This alien thing that is my inheritance

Judaism, Fall, 1995 by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz

IN ONE SENSE, MY SCHOLARLY INTEREST IN ANCIENT Judaism is a product of my struggles to formulate an adult identity. I come from what is a typical Conservative Jewish home, first in Baltimore, Maryland, later in Silver Spring and Rockville, Maryland. We attended synagogue infrequently, mostly on High Holidays. I attended Hebrew school three times a week and hated it. The crucial transition came for me in college, at Duke University, when a born-again roommate and his girlfriend tried to convert me. They remain close friends of mine, both of them now ministers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where they share a pulpit. Their faith like mine has subsequently matured and deepened. At that point I knew that I could not accept Christ. But when they asked me what Judaism said about matters of mutual concern, I could not answer. Their questioning and my own sense of disorientation as a young adult fueled my search for some deeper connection, for some meaning, and I turned to Judaism. I found a home in Hillel -- despite my sense that it was for nerds, and that I was a jock. I also began taking Jewish studies courses. I was fortunate to have an extraordinary instructor -- Kalman Bland, who introduced me to jewish mysticism and rabbinic literature.

At that point my Jewishness and my intellectual life were in harmony. I was in search of roots, to understand this alien thing that was my inheritance, this Judaism, which I claimed as my own but knew nothing about. And intellectually what intrigued me about the tradition was its otherness. I did a research paper on the rabbis and was amazed at the liberties they took with Scripture. I was an anthropologist among my own people. But I did not know it then. Somewhere in college, I began to think about becoming what a good Jewish boy should never be: a rabbi. The idea bothered my mother, though she had always pushed me during my youth to be more Jewish. Becoming a rabbi seemed to integrate my interest in psychology, which was then my major, with my growing interests in Judaism. After much agony, and a growing period of becoming more observant, I chose rabbinical school and went off to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. While I was happy learning how to gain access to talmudic arguments and the ancient texts, once the linguistic obstacles were overcome, I became disenchanted. For I wanted to understand the text and that meant asking: Why did people perform these rituals? Why did they produce these unusual texts? Why did they take such liberties with Scripture? I was intrigued by the strangeness of my own past. At that point, I was introduced to anthropology by another rabbinical student."Have you read this?" he said, and handed me Claude Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind, which he had studied as an undergraduate. I shortly discovered that for some time anthropologists had been puzzling over practices and beliefs similar to those of ancient Judaism, practices such as circumcision, purity rules, menstruation, sacrifice, and so forth. They were asking about the meaning of practices -- about the symbolisms carried in practices, about how power was invested in rituals, about the ways in which they supported social relations.

These interests led me to pursue a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and the History of Judaism at Brown University. Immersing myself in anthropological inquiry, I began to ask why interpreters of Judaism-both Christian and Jewish -- had tended to ignore anthropology in trying to understand Judaism? It eventually became clear to me that Western scholarship viewed Judaism as a higher tradition. Since Judaism was the foundation for Christianity and since it was monotheistic, it was assumed to be superior to primitive, or polytheistic traditions. To be sure Judaism was always viewed as inferior to Christianity, but generally it was regarded as higher than other religious forms. This explains why so few interpreters turned to anthropology to study ancient Judaism. For the discipline of anthropology originally emerged as the way of studying so-called primitive societies. I found this distinction between higher and lower traditions morally and intellectually problematic. It is not that I believe judaism has primitive elements and should be studied as a primitive religion. Rather, I found the whole category of "primitive" to make little sense. "How will it affect our understanding Judaism," I asked myself, "if we no longer work on the assumption that it is a higher tradition?" To ask this kind of question was to turn upside down the dominant discourse on Judaism. Ultimately this line of thinking culminated in my book The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Ancient Judaism and Israelite Religion (Indiana University, 1990), which attempted to explain why anthropology was rarely used to study Judaism and how anthropological perspectives could illuminate classic Jewish practices.

There is an irony in this anthropological turn in my work. Initially I was attracted to anthropology to help rehabilitate Judaism, to imbue with meaning practices that seemed nonsensical or empty. But I found that as my work progressed it alienated me in ways I did not originally anticipate. Or perhaps I should say that it was part of the alienation I was undergoing. If at first I was an anthropologist among my people, now the native had gone anthropologist. In part this was a reaction to the nature of rabbinical school. Irony of ironies: discovering one's Jewishness at Duke University only to lose touch with it in rabbinical school? I don't understand completely my growing disengagement with traditional Jewish practice. Part of it was the claustrophobic and judgmental nature of the seminary community in which expertise (Bekios) was valued above all else. In part, though, it was just simply a consequence of my own intellectual journey. There were no jewish communities in which I felt completely at home.