Early Jewish Communities Research Articles

Should the Church Be Committed to a Particular Order of the Old Testament Canon?

Abstract This article argues that Hebrew and Greek ot canonical orders are both ancient, and that there is no evidence that the Hebrew canon represents the oldest arrangement or that the Greek way of ordering the biblical books was due to Christian influence. This finding precludes the idea that either order is to have hermeneutical priority over the other, or that either organization can be made the exclusive basis for a theological appreciation of the ot. The Hebrew and Greek ot canons need not be read as competing traditions in early Jewish communities, and, in terms of interpretive method, the contemporary reader is not required to decide which sequence of books is to have precedence as a frame for interpretation. The various canonical arrangements are better viewed as interpretive options available to ancient readers and now offered to present-day readers for their pondering.

The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland by Marisa Scheinfeld

Reviewed by: The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland by Marisa Scheinfeld Victoria M. Breting-Garcia The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland. By Marisa Scheinfeld, with essays by Stefan Kanfer and Jenna Weissman Joselit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016, 200 pages, $29.95 Cloth. The July 24, 2017 edition of Time magazine featured an article titled, "Where Did America's Summer Jobs Go?" Author Karl Vick of New Jersey made poignant reference to the declining numbers of young men and women out of high school and college applying for seasonal work, particularly in venues associated with summer recreation. Life guards, kiosk attendants, movie theaters, summer resorts, and day camps—job demographics have changed over the last sixty years, reflecting the ambitious values of a nation keenly attuned to upward mobility and career status. Asking the same question, cross-disciplinary scholars have taken a deeper look at the Catskill Mountains, carefully documenting the memory of the summer resorts and the people who worked and played there during the twentieth century. From century to century, the passing of time creates a powerful forum for memory and the recollection of unique moments in our nation's social history. Marisa Scheinfeld's photographic collection, The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland—with essays by noted authors and scholars Stefan Kanfer and Jenna Weissman Joselit—is a beautiful series of visual compositions designed to evoke the experience of [End Page 513] America's early Jewish communities which rose from the immigrant ghettos of New York City to enjoy the mobile lifestyles so popular at the height of the modern era. Hard-won prosperity and the expansion of the railroads into the New York State hinterland created the momentum for the aggregation of rural Catskill Mountain communities into a vibrant resort complex that catered to scores of vacationers, eager to escape the city's summer doldrums. Like the velveteen rabbit of Margery Williams's classic tale, the Borscht Belt and its cultural artifacts stand as the rumpled remains of an immigrant community's warm embrace of their new American homeland. Scheinfeld's opening prologue is followed with a full-page map that illustrates the locations of many memorable "hotels and bungalow colonies of the Borscht Belt" (13). Located approximately ninety miles north of New York City, the southern Catskill resort complex fanned out east and west along Route 17 in Ulster and Sullivan Counties. Bungalow colonies were nestled along its tributaries, creating a vibrant multi-layered venue for summer recreation. While nineteenth-century European fin de siècle artists lamented the decadence of a passing age, more than two million Jews vacated the shtetls of Central and Eastern Europe to take refuge in America. Many settled in the crowded tenement communities for which Manhattan's Lower East Side is noted, while other families preferred the rural lifestyles that the Catskill communities offered. Long inured to hard poverty and its exclusions, Jewish newcomers to the mountains nevertheless bought farms and created homesteads, relying on the railroads for a steady population of transient merchants and vacationers looking for room and board. The relationship between the city and its mountain resorts was enhanced in great measure by the flowering sophistication of the popular arts and the rise of the entertainment industry at the dawn of the twentieth century. Gilded Age patronage for the classical performing arts gave way to a popular demand for entertainments for which vaudeville and Broadway were famous. By the early twentieth century, the Yiddish Theater District was world-renowned for its productions of classic theatre and entertainments. It was a fertile training ground for many artists whose talents filled vaudevillian show houses and movie theaters all over the country. Booking agents contracted resort hotels which provided enthusiastic audiences for the rising stars of film and radio. Borscht Belt venues were a stronghold [End Page 514] for performers whose sharp wits and warm personas took the edge off American nativism in homes and communities nationwide. With the distribution of televised broadcasts, the lively antics and seasoned humor of dozens of performers became beloved twentieth-century American film industry classics, including iconic productions...

Psalms, part 2, and Lamentations (Forms of the Old Testament Literature Volume XV)

Gerstenberger's commentary on Psalms 61-150 (Book 2-5) of the Psalter and Lamentations follows his 1988 commentary on Psalms 1-60 (Psalms, Part I; with an introduction to cultic poetry - FOTL XIV) which included a very important section on cultic poetry. The two volumes should ideally be studied together as Part 2 frequently refers back to especially the section on cultic poetry in Part 1. Part 1 also contains the general introduction to the Psalter where Gerstenberger discusses the growth and history of the Psalter and proposes his main premises. Part 2 is a form-critical commentary in line with the stated goals of the FOTL series to give a 'form-critical analysis of every book and each unit of the Old Testament ... [to] expose the exegetical procedure in such a way as to enable students and pastors to engage in their own analysis and interpretation' (xii). Gerstenberger successfully complies with these goals by giving an extensive (traditional) form-critical analysis of Psalms 61-150 and Lamentations, involving attention to theology and poetic language. He continues on what Petersen (1992:32) called his 'innovative course' and 'fresh approach to ritual.' Like in Part 1 Gerstenberger's main premise is that the 'final converging point of collecting and redactional activities' of the psalms should be sought in the 'worship ceremonies of the early Jewish communities of the sixth to second centuries B.C.E.' (xv). To him the God of the Psalter is therefore 'mostly the God of exilic and postexilic Israel' (xv). The cult, liturgy and ritual practice inform his research as well as the maxim that the social context of texts should be respected as 'texts are not freelancing autonomous powers, but belong to determined people' (xvi).

Inscribing Authority: Female Title Bearers in Jewish Inscriptions

This paper investigates representations of gender in the material culture of the ancient synagogue. The pertinent data are numerous dedicatory and funerary inscriptions linking individual Jews, men and women, with titles seemingly associated with leadership in Late Antique synagogues (ca. 200–600 CE). Bernadette Brooten’s influential 1982 monograph argued against the prevailing tendency to characterize these titles as indications of power, authority, and responsibility when associated with men but as meaningless flattery when applied to women. She suggests that synagogue titles denote power, authority and responsibility on all title bearers equally, both men and women. I question the continued utility of proffering female title-holders as enumerable examples of powerful women rescued from their forgotten place in history. Using theoretical insights developed by historians Elizabeth Clark and Gabrielle Spiegel, this paper will engage a comparative analysis with the work of Riet van Bremen and Saba Mahmood to develop new methods of conceptualizing women’s authority in early Jewish communities. I propose that viewing women’s synagogue titles as culturally constructed representations allows for a fruitful inquiry into how women’s titles were used by male-dominated synagogue communities in their self-articulation and public presentation of Judaism.

Correspondence

CORRESPONDENCE Reading Roland E. Murphy's review of my Psalms. ParI I (HS 31 [1990):154-156) I really felt a sort of relief: Professor Murphy succinctly points out the newness and strangeness of my interpretation of the psalms, leaves some room for doubts as to the validity of my basic points of view, but acknowledges generously to be "stimulated by the larger and often surprising perspective in which the psalm is viewed" (p. 156). This kind recognition of my intentions is more than I hoped to obtain when thinking of all my expert colleagues in the field. Thank you, Roland! Still, the question remains: Are we up to a new phase of psalm exegesis? Is there really an "increased sensitivity to contextual interpretation" (p. 156)? Could we substantially agree that our psalter is by and large the product of postexilic, dispersed Jewish communities instead of a pre-exilic, centralistic temple cult? What about the value of the immense amount of ancient Near Eastern and modem anthropological texts and studies relating to religious ritual? Let me focus on some of the most important issues in this forest of questions and hypotheses. (1) Although very much aware of a whole bundle of new literary theories and holistic approaches to Scripture, which all tend to encounter "the text as such," draped as an autonomous, literary, and kerygmatic entity, I consider it of primary importance to reconstruct the life-setting (better: consecutive life-settings) of any given text. To put it bluntly: human words are meaningless, until they are being identified as utterances of people, groups, interests, situations. If we fail to recognize the ancient (and strangely different!) settings of biblical texts, we consciously or unconsciously fall into the trap of incorporating biblical words into our own environment and modes of thinking. In theological terms this means: The Word of God, which "became flesh" in concrete historical and social circumstances, is being domesticated and assimilated into our own system of life, thus losing its critical edge. The quest for "life-settings" of biblical texts, splendidly inaugurated by Hermann Gunkel and Sigmund Mowinckel, needs to be vigorously pursued. Today we are much better equipped to do the necessary research than the pioneers of form-critical work could dream possible. (2) The Psalter is but a very small collection of songs and prayers which has come down through a millenary history of faith to be reused and Hebrew Studies 32 (1991) 208 Correspondence remodelled by the post-exilic Israelite communities. The psalms do contain the sediments of old expressions of faith and quite a number of layers of religious organization. There are family rituals preserved as well as tribal and royal (and even pre-Israelite Canaanite!) concepts of God and Salvation. The Psalms are the richest and deepest treasure of the most varied modes of believing in God. The psalms are directly linked to ancient Near Eastern psalmody and incantation, ritual and social constellations. They also prove comparable to virtually all known healing ceremonies, religious affairs of tribe, state, political or spiritual associations, communal and individual theological reflection. The fmal and most fonnative stage of psalm-composition and collection, it seems to me, was the perusal and creation of liturgical texts in early Jewish communities of the fifth century B.C.E. There may have occurred some "democratization" of royal psalms (as Roland E. Murphy hints on p. 155). We know that "royalistic theology" was transfonned into messianic hope (cf. Pss 2; 45; 110, etc.). But the genres "individual complaint" and "thanksgiving" most certainly were not creations of the royal court but had their very deep roots in ancient family and clan ceremonies. Professor Murphy maintains that my "conclusions are contrary to current views of modem scholarship" (p. 156), referring to interpretations of individual psalms. That may be so. But the strange fact is that during the long years of studying the psalms my fundamental assumptions about their nature and origin have changed considerably. It is from this different perspective that deviant conclusions imposed themselves. And my basic theological conviction is this: The Psalms are the very center of biblical faith (cf. also Martin Luther, Preface to the Psalms). A biblical theology based on the...

: The Early Jewish Community of Boston's North End: A Sociologically Oriented Study of an Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Community in an American Big-City Neighborhood between 1870 and 1900 . Arnold A. Wieder.

: The Early Jewish Community of Boston's North End: A Sociologically Oriented Study of an Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Community in an American Big-City Neighborhood between 1870 and 1900 . Arnold A. Wieder.