Goy : Israel's multiple others and the birth of the gentile

445 Pages·2018·4.807 MB·English

by  Adi Ophir, Ishay Rosen-Zvi

Title Pages
Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the
Gentile
Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198744900
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198744900.001.0001
Title Pages
Adi Ophir
Ishay Rosen-Zvi
(p.i) Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions
(p.ii) Oxford Studies in the Abrahamic Religions
(p.iii) Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile
General Editors
Adam J. Silverstein Guy G. Stroumsa
This series consists of scholarly monographs and other volumes at the cutting
edge of the study of Abrahamic religions. The increase in intellectual interest in
the comparative approach to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reflects the
striking surge in the importance of religious traditions and patterns of thought
and behavior in the twenty-first century, at the global level. While this
importance is easy to detect, it remains to be identified clearly and analyzed
from a comparative perspective. Our existing scholarly apparatus is not always
adequate in attempting to understand precisely the nature of similarities and
differences between the monotheistic religions, and the transformations of their
“family resemblances” in different cultural and historical contexts.
The works in the series are devoted to the study of how “Abrahamic” traditions
mix, blend, disintegrate, rebuild, clash, and impact upon one another, usually in
polemical contexts, but also, often, in odd, yet persistent ways of interaction,
reflecting the symbiosis between them.
Titles in the series include:
Title Pages
The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity
Guy G. Stroumsa
Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt
A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Times
Elisha Russ-Fishbane
Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature
Moshe Blidstein
Islam and its Past
Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qur’an
Edited by Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook
Veiling Esther, Unveiling Her Story
The Reception of a Biblical Book in Islamic Lands
Adam J. Silverstein
(p.iv)
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Acknowledgments
Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the
Gentile
Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198744900
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198744900.001.0001
(p.v) Acknowledgments
Adi Ophir
Ishay Rosen-Zvi
Writing this book was a long, arduous, and joyful process, during which our
friendship grew as our research expanded. We have never stopped learning from
each other and never been satisfied with the conventional division of labor
between two scholars coming from different disciplinary and, to some extent,
cultural backgrounds. Each subsection in the book was rewritten several times,
by both of us, and each phase of this rewriting bore the fruits of our
disagreements, misunderstandings, and coming to terms with the other’s
perspective. Only the footnotes, which are mostly dedicated to our polemic
accounts of the history of research on a variety of issues related to our
argument, bear witness to the differences in our expertise, intellectual interests,
and temperament.
This book emerged from a classic havruta (the study of text in tandem) of the
two authors at the Shalom Hartman Institute in 2007, where both of us were
fellows at the time. It could not have been conceived without the intellectual
atmosphere at Hartman, a place where critical thinking constantly blends with
the study of corpora of Jewish thought from all periods, and Judaic Studies are
nourished by multiple currents of humanistic scholarship and driven by a
genuine effort to understand and respond to the historical present. We are
indebted to the friendly and constructive criticism of our colleagues at the
Hartman Institute with whom we shared many earlier drafts of various parts of
this book, as well as the toil and troubles of writing them: Menachem Fisch,
Moshe Halbertal, Israel Knhol, Menachem Lorberboim, Yair Lorberboim, Shlomo
Naeh, Vered Noam, Aharon Shemesh, Adiel Shremer, and Dror Yinon.
Acknowledgments
Daniel Boyarin and Paula Fredriksen offered us invaluable criticism of our thesis
on Paul, as well as support and encouragement at crucial phases of this long
process. During the many years of writing this book we benefited from the
scholarship and wisdom of many friends and colleagues in Israel and the U.S.,
who commented on earlier drafts of some of this book’s chapters and provided
invaluable criticism and suggestion: Êtienne Balibar, Peter Brown, Yael Fisch,
Yair Furstenburg, Christine Hayes, Menahem Kahana, Assaf Rosen-Zvi, Peter
Tomson, Ann Stoler, Moulie Vidas, and Azzan Yadin-Israel.
Invaluable comments from our reviewer at Oxford University Press compelled us
to make some important revisions to the scope of our argument, clarify it, and
strengthen some of its more speculative points.
Ishay would like to thank the students at the Department of Jewish Philosophy
and Talmud at Tel-Aviv University, who, over the years, participated in his
seminars on “goyim” in various ancient Jewish texts. Adi would like to thank the
Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv (p.vi)
University and The Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, two
centers of interdisciplinary work in the humanities, where scholarship in
continental philosophy and political theory can naturally include a close reading
of ancient Jewish texts.
We are especially grateful for the professional editing of Amit Gvaryahu, who
also translated some key passages from the Hebrew, and provided us with
numerous critical comments that forced us to clarify cumbersome passages and
to rethink some of our arguments. Dikla Bytner was a superb, overqualified
research assistant, whose contribution was never merely technical. Maya Rosen
offered careful, professional assistance at the last phase of proofreading, and
prepared the book’s indexes. All this invaluable assistance was generously
supported by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (no. 580/13).
Several parts of this book were published as articles in Dine Israel, The Jewish
Quarterly Review, The Journal for the Study of Judaism, as well as in Myth,
Mysticism and Ritual: A Festschrift for Ithamar Gruenwald (Tel-Aviv, 2014) and
Talmudic Transgressions: Encounters with Daniel Boyarin (Leiden, 2017) (for
details see Bibliography). None of these texts was reprinted here; each has been
substantially revised and rewritten to become an integral part of this book.
Our beloved partners, Ariella Azoulay and Yael Sternhell, helped us for many
years to cope with our gentile obsession, to think through all the wild
hypotheses we tested on them, and to place the gentile in the context of the
many other kinds of others who deserve our attention. They provided the love
and support without which this endeavor could not have been possible.
Introduction
Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the
Gentile
Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi
Print publication date: 2018
Print ISBN-13: 9780198744900
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198744900.001.0001
Introduction
Adi Ophir
Ishay Rosen-Zvi
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198744900.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
Much scholarship has been devoted to Jewish relations with and attitudes
toward gentiles in different periods. This book explores the category itself and
its formation. The concept of the goy divides humanity in a binary manner,
separating Jews from all non-Jews, and lumping the latter together into one
group. This division also assumes, tacitly or explicitly, God, His Law, and His
relation to one people. Such naming, partition, and structure is anything but
self-evident, and was not always a part of the thinking patterns and discursive
practices of Jews. Where did it come from? What forces made it possible? How
and why did it overcome alternative categorizations? What happened to other
discursive formations once the Jew/goy opposition won the day? This
introduction documents the scholarly lacuna, presents the novel perspective,
details the questions asked, and defines the various tools—historical,
philological, and philosophical—used to tackle them.
Keywords:   Jew-goy, binary distinctions, basic concept, historicity, figure, genealogy, typology of
otherness
Rabbi Yehuda says: A man should say three blessings every day: Blessed is
He who has not made me a gentile (goy). Blessed is He who has not made
me an ignoramus. Blessed is He who has not made me a woman. A gentile,
for it says “all gentiles are nothing to Him, as naught and vanity they count
toward Him” (Isa 40:17). An ignoramus, for there is no ignoramus fearful
of sin. A woman, for women are not obligated in the commandments.
Introduction
t. Ber. 6:181
Rabbi Yehuda, son of Ilai, a disciple of Rabbi Akiva, lived in the Galilee during
the second half of the second century CE. His statements are recorded in the
Mishnah more often than those of any other early rabbi. The statement above
was canonized and incorporated into the daily morning prayers in a rather early
stage of its institutionalization, as attested in the earliest prayer books.2 A
Jewish man must say these words every day upon waking, all year round. No text
in the early tradition contests or apologizes for these blessings,3 and they are
still recited each morning by Orthodox Jewish men (and, mutatis mutandis, by
many women as well).4
Rabbi Yehuda describes the male Jew by three simple negations: he is not
ignorant, he is not a woman, and he is not a goy. These negations are ascribed to
the creative power of God—the source and originator of all three distinctions.
Jewish men, defined in contradistinction to women, ignoramuses, and goyim, are
called to acknowledge their separation, accept their difference as (p.2) fact,
understand their position as destiny, and thank God for all the advantages their
separateness provides. Each separation is followed by an explanation: the
exclusion of women and ignoramuses is justified in terms of their relation to the
law. In the case of the gentile, however, no such argument is offered. Instead, R.
Yehuda invokes a verse from Isaiah (40:17) that presents all gentiles as “nothing
… naught, and vanity” with respect to God (“Him”).
In context, the verse describes the smallness of all nations, Israel included, in
the face of God, the Lord of the universe.5 From His point of view, the prophet
argues, no nation, mighty as it may be, can challenge Him; they are nothing but
“a drop of a bucket … counted as the small dust of the balance” (40:15). But
goyim, “nations” in Biblical Hebrew, are transformed in Rabbi Yehuda’s
benediction, according to the rabbinic dialect,6 into individual non-Jews.7 The
biblical distinction between creator and creatures, and the underlying
ontological opposition between being and nothingness, are thus transformed
into a distinction, no less sharp, between Jews and all others.
When did this transformation happen and what was its significance? When did
Yehudim or Ioudaioi start looking at other goyim or ethnē as gentiles and how
can we know this? Let us look at the image on the cover of this book. It is a
fresco, one of about sixty, from the synagogue in the town of Dura-Europos, on
the east bank of the Euphrates, in what today is south-east Syria. More than half
of these frescoes were recovered intact, and all of them narrate various episodes
from the Hebrew Bible. This was an unprecedented and spectacular find (as far
as we know, synagogues were not covered with wall paintings again until the
seventeenth century). But the synagogue had a very short career: it was
Introduction
inaugurated under Roman rule in 245 ce,8 and ransacked and abandoned in the
Sasanian conquest of 256.
Two groups of men are depicted in this image, readily distinguishable by their
garb. On the left, we see men in standard Greek attire (chiton and himation). On
the right, a man sits on a dais or a platform, surrounded by a few other (p.3)
figures, all dressed in Persian-style clothing. In between is a reclining servant
handing a scroll to or receiving it from the king. The king is Ahasuerus (Xerxes),
and the woman sitting solemnly next to him is Esther. The two names are
inscribed in Aramaic on the wall. Both are enthroned and surrounded by two
courtiers, probably of different ranks, and a maidservant. The scene is clearly
taken from the biblical book of Esther, but the specific episode is much
debated.9
The panel itself, however, is wider than what can be shown on the cover. It is
exceptionally large and exceptionally realistic.10 It is also centrally located,
placed at the left of the ark which houses the Torah, the focal point of the entire
synagogue.11 On the other side of the ark is a fresco of Moses being rescued
from the Nile; both panels are equal in size and similar in structure.12
The left side of the panel depicts another episode, in which a bare-footed Haman
leads Mordechai in a triumph. Mordechai (also identified by an inscription) is
riding a royal horse, following Esther 6:11. At the center of the panel, placed
exactly in the middle between these two biblical scenes are the four figures
dressed like Hellenistic aristocrats. Who are they? To which of the scenes are
they related? Why do they deserve such a central place? The fact that they raise
their hands with a Roman gesture of acclamation has led scholars to identify
them with part of Mordechai’s procession.13 They may however also depict
Esther 8:15: “and the city of Shushan rejoiced and was glad.”14 This might
connect them to the scene on the right in which the news of victory and rescue
are delivered. Or, being right in the middle, perhaps they may be attached to
both scenes. Be that as it may, the scholarly consensus is that these are Jews,
perhaps (p.4) even representing “the House of Israel.”15 This would explain
their central place in the panel. Their Greek attire differentiates them from the
other figures in the panel, all dressed in various Persian clothes.16 Indeed, it is
they who turn the narrative, with both its left and right scenes, from a court
affair to a national drama of divine salvation,17 with which the Jews in third-
century Dura, living under constant threat of Persian invasion, could easily
identify.18
It is tempting to read this scene as a visual representation of the distinction
between (individual) Jews and others, perhaps the earliest existing such
representation. But the distinction between Jews and Persians is not the only
social division that the panel depicts. Both Mordechai and Esther, the heroes of
the biblical story, are dressed as Persian aristocrats,19 while Haman is dressed
Introduction
as a stable boy.20 The distinction between servants and masters is no less
present than the distinction between Jews and Persians.21 While the ethnic
distinction of the Jews is visible and stands in contrast to other identifiable
groups, the (p.5) fresco presents it as neither abstract (the non-Jews are
specifically Persians) nor encompassing (the class distinction crosses it and is
not contained within it).
Did the painter know he was juxtaposing Jews and gentiles?22 Did he mitigate
the contrast for the sake of the realism of the Persian court? Did he have a
concept of gentiles to begin with? The visual evidence is far from conclusive, but
a careful examination of earlier and contemporary textual sources might allow
us to argue that it may well be the case that the painter in Dura-Europos, like
the people who gathered in the decorated synagogue he embellished, did not
share Rabbi Yehuda’s Jew/goy discourse and could not think of, let alone draw,
gentiles. Persians were not “gentiles,” even though they were clearly social and
maybe even national Others. The ethnic distinction could be visually underlined
without the abstraction the concept of “gentile” requires.
The Jewish community in Dura, though clearly affluent, was small and
peripheral. Its self-understanding as a distinct community, however, was quite
typical. Like many Judeans before them, they saw themselves separated, without
having a general concept of “gentiles” to separate from. And yet by the end of
the second century CE, slightly before the synagogue was built, it became
inconceivable for a certain group of Jews (as we should probably call them at
this stage)23 living in Roman Palestine to reflect on their distinction and
separateness without relying heavily on a binary opposition between themselves
and all others, namely gentiles.
The fact that we cannot determine with any certainty whether or not the Jews of
Dura shared the concept of the gentile used by the early rabbis is not just
because our knowledge of that city and period is limited.24 It is precisely what
we do know about the concept of the gentile itself that prevents any conclusive
assertion. Even if the painter of our fresco had conceived of Persians as
“gentiles” in the full rabbinic sense of this term, the fresco could not depict it.
Goy, like “Israelite,” was a faceless, textual figure with few visual or material
distinguishing marks. The figures dressed in himatia might have been Roman
aristocrats, but they are Jews because the biblical text, whether read or
recounted, and to which the paintings refer, tells us so.25
Taken together, Rabbi Yehuda’s blessings and the fresco from Dura encapsulate
our book’s project. First, to reconstruct the transformation of “gentile” from
“people” to “non-Jew.” And second, to analyze the way this transformation, in
(p.6) its specificity, was not simply the product of lived experience but one of
its conditions. We wish to recover the discursive framework that naturalized the
radical alterity of the gentile and its binary opposition to the Jew, and made it
Introduction
into a fact of life. This we can do only by summoning a large body of ancient
texts and reading them with an updated theory of discourse. It is for this reason
that the following introduction is evenly occupied with the corpus discussed and
theories used in this book.
A Surprising Lacuna
The shift in the meaning of the term goy did not happen overnight; the goy has a
history, which, surprisingly, has never been studied. Since the rise of
Wissenschaft des Judenthums over two hundred years ago, almost every
category in the vast corpus of ancient Hebrew writings has been historicized,
with the glaring exception of (what eventually became) the gentile.
When did the goy come into being? What categories preceded it to mark the non-
Israelite and, later, the non-Judean and non-Jew? How did the appearance of the
goy effect the rules and techniques of separation of Jews from non-Jews? How
did it modify the category of the Jew? Despite the centrality of the category of
the goy, which has been present in Jewish thought and practice in various forms
and shapes from ancient times to the present, these questions have not been
asked. Many have studied Jewish relations with and attitudes towards gentiles,
but there has been no study of the emergence and development of “the gentile”
as a discursive category that gave rise to these relations and attitudes in the
first place.
None of the studies on Jews and gentiles in antiquity have attempted to give the
goy the history it deserves. In his formative study, The Beginnings of Jewishness,
Shaye Cohen historicizes the category of the Yehudi/Ioudaios and traces its
transformations from the ethnic “Judean” to the cultural-religious “Jew.”26 He,
however, avoids historicizing the Jew’s “other,” the gentile. Gary Porton offers a
textual study of goyim in Tannaitic literature, but he treats the term itself as
designating a natural kind, a given.27 Sacha Stern offers a thorough and critical
study of the function of non-Jews in forming Jewish identity in rabbinic
literature.28 But his discussion similarly concentrates exclusively on attitudes
towards goyim, and so the category itself is neither historicized nor (p.7)
problematized. Christine Hayes offers a systematic, diachronic analysis of
gentile impurity and different conceptualizations of separation underlying purity
laws,29 without, however, questioning the very category of the gentile, even
when dealing with biblical and other pre-rabbinic sources. Eric Gruen offers a
thorough study of how ancient authors understood the cultures of their “others.”
But when writing about Jews’ relations to their others, he simply notes in
passing that “the division of the world between Jew and gentile has its roots in
the Bible.”30 These are all excellent and careful studies, written from different
theoretical perspectives with a variety of interests and motivations. But the
reader is left to wonder: why this shared lacuna? It is as if the unusual