Texts as Places, Texts as Mirrors: Anthropology of Judaisms and Jewish Textuality
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Texts as Places, Texts as Mirrors: Anthropology of Judaisms and Jewish Textuality Shlomo Guzmen‑Carmeli1 Received: 19 May 2020 / Accepted: 28 September 2020 / Published online: 5 December 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper takes a three-pronged approach to Jewish society and Jewish texts. The first cites several seminal works that illustrate the importance of examining Jewish textuality as an essential theme in the anthropology of Judaism. The second presents four scenes from a multi-sited ethnography I carried out that examines Jewish study institutions in differing cultural contexts and describes the possible contribution of this methodology to the ethnographic study of Jewish textuality. The third expands on the place of religious texts and their meaning in the context of processes of preservation, creativity, and change in Jewish culture. The discussion highlights the contribution of multi-sited ethnography, which illustrates how text creates “places,” meeting points between Jews and their Judaism, and how this encounter with the text serves as a source of reflection that can then be adapted to changing cultural contexts. Keywords Religious text · Anthropology of Judaism · Jewish textuality · Multi-sited ethnography From the Book of Esther I filtered the sediment of vulgar joy, and from the Book of Jeremiah the howl of pain in the guts. And from the Song of Songs, the endless search for love. And from the Book of Genesis, the dreams and Cain, and from Ecclesiastes, the despair, and from the Book of Job: Job. And with what was left, I pasted myself a new Bible. Now I live censored and pasted and limited and in peace. (Yehuda Amichai, excerpt from Time. Jerusalem: Schocken, 1977)
* Shlomo Guzmen‑Carmeli [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat‑Gan, Israel
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Both traditional and modern Jewish culture attach tremendous importance to the Torah. Torah study is viewed as a fundamental activity in the religious and cultural life of Jewish communities. Many Jews believe that everything that exists in our world is hinted at, concealed, or implied in the Torah, and that Torah study is the spiritual underpinning of the entire world. The Jewish Bookcase, that vast array of Torah-related texts, is prevalent even in non-intellectual contexts and secular settings, although its composition may vary from one community to another. The Jewish Bookcase holds an important place in religious practices as well as in national, communal, and personal rituals. Religious texts have a permanent presence in the Jewish world of images (Halbertal 1997). Steiner (1996) even refers to “the text” as the exclusive living space of the Jews.1 After the Jews were exiled from their physical homeland, it was transformed into the notion of a spiritual homeland. The true homeland of the Jews lies in canonical religious texts, and the Jewish people has survived not because of their political independence or military might, but because
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