Long before ethnicity became the focus of studying neglected groups and cultures—the black, Judaic, Chicano, and feminist counterpart to “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”—leading intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, in feminist studies; Harry A. Wolfson, in Judaism as part of the Western philosophical tradition; Eugene Genovese and John Hope Franklin, in Afro-American studies; and their equals in Hispanic literature and philosophy, all commanded attention. They did not have to demand it. They earned a hearing by the power of intellect, not politics.
No threats of race riots created Genovese’s chair at Rochester, and no affirmative action program opened doors for John Hope Franklin, who rightly would not be patronized. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex made its impact upon the course of learning; so did the work of Rosaldo in anthropology, and that of Helen H. Vendler in poetry and literature. The academy accorded the new humanities and the Catholics, blacks, women, and Jews who showed up on the scene in the early 1950’s a serious, if not cordial, hearing. In other words, matters played themselves out. Ideas registered, special claims did not.
In the next generation, from the late 1960’s onward, quite different models defined the role of the new departments and courses. Feminism became male-bashing; black studies degenerated into vile bigotry against everybody; and Jewish studies became an arena for special pleading. As a result, an entire generation of ordinary Americans grew up with well-grounded suspicion and contempt for once honorable academic fields, such as Afro-American history, the study of Judaism, women’s studies, and the various other corners of the academy that today subject themselves to contempt and derision because of the vacuous character of their courses. “Multiculturalism” ought to have opened doors to everybody, but ended up closing the minds of anybody reached by these fields. Mediocre women, blacks, and Jews practicing women’s, black, and Jewish studies, who could never have made their way in the scholarly world if held to the standards elsewhere governing academia, call themselves professors; others do so only with a snicker. They’re here, they’re queer, we’re all used to it—and no one cares. The rigorous parts of the curriculum—math, natural science, engineering, logic, for instance—go forward untouched by charlatanism, and, as a matter of fact, only women study women’s physics.
Take the traditional study of Judaism, for example, which came after the establishment of the study of religion in general. First came Christianity, with its ancillary subjects. Biblical Studies and philosophy of religion and missiology. Then came a specific religion other than Christianity, and in many colleges and universities in the early 1960’s, it was Judaism. Since few endowments for the subject were available at that time, the departments made a commitment of precious resources, which represented a solemn judgment indeed. For until universities concluded that their cultural horizons encompassed the religious activities of humanity, Judaism would hardly have been a candidate for inclusion within the curriculum.
Who made the decision, within the departments of Religious Studies, to include Judaism? hi many cases the field was the creation of Protestant clergy, who moved from the college chaplaincy to chairmanships of academic departments, or who did not even move out of the chaplaincy when they took on the work of organizing departments. In other cases, philosophers of religion broadened their horizons. The founders of Religious Studies, encompassing Judaism, exemplify the breadth of sympathy among the framers of American civilization: white, mostly male Protestants, generally deriving from old American families, many originating in liberal Protestant seminaries, who so defined a field as to accommodate everybody and in theory exclude nobody. They were truly multicultural in sympathy and intent.
Why did they choose to study a religion other than Christianity? Since we deal with a phenomenon of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, we do well to remember the political tasks of the universities of that time: to prepare young Americans for the struggle against communism, to provide the intellectual foundations for this country’s encounter with world polities. Isolationist before World War II, Americans had to learn how to deal with difference, to negotiate diversity on a world scale. Intellectually quiescent and hardly the center of world science and learning before World War II, Americans had to build upon the remarkable achievements in natural science and social science, to retool in engineering, and to reshape the humanities into a medium conducive to our country’s encounter with its allies and potential allies throughout the world. Within that political setting, the academy opened its doors to formerly excluded groups, Jews standing first in line at what they conceived to be the prestigious universities; Catholics aspiring to draw their parochial system of higher education into the mainstream.
The founders of Religious Studies wanted Judaism to form the centerpiece for the study of religion in general, to reshape the field. They had in mind not believers celebrating the faith for believers (rabbis interrogating young Jews, as they commonly did in the 1950’s, on why they ate pork or dated Gentiles) but qualified scholars, Jewish or Gentile, engaging students in the study of religion in general. And they believed Judaism could be a topic of sustained analytical interest, so that studying Judaism under diverse circumstances would be challenged by a new paradigm and a fresh episteme.
Twenty years after the academy had already opened the doors to these new disciplines, ethnic studies showed up on campus with their special pleading, their appeals to “our crowd,” and their explicitly exclusionary program: black dorms, black professors teaching black students to hate whites, especially Jews and Catholics; Jewish professors of Jewish Studies teaching Jews to fear Gentiles; man-bashing 101 (as my daughter called Women’s Studies at her college).
Religious Studies defined a discipline that encompassed Judaism. Ethnic studies, on the other hand, are inclusive topically but lack all disciplinary focus. In the former setting, a variety of data will come under study, and a variety of approaches to learning will make an appearance. In the latter model that the academy has now absorbed, all things Jewish belong together, but nothing Gentile, so that a major may comprise courses on American Jewish history. Job, and Maimonides, or six courses on the Holocaust in history, polities, and religion, and four courses on Midrash—or any other combination of matters that scarcely hold together at all.
We need not dismiss as merely self-celebratory or self-indulgent the formation of programs or departments of Judaic Studies, for when well-crafted as a meeting place for a number of coherent disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, such programs or departments may mount a strong intellectual defense of their work. But it is the simple fact that, at this time, no program or department of Jewish Studies may represent itself as disciplinary in its focus—let alone as interdisciplinary. The current programs may more accurately be classified as nondisciplinary.
In fact, while Gentile students may enroll in courses in Judaism as part of Religious Studies, and Gentile professors may well offer such courses (as they often do in “Hebrew Scriptures” and “Second Temple Judaisms”), in the new Jewish Studies programs, the ethnic definition of the subject encompasses also the practitioners. As Bernard D. Cooperman notes in his essay “Jewish Studies and Jewish Identity,” enrollments in Jewish Studies courses arc low and getting lower: “Certainly we arc failing to attract Gentiles to our courses.” In disciplinary courses in Religious Studies, it is common for far more than half the students to derive from Christian or other Gentile origins. The prevailing premise in Jewish Studies is that here is where “we” get to study ourselves. Cooperman is explicit on the goals: “Jewish Studies programs aim at giving students the ability to participate in Jewish culture and contribute to it.” A statement along those same lines on behalf of “Christian Studies” would exclude all but practicing Christians and therefore be unacceptable. So the difference between Jewish Studies and the traditional academic study of Judaism, the religion, registers keenly. Here is multiculturalism that in fact ghettoizes; it is monoculturalism. The counterpart to this is the black professor who teaches his opinion but offers nothing even remotely resembling scholarship. These “multiculturalists” are anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-everybody else and can only get students by making Black Studies a requirement.
“The salient characteristic of modern Jewish Studies,” Cooperman continues, “is an intense and passionate effort to discover and delineate an authentic and independent Jewish society and culture through the ages. The field of Jewish studies assumes that, no matter how much Jews took from surrounding civilizations, they also addressed Jewish concerns in the terminological, conceptual, and often institutional vocabulary of the Jewish past. Demarcating the contours of this ‘independent authenticity’ is the cardinal task of Jewish Studies today.”
The contrast is clear between the terms and issues stressed by Cooperman and those that would characterize a corresponding statement about the traditional academic study of Judaism. The ethnic model for Jewish Studies came on the scene about a decade and a half after departments of Religious Studies had included Judaism. How come? The powerful emotions generated by the 1967 war in the Middle East; the discovery of the Judaism of the Holocaust that has predominated to the present and reached a climax in America with the Holocaust Museum movement in every Jewish community in the country; the focus on Israeli politics—these phenomena deeply affected how Jews and Judaism were represented on campus. ‘The highly intellectual, profoundly Protestant conception of religion and culture as masters of conviction, intellectual consequence, reflection and criticism, now met competition from an other-than-intellectual rendering of Jewish existence (here the difference between Judaic religion and Jewish ethnicity is wholly obscured). Courses on the Holocaust attracted many more students than courses on Judaism. Ethnic history, seen as not only continuous but consequential for personal identification and conviction, enjoyed far more interest than those in the classical writings of Judaism. For the natural constituency of both types of courses, Jewish students themselves, brought to the curriculum these same powerful convictions on the self-evidence of the ethnic and the dispensability of the religious that animated the community at large.
Who paid? Blacks got their slots through threats and intimidation; Jews, on the other hand, bought their way in. Jewish philanthropists, likewise secular to the core, remarkably indifferent to the provisions of chairs in departments of Religious Studies for the traditional study of Judaism, brought millions of dollars in endowments for the study of the Holocaust, Jewish history leading up to the Holocaust, Israeli literature, Hebrew as spoken in the state of Israel (but not as written in the classics), and the study of the Jews as an ethnic group here, there, and everywhere. Not only could the disciplinary study of Judaism not compete, but departments of Religious Studies themselves, earlier prepared to use precious university-funded positions for Judaism, now accommodated the new ethnic definition of Jewish Studies. The externally funded positions would now sustain courses on the Jews that in no way pretended to compare with courses on Christianity or Buddhism or Islam in those same departments.
Yale’s Department of Religious Studies, its home for Jewish Studies, has professorships in every discipline but that of religion: in history. Oriental studies, literature, but not religion. Brown University’s Department of Religious Studies offers no courses on Judaism, insisting that the Program in Judaic Studies do the work; but that program has no professor educated in the discipline of religion at all! These cases arc not extreme, but typical. The study of Judaism, in essence, is once again in I ghetto, matching the one in which it thrived before reaching the academy. When German-Jewish scholars of Judaism in the beginning of the 19th century aspired to form a university discipline and found themselves excluded, they produced outside the academy scholarship more than matching the profession’s highest standards, whether in philosophy, religion, theology, or history. American Jewish scholars of Judaism in our own day have indeed found a warm welcome within the academy, but their enclave is a wasteland.
It appears that neither the academy nor the Jews welcomed the opportunity presented by the visionaries of the 1950’s. The academy would make its peace with self-segregation, and the Jews would seek their home in an intellectual ghetto. Comprised of generalists, rich in opinions on everything but qualified by specialization in only a few things, and validated by no rigorous discipline at all, that self-segregated cell of discrete specialists found little in common in its own academic base, and nothing at all in common with the rest of the university.
Today, the academic and disciplinary study of Judaism takes place in the academy only with considerable difficulty, because the minority that values the academic calling finds itself scarcely able to compete with the sectarian and nondisciplinary study of the jews. How Judaism will be studied in the future will be dictated by whether the academy recovers its own vocation, which has been, and may once again become, the task of forming a community of shared argument, about common questions, investigated through autonomous reason, producing results bearing insight beyond all special pleading and claims of a prior consequence. But whether the academy regains what has made it whole is a question that far transcends the study of Judaism.
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