With the publication of Daniel Boyarin’s book, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion, “Judaism” is back on the scholarly agenda. The book (for which I supplied a blurb) was recently the center of an interesting forum in Marginalia, and comes on the heels of a few books dealing with the usefulness of the term “religion” to denote anything in antiquity (including one that Boyarin also co-authored) and Cynthia Baker’s book, Jew, tracing the genealogy of that term as well (and which I reviewed here). This is a topic that I’ve long thought about. How do we define “Judaism”? This actually breaks up into two related clusters of questions. The first is whether, and how, Jews themselves have defined “Judaism,” whether they use that term (attested relatively late) or not. The second is how outsiders – including academics – define “Judaism,” and the extent to which those definitions due useful work. The former is known as an emic definition, the latter as an etic one. My own work has been more on the etic side. How can scholars create a non-normative definition of “Judaism” that is useful to our work? I discussed this both in my book, Creating Judaism: History, […]
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