jewish culture essay

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

AP®︎/College Art History

Course: ap®︎/college art history   >   unit 2, judaism, an introduction.

• Jewish history to the middle ages
• Jewish history—1750 to WW II
• Jewish history—the post-war period
• Writing a history of Jewish architecture

Judaism and time

The debate continues, want to join the conversation.

• Upvote Button navigates to signup page
• Downvote Button navigates to signup page
• Flag Button navigates to signup page

Trending Topics:

• Say Kaddish Daily
• Passover 2024

The Arts in Jewish Culture

Cultural arts have been a part of Jewish life since our beginnings.

By Dan Schifrin

The arts have been a fundamental part of Jewish life since the very beginning, in some ways so obviously that their significance is hidden. The first, of course, is that the Torah and the other biblical books are of an uncanny literary quality and power; the Hebrew language itself has been invested, over millennia, with a certain life force of its own. The Torah has been perfectly reproduced for hundreds of generations, and if even one letter of the Torah is wrong the entire scroll is invalidated. The attention to the origin and quality of the Torah parchment, the type of quill and ink, everything about the process is suffused with sensuality and an artistic passion, and suggests enormous reverence for the beauty of language as well as for the Torah’s religious content. 

The Arts in Pre-Modern Jewish Culture

This attention to detail–also seen, for instance, in the instructions God gives to Bezalel , the builder of the Tabernacle–stems from the injunction of hiddur mitzvah , or the beautification of each commandment to the best of one’s ability. This injunction includes everything from selecting the most beautiful etrog [citron fruit] on Sukkot to composing the most beautiful melodies for prayers. King David , the author of the Psalms , was a musician before he was God’s and Israel’s servant, and one assumes he was picked for holy duty, in part, because of what his music said about the quality of his heart.

As David Roskies has noted in Against the Apocalypse and The Literature of Destruction, and Alan Mintz in Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature , literature has traditionally been a way for Jews to maintain a sense of continuity in the face of terrible communal rupture. At the same time, this Diaspora literature–commentary, poems, midrash , prayers, responsa and other works–provided a standard way for individuals and communities to understand their persistent tragedies and wanderings in a way that gave emotional, spiritual and creative release. The spiritual impulse of a people living in their own land was replaced, by and large, by the urgent need to remember and continue. And literature served the needs of a community struggling with unprecedented angst and dislocation.

Modern Questions of Identity

The situation became more complex during the Haskalah [the Enlightenment, running from the late 18th through early 19th centuries], one of a number of Jewish responses to modernity, when the idea of being a secular Jew as we understand it first became a possibility, and the tension between renewal and continuity became more pronounced. It was during this period, especially in Germany, that demonstrating mastery of the “culture” of the host society became a way to gain acceptance. Heine, Mendelsohn, and Mahler are only the best known of many artists who became masters of their respective arts, through which they gained the opportunity to influence the surrounding culture (after they or their family formally converted, of course).

It was at this time, with the increased possibility of assimilation, that Jews began to divide their sense of identity into different categories. The Haskalah idea of being “a Jew in the home and a man in the street” meant that Jews would by necessity have multiple identities, with this rich confusion leading to a more ambiguous cultural production. In what way, for instance, could Heine’s work be seen as Jewish by his Jewish contemporaries? How do we understand the generations of Jewish families revered Heine? What did they tell their kids about the relationship between art and community? These are questions we could very well ask today about our secular Jewish artists.

In 19th-century Eastern Europe, as David Roskies explains in A Bridge of Longing , Nahman of Bratslav can be seen as a conflicted Jewish artist on the cusp of modernity, as well as the founder of Yiddish literature. But how do we understand Hasidic stories and early Yiddish literature , Roskies asks, if Nahman’s religious parables draw heavily from non-Jewish folk sources? This is a textbook example of how the conflicted, the spiritual, and the new all come together to energize huge groups of Jews (those who became Hasidim or drew on Hasidic ideas) while infuriating their mitnagid opponents. [“Mitnagid” is the name given to the movement that opposed the Hasidic movement. The name literally means “those who oppose.”]

The Arts and Jewish Self-Understanding

In the 19th century, the arts became even more crucial to the community’s recreations of itself. The flowering of Yiddish literature, for instance, was a way to maintain continuity with a culture already fading away; and the renewal of the Hebrew language and literature, among other things, was an expression of newfound self-determination.

Both in late 19th century America, and in Weimar Germany, an emphasis on scholarship and history, and the creation of institutions to promote them, helped reenergize communities searching for new answers to the question of why they should remain Jews. This emphasis on the intellectual was not radical; but its promoters realized that Jews needed to reconnect to Judaism through an association with broader cultural and intellectual ideas and venues. So the creation of The Jewish Encyclopedia in 1905 in America gave Jews a sense of pride in the sweep of their civilization, while Franz Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus [a Jewish educational institution], sensitive to the biases of the German Jewish middle class, hired well-known doctors and physicists, revered citizens, to teach about Jewish life.

Even more compelling, perhaps, was the way in which Martin Buber resumed the Lehrhaus under the Nazis (and recreated it yet again in Jerusalem in the early 1950s) as a way to maintain community and raise spirits when, one could argue, there were more pressing problems than an unexplicated poem. But Buber–and Rosenzweig before him–believed that culture led to the strengthening of community, and that a sense of community is what makes the difference between a withering civilization and a thriving one.

Cultural Insecurity

The enormous insecurity of German Jews at the beginning of this century, despite the cultural brilliance of that community, further indicates an ingrained conflict about a Jewish relationship with the arts. The best example of this is composer Arnold Schoenberg’s musical response, in the form of his opera “Moses and Aaron,” to Wagner’s pronouncement in his infamous essay “Judaism in Music” that Jews could never be “true” creators because they are essentially parasitic. Any outward shine of brilliance, Wagner said, merely reflects their ability to mimic and adapt. Underneath, they are only critics and commentators, never artists.

Freud , a man of letters as much as a scientist, grappled mightily with this idea. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the German medical establishment viewed Jewish creativity as pathological, indicative of a diseased and degenerate nature. According to Sander Gilman, much of Freud’s work was an attempt to disprove this “fact,” and return the Jewish creative mind to a normative place in history.

We also cannot forget the importance of the arts for the secularists of the past century– including the Yiddishists, Zionists, socialists, and other radicals–who saw the renewal of language and languages as a key to their respective visions of a new Jerusalem. For the fans of the Yiddish stage in New York, or the radicals who first learned of Isaiah’s moral teachings from Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing,” the arts were a window into Jewish life and a sign of its continuing importance and relevance, and perhaps– as for Irving Howe, Arnold Schoenberg, and many others–a way back in.

Pronounced: khah-SID-ik, Origin: Hebrew, a stream within ultra-Orthodox Judaism that grew out of an 18th-century mystical revival movement.

Pronunced: TORE-uh, Origin: Hebrew, the Five Books of Moses.

Join Our Newsletter

Empower your Jewish discovery, daily

Discover More

Jewish Culture

Eight Jewish Nobel Laureates You Should Know

These eight lesser-known Jewish Nobel laureates made groundbreaking contributions to science, culture and more.

These Nine Tombs Have Attracted Jewish Pilgrims for Centuries

Take a look inside the places that Abraham, King David, Queen Esther and other biblical characters are said to have been buried.

Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish

An Ashkenazic Reform Korean rabbi explores her identity.

The New Tradition: Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature

What Makes Jewish Literature “Jewish”?

Ilan stavans on belonging, bookishness, and memory.

Is there a fundamental difference between Jewish literature and other literary traditions? Is it religion? A national quest? Antisemitism? A shared sense of history? What brings together books as disparate as Luis de Carvajal’s Autobiography , Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye’s Daughters , Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales , Arthur’s Miller’s Death of a Salesman , Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem , Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star , Art Spiegelman’s Maus , and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land ? One explanation is that they come to us in translation. Another one is that what unites the authors is a shares sense of being outsiders—even when they are on the inside. The following excerpt, which comes from Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction , published this week by Oxford University Press, offers some context. 

In a lecture titled “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” delivered in Buenos Aires in 1951, Jorge Luis Borges, the author of a number of stories on Jewish themes, including “Death and the Compass,” “Emma Zunz,” and “The Secret Miracle,” argues, insightfully, that Argentine writers do not need to restrict themselves to local themes: tango, gauchos, maté , and so on. Instead, he states, “I believe our tradition is the entire Western culture, and I also believe we have a right to that tradition, equal to that of any other citizen in any Western nation.”

In other words, nationalism is a narrow proposition; its counterpart, cosmopolitanism, is a far better option. Borges then adds, “I remember here an essay by Thorstein Veblen, a United States sociologist, about the preeminence of the Jews in Western culture. He asks if this preeminence is due to an innate superiority of the Jews and he answers no; he says they distinguish themselves in Western culture because they act in that culture and at the same time do not feel tied to it by any particular devotion; that’s why, he says, ‘a Jew vis-à-vis a non-Jew will always find it easier to innovate in Western culture.’”

The claim Borges takes from Veblen to emphasize is a feature of Jewish literature: its aterritoriality. Literary critic George Steiner, an assiduous Borges reader, preferred the term extraterritorial . The difference is nuanced: aterritorial means outside a territory; extraterritorial means beyond it. Either way, the terms points to the outsiderness of Jews during their diasporic journey. Unlike, say, Argentine, French, Egyptian, or any other national literature, the one produced by Jews has no fixed address. That is because it does not have a specific geographic center; it might pop up anywhere in the globe, as long as suitable circumstances make it possible for it to thrive. This is not to say that Jews are not grounded in history. Quite the contrary: Jewish life, like anyone else’s, inevitably responds at the local level to concrete elements. Yet Jews tend to have a view of history that supersedes whatever homegrown defines them, seeing themselves as travelers across time and space.

My focus is modern Jewish literature in the broadest sense. I am interested in the ways it mutates while remaining the same, how it depends in translation in order to create a global sense of diasporic community. Jewish literature is Jewish because it distills a sensibility—bookish, impatient—that transcends geography. It also offers a feeling of belonging around certain puzzling existential questions. Made of bursts of consent and dissent, this literature is not concerned with divine revelation, like the Torah and Talmud, but with the rowdy display of human frailties. It springs from feeling ambivalent in terms of belonging. It is also marked by ceaseless migration. All this could spell disaster.

Yet Jews have turned these elements into a recipe for success. They have produced a stunning number of masterpieces, constantly redefining what we mean by literature. Indeed, one barometer to measure not only its health but also its diversity is the sheer number of recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature since the award was established in Stockholm in 1895: more than a dozen, including Shmuel Yosef Agnon writing in Hebrew (1966), Saul Bellow in English (1976), Isaac Bashevis Singer in Yiddish (1978), Elias Canetti in German (1981), Joseph Brodsky in Russian (1987), Imre Kertész in Hungarian (2002), Patrick Modiano in French (2014), and Bob Dylan (2017) and Louise Glück (2020) in English.

With these many habitats, it is not surprising that Jewish literature might seem rowdy, amorphous, even unstable. It is thus important to ask, at the outset, two notoriously difficult questions: first, what is literature, and second, what makes this particular one Jewish? The answer to the first is nebulous. Jewish writers write stories, essays, novels, poems, memoirs, plays, letters, children’s books, and other similar artifacts. That is, they might be so-called professional writers. But they might also have other profiles. For instance, in awarding the Nobel Prize to Dylan, the Stockholm Committee celebrated his talent as a folk singer, that is, a musician and balladist. Equally, standup comedians such as Jackie Mason and Jerry Seinfeld are storytellers whose diatribes are infused with Jewish humor.

Graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman explore topics like the Holocaust in visual form, just like filmmakers such as Woody Allen deliver cinematic narratives bathed in Jewish pathos. Translation and the work of literary critics also fall inside the purview of Jewish literature. It could be said that such amorphous interpretation of literature undermines the entire transition; if the written word is what writers are about, evaluating everything else under the same criteria diminishes its value. Yet it must be recognized that, more than half a millennium after the invention of print, our definition of the word book as an object made of printed pages is obsolete. In the early 21st century, books appear in multiple forms.

I now turn to the second question: What makes a Jewish book Jewish? The answer depends on three elements: content, authorship, and readership. While none of these automatically makes a book Jewish, a combination of them surely does. Take, for example, Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice (1605). Shylock, its protagonist, might be said to be a sheer stereotype of a money lender, even though, in truth, he is an extraordinarily complex character who, in my view, ought to be seen as the playwright’s alter ego. Clearly, the play does not belong to the shelf of Jewish literature per se, despite its ingredients.

Now think of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), in which the protagonist, a middle-class man called Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning, after uneasy dreams, to discover himself transformed into a giant Nowhere in the novella does the word Jew appear. Yet it is arguable, without struggle, that a Jewish sensibility permeates Samsa’s entire odyssey, from his feeling of psychological ostracism, within his family and in the larger society, to the perception that he inhabits a deformed, even monstrous body.

To unlock the Jewish content of a book, the reader, first, must be willing to do so. But readers are never neutral; they have a background and an agenda. It is surely possible to ignore Kafka’s Jewish sensibility, yet the moment one acknowledges it, his oeuvre magically opens up an array of unforeseen interpretations connecting it to Jewish tradition. Paul Celan, the German poet of “Todesfuge,” in an interview in the house of Yehuda Amichai, once said that “themes alone do not suffice to define what’s Jewish. Jewishness is, so to speak, a spiritual concern as well.” Hence, one approach might be what Austrian American novelist Walter Abish is looking for when asking “ Wie Deutsch ist es ?”: How German is this Prague-based writer?

Another approach is to move in the reverse direction, questioning how Jewish it is, without an address. Simple and straightforward, the plot line might be summarized in a couple of lines: the path of Jews as they embrace modernity, seen from their multifarious literature, is full of twists and turns, marked by episodes of intense euphoria and unspeakable grief; at times that path becomes a dead end, while at others it finds a resourcefulness capable of reinventing just about everything.

To the two questions just asked, a third needs to be added: What makes modern Jewish literature modern? The entrance of Jews into modernity signified a break with religion. According to some, this started to happen in 1517, when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses and initiated the Protestant Revolution, which eliminated priests as the necessary intermediaries to God. Or perhaps it happened when, in the Renaissance, at roughly 1650—the date is a marker more than anything else—Europe as a civilization broke away from the long-held view that the ecclesiastical hierarchy justified everything.

In my view, the date ought to be 1492. That is when Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and the same year Jews were expelled from Spain. Large numbers of them and their descendants, persecuted as they were by the Spanish Inquisition, sought refuge in other lands, including the Americas, fostering a new age of discovery and free enterprise.

In any case, by 1789 the ideas of the French Revolution— liberté , egalité , fraternité —were seen as an invitation to all members of civil society, including Jews, to join ideals of tolerance in which an emerging bourgeoisie, the driving force against feudalism, promoted capitalism. New technologies brought innovation, including the movable letter type pioneered by Johannes Gutenberg, which made knowledge easier to disseminate. The outcome was a process of civic emancipation and the slow entrance of Jews to secular European culture—indeed, Jews were granted full civil rights within a few years of the French Revolution.

A well-known example of this journey, from the strictly defined religious milieu to the main stage of national culture, is Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th-century German philosopher, who, along with his numerous descendants, underwent a series of important transformations quantifiable as concrete wins and losses. A Haskalah champion, Mendelssohn, in his book Jerusalem (1783), argued for tolerance and against state interference in the affairs of its citizens, thus opening a debate in Europe about the parameters of tolerance. He translated the Bible into German: his version was called Bi’ur (Commentary) (1783).

Mendelssohn’s invitation for Jews to abandon a restricted life and become full-fledged members of European culture was a decisive event. It triumphantly opened the gates, so to speak, to an age of mutually respectful dialogue between a nation’s vast majority and its vulnerable minorities, the Jews among them. A couple of generations later, one of Mendelssohn’s grandchildren, German composer Felix Mendelssohn, known for an array of masterpieces like the opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho (1827), was at first raised outside the confines of the Jewish religion but eventually baptized as a Christian at the age of seven.

Such a transgenerational odyssey is emblematic of other European Jews: from devout belief to a secular, emancipated existence, from belonging to a small minority to active civil life as a minority within a majority. It is therefore crucial not to conflate modernity with Enlightenment: whereas the former is a historical development that fostered the quest for new markets through imperial endeavors that established, depending on the source, a satellite of colonies, the latter was the ideology behind it.

A forerunner of this crop of scholars is Hayim Yosef Yerushalmi, whose short book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), I thoroughly admire. One of the conclusions drawn from his central arguments is that Jews remember not in chronological ways, but through myth. That is, memory is not lineal; it leaps back and forth with little cohesiveness. The art of telling history depends on sequential narratives: A leads to B, which in turn becomes C. Myth takes the opposite route: it is nonsequential and has little interest in cause and effect. Jewish literature is a way for Jewish memory to engage with history.

Emerging from a specific time and place, writers—poets, playwrights, novelists, memoirists—are in dialogue, overtly or unconsciously, not only with their precursors but also, magically, with their successors. Not arbitrarily, Jews are called Am Ha-Sefer, Hebrew for “Peopleof the Book.” The term was first applied to them in the Qur’an —in Arabic, Ahl al-Kita ̄ b . Taken together, the books Jews have written in modernity constitute an uber-volume that features them as authors, characters, and reader and that conveys the experience of aterritoriality (even counting those books produced in Israel) as a transcendent endeavor.

__________________________________

Adapted from Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction by Ilan Stavans. Used with the permission of Oxford University Press.

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Ilan Stavans

Previous article, next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

David Potter on What Lenin and Luther Can Teach Us About Our Age of Disruption

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Ancient Jewish diaspora: essays on Hellenism

Jocelyn burney , university of missouri. [email protected].

For over a century, scholars of ancient Judaism have asked how diaspora Jews adapted to living as a minority population in towns and cities around the Mediterranean. To what degree did Jewish communities want to—or, conversely, to what degree were they permitted to—integrate into Greco-Roman civic and cultural life? How did their liturgical and textual practices compare to those in their homeland, and how central to their identity was that homeland? These questions remain unresolved, in large part due to the conflicting nature of the evidence. In cities like Alexandria and Rome, which boasted robust Jewish populations, ancient sources preserve misunderstandings, confusion, and prejudice-driven fears about Judaism that occasionally boiled over into violence. On the other hand, we also possess evidence for Jewish stability and success in the diaspora: synagogue buildings funded by wealthy community members (Sardis is the preeminent example), epigraphic evidence for non-Jewish patrons, and, of course, the writings of Philo of Alexandria, the beneficiary of a good Greek education who famously called Hellenistic Egypt his fatherland ( patris ). How, then, should we understand what it was like to live as an ancient Jew in diaspora?

The present volume takes up this big question, drawing much of its evidence from Hellenistic Alexandria. The volume collects sixteen of Bloch’s essays published between 1999 and 2022, dividing them into four thematic sections. Four essays appear here in English for the first time (chapters 2, 6, 12, and 14). Covering a range of topics, from Philo’s depiction of Moses to ancient Jewish tourism and theater-going, Bloch sheds light on the sophisticated negotiation necessitated by life in the diaspora. On the whole, Bloch argues that diaspora Jews, especially in Alexandria, were well integrated into their Hellenistic milieu. Rather than seeing their cultural negotiation as a symptom of outsiderness and discomfort, Bloch suggests instead that such negotiation was inherent to the Hellenistic Period. In an era of globalism, migration, and new religious movements, diaspora Jews “did not really differ from other peoples of the Hellenistic age, least of all from the Greeks” (3). As such, Bloch argues, those interested in any aspect of Hellenism will benefit from studying the experience of diaspora Jews in the Hellenistic world.

The volume opens with four chapters on “Moses and Exodus.” These chapters investigate how Philo’s depiction of Moses in De vita Mosis sheds light on Philo’s own life and the position of Alexandrian Jews, whom Bloch characterizes as “at times embracing and at other times resisting acculturation” (2). In “Alexandria in Pharaonic Egypt: Projections in De vita Mosis ,” Bloch outlines the autobiographical parallels that Philo wrote into his story of Moses: both Philo and his Moses consider Egypt their fatherland, are philosophers, and reluctantly assume the role of political leader in times of trouble. On this basis, Bloch makes two arguments. First, Philo’s portrayal of Moses as a reluctant leader suggests that De vita Mosis was written near the time of the embassy to Rome in 38 CE, rather than at the beginning of Philo’s career. The second argument is vaguer. “I am not suggesting that Philo was presenting himself as a Moses redivivus, ” Bloch says, but rather that Philo occasionally “slipped” into the role of Moses and used Moses to evaluate his own life. Thus, a study of Philo’s Moses should shed light on the character of Philo, about whom we know very little. Chapters 2–4 also focus on Philo’s Moses to make the case that Philo and his Alexandrian community had mixed feelings about their diasporic status. Like Moses, they were both Jewish and Egyptian, recipients of Greek education, and more concerned with local issues in Alexandria than distant Jerusalem. Few will disagree with this middle ground approach. Bloch does not push the envelope, but his close readings of Philo are insightful and employ a refreshing mix of rabbinic and Greco-Roman comparanda.

The three essays in part 2, “Places and Ruins,” center on issues of memory, or how Jews remembered their past and how they were described by others. One of the highlights is chapter 5, “Geography without Territory: Tacitus’s Digression on the Jews and Its Ethnographic Context,” in which Bloch makes an astute observation about Tacitus’s commentary on Jews and Judaism in book 5 of the Histories . Whereas Tacitus typically follows the tradition of Greek anthropogeography by attributing the ethos of a particular people to the physical environment of its homeland, he fails to mention many of the standard ethnographic topoi in his description of Judaism, including clothing, housing, and armor and customs of war. According to Bloch, Tacitus omitted these topoi because ancient Jews lived in many lands, not just their ethnic homeland of Judea, causing them to fall outside the standard dichotomy of Greek and barbarian. While some aspects of Judaism were consistent from place to place—abstaining from eating pork, observance of the Sabbath, circumcision—Tacitus could not cover the standard range of cultural topoi because of the diversity within diaspora Judaism.

Chapter 7 offers a thought experiment: “What If the Temple of Jerusalem Had Not Been Destroyed by the Romans?” Bloch argues that if Titus had spared the Temple, the practice of animal sacrifice would nevertheless have petered out on its own within a few centuries (136). Citing critiques of sacrifice in Isaiah 1:11–17 and Matthew 9:13 (quoting Hosea 6:6), Bloch argues that Second Temple Judaism was already moving away from animal sacrifice before 70 CE. Furthermore, diaspora Jews had operated without access to the Temple for generations, illustrating the waning importance of the sacrificial cult. Thus, the chapter’s title is somewhat misleading. It is really about the decline of the sacrificial cult over the course of the late Second Temple period, not about the decreasing importance of the Temple in general (which held significance for ancient Jews beyond the sacrificial cult), nor the historical circumstances in the first to fourth centuries CE that would have impacted how long the Temple cult could actually have continued to function. Setting aside whether or not Hadrian would have taken control of the Temple when he rebuilt Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, once Jerusalem came under Christian rule, it is reasonable to assume that Christians would have seized the Temple and put an end to the sacrificial cult. As Bloch points out, the destruction of the Temple was critical for Christians, who viewed it as confirmation that God had abandoned the Jews. This would be sufficient reason to capture and/or destroy the Temple in the fourth century, if not earlier. Bloch also raises the possibility that the survival of the Temple after 70 would have suppressed the growth of the rabbinic movement, a fascinating hypothetical worthy of further discussion.

Part 3, “Theater and Myth,” contains chapters on Philo’s reconciling of Jewish myth and allegorical interpretation, Jewish attendance of and participation in the theater, and Egyptian-Jewish relations in Joseph and Aseneth . As in part 1, Bloch characterizes diaspora as a state of constant cultural negotiation. In chapter 8, he argues that Philo struggled to reconcile widespread belief in the historicity of Jewish mythological stories, such as the transformation of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:26), with his method of allegorical interpretation. Such struggle, according to Bloch, makes Philo “part of a common and widespread intellectual discourse” among Hellenistic writers, who likewise doubted the historicity of Greek myths but accepted that myths had some heuristic value, especially for the common person. Likewise, chapter 9 argues for a spectrum of Jewish responses to the theater, from rabbinic prohibitions on entering theaters except in dire circumstances to evidence for Jewish actors and reserved seating for Jews in public theaters. Finally, in chapter 10, Bloch outlines the similarities between Joseph and Aseneth and early Greek novels: an initially reluctant couple eventually falls in love; the occasional erotic moment; suffering and longing; and final resolution. Bloch argues that Joseph and Aseneth has been unjustly singled out as a “Jewish novel” despite its clear embeddedness in Greek literary tradition. “It is not a Jewish reaction to the literary genre of the Greek novel,” Bloch argues, but rather a very early example—perhaps even the earliest—of what came to be known as the Greek novel. Moreover, Aseneth’s shift from frenetic and preoccupied to tranquil and poised after her conversion to Judaism suggests to Bloch “a confident Diaspora Judaism that is less interested in a confrontation with the Egyptians than in highlighting Jewish presence and competence” (215).

Part 4, “Antisemitism and Reception,” is truly the highlight of the book and will be of great interest to scholars of diaspora Judaism in all periods, ancient or modern. Chapter 11, “Antisemitism and Early Scholarship on Ancient Antisemitism,” surveys the efforts of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars to understand the origins of antisemitism—a quest that was inspired by their desire to know whether Jews had a place in the modern nation-states of Europe, especially Germany. Bloch identifies two major discourses on the origins of antisemitism among scholars from this period. First, following Wellhausen, scholars divided Jewish history into two phases: the “early Judaism” of the Hebrew Bible, characterized by revolutionary monotheism, and the ossified, legalistic “late Judaism” of the rabbis. Early understandings of diaspora Judaism emerged in parallel to this model: the formation of the diaspora was initially a positive development because it exposed Judaism to Hellenistic philosophy, but, after 70, the diaspora came to symbolize Judaism’s ossification and the triumph of Christianity. Second, antisemitism developed in response to the perceived qualities of “late Judaism”: misanthropy, legalism, and superstition. Chapters 13–15 examine historiographies of specific topics related to Hellenistic Judaism: the Philo-Lexikon , reception of Tacitus’s excursus on the Jews and Judea in the Histories , and Jan Assman’s thesis on monotheism in Moses the Egyptian . The volume concludes with the fascinating investigation of a Roman bust of a young, bearded man on display in the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen that was—and continues to be—erroneously identified as Flavius Josephus on the basis of antisemitic physiognomic tropes.

This volume serves two audiences. On their own, parts 1–3 will be of greatest interest to those who study Philo and the Alexandrian Jewish community. Bloch’s depiction of the Alexandrian diaspora is fairly standard: Alexandrian Jews had a hybrid identity and carefully negotiated their place within the city’s Hellenistic milieu. His secondary argument—that such negotiation really characterized all of the Hellenistic world, not just diaspora Jews—is compelling but unfortunately does not feature heavily in the case studies. Research on identity and hybridity in the Greco-Roman world—evidenced by language use, naming styles, and visual and material culture—has boomed in recent decades. Bloch’s essays on Philo will be of interest to those who study these dynamics in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt.

For those interested in diaspora Judaism beyond Hellenistic Alexandria, or ancient Judaism in general, the essays in part 4 will be of great interest. Bloch’s familiarity with German scholarship makes the analysis particularly insightful, and English readers will appreciate his engagement with (and translation of long quotations from) both familiar and lesser-known German, French, and Italian scholars of the early modern and modern periods. The scope of the essays in this volume—ranging from close readings of Philo to the twenty-first–century misuse of a Roman bust of identified as Josephus—is a credit to the author. Bloch reminds us that the complex negotiation that defines life in diaspora continues to this day, making close study of ancient evidence and careful detangling of historiography equally critical.

A Guide to Jewish Studies: Gender and Judaism

• Geographical Identities
• Denominations
• Gender and Judaism
• Commandments ( Mitzvot )
• Prayers & Liturgy
• Life-Cycle Events
• Jewish Calendar & Holidays
• Judaism in Antiquity

Classical Rabbinical Period

Medieval period.

• Early Modern Period
• Enlightenment and Industrial Age
• The Holocaust
• Judaism since 1945
• Rabbinic Literature

Visual Glossary

General resources, table of contents - jewish identities.

• Geographical

On This Page

Historical perspectives, general overviews, jewish women in antiquity, women and judaism in america, jewish feminism, orthodox women, lgbtq and nonbinary jews.

Jewish Identities

• << Previous: Denominations
• Next: Beliefs >>
• Last Updated: Jun 9, 2023 6:02 PM
• URL: https://libguides.gustavus.edu/jewishstudies

Get JTA's Daily Briefing in your inbox

I accept the JTA Privacy Policy .

By submitting the above I agree to the privacy policy and terms of use of JTA.org

Guernica editor who published Israeli writer’s coexistence essay resigns, saying she disagreed with retraction

( JTA ) – The editor-in-chief of the prestigious literary magazine Guernica whose decision to publish an Israeli writer’s essay about the war in Gaza last month led to the mass resignation of the magazine’s staff has herself resigned from the publication, saying she disagreed with the decision to retract the essay.

Jina Moore announced her resignation in a blog post on Friday , nearly a month after Guernica retracted the essay by the British-Israeli writer and translator Joanna Chen.

“The magazine stands by its retraction of the work; I do not,” Moore wrote in the post.

On the social network X, Moore issued a more pointed critique of the Guernica staffers who objected to Chen’s piece . “After weeks of difficult conversation, it is clear to me that Guernica’s space for writing on war, injustice, and oppression has evolved away from commitments I consider essential,” she wrote.

Chen’s essay, “From the Edges of a Broken World,” ignited a firestorm at the heart of the literary world’s deeply polarized reaction to the war. After the piece was published in early March, Guernica’s co-publisher called it an “apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” and more than 15 members of the all-volunteer staff resigned in protest. The journal also removed Chen’s essay, appending a note online promising “a more fulsome explanation” for the decision, though none has appeared to date.

For some Jews who have questioned their place in progressive and literary spaces since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Guernica’s retraction offered new evidence of a toxic discourse in which no Israeli or Jew can pass muster. “The problem, when it really comes down to it, is that it presents an Israeli as human,” the Jewish writer Emily Fox Kaplan tweeted at the time.

Moore said she disagreed with the criticism of the essay.

“Many critics have said the essay normalized the violence Israel has unleashed in Gaza. I disagree,” Moore wrote in her Friday post. “I saw the piece as an example of the difficult work that Guernica is known for: capturing, with complexity and nuance, how such violence is normalized, and how a violent state extracts complicity from its citizens.”

Moore had served as Guernica’s top editor for three years and its co-publisher since 2003. A former East Africa bureau chief for The New York Times who has worked to support journalists in the aftermath of violence, Moore is managing editor of the Harvard Public Health Magazine. Moore was a Truman Scholar at Boston University, where she led a Holocaust education club, studied with Elie Wiesel and conducted research into the Holocaust. “I want to address genocide — why it happens, and what it means for those of us living secure lives as it occurs,” she told the university newspaper as an undergraduate in 2001.

Moore previously spearheaded a women’s rights reporting initiative at Buzzfeed. In her Guernica resignation announcement, she wrote, “A personal essay by a woman writer about the political nature of caregiving also struck me as aligned with a long tradition of feminist writing in Guernica’s pages.” In the essay, Chen, a peace activist who volunteers as a medical transport driver for Palestinians, describes her conflicted emotions after Oct.7.

Moore’s resignation was itself pilloried by some progressive writers. “There was nothing feminist about that essay,” Palestinian-American novelist Susan Muaddi Darraj wrote on X. “I am shocked by people who cannot see how harmful it was.”

“Good riddance!” added anti-Zionist Jewish writer Joshua Gutterman Trannen.

After being retracted, Chen’s piece was later re-published by The Washington Monthly , a center-left publication.

Share this:

Recommended from jta.

Alex Edelman’s ‘Just For Us’ premieres on HBO and Max, with Jewish identity and antisemitism again in the spotlight

Elliot Gould, Joaquin Phoenix, Ilana Glazer, 150+ Jewish creatives sign open letter backing Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech

On the Lower East Side, a corporate ‘fixer’ honors his Jewish roots with a unique, NYC-centric bookstore

Inside 10 new haggadahs for 2024: America and Israel take their places at the seder table

‘Testament: The Story of Moses’ is one of Netflix’s top shows — and it features multiple rabbis