Scholars Of Judaism Research Articles

Jennifer Nyström, Reading Romans, Constructing Paul(s): A Conversation between Messianic Jews in Jerusalem and Paul within Judaism Scholars

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Reading Paul with Messianic Jews

This review article presents and summarises my doctoral dissertation ‘Reading Romans, Constructing Paul(s): A Conversation between Messianic Jews in Jerusalem and Paul within Judaism Scholars’, defended on 24 September 2021 at Lund University. It is a highly interdisciplinary study between New Testament studies and the anthropology of Christianity. It focuses on Paul and readings of Romans 11, where the Messianic Jewish readings originate from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem through so-called Bible-reading interviews. This article summarises each chapter, provides examples from the empirical chapters ‘Identity and Torah’, ‘Relations and Yeshua’ and ‘Time and Land’, and finishes by pointing out three major conclusions followed by three additional key contributions that the study makes.

A Response from E-FSR

A Response from E-FSR Michal Raucher (bio), Sharon Jacob (bio), and Jennifer Maidrand (bio) The electronic branch of Feminist Studies in Religion (e-FSR) has taken several steps to transform FSR from a white, Christian space to a space that is created by and belongs to all of us. Our goal is to create a space where our board members and blog authors can thrive and receive mentoring in a supportive and open environment. The change that has made everything possible is that we have significantly expanded our board. Although our board has always been diverse, we wanted to include even more voices in the leadership team. Since 2020, we have added nine new board members, growing the size of our board from ten to sixteen. We intentionally invited more womanist scholars. We also invited more people of color, scholars of Islam and Judaism, and activists working in the field. Knowing the history of FSR, we envisioned a board that would not just include women of color but also create an environment that would allow scholars of color to feel empowered and mentored and to succeed. The expansion of our board also means that we have more than one expert in a particular field. This allows us to tackle the issue of tokenism and create a space where relationships are fostered and nurtured. Quite often in organizations that are predominantly white, only one or two people of color are included. Similarly, in religious studies spaces that are marked as Christian, one or two scholars of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism might give an illusion of diversity. To avoid this, we aim to continue growing our board. This will also relieve some pressure and prevent feelings of isolation and burnout that a person of color or a scholar of a non-Christian tradition might feel in being the only person on a predominantly white, Christian board. At e-FSR, the expansion of the board was a step taken to not merely include diversity but to create a space where diversity [End Page 81] with regard to race, sexuality, gender, and scholarship would create something new for FSR. This expansion has sometimes led to conflict, but it has been the kind of conflict that Traci West refers to in her response to Judith Plaskow. We are respectful and honest with one another. We are also sometimes uncomfortable. Discussions that we’ve had over approaches to mentoring, reviewing blogs, writing blogs, welcoming new board members, and social media usage are the kinds of conflicts that, as West writes, “fuel more disruption of our tolerance for the continual reiteration of those familiar, lived patterns” of white, Christian supremacy ($$). Although this work is not easy, we are able to return again and again because we make space for regeneration and support. [End Page 82] Michal Raucher Michal Raucher is assistant professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University. Her research lies at the intersection of the anthropology of women in Judaism, reproductive ethics, and religious authority. Raucher’s first book, an ethnography of Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jewish women’s reproductive ethics, titled Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women was published in 2020. Raucher is currently conducting ethnographic research on the ordination of women in Orthodox Judaism in Israel and America. michal. raucher@rutgers.edu Sharon Jacob Sharon Jacob is associate professor of New Testament at Pacific School of Religion. Jacob earned her master of divinity from Lancaster Theological Seminary and master of sacred theology from Yale University. She earned her PhD from Drew University. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, race and whiteness theory, and postcolonial theory. Her publications include a monograph entitled Reading Mary alongside Indian Surrogate Mothers: Violent Love, Oppressive Liberation, and Infancy Narratives (2014). Jacob is also a regular contributor to the Electronic Feminist Studies of Religion where she has written several blogs on various topics. sjacob@psr.edu Jennifer Maidrand Jennifer Maidrand is a PhD candidate at Drew University in the Bible and Cultures program. Her research interests include the Hebrew Bible, ecological hermeneutics and theology, womanist and feminist hermeneutics, and geopolitics of Israel/Palestine. Maidrand serves as the web director and blog submissions editor for...

Theopolitics Contra Political Theology: Martin Buber’s Biblical Critique of Carl Schmitt

This article recovers Martin Buber’s important but neglected critique of Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Because Buber is known primarily as an ethicist and scholar of Judaism, his attack on Schmitt has been largely overlooked. Yet as I reveal through a close reading of his Biblical commentaries, a concern about the dangers of political theology threads through decades of his work. Divine sovereignty, Buber argues, is absolute and inimitable; no human ruler can claim the legitimate power reserved to God. Buber’s response is to uncover what he sees as Judaism’s earliest political theory: a “theopolitics,” where human beings, mutually subject to divine kingship, practice non-domination. But Buber, I show, did not seek to directly revive this religious vision. Instead, he sought to incorporate the spirit of theopolitics, as embodied by Israel’s prophets, into modern society. The result is a new and significant perspective on liberal democracy and political theology.

Is the Concept of Conscience Found in Judaism?

Is the Concept of Conscience Found in Judaism?1 Gilbert S. Rosenthal (bio) Introduction Is the concept of conscience found in Judaism? If so, what are its parameters and implications in Jewish law and ethics? This is, in my view, an important and timely issue—one that has really been given short shrift by scholars of Judaism. There are those who claim that conscience is irrelevant because all that matters is what the Torah requires and what halakhah—Jewish law—demands of Jews. But there are others who insist that the ideal and goal of Jewish law is to nurture and develop in humans a sense of conscience. Some scholars maintain that in Judaism, all ethics and laws are theonomous—divinely inspired and ordained. And since conscience is an autonomous source of behavior, it is irrelevant. Others insist that heteronymous ethics, defined and legislated by society, are what matter—not autonomous ethics that are so personal and subjective.2 In this study, I propose to examine the sources that seem to prefigure the notion of conscience in the Bible, rabbinic literature, and medieval Jewish writings, and I shall endeavor to draw from the sources meaningful lessons relevant to a modern understanding of the role of conscience in Jewish individual and group behavior. What Is Conscience? I should start by defining conscience and citing several important and instructive scholarly reflections on this concept. The word comes from the [End Page 3] two Latin words that mean “knowing with.” Conscience is the authentic awareness of the self that makes decisions with regard to values. Its chief concerns are good and evil. It represents the totality of the human’s cognitive and judging faculties. It is generally thought of in a negative sense: it is the faculty that reminds us, by stimulating feelings of guilt and shame, that we are doing wrong. The troubled heart is a sign of conscience. Paul seems to have used the Greek term syneidesis to denote conscience.3 In the thirteenth century, Aquinas thought of conscience as “that which witnesses or binds, incites and also accuses, stings, or rebukes,” and he argued that “it must bind even in error and have all authority.”4 Sigmund Freud suggested that conscience is the product of what he called the superego. He defined conscience as that which gives our impulses “direction towards what is right,”5 further writing that “conscience is that internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.” He connected it to the savage’s attitude to taboo and a “fearful sense of guilt.” It is “the higher side of human life; it incarnates ideals, moral decencies, as well as spiritual currents we’ve absorbed into ourselves,” and it both judges and directs humans.6 Lawrence Kohlberg suggested that conscience stands at the final stage of moral development; what is right is defined by the decisions of conscience: “At heart, these are the universal principles of justice, regarding reciprocity and equality of human rights and respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons.”7 Erik Erikson wrote that conscience is the development from a child’s reaction to an adult’s autonomous values of reality and ideals and what selection to make of authoritative statements. That, he suggested, is autonomy in the moral decision-making process.8 Milton Konvitz argued that “each man has a heart, but each man is not a law unto himself.” He wrote, “The heart of conscience is not a voice that speaks out of man; it is a hearing agency given to man so that he may hear the voice of God.” He defines two aspects of conscience: the judicial aspect, which passes judgment on acts committed; and the directive aspect, which guides the person before the action has taken place. Konvitz adds that it is the role of legislation to nurture conscience, and the genius of Judaism was to translate conscience into legal principles.9 Martin Buber described conscience in these words: “Conscience is that court within the soul which concerns itself with a distinction between the right and the wrong, and proceeds against that which has been determined as wrong.”10 Abraham [End Page 4] Joshua...

Passover and Last Supper Revisited

Although Jesus' Last Supper probably took place on the night before Passover (as in John) rather than on the first night of Passover itself (as in the Synoptics), it contained elements strongly marked by the Jewish institution of the Passover seder (fixed order of service) and haggadah (ritual retelling of the exodus events). These elements were not, as some scholars of Judaism have recently argued, post-70 CE developments. Rather, evidence fromJubilees, Philo, and the NT itself indicates that seder and haggadah already existed in some form in the pre-70 period.

Introduction: Icon, Image, and Text in Modern Jewish Culture

In recent years, scholars of Judaism have increasingly turned to consider the relationship between Judaism and art. These studies include, but are by no means limited to, Richard Cohen's Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (California, 1998), Elliot Wolfson's Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton, 1994), Vivian Mann's Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (Cambridge, 2000), Kaiman Bland's The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations of the Jew (Princeton, 2000), and Margaret Olin's, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Nebraska, 2002). Scholarly interest in the relation between Judaism and art stems not only from a consideration of contemporary Jewish artistic expression, but perhaps even more fundamentally from an explicit or implicit reaction to nineteenth-century European musings on this relation. Particularly in the GermanJewish context, the question of Judaism's relation to art was paramount, not only within internal Jewish debates about the meanings of modern Jewish identity but also in conversations, between Jews and nonJews alike, about Judaism's compatibility with modernity in particular and the history of western civilization more generally. Contemporary scholarly attempts to retrieve strands of pre-modern Jewish theological and philosophical affirmations of vision and visuality, such as Bland's, Mann's and Wolfson's, mentioned above, are themselves predicated on the nineteenth and twentieth-century scholarly denials of visuality in Jewish thought and culture, as is Richard Cohen's attempt to detail Jewish interaction with the visual arts and the role of visual

Dybbuk and Maggid: Two Cultural Patterned of Altered Consciousness in Judaism

For many years scholars of Judaism were reluctant to employ the analytic tools distilled in anthropology for studying Jewish culture. One reason for this reluctance was that the classical ethnographic field, consisting of a small-scale tribal society with no written tradition, did not appear pertinent to the study of the text-informed “great tradition“ of Judaism. In addition, the notion of comparative research implicit in most anthropological studies appeared dubious to many scholars of Judaism, who were alarmed by the sweeping, methodologically unfounded comparisons evident in the treatment of biblical material by such precursors of modern anthropology as Robertson Smith and Frazer.1 This methodological consideration was augmented by an emotional unwillingness to equate the “primitive’ religious systems of “savage’ societies with concepts and rituals pertaining to the oldest monotheistic religion.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz: Liberating Israel from the Occupied Territories

Dr. Yeshayahu Leibowitz is a well-known scholar of Judaism and philosophy, and the former editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica. Born in 1903 in Riga, he holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry and an M.D., and taught on the science faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for many years. After his retirement, the Hebrew University's Department of Philosophy invited him to lead advanced seminars on various topics. Professor Leibowitz was interviewed for the Journal by John P. Egan in Jerusalem on 15 September 1985.