The Rabbinic Goy Takes Center Stage

Abstract

The Rabbinic Goy Takes Center Stage Jeffrey P. García Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile. By Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi. Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions. Pp. viii + 333. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Cloth, $99.00. The development of a decade long havruta between Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi—a philosopher and talmudist, respectively—Goy sets out to address a "striking lacuna," namely, the category of "Gentile" in rabbinic literature or, more specifically, to "reconstruct the transformation of 'gentile' from 'people to non-Jew'" (p. 5). The primary contention of the volume is that the "Gentile" ()—a collective and individualized category for every non-Jew—as it appears in the literature of the Tannaim is novel to the rabbis and can only be seen in its embryonic stage in earlier discourses regarding Israel and its Other. The authors argue that the rabbinic as a category is a discursive formation that is part of a framework of shifting alterities attested in a nearly thousand-year corpus—if the earliest layers of the Hebrew Bible are dated to the eighth or seventh century BCE—that includes the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple literature, and the undisputed letters of the Apostle Paul (primarily Romans and Galatians). The study is not simply a terminological analysis of , , or the Greek parallel ἔθνος, ἔθνη, however, although it forms a "point of entry" of sorts. The authors are also concerned with the discursive goy that moves beyond the parameters of language. Their perspective is admittedly influenced by a modified version of Foucault's theory of discourse—drawing inspiration from Reinhart Koselleck1—so that the Tannaitic goy is thought to be a "basic concept" that is critical to their exploration. This is particularly key to their reconstruction of the goy from collective to individual. Accordingly, the work examines modes of othering and types of others. It also attempts a genealogical reconstruction that is presented simultaneously [End Page 473] on two axes, synchronic (Foucauldian archeological) and diachronic (Foucauldian genealogical). The synchronic axis pertains to what makes the Jew/goy division, as well as additional forms of Jewish alterity, possible. The diachronic axis, on the other hand, is the examination of the linguistic permutations that eventually result in the rabbinic . The book is structured as follows: Chapters 1 and 2 deal primarily with the Hebrew Bible; chapters 3 and 4 analyze Second Temple literature; chapter 5 addresses an apparent anomaly in New Testament discourse in which the "Gentile" appears as an individualized/collective other in the Pauline epistles; chapters 6 and 7 deal with rabbinic literature, in particular, the homogenization of biblical and post-biblical alterities, as well as the presentation of the rabbinic in both halakic and haggadic literature; and chapter 8 and the postscript form appendices of sorts that examine similarities between the "Gentile" and "barbarian" categories and the positing of where research should proceed from this point, respectively. Chapter 1, "Nokhri, Ger, and the Art of Separation in the Hebrew Bible," intends to show, in part, that otherness in regard to Israel does not begin with the term or with abstract otherness. Regarding the diachronic approach, the authors analyze two concepts in the Bible, (1) a collectivization of foreigners and its construction as an ethnic marker and, (2) the formation of a binary relationship between Israel and its others. Ophir and Rosen-Zvi argue that there is little to nothing that resembles the rabbinic , noting further that the term , which designates any number of people or nations—associated with land, language, kinship, and a particular god—does not mean "a collective of others." According to them, the Hebrew Bible utilizes a different strategy for alterity in regard to the Israelite nation that is attested in diverse terms but shows no evidence of the binary relationship that is evident among the rabbis. The bulk of the analysis of chapter 1 is to reconstruct two competing models that are associated with Deuteronomist (D) and Priestly (P) Sources, respectively. The chapter begins, however, not with the two models but by dealing with , as well as , which can refer to a masked unrecognizable Israelite who might otherwise be easily identified (e.g., Joseph...