Jewish Practices Research Articles

Cultural considerations when working with Jewish students and supervisees

ABSTRACT The author examines the marginalization of Jewish identities in multicultural clinical education and supervision amid rising antisemitism in the U.S., proposing the use of cultural democracy to address these issues. He critiques the erasure of Jewish identity due to the neglect of Jewish backgrounds in key theories and inaccuracies in clinical literature. He further underscores the importance of Jewish cultural considerations, including accommodating Jewish practices such as holidays, Sabbath observance, mourning customs, and dietary laws, while advocating for flexibility and sensitivity. Finally, he addresses considerations when supervisees experience antisemitism from a person at the center of a clinical encounter.

Live chickens on the balcony and fish in the bathtub: private upkeep of Jewish traditions in the post-war Soviet Union

ABSTRACT This article sheds light on the clandestine maintenance of Jewish traditions in the Soviet Union after World War II, focusing on Ashkenazi Jews in the European part of the country. It draws on post-secular theory to shed a new light on traditional Jewish practices in the atheist Soviet Union. The central argument is that Jewish traditions persisted in the post-war period (despite surging antisemitic campaigns) but were confined to private and domestic spaces. Three central characteristics of this tradition were: its relegation to the private sphere of Jewish households; its main expression through cooking Jewish dishes in kitchens dominated by women; and the ambivalent character of the clandestine Jewish practices in the ‘“double life’” of Soviet Jews.

Celebrating Fifty Years of Jewish Pride: An Autoethnographic View on Queerness, Diaspora and Homeland in an American Gay Synagogue

Anthropologists of religion are preoccupied with questions of identity, community, performance and representation. One way they cope with these concerns is through a reflexive examination of their ethnographic positionality in the field. This provides an opportunity to engage not only with “the other”, but also to explore their own identities and background. This article presents an autoethnographic analysis of Pride Shabbat, a special service held in June to celebrate the intersection of Judaism and queerness. The service took place at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) as part of their 50th-anniversary celebration. Since the 1970s, CBST has been known as the largest gay synagogue in the world and provided diverse religious and spiritual services to the Jewish LGBTQ+ community. Based on my participation in this specific event in June 2023, I draw distinct differences between the Israeli Jewish LGBTQ community and the American Jewish LGBTQ community, such as issues related to ageism and multigenerational perceptions within the gay community, the internal dynamic for gender dominance, as well as diverse trajectories of queerness, religiosity and nationality. Symbolically, contrary to the common perception that the diaspora looks to the state of Israel for symbolic and actual existence, this inquiry sheds light on the opposite perspective; the homeland (represented by the ethnographer) absorbs and learns from the queer Jewish practices and experiences taking place within the diaspora (the American Jewish LGBTQ community). This is an opposite movement which reveals the cracks in the perception of the gay community as a transnational community, as well as the tense power relations between Israel and American Jewry.

Jews in Republican Rome: The literary sources

There is considerable literary evidence that gives us some insight into the Jewish culture in the city of Rome from different perspectives after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Yet, there are few primary accounts of Jews in the city of Rome during the 1st century BCE. In this article it is argued that there was already a significant Jewish population in Rome during the middle of the 1st century BCE and it already had a noted influence on daily life in the capital city. In the wake of the Roman Republic’s imperialistic successes, the city saw an influx of foreign peoples and cultures, including Jews, and they were mentioned in the literature of the time. The little that was written about Jews during this time pertain to those aspects of their culture and religion that appeared peculiar to the Romans, especially in the so-called higher genres of philosophical treatises or history. Yet, we also have texts describing everyday live in Republican Rome – lyric and elegiac poetry. These, too, feature references to Jewish culture. Although Roman poetry is never explicitly interested in Jews or Jewish people, it did paint a picture of Rome at street-level, so to speak, through the eyes of a literate citizen and this picture sometimes included Jews. In this article this type of evidence available to us will be reconsidered to fill in the gap in our historical knowledge.Contribution: This article presents an interpretation of Jews and Jewish practices mentioned during the 1st century BCE in Roman poetry. The poetry of Tibullus, Horace and Ovid, written from a Roman perspective, have been contextualised in their literary traditions and informed by the established philosophical opinions of the time from Cicero, Varro and Lucretius. The result is a useful discussion of how extensive and how reliable these sources are for the understanding of Jewish culture in Rome during the 1st century BCE.

Blood Libels between Trento and the Bodensee

Abstract This article examines a little-known event that took place in 1475. This year saw a well-publicized trial at which the Jews of Trento were falsely accused of kidnapping a Christian toddler named Simon and murdering him in a religious ritual. Pope Sixtus IV, abiding by the long-standing papal tradition of defending the Jews against such accusations of ritual murder (known as blood libels), sent an apostolic commissioner to Trento to investigate the legitimacy of the proceedings opened by the local prince-bishop, Johannes Hinderbach. To defend his version of the story, namely that the Jews were responsible for the crime and that the ritual killing of Christian children was a long-established Jewish practice, Hinderbach sent the Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer von Schlettstadt (later known for his role in the development of the witch hunt) on a mission to the Bodensee region to uncover reports of previous alleged Jewish ritual murders. During his journey, Kramer managed to obtain a bundle of written notarial documents that attempt to prove the thesis of the magistrates and the bishop of Trento. Kramer’s mission is analysed by comparing the documents produced for him in southern Germany with other sources concerning the same cases and within the broader context of the blood libel of Trento.

A Jewish Qur’an: An Eighteenth-Century Hebrew Qur’an Translation in Its Indian Context

This essay places the Washington Library of Congress Heb. Ms 183, a Hebrew Qur’an translation from eighteenth-century Cochin, in its South Indian context. After pointing out important general differences between early modern European and South Asian inter-religious cultures and attitudes to translation, this essay analyzes three salient differences between Ms 183 and its Dutch source. Then, the essay scrutinizes three relevant and interrelated contexts: the eighteenth-century Indian diplomatic culture of owning and exchanging scriptural translations; the social position of Muslims and Jews as ‘guests’ and diplomatic brokers; and the rise of Muslim military power in Malabar. On this basis, I argue that this Hebrew Qur’an translation was intended to be cultural–diplomatic capital for Jewish diplomats dealing with Muslim rulers, indicating that not only rulers translated the scriptures of their subjects but also subjects those of their rulers. In addition, by showing how the Mysorean rulers implemented Islamic reforms and how Jewish practices were attuned to majoritarian religious practices, the essay suggests that Ms 183 was also meant to serve Jewish religious purposes, making this manuscript possibly a rare instance of using non-Jewish religious scriptures for Jewish religious practice.

הפרות סדר: רחל פומרנץ כסוכנת שינוי בספרות החרדית הישראלית

The ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) writer Prof. Malka Schaps, who writes under the pseudonym Rachel Pomerantz, has a unique biography that positions her as an agent of social change in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox society. This article offers a reading of three of Schaps' novels: A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew (1997), Cactus Blossoms (1999), and Wildflower (2004), in light of Alicia Ostriker’s term ‘stealing the language,’ which describes ways in which women have ‘re-appropriated’ the language of the patriarchy and invaded the sanctuaries of male discourse. Uncovered here are the novels’ violations of accepted ideological norms in Israel’s ultra-Orthodox society, though they are not identified as critical texts, but rather as the stories of young Jewish-American women who ‘return’ to traditional Jewish practice by becoming baalot teshuva. My argument here is that even though Schaps' texts are conservatively grounded in the writing conventions of ultra-Orthodox literature, they undermine the accepted ethos with a discourse that is simultaneously conservative and subversive.

The Virtues of Limits

Some virtues are chiefly about increasing one's domain, striking out into the unknown, and bursting the bounds that confine us. Other virtues are about accepting limits and thriving within them. David McPherson's worthwhile book is an extended exploration of the latter, with an emphasis on reverence, humility, gratitude, contentment, moderation, loyalty, and neighbourliness. Appealing to these ‘limiting virtues’, as he calls them, McPherson defends a panoply of normative conclusions in ethics, politics, and economics. For instance, by appealing to reverence, he argues there are absolute prohibitions we must respect no matter the stakes; by appealing to humility, that utopian ambitions in the political sphere are unacceptable; by appealing to patriotism, that it is better to be a citizen of a particular somewhere rather than a citizen of the world; and by appealing to gratitude, that all of us, regardless of religion, should embrace something like the Jewish practice of Sabbath.

Election, Favoritism, and Freedom: Towards a Modern Jewish Theology of Matrilineal Descent

AbstractThis article offers an account of the broad theological contours of the Jewish practice of matrilineal descent. I make the case that matrilineality epitomizes God's contingent preference in favoring and electing Israel. I link Mara Benjamin's recent work to recuperate asymmetrical power relations for feminist theology to the asymmetrical relationship inherent in God's election of Israel. With Benjamin, I emphasize the importance of contingency, vulnerability, and favoritism for divine and parental love. I then read the opening parable in the tractate of Avodah Zarah for one Talmudic strategy for reckoning with the contingency of election. In Avodah Zarah, election's contingency is qualified by the concept of zekhut avot—the merit of the patriarchs. From here, I turn to the work of Jon Levenson for an account of the construction of zekhut avot in the Genesis stories. I show that the merit of the patriarchs is defined by the patriarchal encounter with the trial of favoritism. For the Israelites after Genesis, a decisive consequence of zekhut avot is that all of Jacob's (Israel's) descendants become beloved of God. The contingent transmission of the covenant thus transforms from inscrutable divine choice to the still‐contingent power of ancestry. The article closes with an interpretation of the rabbinic concept of zekhut imahot—the merit of the matriarchs. The preferred or preferring matriarch is decisive for determining the next beloved son in Genesis. The article argues that matriarchal merit is not tied to any essential construction of gender, but to the capacity to exercise freedom under conditions of providential silence. I contend that the practice of matrilineal descent re‐inscribes matriarchal merit for every generation of the Jewish people.

Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought by Ethan Kleinberg

Reviewed by: Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought by Ethan Kleinberg Annabel Herzog Ethan Kleinberg. Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn: Philosophy and Jewish Thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 220 pp. Levinas’s essays on the Talmud and other texts of the Jewish tradition (his “talmudic readings”) have been studied from various perspectives. Some consider them a mere illustration of Levinas’s phenomenology. Some try to fathom their philosophical meaning. Some read them in a purely Jewish context, as examples of modern midrash. Some emphasize their historical impact on the Jewish renewal that took place in intellectual circles in Paris in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. In his excellent book, Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic Turn, Ethan Kleinberg proposes a truly original twist: his historical account focuses on Levinas’s teaching and transmission of Talmud. In emphasizing primarily neither the French Jewish scene of the time, nor the midrashic relevance of Levinas’s endeavor, but the passages between them, Kleinberg asks how Levinas came to teach the Talmud and what this move meant. The answer is presented in two parallel discussions: one classically historical and one that delves into the arguments of some specific talmudic readings. This double strategy, appearing visually on the page as two columns of text, is influenced by Derrida’s writing in Glas and in Margins of Philosophy—which [End Page 213] is in its turn influenced by the Talmud’s page layout—and aims at opening the text and challenging the process of reading. Kleinberg’s project starts with the realization that, contrary to what is too often believed, Levinas never had formal talmudic training. While he was born and grew up in Lithuania, he did not study in a traditional yeshiva. This point is important and Kleinberg comes back to it several times, to emphasize that the centrality of Talmud in Levinas’s thinking is not the result of religious upbringing but of choice. The discussion that Kleinberg elaborates from this point forward, however, goes beyond the simple exposition of a biographical fact. Indeed, it is now well known that for many Jewish secular scholars and intellectuals in France and in other countries, Levinas’s idiosyncratic interpretations of the Talmud opened a way back to the Jewish tradition. This, I must add, is not a unique phenomenon. Buber, Rosenzweig, and Heschel also gave Jewish intellectuals a new taste for Jewish texts and sometimes Jewish practice. Yet, the question that Kleinberg asks is about the meaning and composition of tradition: If we acknowledge that Levinas began his talmudic investigations at quite a late moment of his life, can his teaching be considered tradition? Can a tradition whose thread has been broken be reconstructed? Is a talmudic commentary that includes insights taken from other realms of thinking (such as Western philosophy or French humanism) still talmudic, still Jewish? What did Levinas exactly do in suggesting that his universalist understanding of the Jewish tradition is the Jewish tradition? Should his endeavor affect our presumptions about that tradition? These are fascinating questions. Some of them have already been raised in Levinas’s scholarship, but not as the basis for such a far-reaching discussion. In addition, Kleinberg shows that Levinas himself formulated versions of these questions in his talmudic readings, which deal with the meaning of tradition and transmission beyond their specific topics. The argument of the book, therefore, is that Levinas “inserted himself” into the Jewish tradition (99). And this implies two things. The first is that he opened that tradition to make room for himself. This was made possible by the fact that tradition had already been transformed, shaken, or even broken by a series of processes and events: the Jewish emancipation, secularism and assimilation, Nazi rule, and the decolonization wars that brought Sephardic Jews to Paris and created a new Jewish conversation. In other words, Levinas used the crises of his time to find his way into the talmudic chain of transmission. The second is that entering tradition from outside, he would almost necessarily start a new tradition or reformulate the tradition in a new language reflecting that outside realm, and dialoguing with it. This is what Levinas meant when...

Conclusion

Conclusion Domenik Ackermann (bio) The most recent generation of scholars engaging in comparative theological discourse has elevated issues of decoloniality and questions around decentering Western Christian theology. The discourses in this issue of CrossCurrents strive to be in line with a decolonial approach both on a meta-level and on the level of theological content. Indeed, in all of the articles presented here, the contributors imply that a comparative theology that wishes to engage seriously in decoloniality must reflect on and rethink the meaning of land, with its many facets of meaning and importance. On the topic, the contributions to this special issue on theologies of land not only showcase a kaleidoscope of meanings that land can have but also reveal that there is potential for further comparative theological engagement. We delineated how places, soil, and geography have theological meanings that reach into relevant meta-theological questions, as well as cultural and even political conversations. By way of conclusion, I should like only to mention possible pathways for further conversation. Clearly, the relevance of land with respect to religious traditions' identities reaches beyond the four perspectives presented here. There has been engagement in historical theology and the question of colonization, as well as studies in scriptures about the meaning of land, soil, and Israel. However, discourse across and between traditions is still a novelty. Our discourse on land, specifically, provokes me to think about what perspectives present themselves from native traditions outside the Batak, Anishinaabe, or Naga traditions. What further insights about the significance of land can we gain from the ongoing cultural-political discourses with Native people in colonized countries (such as those in North America, Africa, and Australia, to name just a few)? How can dialogue about land include Muslim insights, especially in the context of conversations about Israel and Palestine? These are but a few questions of many that must be asked. Finally, how can land, as a [End Page 86] paradox between porosity and particularity, help us further understand multiplicity and interconnectedness? The conversations that the four of us engaged in during the process of compiling this issue were rich and insightful. It is our hope that this conversation sparks interest in a broader theological conversation. I personally thank Michelle Voss Roberts, Hesron Sihombing and O'neil van Horn for availing themselves and creating these thoughtful and thought-provoking articles. I also thank Paul Hedges for introducing us, and S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate for offering CrossCurrents as an outlet for our conversations. [End Page 87] Domenik Ackermann Domenik Ackermann studied Protestant Theology in Göttingen (Germany), Heidelberg (Germany), and Beirut (Lebanon) with a focus on ecumenical issues and interfaith questions. A Ph. D. Candidate at the Theology Department at Boston College, his research interests include comparative theological and liturgical studies on Christianity and Judaism with a particular emphasis on the function of memory in prayerful activity. His dissertation "Prayerful Memory. What Christian Theology Can Learn from Jewish Practice" explores the meaning of prayer as an experience through Jean-Louis-Chrétien and Johann Baptist Metz in dialogue with Jewish liturgical functions of prayer. Domenik is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ (UCC). Copyright © 2023 Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life

Does Smoke Mean Fire? Illumination, Incense, and the Senses in Late Antique Synagogues

Synagogues remain among the best studied institutions of Late Antiquity. Associated scholarship commonly considers activities of prayer or scriptural recitation once conducted within synagogues and impacts of their architectural and visual programs on visitors. Yet, regardless of recent interest in embodied dimensions of ancient life, attention to Jews' sensory experiences inside these buildings remains rare. As inspired by Karaite critiques of Jewish practices of lighting lamps and incense in late ancient synagogues, this analysis addresses this lacuna by taking a distinctive approach. It reconsiders diverse artifacts discovered in excavations of synagogues and their surroundings in the Levant, North Africa, and Europe, including fragments of glass, stone, bronze, and ceramic lamps; preserved images in floor mosaics; and remains of bronze and ceramic censers. Read in tandem with rabbinic textual evidence from Roman Palestine, assessments of these texts and artifacts inspire considerations of how historical uses of lamps and incense burners implicate atmospheric elements of ancient synagogues, including experiential illumination and olfaction, which heretofore evaded notice. The ensuing discussion thus inspires new vantages on Jewish sensory and devotional landscapes in past time and challenges bifurcated notions of public versus private expressions of piety among Jews inside their synagogues, homes, and study halls.

“Remain in the Calling in Which You Were Called” (1 Cor 7:20): A Post Supersessionist Reading of 1 Corinthians

This essay explores how Paul negotiates and constructs social identity for the Christos-followers in Corinth from a post-supersessionist perspective by using the Social Identity Theory. Focusing on a close reading of two controversial passages taken from 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 7:17–24 and 9:19–23), this essay argues that there is continuation of existing social identities of both the Jewish and gentile Christos-followers. In the Christos-movement, Jews were not expected to give up their place of belonging in order to become Christos-followers. Likewise, gentiles were not expected to leave behind their previous identity and embrace Jewish practices in order to become the people of God who worship the God of Israel. While the existing social identities continue, Paul also creatively transforms them. Reflection on the implication of this reading for contemporary ethnic Chinese Christos-followers in Muslim-majority Malaysia is also offered.

Imagining the Jubilee: Modern Jewish Utopias from the Inception of Zionism to the Existential Turn

The commandment to observe the Jubilee year, which appears in the final chapters of Leviticus, is a multifaceted riddle. The Talmud claims that observance of the Jubilee ceased with the expulsion of the Israelite tribes 2,700 years ago, implying a complete lack of oral traditions on the subject. However, despite its absence from Jewish practice and actual memory, the Jubilee played a central role in Jewish utopian thought on ownership, property, and the relationship with the Land of Israel. The rise of modern Zionism witnessed a flowering of utopian thinking inspired by the Jubilee. Herzl, Jabotinsky, and other Zionist thinkers offered modern interpretations of the Jubilee, intended to serve as the foundation of the model society they aimed to create. In recent decades, discussion of the Jubilee has become a battleground between liberal and conservative thinkers, who have attempted to frame the commandment as a mechanism of social and economic reform or as a means to strengthen private ownership respectively. This article addresses modern interpretations of the Jubilee from the early Zionist writers to the present, exploring the various ways in which Jubilee utopias have been employed as a source of inspiration for a newly constructed social and economic ethos. Following this analysis, I offer a new, existential interpretation of the Jubilee for the 21st century. I suggest a reading of the act of return to ancestral land every fifty years in the context of the global and virtual era, specifically drawing on the process described by Zygmunt Bauman (1998) as the great war of independence for space.

Household and Halakhah: A Genealogy of Jewish Practice

In this article, I examine the role of the household and its web of social relations in the formation of halakhah. Through close readings of talmudic texts, I propose that the household functions not only as a domain of halakhic practice but as a significant point of origin. Drawing upon the Latin root matrix (mother), I suggest that everyday activities involving food preparation, childrearing, and household management form a significant matrix in the genealogy of halakhah, from ancient through modern times. Ultimately, I conclude that the practicalities of household life and its halakhic renderings are mutually-informing and, at times, inseparable religious formations.

Jewish Identity and American Acceptance: Welcoming a Firstborn Son in Two Classic Children's Books

Jewish-American-themed children’s fiction often includes descriptions of ritual observance. Yet, although ritual circumcision (brit milah, or bris) is a requirement in halacha (Jewish religious law) for all newborn males, this event is virtually absent from Jewish children’s books; the incorporation of a surgical procedure would create obvious narrative difficulties. Sydney Taylor and Sadie Rose Weilerstein, two of the most important twentieth century Jewish-American children’s authors, each wrote a series of books including a newborn son. Instead of a bris, they both included the less common, nonsurgical ritual of pidyon ha-ben. Thus, they eluded a problematic description, while informing readers about a lesser-known Jewish practice.

Bending, Breaking and Adhering to Rules of Contemporary Jewish Practice in Finland

This article draws on an ongoing research project that seeks to document ethnographically everyday Jewish life in Finland today. Based on the framework of vernacular religion, it approaches religion “as it is lived” (Primiano 1995) and analyses the many expressions and experiences of rules in day-to-day Jewish life as part of complex interactions between individuals, institutions, and religious motivations. Historical data, institutional structures and cultural context are put in dialogue with individual narratives and nuances, described as “self-motivated” ways of “doing” religion.
 In this article, we seek to investigate what a vernacular Jewish approach to making, bending, and breaking rules amounts to in a community where increasing diversity and deep-reaching secularity contest and reshape traditional boundaries of belonging. What rules are accepted, adopted and appropriated as necessary or meaningful for being and doing Jewish? Our analysis traces how static values and conceptions of “Jewishness” give way to more flexible subjective positions as our interviewees struggle to find religiously and culturally significant models from the past that can be subjectively appropriated today. Both everyday quandaries and existential questions influence their ways of crafting vernacular religious positions. Focusing on formal and personal rituals related particularly to family life and foodways, the article shows how rules are revisited and refashioned as the traditional boundaries between sacred and secular, gendered practices and ethnic customs, are transgressed and subjective combinations are developed.
 Keywords: vernacular Judaism; Jews in Finland; ethnography; religion and rule; kashrut; Jewish family life; Jewish rituals

Secularization and its ethical consequences: orthodox Israeli Jews sanctifying ‘mundane’ Buddhist meditation

Abstract‘Insight’ or vipassanā meditation refers to meditative practices employed within Buddhist traditions. But following the secularization of vipassanā in recent decades – that is, its differentiation from Buddhism – orthodox Jewish Israeli meditators frame it as a religiously neutral, therapeutic technique centred on the mundane human body. They thus consider it as involving no forbidden ‘Eastern’ religious contents. Nevertheless, these ‘Jewish Vipassanā’ meditators also utilize insight meditation for improving their Jewish practice, characters, and ability to experience closeness to God; and some situate it within a national‐religious historical narrative culminating in redemption. The secularization of vipassanā enables orthodox Jewish practitioners to engage with it in ways that are significant for them as observant Jews, and without continually being concerned over ‘idolatry’. Secularization therefore has important implications for people's ethical projects, or attempts to foster what they consider good. Examining these implications can both stimulate secular studies and contribute to anthropological research on ethics.

Not Just the Time of the Other—What Does It Mean for Christians Today to Remember Shabbat and Keep It Holy?

In this essay, I explore how Christians can relate to the Sabbath in a way that adequately expresses Christian traditions about sacred time while showing respect for distinctly Jewish practices. My basic claim is that a Christian sanctification of the Sabbath presents an entirely new challenge for a Christianity that does not view Judaism as superseded or outdated. Thus, I ask: What should be the meaning of the Sabbath commandment for Christians? How can Christians sanctify the Sabbath while affirming it as a sign of the Jewish people’s living covenant? First, I will lay out the questions that are raised for Christian theology when affirming Jewish Sabbath observance as part of practiced Judaism, that is, as lived Torah and as a tradition passed on from generation to generation. Next, I will consult contemporary Jewish literature on the topic, then look for Christian accounts of the Sabbath in Christian systematic theologies. I will ask: What happens when Christians affirm that Sunday does not abrogate the Jewish Sabbath, while also asserting their own commitment to the Bible’s holy day? I will subsequently sketch an outline of a Christian theology of Shabbat that acknowledges distinctive Jewish legal traditions as well as its own connectedness to Biblical temporal structures.

Regression in Galatians: Paul and the Gentile Response to Jewish Law by Neil Martin

Reviewed by: Regression in Galatians: Paul and the Gentile Response to Jewish Law by Neil Martin Jeremy Wade Barrier neil martin, Regression in Galatians: Paul and the Gentile Response to Jewish Law (WUNT 2/530; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020). Pp. xvi + 308. Paper €84 This writing is a revised version of Martin's D.Phil. thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University in August 2019, supervised by Markus Bockmuehl. Generally speaking, in this work M. takes up a critical issue of Galatians and effectively contributes to our understanding of the writing. In particular, he is interested in explaining the regression language (epistrephō, "return," Gal 4:9) that Paul emphasizes will take place if the Galatians implement Jewish ritual practices (Gal 3:3; 4:8–11; 5:1, 4, 7). The hermeneutical paradox under scrutiny is that Paul perceives the implementation of Jewish rituals as a "return" to paganism. The proposal is unfolded in seven chapters. The first chapter is an overview of the entire work. Methodologically speaking, M. writes from a historical-critical perspective, making use of epigraphical and literary resources associated with Asia Minor that serve as a backdrop for possible proposals and solutions (p. 5). The ingenuity of M.'s argument is understanding how religious rituals would have been perceived differently by the Galatians, Paul, and the Influencers, respectively. While the Influencers (and Paul himself) might have been able to implement Jewish religious practices without inhibiting their faith in Christ, the Galatians could not. In view of their pagan background, the implementation of Jewish practices constituted a regression into their former pagan "basic elements of religious practice," and this concerns Paul (p. 10; see also pp. 202–8). In the second chapter, M. summarizes his assumptions pertaining to Galatians, while also asserting that these assumptions are not essential to the overall argument. He assumes (1) that the audience is churches in southern Galatia; (2) that, generally speaking, Acts of the Apostles is a credible witness; (3) that the date of the letter is 50–52 c.e. Finally, he surveys the major characters that concern this project: Paul; a predominantly formerly pagan Galatian audience; and the Influencers, who are ethnic Jews (pp. 39–46). In chap. 3, "Galatians in the Pagan Religious Context of Asia Minor," M. surveys the relevant literary and epigraphic sources. A centerpiece of the chapter is an analysis of the aforementioned data through a "reciprocity model" that provides several ways of understanding reciprocity exchanges and gift giving between humans and the divine. This approach provides a useful framework for critiquing several of the current interpretations that assume an imperial and/or Anatolian context as the occasion of Paul's letter. This exposition of weaknesses within these theories thus allows room for M.'s interpretation. The information here pertaining to reciprocity gift giving will be essential in chap. 6. Chapter 4, "Paul and Returning to Paganism," expands the context for interpreting Galatians by considering how Paul dealt with gentiles on other occasions. Specifically, M. [End Page 503] applies Paul's discussion of the "strong" and the "weak" from 1 Cor 8:1–13 to Gal 4:8–11, while also offering an innovative interpretation of Rom 14:1–15:3 as possible support for his reading. In sum, when Paul pastors gentiles in the context of Jews, he realizes that there are some things that those who are unfamiliar with the rituals of Judaism (i.e., gentile converts) do not quite understand, and therefore as "weak" members will misconstrue and apply incorrectly. This is also the case in Galatia, M. argues. While connecting the rationale of 1 Cor 8:1–13/Rom 14:1–15:3 to Galatians is tenuous (Gal 5:11 and 4:8–9), M.'s analysis of the expression stoicheia tou kosmou is thorough. He analyzes the expression closely, with the conclusion that this should be understood to mean "fundamental elements of religious practice common both to that past and to the way of life advocated by the Influencers" (p. 139). In chap. 5, "Galatians in the Jewish Religious Context of Asia Minor," M. surveys the literary and epigraphical sources (cf. chap. 3), with special...