between their habits of thought, which we have acquired with them, and those of our own society; in doing so, it is not finally some mysterious “primitive philosophy” that we are exploring, but the further potentialities of our own thought and language. The problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe think then begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own.10

Substituting “collective” for “tribe” and “other” for “primitive” as well as “sense” for “coherence,” since we now strongly prefer to assume that “to get at any culture’s thoughts you need to locate both its coherencies and its incoherencies,”11 I would subscribe to this description of the task of the cultural translator.

The first thing to note is how different this is from the procedure enjoined by J. Z. Smith, who insists that we must translate into the terms of our analytic thought:

Giving primacy to native terminology yields, at best, lexical definitions that historically and statistically, tell how a word is used. But lexical definitions are almost always useless for scholarly work. To remain content with how “they” understand “magic” may yield a proper description but little explanatory power. How “they” use a word cannot substitute for the stipulative procedures by which the academy contests and controls second-order specialized usage.12

This view of cultural translation could not, I think, be more at odds with Lienhardt’s position as explained and defended by Asad.13 Asad himself builds on Lienhardt, making, moreover, the key point that in cultural translation, properly conceived, the target language must always be shifting to accommodate—to make sense of—the new Lebensform that it is translating.14 The languages of dominated groups have always done this, and on a more neutral plane, languages in contact have always done this as well, shifting their semantics in response to contact with other forms of life and thus languages. The eventual development of the concept of “religion” in many forms of life—including the modern Jewish one—under the impact of colonialism is only a case in point. The task of the cultural translator is to make our powerful modern European language submissive to the language of the past, of the other, to let English speak Hebrew or ancient Greek or Hindi.15 Putting it perhaps less metaphorically, anthropological theorist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has written, “I would add that to translate is always to betray, as the Italian saying goes. However, a good translation—and here I am paraphrasing Walter Benjamin (or rather Rudolf Pannwitz via Benjamin)—is one that betrays the destination language, not the source language. A good translation is one that allows the alien concepts to deform and subvert the translator’s conceptual toolbox so that the intentio of the original language can be expressed within the new one.”16

Most of Asad’s paper is an astute explication and defense of Lienhardt’s thesis against some less than seasonable attack that it suffered. In defending Lienhardt against some quite absurd statements by his antagonist, the aforementioned Gellner, Asad hits what is for me the nail right on the head, remarking, “But if the skilled translator looks first for any principle of coherence in the discourse to be translated, and then tries to reproduce that coherence as nearly as he can in his own language, there cannot be a general rule as to what units the translator will employ—sentences, paragraphs, or even larger units of discourse.”17 Note that nothing in this account of cultural translation suggests in any way, shape, or form the necessity to find a word in “our” language that matches up with, for better or worse, a word in the language of the other collective.18 Once again, and with what is to my ears a distinctly Wittgensteinian ring, “We are dealing not with an abstract matching of two sets of sentences, but with a social practice rooted in modes of life.”19

The point is not the mutual unintelligibility of languages or forms of life but the very hard work necessary to render them intelligible to each other and the necessity to do so, as much as possible, without imposing the terms of one on the other.20 As one of Wittgenstein’s most perspicacious interpreters puts it, “Grammar owes no homage to reality. It is, in this sense, autonomous. It does not reflect objective necessities. On the contrary, it determines what we conceive of as necessary. We can understand different colour geometries. We can understand different number systems.”21 We can understand different ways of imagining the world and dividing up practices into categories, and to do so is the task of the translator: to make our languages capable of speaking the language of others. The purpose is to develop a third way between the extremes of assuming unintelligibility—radical Sapir-Whorfianism—on the one hand and a kind of universal science-speak on the other. I do believe that we can learn to understand others with a great deal of difficulty and that the effort is worth it. Neither to leave the texts in ancient Greek nor to translate them into English but to make English speak Greek. Lest this proposal sound unworkable or even Borgesian, I want to point out a method (developed by Carlin Barton) for doing this—namely, the method, adumbrated herein, of presenting as much of the context as practical of a given usage, translating all of the context except for the key words being studied and doing that over and over for the key word in question. Adorno has perfectly described the procedure that we propose:

The way the essay appropriates concepts can best be compared to the behavior of someone in a foreign country who is forced to speak its language instead of piecing it together out of its elements according to rules learned in school. Such a person will read without a dictionary. If he sees the same word thirty times in continually changing contexts, he will have ascertained its meaning better than if he had looked up all the meanings listed, which are usually too narrow in relation to the changes that occur with changing contexts and too vague in relation to the unmistakable nuances that the context gives rise to in every individual case. This kind of learning remains vulnerable to error, as does the essay as form; it has to pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience with a lack of security that the norm of established thought fears like death.22

Both as a research program and as a mode of conveying results, this holds the promise of developing a sense of the range of usage—not lexical meaning—that a word can show within a given state of the language.

The question, thus, remains of how far one can “reduce the unknown to the known,” following J. Z. Smith’s famous injunction,23 before one loses the irreducible difference of “the unknown.” Note that I am not claiming, not at all, that the “external” observer can never see things that are occluded from the member of the culture itself. Any given culture makes distinctions that are not articulated (that are tacit, that “go without saying”) and makes categories and distinctions that do not operate “on the ground.” (For instance, informants might tell an ethnographer that we do not marry first cousins but only second cousins, and then the ethnographer discovers many first-cousin marriages.) Such discrepancies are well known to ethnographers, but this hardly marks an opposition between subjective and objective or insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives. One would have to demonstrate in either case on the basis of the same kind of evidence whether a distinction or category is operative within the culture.

If I want to learn something about Jewish practice—oral, textual, embodied in antiquity, late antiquity, or the Middle Ages—I contend that I cannot do so by reducing those unknowns to the known. Such a practice will inevitably (as I hope to show here) result in a description that assimilates them, in one way or another, to modern “Judaism.”24 Once more, as Adorno has written, “Thought’s depth depends on how deeply it penetrates its object, not on the extent to which it reduces it to something else.”25 If, as argued by Walter Capps, religious studies is founded on the Enlightenment postulate that “the objects of investigation have essences, which are discrete and unchangeable,” then this is precisely what I deny about “religion.” I feel instinctively sure that utilizing terms like “religion” to delineate the concept worlds of people who had no such concepts, or words, is a practice of self-replication and not translation. Benson Saler reminds us that “the power of religion as an analytical category, we might well affirm, depends on its instrumental value in facilitating the formulation of interesting statements about human beings, the phenomenal subjects of anthropological research.”26 It is the claim of my work that “religion” obscures much more than it reveals for the formulation of interes...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: What Are We Talking About When We Talk About “Judaism”?
• Part I. The Terms of the Debate
• Part II. The State of the Lexicon: Questioning the Archive
• Part III. A New Dispensation: The Christian Invention of “Judaism”
• Epilogue: Theory as Askesis
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index of Works Cited
• About the Author