Felix Mendelssohn’s Oratorio St Paul and the Question of Jewish Self-Definition

Abstract

How, precisely, should one understand the term ‘Jewish’? When it comes to defining Jewish identity or ‘Jewishness’ in a systematic way, ideological assumptions are everything. The tendency, especially among theologians, is to essentialize by classifying people and phenomena as Jewish only in so far as they conform to an assumed essence of a normative Jewishness. This essence may or may not be related to theologically derived criteria such as matrilineal descent, conversion to a particular tradition or set of beliefs, adherence to a certain body of law, a role in salvation history, or to non-theological criteria such as racial, national or cultural characteristics. Responsibility for determining Jewish authenticity rests entirely with the observer, irrespective of whether his views originate from within the community or from outside. For the essentialist, anything or anyone who does not correspond to the given definition is to be excluded as marginal at best and deviant at worst. One might imagine a core of authenticity surrounded by concentric circles of ever decreasing legitimacy. The problem, of course, is that observers do not agree on what exactly constitutes the core of authenticity. Whichever definition is to be regarded as authoritative depends upon one’s existing biases. Furthermore, proponents of essentialism do not tend to recognize the historically-conditioned nature of such definitions and often assume that the characteristics of Jewish authenticity have remained fundamentally unchanged down through the ages. An alternative method of categorization is that of ‘self-definition’, the approved method for many social scientists. This non-essentialist approach does not pre-determine the outer limits of Jewishness and so ‘deviancy’ or ‘marginality’ are terms with little or no meaning. The inclusion of those who define themselves Jewishly can lead to political controversies, such as the acceptance of Messianic Jews despite their dismissal as Christians-by-another-name by a broad spectrum of the Jewish community. The advantage of a self-definitional approach is that it largely frees the observer from the responsibility for selection and minimizes the projection onto the subject of his own ideological biases. For some, ‘self-definition’ implies that the individual defines himself primarily in Jewish terms, but this need not be the case. Arguably, an individual Journal of Jewish Identities (2008), 1(1)