Search Results (39)

In recent decades, biblical scholars have begun to read the narratives about ancient persons and peoples on the move in dialogue with modern migration studies. As part of this broader trend, I became involved in a research project focused on descriptions of the earliest Jewish diaspora in the Hebrew Bible and historical documents due to my background as an anthropologist specializing in contemporary migration. This article aims to strengthen and systemize this emerging interdisciplinary conversation about human mobility. It provides a methodological catalog outlining four different ways biblical scholars and students may draw comparatively from the study of modern mobilities to shed new light on ancient and biblical worlds of motion. These four methods are tentatively labeled (1) applying new categories, (2) asking new questions, (3) thinking through concepts, and (4) exposing implicit biases. The article defines these as different comparative heuristics and uses the book of Ruth to reflect upon their respective strengths, limits, and unintended consequences. Full article

The origin of this article lies in the concurrent existence of multiple religious groups in the United States and the interactions between them. This essay examines the dynamics of religious pluralism through the interaction of two religious groups—African Americans and Jews—in the realms of religion, society, and politics. Among the diverse religious groups in the United States, the growing presence of Jews, bolstered by migration from Germany in the 19th century and from Eastern Europe in the 20th century, introduced new traditions and significantly contributed to the development of religious experimentation among African Americans. The phenomenon of African American communities embracing Judaism exemplifies how religious pluralism and diaspora intersect to produce new forms of religious and cultural identity. These communities challenge traditional notions of both Jewishness and African Americanness, demonstrating the fluidity of identity in diasporic contexts. Full article

By analyzing the musical works of Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen, this study examines the theological expressions of secular Jews in the diaspora who retain elements of belief. Drawing on contemporary theories of lived religion and post-secular spirituality, it explores how their lyrics articulate distinctive forms of Jewish spirituality outside traditional frameworks. Through a close textual analysis of their final albums, this study reveals complex theological narratives that intertwine Protestant-oriented individual spirituality with collective Jewish religious and cultural memory. The findings indicate that Cohen and Simon demonstrate distinct approaches to divinity. Cohen adopts a more traditional theistic stance, whereas Simon develops a pantheistic theology. These narratives offer viable and meaningful models for secular-believer Jewish identity and suggest possible foundations for a contemporary secular Jewish existence in the diaspora. Full article

The central institutional model that served Jewish Orthodoxy in its struggle with the threat to the tradition of the modern era and from which grew its intellectual leadership was ultimately the model of the Lithuanian Yeshiva. However, from the second half of the nineteenth-century, new models of Jewish higher education institutions emerged and were even adopted by Orthodox circles. How, then, did the trustees of the Lithuanian yeshiva model see the new institutional models? Our discussion will focus on the modern yeshivas and rabbinical seminaries that accepted the Orthodox halakhic view, including the Tahkemoni rabbinical seminary in Warsaw, the Hildesheimer Seminary in Berlin (1873–1938), and the Seminary for the Diaspora in Jerusalem (1956). The Lithuanian rabbis held to the supremacy of the Lithuanian Yeshiva model. However, until World War II, they saw the Orthodox rabbinical seminary as an institute suitable to its time and place—Germany, most of whose Jews were liberal—and did not consider it able to produce a Torah scholar worthy of his name. They opposed the establishment of rabbinical seminaries in Eastern Europe and the Land of Israel, and after the war, when the issue of establishing a rabbinical seminary in Jerusalem was raised, they rejected the Orthodox rabbinical seminary outright and no longer recognized its contribution to its time and place—Germany. Full article

This study examines the relations between an exiled Jewish diaspora and the surrounding Muslim communities in the significant Ottoman Balkan city of Avlonya between 1520 and 1568. Having been expelled from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1496), numerous Sephardic Jews settled in Avlonya in the early sixteenth century, integrating into Ottoman social structures and making notable contributions to both the economic and demographic landscape of the city. This study examines the extent of the Jewish community’s assimilation into Avlonya and Ottoman society in the immediate aftermath of its arrival, assessing its pathways to integration, their limitations, and the dynamics of coexistence and mutual trust. It posits that in a relatively short period, the integration of Avlonya’s Sephardic Jews into both the city and society proved to be a positive success from the perspective of the state and the community itself. Evidence in support of this assertion is found in an examination of the tahrir defters and sharia court records (the primary sources of data for this research). The depth of the findings and the variety of research questions posed mean that this study has employed a mixed-methods approach, allowing for both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Full article

Judaism was not Paul’s background, but his context, and much of his gospel’s content. Modern Pauline Studies, however, often see Paul’s mission as an expression of what he found wrong with Judaism, a Judaism that supposedly discouraged relations with Gentiles. This essay investigates all the various ways that Jews and Gentiles comfortably cohabited the Graeco-Roman Diaspora. What spurred Paul’s mission was not a critique of an ethnically exclusive Judaism, but his conviction that, in Christ, the end times had arrived. Accordingly, he taught that Gentiles should repudiate their own gods and commit exclusively to the worship of Israel’s god. Paul’s contest was not with Jewish law. It was with pagan gods. Both his mission and his message place him firmly within the pluriform Judaism of his time, a Judaism that took its place within the god-congested world of first-century Mediterranean paganism. Full article

Exile was part of the juridical system of the late Republican and early Imperial Rome. 1 Pet 2.11 adopts the language of exile to identify its audience’s place within the world. Subsequent verses indicate a disparity between their own place and the world, or wider community, but fall short of rejecting wholesale the apparatus of the Roman state and its socio-political conventions. The apparent self-identification of the community as exiles is a potential claim for autonomy, self-determination, and high status. Claims for exile in the context of the Diaspora (1 Pet 1.1) might also embrace a claim to be considered Jewish, members of an ancient tradition protected by long precedent, and so protected from some legal threats. Full article

Against the gloomy forecast of “The Vanishing Diaspora”, the end of the second millennium saw the global emergence of a dazzling array of Jewish cultural initiatives, institutional modalities, and individual practices. These “Jewish Revival” and “Jewish Renewal” projects are led by Jewish NGOs and philanthropic organizations, the Orthodox Teshuva (return to the fold) movement and its well-known emissary Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidism, and alternative cultural initiatives that promote what can be termed “lifestyle Judaism”. This range between institutionalized revival movements and ephemeral event-driven projects circumscribes a diverse space of creative agency. Indeed, the trope of a “Jewish Renaissance” has become both a descriptive category of an increasingly popular and scholarly discourse across the globe, and a prescriptive model for social action. This article explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our post-secular world in two different sociopolitical contexts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, we interrogate the relations between “diaspora” and “homeland” by analyzing two case studies: the Jewish revival movement in Budapest, Hungary, and the Jewish renewal initiatives in Israel. While the first instantiates a diasporic movement anchored in a post-denominational and post-secular attempt to reclaim Jewish tradition for a new generation of Jew-llennials (Millennial Jews), the second group operates against the Orthodox hegemony of the institutional Rabbinate by revisiting religious ritual and textual study. By proposing new cultural repertoires, these movements highlight the dialectic exchange between center and periphery. The ethnography of religious revival decenters the Israeli Orthodoxy as “the homeland” and positions the diaspora at the core of a network of cultural creativity and renewal, while remaining in constant dialog with Israel and other diasporic communities. Full article

Drawing on life-story interviews and ethnography conducted in Israel from 2009 to 2023, this article examines how members of the Spanish-speaking Moroccan–Jewish diaspora in Israel recalled their habits of eating non-kosher food in Morocco. We explore how these memories emerged in response to commonplace discourses that depict Moroccan Jews as a distinctly religious-traditional ethnic group, untouched by European secular influences, and dichotomous to modern secular cultures in Israel. Contrary to this image, members of the community whom we interviewed highlighted a Jewish Moroccan life that was deeply connected to Spanish colonialism and the broader Hispanic and Sephardi worlds. We focus specifically on the concept of selkear, a Haketia (Judeo-Spanish) term meaning to let something go, make an exception, or turn a blind eye. Our analysis of our participants’ memories provides a nuanced understanding of Jewish religiosity in the context of colonialism and of how Mizrahi–Sephardi immigrants in Israel reclaimed their Judaism. Highlighting the practice of eating non-kosher food is thus a strategy used to challenge dominant notions of rigid religious commitment within the Sephardi diaspora and their interpretation in Israel. Full article

This paper explores the Polish Jew journal as a pivotal second-tier record for advancing Holocaust studies and Jewish genealogy. Traditionally underutilized in academic research, this periodical provides a unique repository of names and narratives of Holocaust victims, filling crucial gaps in primary record collections. The investigation centers on the journal’s potential not only to contribute names to existing databases of Holocaust victims—many of whom are still unrecorded—but also to enhance genealogical methods through the integration of network analysis. By examining Polish Jew, this study illustrates how second-tier records can extend beyond mere supplements to primary data, acting instead as vital tools for reconstructing complex social and familial networks disrupted by the Holocaust. The paper proposes a methodological framework combining traditional genealogical research with modern network analysis techniques to deepen our understanding of Jewish community dynamics during and after World War II. This approach not only aids in identifying individual victims and survivors but also in visualizing the broader interactions within Jewish diaspora communities. This research underscores the significance of Polish Jew in the broader context of Holocaust remembrance. It offers a novel pathway for the future of Jewish genealogical research, advocating for the strategic use of second-tier records in scholarly investigations. Full article

The Documentary Hypothesis proposed by Julius Wellhausen has sparked discussions for over a century. The core of this debate revolves around the perspective through which the creation of the Torah should be viewed. Previous studies have often neglected the focus on “people”. The Torah was created by individuals and was profoundly influenced by the era in which they lived. In this specific study, instead of concentrating on the texts or historical background, we should focus on the “authors” or “redactors”, exploring how they processed and created the texts under the influence of their times. In Jewish history, the destruction of the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom played a crucial role in the creation of the Torah. After the fall of the Northern Kingdom, the Deuteronomists, reflecting on historical lessons, formulated a set of legal norms for theology and society, which established theological standards for further interpreting and writing ancient Jewish history. Following the destruction of the Southern Kingdom, Diaspora group and Returnees, centered on reflecting on their catastrophes and responding to contemporary crises, further created and integrated texts of ancestral traditions and the Promised Land, embedding the historical memory of ancestors-land for the Jewish people. Full article

Anthropologists of religion are preoccupied with questions of identity, community, performance and representation. One way they cope with these concerns is through a reflexive examination of their ethnographic positionality in the field. This provides an opportunity to engage not only with “the other”, but also to explore their own identities and background. This article presents an autoethnographic analysis of Pride Shabbat, a special service held in June to celebrate the intersection of Judaism and queerness. The service took place at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) as part of their 50th-anniversary celebration. Since the 1970s, CBST has been known as the largest gay synagogue in the world and provided diverse religious and spiritual services to the Jewish LGBTQ+ community. Based on my participation in this specific event in June 2023, I draw distinct differences between the Israeli Jewish LGBTQ community and the American Jewish LGBTQ community, such as issues related to ageism and multigenerational perceptions within the gay community, the internal dynamic for gender dominance, as well as diverse trajectories of queerness, religiosity and nationality. Symbolically, contrary to the common perception that the diaspora looks to the state of Israel for symbolic and actual existence, this inquiry sheds light on the opposite perspective; the homeland (represented by the ethnographer) absorbs and learns from the queer Jewish practices and experiences taking place within the diaspora (the American Jewish LGBTQ community). This is an opposite movement which reveals the cracks in the perception of the gay community as a transnational community, as well as the tense power relations between Israel and American Jewry. Full article

This article discusses Tzvi Avni’s Second Piano Sonata, Epitaph, a sonic commentary on one of the inner tales in Rabbi Nachman’s “The Seven Beggars”. Written between 1974 and 1979, Epitaph not only marks the composer’s act of translation (from words into music and from a textual tale into a wordless and semantically unmarked piano sonata) but also his very turn to ethnographic sources that defied their negative function in a national territorial culture that vilified otherness while separating art from ethnography. Avni’s turn to Rabbi Nachman was part of a bigger shift that saw composers’ dialectical returns to Jewish histories and cultures that were previously repressed from a national culture which dehistoricized the Diaspora to the point of rendering the times and cultures of diasporic Jews a single temporality—ahistorical, contextless, and outside the teleological time of Zionism. With the (re)introduction of diasporic temporalities, non-redemptive poetics became an affordance in the music of Avni or Andre Hajdu (who is also discussed here) while steadily muting the territorial tropes that constituted Hebrew culture. Full article

This article reviews recent books by Jewish thinkers that critique the idea of a Jewish state from the perspective of Jewish exile. It outlines two main approaches. The first, secular approach, rejects the Jewish state in favor of a secular state, seeing Judaism itself as the problem, whether arising from biblical violence or collective identity. The second, post-secular approach, rejects the Jewish state as secular, and finds resources in Jewish tradition for an alternative political vision centered on exile, understood as resistance to sovereignty and violence. This article argues that Jewish opposition to the Jewish state aims to limit sovereignty, integrate Jews into the Middle East space, and recover an exilic Jewish tradition of social ethics and pluralism. The idea of exile thus provides resources for envisioning decolonization and coexistence in Israel–Palestine. Full article