Anthropology of the Jews Week Ten– Sophie Schocket
The article “Anthropology, Judaism and Jews” by Dr. Seeman and Nehemia A. Stern
further explores the ways in which the anthropological study of Judaism and Jews breaks down
many of the paradigms that are traditional to the discipline. First, it examines this important
distinction between Judaism, the religion and Jews, the people. We have discussed in class how
secular Judaism is a relatively new phenomenon, while the possibility of Christian Jews has also
been a source of controversy, especially as Jews themselves as a collective attempt to determine
the bounds of who they include as a Jew or not. As the chapter discusses on page five, alternate
lenses besides religion are necessary to encompass the claims to Jewishness that these groups
and similar ones make. As such, an anthropologist who is seeking to capture Jewishness
holistically and accurately, and especially one who wants to provide insights on the question of
culture or condition, would likely need to look beyond these traditional boundaries as well. Not
only would these efforts benefit Jewish studies, but the article argues that they would benefit
anthropology as a discipline: “the anthropology of Jewish life ought to serve as a kind of
additional cross-cutting frame that pushes against the grain of these theoretical paradigms to
reveal otherwise inarticulable juxtapositions, family resemblances and analytic possibilities”
(20).
Stern and Dr. Seeman offer a few examples of how Jewish anthropology either already
has or might go about incorporating these ideas. At the beginning of the semester, we noted in
discussion that foundational texts like Zborowski and Herzog’s Life is With People: The Culture
of the Shtetl and Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days take on distinctly nostalgic moods,
capturing Jewish life with a sense of loss or mourning of something past. The article also notes
these moods, and the impact it has on these two ethnographies. On page 13, Dr. Seeman proposes
the question, “what have these ethnographies collectively taught us about the nature of memory
and social experience or of Jewish life and how can they be leveraged into bettering such
understanding?” The tone in both these sources referenced, for example, was likely influenced
by the fact that they were recalling communities that no longer exist or are acutely aware of their
limited time. Even so, perhaps some special relation to attitudes around memory or nostalgia
does contribute to a sense of Jewish identity, at least for Zborowski’s, Herzog’s, and Myerhoff’s
interviewees (who all came from a similar population) and their descendents. Something else that
comes to mind here for me is the way we tell the Passover story. Though the events of the
Israelites’ escape from Egypt happened thousands of years ago, we are instructed each year to tell
the story in the first person as if we ourselves had experienced it, and to tell it to our children. I
wonder if there are examples of any other religions cultivating this type of personal connection
across so many generations in such a conscious way, and whether it exemplifies a broader
attitude around heritage present in Jewish communities.