#boyarin

A boyar was a member of the highest rank of the feudal Bulgarian, Kievan, Moscovian, Wallachian and Moldavian and later, Romanian aristocracies, second only to the ruling princes, from the 10th century to the 17th century.

Boyarin. 1999.

One of the things that struck me as interesting about this week’s reading is its connection to The Slayers of Moses by Susan A. Handelman.  One of the things that Boyarin talks about is how heresy is a concept that became necessary in order to distinguish between Christianity and Judaism, and the process of creating the idea of heresy created a religion.  In other words, Christianity is a religion, whereas Judaism isn’t (or both is and isn’t, as Boyarin sometimes talks about).  To describe this building of a religion, Boyarin uses many interesting phrases to describe how it came about.  For instance, on page 11, he describes it as “religion’s disembedding.”  On the next page, he says, “In other words, when Christianity separated religious belief and practice from Romanitas, cult from culture, Judaism as a religion came into the world.”  The idea of “disembedding,” and the idea of “separating religious belief and practice,” remind me very much of when Handelman discusses the kind of - one might call it - disembedding of the metaphor, from the word.  That is, she talks about how there is a fundamental metaphoricity of words for Rabbinic thought that Greek thought literalizes (page 29 of The Slayers of Moses).  Though Boyarin isn’t talking about words, he is talking about a separation of belief and practice, whereas practice was once inherently belief; likewise, Handelman is talking about how Aristotle “reoriented the forms of being to the forms of assertion...” (7).  So, according to Boyarin, doing was once believing, and then Christianity comes along and separates doing from belief.  Likewise, the word was being, and then Aristotle came along and separated being and assertion towards being.  It’s interesting to me that two forms of separation are taking place. One other thing that I wanted to add has to do with how amazing it was to me that Boyarin brings up the importance of heresy in terms of being the item that arrives in order for Christianity to distinguish itself from Judaism.  I had never thought of heresy that way before.  That is, perhaps, because the idea of making divisions seems so innocuous at first, and there is a kind of horror at the realization that something that was created to understand where certain divisions begin and end becomes such a monster later on.  In any case, it reminds me of a kind of reverse sexuation graph, where - instead of desiring to see the similarities of oneself in another - one desires to see all the items that are not remotely connected to one in another (no semblance of oneself).  As Boyarin describes, crucifying the Logos - giving it up to the Christians - creates “a perfect mirror in which the Rabbis construct (as it were) Christianity, while the Christian writers, such as Justin, construct (as it were) Judaism” (31).  There is a potential mutual desire to create these divisions; though, this is of course only necessary because they share so many similarities.  And this is, perhaps, why something so huge, such as splitting belief and practice, has to occur - because they share too many similarities.  If there has to be SOME SORT of difference, any sort of difference, when dealing with something so similar, then a radical change in the understanding of belief (or word) has to take place.

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The next event of the Jewish Studies Program initiative will be the first Ithaca Yiddish Theater Festival on September 8-10, to be held at Cornell and Ithaca College. For more information, email [email protected].

One of those histories, “A Fire Burns in Kotsk,” has just been translated from Yiddish for the first time by Jonathan Boyarin, the Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Jewish Studies and professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. The historical narrative, which weaves together tales told in Unger’s family with an account of one of the most controversial Hasidic dynasties in Poland, originally was published in Buenos Aires in 1949.

For American Jewish parents trying to assimilate, it became imperative to find their children partners who would a) produce more Jews, and b) afford them a “pleasant, secure, respectable, class-appropriate domesticity,” Boyarin says. “To me this phrase’s natural home is in a parent’s mouth, saying to a daughter, ‘Why don’t you find a nice Jewish boy?’”