Coring the Center: Reflections on the "Jewish Periphery". - Review - book review

Judaism, Summer, 1999 by Jeffrey Lesser

The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa. By MILTON SHAIN. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.

In August, 1996 I had the chance to join with colleagues from around the globe in a conference hosted by the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. In the opening lecture, Sander Gilman challenged participants to consider how the field of Jewish Studies might change now that we have entered, in his words, the era of post-Zionism. Now was the time, he suggested, to abandon the core-periphery model which has played such an important role in Jewish Studies. The model, whether it be constructed with Torah as the core and messianism as the periphery, or in a more contemporary way with Israel at the core enveloped by an enormous and devalued diasporic periphery, has dominated Jewish studies. Indeed, the diaspora model has been recreated with the United States representing a core Jewry whose "importance" overshadows Jews in other countries. [1] For Gilman, new models of Jewish Studies had to emerge from a non-centrist history.

I was quite touched by Gilman's comments even though I found myself in disagreement with much of what he said. Yet as I thought about my own situation, the force of the core-periphery notion struck me as sadly accurate. Today, as theories of transnational identity have begun to eclipse the ideas of a capitalist world clearly divided between haves and have-nots, Jewish Studies has begun to feel the pressure of the peripheries. [2] My own field of Latin American Jewish Studies provides a perfect example. At the macro-level, the study of Latin American Jewry has been judged a "peripheral" topic in Jewish Studies, even as another set of micro-centers and margins has been created within the field of Latin American Jewish Studies. Thus old style studies of Latin American Jewry tend to place Argentina (with Latin America's largest Jewish population) at the core even as they marginalize Latin American Jewry more broadly via the creation of models where Jews live virtually independent of national contexts, their victi m status the only exception. [3] Yet in recent years, as scholars have begun to challenge the core, serious challenges have also emerged in the sub-fields. By asking new questions, and thus looking for documentation in new places, Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness are now beginning to be understood as malleable. The number of Jews in a particular place has become less important than understanding how Jews fit into the general picture of minority and majority life in particular countries, cities, and regions. Contestation and cooptation seem to fit hand-in-hand.

We spent may hours locked together in that conference room in Cape Town, and the old and new Jewish Studies collided constantly. From one end came the Zionists who were explicit in their contention that Israel represented a Jewish core which by its existence marginalized the rest of the world. From another direction came the forgotten Jews of Canada, Brazil, and China, who were lumped together and stamped as "exotic but perhaps interesting." From yet another pole came the studies of South Africa which in themselves replicated the core-periphery model. Traditionalists tried to dismiss the role of Jews in upholding the structures that allowed apartheid to exist for so long by focusing on antisemitism and Jewish participation in the (formerly illegal) African National Conference. Such sentiments did not go unchallenged. In an angry attack on her elders, a scholar from Johannesburg courageously demanded that the Jewish community of South Africa set up the same kind of "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" that th e Mandela government had created for the country. A more senior colleague showed how an English-speaking Jewish core marginalized Yiddish speakers and in the process "disappeared" from the historical record critical documents for understanding the Jewish-(black) African relations which many scholars assert is an impenetrable unknown.

The Cape Town conference was just a microcosm of the tensions that can be found throughout the field of Jewish Studies, not only between the studies of core and peripheral "Jews" but also between core and peripheral topics. On one side of the chasm are those in "Jewish Studies," where the dominant sociological paradigm appears to be that one learns about Jews by either looking internally (community studies) or by comparing Jews to Jews in other geographical spaces. The other side takes a radically different view, using the methods and insights of cultural studies to ask how Jews are seen by and react to dominant culture, or more recently, how Jews are like other minority and majority groups. [4] Yet if culture is never pure, but rather a constant melding and mixing, then the reassertion of the primacy of the periphery may be a useless exercise. Perhaps it is time instead to focus on the porous and permeable "contact zones" where cultures (including Jewish ones) meet and are in constant flux. [5]