Michael F. Bernard-Donals - Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice

Introduction

Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice

MICHAEL BERNARD-DONALS and JANICE W. FERNHEIMER

In the past two decades, humanities scholars have paid a great deal of attention to ways of speaking and writing that are particular to members of ethnic minority groups and cultural enclaves who were previously underrepresented in historical and theoretical accounts. Many of these studies share a more or less stable definition of ethnicity and cultural membership, one that is careful not to take for granted a monolithic set of criteria for membership but that nonetheless refers to, in Werner Sollorss words, an acquired... sense of belonging that replaces visible, concrete communities whose kinship symbolism may yet mobilize in order to appear more natural (The Invention of Ethnicity, xv). In other words these studies embrace an imagined community in Benedict Andersons sense of the term: they create a sense of affiliation and a set of common historical or cultural memories or tropes that identify, far more than borders or even belonging itself can do, those who share an imaginary, if not a real, cultural or historical location.

It is this sense of ethnicity, identity, and cultural history as invented or imagined that leaves room for the inclusion of Jewsa group whose discursive practices, shared cultural assumptions, and rhetorical engagements with majority cultures around the globe would seem ripe for discussionin a historical and conceptual consideration of a rhetorical project. As a marker of identity, the term Jewishness often has as much to do with an absence of a shared territorial origin as it does with a shared heritage of diaspora and assimilation. There are any number of reasons for the still nascent state of the field of Jewish rhetorics, butto speak only of the contemporary contextthree seem most significant.

First, discussions of minority and ethnic rhetorics tend to conflate the categories of race and ethnicity, and Jews dont fit neatly into either. From the late nineteenth century until after the Second World War, Central and Eastern European Jews in the United States were interpreted by the mainstream (read: mostly white and Protestant) culture as nonwhites. This interpretation of American Jews began to change after the Second World War and the creation of the state of Israel, when Jews rise to cultural and economic prominence in the United States led to a change in status to marginally white, thus depriving Jews of a unifying, racial marker of difference (see Ignatiev; Goldstein; Brodkin; Jacobson).

The complex and important role that language plays in shaping Jewish cultural identity offers a second reason why Jewish rhetorics often have been excluded from broader discussions in rhetorical studies. Again to speak only of the contemporary American context, since mainstream US culture identified Jewish culture as primarily one and the same as Ashkenazi Jewish culture, the nearly wholesale destruction of Yiddish and Eastern European culture more broadly during the Holocaust made it harder for Yiddish to be seen as a common tongue spoken by a majority of Jews. Yet these cultural educational practices offered access to systematic study of the Torah and Talmud, Judaisms principal rhetorical texts from which (mostly male) children learned modes of argument and reasoning. And although the number of Yiddish speakers significantly decreased after the Second World War, modern Hebrew speakers have been on the rise, especially since Eliezer Ben-Yehudas careful efforts to revive Hebrew as a modern, spoken language in the nineteenth century. But Hebrew occupied an uncomfortable position with respect to the Western tradition that viewed it as exotic and other, although simultaneously foundational to Western culture. In the United States at least, the argument goes, since the acculturation that followed the Second World War, Jewish linguistic particularity has been largely if not wholly subsumed into mainstream culture, much as members of the original Reform movement in the mid-nineteenth century had hoped it would. Of course, this simplified narrative has focused mainly on the linguistic practices of mostly Ashkenazi Jews in the United States and has not addressed the important ways that other specifically Jewish linguistic practicessuch as the speaking and preservation of Ladino for Sephardic Jews, and the use of Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Farsi, and Hakatiaserve other Jewish communities and shape their cultural and rhetorical practices. Since Jewish peoples and practices have traveled far across geographic space and over historical time, the linguistic resources necessary to investigate them in a comprehensive way are more than most contemporary scholars have at their disposal.

The daunting historical and geographic scope of Jewish rhetorics combined with their uncertain place offers a third reason. The nature of diasporic existence has contributed to an overwhelming plurality of Jewish experiences in lands around the globe. Similar to the way Jewish peoplehood complicates the American bifurcation of race into white and black, this abundance of experience presents a challenge to one way of expanding the rhetorical tradition in either Western or non-Western directions. Depending on the historical period and geographic locale, Jewish rhetorics might fit in either, neither, or both categories of Western and non-Western. Attending to Jewish rhetorics place in the curriculum contributes another layer of complexity. Should Jewish rhetorics be considered in conversation with other rhetorical traditions, or as a single though multifaceted tradition in its own right?

Yet the challenges presented by the richness and diversity of Jewish rhetorical traditions that have survived and thrived in the culture of diaspora in which Jews have lived for millennia certainly warrant greater attention. In fact, there are a number of Jewish rhetorics, all of which have at their core a significant body of rhetorical precedent for their modes of writing and argumentation, precedents that reside in biblical texts, the Talmud, Midrash, rabbinical responses (