Defining Jewish Difference
From Antiquity to the Present

Berkowitz shows that interpretation of Leviticus 18:3 provides an essential backdrop for today's conversations about Jewish assimilation and minority identity.

Beth A. Berkowitz (Author)

9781107663619, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 May 2014

290 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

'Berkowitz's chapters are a wellspring of information on defining Jewish identity from epochs of Jewish life, culled mainly from scriptural verses as interpreted in traditional rabbinic sources … this volume is a welcome and needed repository of classic rabbinic legal discussion, disputation, and decisions concerning keeping Judaism and maintaining Jewish survival in the proximity of adaptation and assimilation … this book, with its erudite scholarship, is a worthwhile read.' The Catholic Biblical Quarterly

This book traces the interpretive career of Leviticus 18:3, a verse that forbids Israel from imitating its neighbors. Beth A. Berkowitz shows that ancient, medieval and modern exegesis of this verse provides an essential backdrop for today's conversations about Jewish assimilation and minority identity more generally. The story of Jewishness that this book tells may surprise many modern readers for whom religious identity revolves around ritual and worship. In Leviticus 18:3's story of Jewishness, sexual practice and cultural habits instead loom large. The readings in this book are on a micro-level, but their implications are far-ranging: Berkowitz transforms both our notion of Bible-reading and our sense of how Jews have defined Jewishness.

1. Introduction: law, identity, and Leviticus 18:3
2. The question of Israelite distinctiveness: paradigms of separatism in Leviticus 18:3
3. Allegory and ambiguity: Jewish identity in Philo's De Congressu
4. A narrative of neighbors: rethinking universalism and particularism in patristic and rabbinic writings
5. The limits of 'their laws' in midrash halakhah
6. A short history of the people of Israel from the patriarchs to the Messiah: constructions of Jewish difference in Leviticus rabbah
7. Syncretism and anti-syncretism in the Babylonian Talmud
8. The judaization of reason: the Tosafists, Nissim Gerondi, and Joseph Colon
9. Women's wear and men's suits: Ovadiah Yosef's and Moshe Feinstein's discourses of Jewishness
10. Conclusion: an 'upside-down people'?

Subject Areas: Judaism [HRJ], Biblical studies & exegesis [HRCG]