Jewish Women in New Zealand

Abstract

If we had no means of classing things, human thought would be unthinkable— humankind cannot bear too much particularity. Whether the classes we use for thought exist objectively, or are construed by the perceiving mind or indeed are a mixture of both objectivity and experience is a question particular philosophers may well have answered for themselves but one which continues to vex philosophy. Are kowhai bushes or trees? Is a particular kowhai a bush or a tree? Can we answer objectively, or only by reaching intersubjective consensus? To what extent does the word itself create the category? If it does so, how does it do so? Such questions can be troublesome enough applied to objects, but when we come to human beings, our trouble is even greater, largely because they answer back. While we are classing them, they are classing us and, even more perplexing, themselves. Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo once compared a person defining a foreign nation to someone standing on the deck of a ship moving at uncertain speed in a storm trying to assess the speed and movements of another ship, also travelling. The theory of relativity might help one judge the movements of physical objects, but where is the theory of cultural relativity? What, to be particular, is a Jewish woman? Perhaps the question has to be broken down, particularised: what is a Jew? what is a woman? But would the person so classed accept such a breakdown? Or would she prefer to see herself as a whole, a unique individual from whom it is not at all possible to extract her Jewishness or her womanhood? This way the human class has of answering back and questioning its fellows’ definition of it throws the whole question into a political furnace, perhaps the fiercest political furnace of all. If we assign qualities to Jewishness and check the individual to see whether those qualities are present or not in an individual, we run the risk of including people in our category who refuse to be there or of excluding others who insist on being there. Passions are aroused and conflict seems inevitable. Image and selfimage can diverge and the results can be catastrophic.