Gilad Sharvit (editor) - Canonization and Alterity: Heresy in Jewish History, Thought, and Literature

Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts

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ISBN 9783110667936

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e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110668179

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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

This volume explores the way various aspects of heresy as difference, variation, and deviation have come to function in Jewish history and tradition. The main argument of this volume is that heresy not only distinguishes, demarcates, and separates groups, but creates a social, political and religious dynamics that has proved to sustain rather than disrupt tradition. The contributions collected here examine various aspects of canonization and its discontents as a result of a rich, complex, and often conflicted process in which alterity plays a formative role. Exploring this phenomenon in various historical, cultural, social, and political contexts, the authors of this volume offer studies of a rich panoply of creative responses to the challenge that the interplay of canonization and alterity poses in Jewish tradition, its history, thought, and literature.

In Greek antiquity, the term (hairesis) initially denotes taking and receiving, a choice, or inclination. From the second century BCE, the term mostly refers to groups, which oftentimes had creedal or philosophical organizing principles, and comes later to represent a school of thought.

The Talmud uses several different terms to designate heretics. There are references to min, hizonim (outsiders), apikoros, kofer ba-Torah (R. H. 17a), and kofer ba-ikkar (he who denies the fundamentals of faith; Pes. xxiv. 168b). There are references also to poresh mi-darke zibbur (he who deviates from the customs of the community), and mumar le-hakis (one who transgresses the Law, not for personal advantage, but out of defiance and spite). The Hebrew word harisah appears only late in a Kabbalist work in 1558 in Mantua. Remarkably, the anonymous author musters a biblical alliteration in Exodus 19:24 to motivate

However, Jewish tradition never produced a unified generalized term for, or concept of heresy. The term may be stabilized in common speech, and yet in Judaism the concept of heresy is multifaceted by its very function. Indeed, the sheer variety of terms for various forms of internal differences and deviation highlights the impossibility of reducing the diversity of Jewish tradition to one unified principle or another, be it purely doctrinal, halachic, communal, creedal, spiritual, or intellectual. Rather, the different terms address disparate aspects that defy unification. This resistance to the reduction to a purely doctrinal or halachic structure reflects the various strands of narratives that inform the dynamics of Jewish tradition. The local minhag (custom) trumps that of another community and there is no higher order that supersedes the particular to control and police it.

Hermann Cohen famously suggested that Jewish tradition rests on multiple sources that mutually complement and enrich each other. Moses and the prophets, written and oral law, Torah and Talmud, Palestinian and Babylonian, Halacha and Haggadah, Ashkenazi and Sephardi strands combine to form a continuous exchange that gives life to its various traditions (narratives of figures like Abraham, Moses, and the later sages and rabbis reflect such rich and varied trajectories, which often stand in tension with each other. Arguably these tensions inscribe the heretical as a formative moment present even in the foundational narratives themselves.

Abraham, the founder of the dynasty of biblical patriarchs, typifies this formulation. He becomes who he is (Abraham from Abram) through what could be called an act of heresy. Destroying the idols of his native city, he breaks camp and leaves for a life of his own. Abraham, put differently, becomes the founding father by moving out of his native community and creating a tradition of his own. At the beginning of Jewish communal existence there stands a pointedly singular figure reminding us that tradition does not arise from some kind of an already meaningful, clear and well-demarcated point of origin, but through a move of difference and self-differentiation.

The narrative of Moses reflects similar aspects of embracing internal difference as the foundational moment in the formation of tradition. However, the accent in his story shifts. The differences are reflected not only in Moses blurred Jewish-Egyptian origins but in the tensions and conflicts erupting in the years in the desert and later during the settlement of the new land. In its later development, the Mosaic narrative presents a story fraught with dissent, disobedience, conflict, and heresy. Yet here, the story presents a series of tensions not just between Moses and his people, but also between Moses and God, and ultimately a tension that defines Moses himself. Freud will explore the meaning of this drama in psychoanalytic terms in his Moses and Monotheism (1939).

To these aspects are also to be added the Prophetic and other biblical traditions, the Rabbinic traditions, and the later mystic and Messianic traditions. Layer upon layer, the various strands add complexity to a historical process that defies any claims to dogmatic or creedal unity. Rather, Jewish tradition is as Gershom Scholem suggested in a letter in 1936 more like the sum total of all its different manifestations, no more or no less:

The Torah is the essence and integral of all religious tradition, from Moishe Rabbenu to Israel Hildesheimer, and if you are a Jew, Herr Lehmann, to you yourself [].

(, 37)

Half a century later, Scholem reiterated this point with emphatic resolve:

[Judaism] cannot be defined according to its essence, since it has no essence. Judaism cannot therefore be regarded as a closed historical phenomenon whose development and essence came into focus by a finite sequence of historical, philosophical, doctrinal, or dogmatic judgments and statements. Judaism is rather a living entity

(, 505)

This passage echoed the resolute admonition that Scholem had issued in his magnum opus, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (1973). There he notes:

There is no way of telling a priori what beliefs are possible or impossible within the framework of Judaism. Certainly, no Jewish historian would accept the specious argument that the criteria of Jewish belief were clear and evident until the kabbalah beclouded and confused the minds. The Jewishness in the religiosity of any particular period is not measured by dogmatic criteria that are unrelated to actual historical circumstances, but solely by what sincere Jews do, in fact, believe, or at least consider to be legitimate possibilities. [] Extreme caution should, therefore, be exercised before pronouncing on the Jewish (namely, un-Jewish) character of spiritual phenomena in Jewish history.

(28384)

Similarly, Heinrich Graetz, one of the founding fathers of modern Jewish historiography and exponent of the Science of Judaism, which Scholem so fiercely challenged, had noted that,