The Jewish Roots and Routes of Anthropology1

Does anthropology have “a Jewish problem”? Let us not be deceived by the fact that Mary Douglas’s “The Abominations of Leviticus” is part of the contemporary canon of mainstream anthropology, or that Barbara Myerhoff’s work has inspired and moved innovative scholars in anthropological folklore. Large numbers of American anthropologists come from Jewish families, yet very few have done any research or writing on Jews (Dominguez 1993:621-622).

Ten years after Virginia Dominguez questioned the existence of a “Jewish problem” in anthropology, the critically and ethnographically engaged study of Jews and Judaism is on the move. The rise of this new subfield has been marked by an increase in networking sessions, conference panels, and publications, as well as a host of new undergraduate courses and doctoral projects devoted to Jewish topics. Even more recently, this phenomenon has moved from the margins to the center of the discipline. In his 2002 William A. Douglass distinguished Lecture for the Society of the Anthropology of Europe, “History, Memory and Remembering,” Johannes Fabian addressed at considerable length the topic of Jewish experience. The significance of such a distinguished anthropologist shifting his focus from Africa to Jewish culture was well-received by Europeanists, was inspiring for advocates of the anthropology of Jews and judaism, and was further evidence that the study of Jewish culture has finally secured a place at the very heart of anthropology.

Despite these long overdue developments, for many who have contributed to the anthropology of Jews and Judaism, Dominguez’s question remains largely unanswered. This is because the Jewish problem in anthropology is not merely a question of culture areas, but a multifaceted discourse on anthropology’s own cultural biography. Historically, anthropology has always been of two minds when it comes to Jews and Judaism. Anthropologists have often shown a keen interest in the Jewishness of their intellectual ancestors even as they have remained cautiously ambivalent towards the study of Judaism as an ethnographic pursuit, a hesitancy resulting from unease with ethnographic subjects not contained by discrete geographic spaces (Fabian 1983:19; Boyarin 1992: 58-61).

In the abstract for a recent scholarly panel titled “A Jewish Science?” (American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, 2002), Matti Bunzl observed:

Since its modern codification…our discipline has been rumored to be a “Jewish science.” For some practitioners and commentators, this has been a cause for anthropology’s celebration, while others have commented on the discipline’s purported Jewishness with a certain degree of skepticism and even disdain. Whether partisan or seemingly objective, self-consciously philosemitic or the function of casual anti-Semitism, the persistent discourse on anthropology’s Jewishness has rarely taken the form of sustained critical engagement. Instead, it has been confined to such informal settings as conference gossip, hallway conversations, and graduate seminars (Bunzl 2002:40)

Picking up where Dominguez left off, Bunzl argues that the Jewish problem exists as a “persistent discourse” on the backstage of anthropological practice. What remains to be scrutinized of anthropology’s “Jewish problem” is not the exclusion of Jews and Judaism from the list of viable ethnographic topics, but the absence of critical debate on exactly how anthropology treats the Jewishness in its own history. What I have often perceived as a kindly fascination with the Jewish identity of anthropologists continues to be expressed, even as the ethnographic base on Jewish culture pushes towards a critical mass. Accordingly, in this paper I address the question of how anthropology thinks about the Jewishness of anthropologists. How does anthropology inquire after and discuss the Jewishness of its ancestors? Is the idea of a “Jewish identity” historically and theoretically sound, and is it relevant to the question of anthropology’s Jewish roots? What insights can the ethnography of Jews and Judaism offer the history of anthropology, both in its informal and professional venues?

Since the publication of Jack Kugelmas’ The Miracle of Intervale Avenue (1986) and Jonathan Boyarin’s Polish Jews in Paris (1991), key themes of global disjuncture, cultural contingency and social memory have emerged from the anthropology of Jews and Judaism. Synagogues became starting points for ethnographies of Jewish identity construction and post-Holocaust discourse, rather than static containers of textually predetermined ritual practice. The late 1980s also brought about a new critical engagement with questions of Jewishness and power (Biale 1986). Anthropologists began to deconstruct Ashkenazi, Zionist and Jewish hegemonies and to question how these specific perspectives frame broader theoretical concerns (Dominguez 1989; Kugelmas and Shandler 1989; Webber 1992). Even more importantly, claims to the historicity and authenticity of Jewish practice began to be theorized as situated arguments made meaningful in social context-cultural discourses to be described, analyzed and, when appropriate, contested (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1992; Katriel 1997). By the early 1990s, even the boundary between the Jewishness of the anthropologist and the practice of anthropology had entered the discourse of the discipline (Orlove 1997; Behar 1996).

Within the framework of these general themes, several texts have emerged more recently as key reference points for a new subdiscipline. Boyarin’s reflexive essay on anthropology, modernity and Jewish contingency “Waiting for A Jew” (1986), reissued in his collection Thinking in Jewish (1996), has come to stand above all other works as the iconic starting point for general theoretical considerations of Jewish community. Karen Brodkin’s How Jews became White Folksand What that says about Race in America (1998) has, likewise, inaugurated a new interest in the historical and ethnographic intersections of Jewishness, race and cultural citizenship. Whereas Moshe Shokeid’s ethnography of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, A Gay Synagogue in New York (1995), has suggested new directions in the ethnography of Jewishness and gender, Jonathan Webber’s essay “The Future of Auschwitz” (1992) has established a set of general questions taken up by ethnographers of post-Holocaust memory and representation in the new Europe. Finally, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s Destination Culture (1998) has provided a framework for critical ethnographies of Jewish exhibitions, museums and material culture.

Even when seen through the limited scope of anthropological works published in English, it is possible to argue that these key texts now shape-or at the very least influence-a new generation of fieldwork ethnographers whose scholarship has just recently begun to appear.2

Despite these developments, the questions remains as to how these developments can redress the reticence that Bunzl described in the abstract for “A Jewish Science?” How can the theoretical issues in the new anthropology of Jews and judaism be deployed to engage in a “sustained critical engagement” with anthropology’s Jewishness?

Taking my cue from these recent thematic developments, and to contribute to that broad effort at excising a stagnant view of Jewishness from the habitus of anthropology, I offer a close reading of the Jewishness of two anthropologists: Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908) and Sol Tax (1907-1995). Although not the anthropologists whose Jewishness is most often discussed-more attention has been paid to the American school, in particular Boaz (Frank 1997)-both Levi-Strauss and Tax are inspiring figures in the history of anthropology. Moreover, I choose them as starting points in a meta- discussion of anthropological ethnicity because each left behind highly accessible records of their own thoughts on Jewishness. Levi- Strauss participated in a detailed set of interviews with French journalist Didier Eribon that are widely available in French and English (Eribon 1988). Tax, by contrast, left behind a record of his thoughts on Jewishness in both his personal papers and his publications. Taking advantage of these rich resources, George Stocking has recently published a thorough account of Tax’s Jewishness (Stocking 2000).

Despite their abundance, ethnographic sources on the Jewishness of anthropologists are most often ignored. Rather than seeking out and interpreting the details of an anthropologist’s Jewishness in documents or interviews, the discipline has grown accustomed to accepting scholarly ruminations on Judaism as if they were based in ethnographic authority. Stanley Diamond’s intriguing and oft-cited discussion of Levi-Strauss’ Jewishness is just such an example (1974). Lifting his definitions from Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1948), Diamond labels Levi-Strauss an “inauthentic” Jew, by which he means: “those who do not live to the full the condition of being Jewish, in fact deny it and attempt to escape from it” (Diamond 1974:324). Without so much as considering the barest details of Levi- Strauss’s life, Diamond then uses Sartre’s concept as a diagnostic for Levi-Strauss’ anthropology (ibid, p. 330). Despite the suggestive nuances of Dia\mond’s argument, the term “Jew” becomes a hollow signifier-a cultural term rooted in speculation, not description. The Jewishness of the anthropologist is never given ethnographic footing.

My goal in reading Eribon’s interviews and Stocking’s essay is not simply to extract the details of the anthropologists’ Judaism, but to offer each study as representative of a distinct view of the Jewishness of the anthropologist. Following the model offered by Benjamin Orlove, I read memoirs, interviews and personal reflections not as pretexts for imposing a uniform Jewish identity onto the anthropologist, but as a sources of the images, ideas and experiences of Jewishness that “surface” in the life of anthropology (Orlove 1997:20-21). Yet, I also read the manner in which the historian-biographer of anthropology imagines the form and content of those Jewish surfaces. While Eribon’s interviews generate a static conception of normative Judaism, Stocking deploys a more dynamic, grounded approach to Jewish practice. Distinguishing the two essays is the very ethnographic approach to Judaism legitimated of late as a subdiscipline in anthropology. As my readings are intended as illustrative, not exhaustive, I do not offer these two essays as evidence of a broad paradigm shift in anthropological thought on Jews and Judaism. Rather, by casting light on the critical distance between Eribon and Stocking, I take a first step towards theorizing a key topic in anthropology that has been previously “confined to…conference gossip” (Bunzl 2002:40).

In the remainder of this paper, I first offer a close reading of statements made by Levi-Strauss in his conversations with Eribon, generalizing from LeviStrauss’ comments to a broad discussion of what Jewishness means for him. Second, I examine Tax’s Judaism as presented by Stocking, focusing on the interplay between Tax’s personal files and anthropological writings. In each case, I consider how the perspective of the biographer and historian impacts the model of Jewishness that emerges from the study.

The Jewish problem in anthropology, I argue, is in fact a problem in the ethnography of the discipline. It exists as a habitual search for the Jewish roots of the anthropologist that, until recently, has eschewed an ethnographic perspective on the contingency of Jewish experience-even though that perspective has been part of the conversation with anthropology theory for decades. With this attitude, scholars attributed to the founding figures a static conception of Jewish identity, but exclude what can be generally framed as a critically informed, grounded perspective on a life lived with Judaism and anthropology: a conception of Judaism and anthropology based on ethnographic account rather than normative, transhistorical definition. I theorize this distinction as a difference between searching for the Jewish roots of anthropology and reconstructing the Jewish routes of an anthropologist. Just like other discussions of cultural identity, in the anthropology of Jewish anthropologists “assumptions of rootedness” (Clifford 1997:3) can negate and obscure both cultural and individual agency. A more dynamic view of Jewishness begins with assumptions that cultural difference is crafted out of movement, travel, and the multiple locations that constitute cultural experience. Such a view is not only more accurate, but offers a better frame for understanding the interplay between Judaism and anthropology.

As more and more ethnographic work brings to light a diverse view of Jewish practice, the tendency to invoke, even romanticize, a static conception of Jewish identity grows ever more out of sync with anthropological theory. To understand the Jewishness of the anthropologist, indeed any aspect of an anthropologist’s cultural makeup, ethnographers and historians must first retrace the routes of the anthropologist in all of its changing and often contradictory forms.

Digging for Jewish Roots

One of the most difficult scenarios to reproduce in textual form is the dynamic that unfolds when an historian searches for an anthropologist’s Jewish roots through direct interrogation of the memory and experiences of the individual. A misguided chase from the start, this type of inquiry is remarkably common in casual conversation. Eribon’s interviews with Levi-Strauss, to the extent that they reproduce this dynamic, offer an opportunity to learn how the search for Jewish roots loses its way and, ultimately, obfuscates more than it discovers.

While it is well known that Levi-Strauss is Jewish, the particulars of that Jewishness remain elusive. The portrait of Levi- Strauss that takes shape in the interviews is of an anthropologist who uses nostalgia to position himself not within, but relative to a monolithic conception of ritual-based Jewish tradition.2 Rather than commenting directly about his Jewish practice, Levi-Strauss recalls his relationship to Jewish ritual through a series of reflections on the practice of his family patriarchs, including rabbis, agnostics and antique collectors. At the same time, Levi-Strauss avoids confessing to any strong association within collective Jewish identity. Eribon’s questions about Jewishness elicit comments about high culture, citizenship, and bourgeois society. Curiously, Eribon seems unable to capitalize on these themes, attempting instead to lead Levi-Strauss to direct statements about a ritual practice or family religious tradition. Some particulars from their conversations will help to illustrate this critique.

In one exchange, for example, Levi-Strauss touches on Jewishness as he recalls his childhood: “My great-grandfather, my father’s maternal grandfather…[had] an important collection of Jewish antiques, which today are in the Cluny Museum. Various objects that passed through his hands were acquired by donors who gave them to the Louvre. The remaining things were sold when he died or were distributed among his daughters. What was left was plundered by the Germans during the Occupation” (Eribon 1988:3-4). The Jewish antiques assembled by Levi-Strauss’ great grandfather, Isaac Strauss (1806 – 1888) are widely recognized as the first privately held collection of Jewish ritual objects to have been exhibited as fine art (Klagsbald 1981; Feldman 1995). Rather than pursuing this connection between art and Jewishness, Eribon follows up with a question about Jewish tradition. In response, Levi-Strauss discusses the family’s memory of court life. Further on in their conversation, Levi-Strauss expresses admiration for another grandfather, the former rabbi of Versailles whom he knew very well having lived at his home during World War I. Again, Eribon asks if his childhood was structured by “a sense of Jewish tradition.” As in the first exchange, Levi-Strauss’s response emphasizes the social standing of his family, not Jewish ritual.

The dissonance between Levi-Strauss statements about Jewishness and Eribon’s search for Jewish tradition becomes clearer with each response. While conceding that his parents were raised with close ties to Jewish tradition, Levi-Strauss elaborates that they did not so much practice Jewish ritual as “talk about” Jewish holidays. He stresses the tension between the “believers” and “unbelievers” in his family-between the Jewish ritual of grandparents and the cynicism of his parents. He discusses his Bar Mitzvah, for example, less as an act of Jewishness than an instance of acquiescence to the will of the family patriarch. In his remarks, Levi-Strauss seems to be arguing that his family tradition was not religious, not anti- clerical, but had the quality of an intergenerational tension. Thus, his memory of his parents Judaism and of the family’s Jewish routines, consists both of a nostalgia for the grandfather’s orthodoxy and a fondness for his parents’ resistance to rabbinical authority.

As Cuddihy has argued, Levi-Strauss’s recollections of his grandfather, which first appeared in The Origin of Table Manners, are nostalgic episodes where Jewish ritual merges with the structures of domesticity (Cuddihy 1974:158). It is difficult, in other words, to pin down Levi-Strauss’s recollections as religion or even identity. Jewish tradition for Levi-Strauss is based on the absence of continuity. His statements about Jewishness are framed by his own poetics of exclusion. These hints of Jewish tradition that is both lost and absent in Levi-Strauss’s suggest themes of disjuncture and discontinuity similar to those found in Kafka’s recollections of childhood. Reading Kafka’s writings, Boyarin has argued that Kafka’s “pretends to no [Jewish] expertise except the sense that there once must have been something rich and living (Boyarin 1992: 94-98). Both Kafka and Levi-Strauss attribute themselves less with a Jewish identity-composed of embodied ritual knowledge and textual fluency-than a sense of nostalgia for Jewish practices absent before they could even be lost, a sense of disjuncture even from the fragmenting “deterritorialization” of their parents (Boyarin 1992: 97).

For example, when asked by Eribon how he felt when another colleague described him as “the very picture” of a Jewish intellectual, Levi-Strauss responded: “That doesn’t bother me…I admit that certain mental attitudes are perhaps more common among Jews than elsewhere…Attitudes that come from the profound feeling of belonging to a national community, all the while knowing that in the midst of this community there are people-fewer and fewer of them, I admit-who reject you. One keeps one’s sensitivity attuned” (Eribon 1988:156). This type of response is different from his evasive answers on family tradition. Here, it appears, at first, that Levi-Strauss has embraced an essentialist view of Jewishness. On closer inspection, however, his essentialism seems less certain. The “mental attitudes” he describes are less the symptom of genetic conditioning than political dis\position resulting from feelings of societal exclusion. Thus, even in a discussion of anti-Semitism Levi- Strauss denies a sense of membership in a transhistorical Jewish entity, expressing instead a Jewishness qua awareness of the state.

Subsequently, even this concept of Jewish membership as an awareness of national membership denied is qualified by other thoughts on nationalism. In reflecting on his 1984 trip to Israel as a guest of the Israel Museum, he commented: “I know myself to be Jewish, and the ancientness of the blood, as they used to say, suits me…All that is to say that there was no time when I was in Israel that I had the impression of actually touching my roots. Israel has interested me enormously, less because I find it to be a nation of distant cousins (I don’t have that kind of family feeling), than as the bridgehead held by the West in the East, the Ninth Crusade as it were” (Eribon 1988:156-157). Jewish roots exist, but they do not extend fully to Levi-Strauss.

Levi-Strauss does not deconstruct the problematic conception of the Jewish people as a national entity that has remained unified while wandering the centuries from exiled to so-called “return”-a view of Diaspora Judaism often associated with Zionist devaluation of all extra-Israeli experience (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994:40). Rather, Levi-Strauss conjures this essentialist model as part of an apparent rhetorical strategy. He does not, cannot or will not feel a primordial connection to Israel because he lacks knowledge of nearly two millennia of family ties.

For Eribon, distilling Levi-Strauss’s Judaism is a complicated matter despite the fact that relevant details are everywhere in his responses to questions about family history and his experience as a public figure. Unfortunately, Eribon keeps too strictly to the idea of a Jewish tradition maintained by the family and inherited through kinship ties to make sense of Levi-Strauss’s responses. Levi- Strauss’s answers complicate the portrait of the Jewish anthropologist that Eribon seeks. If one listens to Levi-Strauss’ testimony, however, the starting point for understanding the Jewish tradition of his grandparents is to question the family tradition of aristocratic taste. Moreover, if there is a Jewish ritual tradition in the family, it was the routine of rejecting orthodoxy. In the face of these details, Eribon’s conundrum seems to be whether to value Levi-Strauss’ recollections of Jewishness as ethnographic fact or to treat them as an interpretive red herring-to ignore them and draw his own conclusions about the Jewishness of the anthropologist.

The actual model of Jewishness that emerges from Levi-Strauss’ responses is difficult to categorize and frustrating to reduce to type. Throughout his life, Levi-Strauss’ social experience structures and is affected by two cultural identities. He is both a citizen in the metropolis and an excluded other in the nation. Jewishness has had the effect of periodically making life for him more meaningful as a cultured person, and more vexing as a social thinker. Levi-Strauss’s Jewishness has taken shape through his movement between urban centers-Paris, New York, Jerusalem.

While the difficulty in synthesizing Levi-Strauss’ responses is familiar to the ethnographer of Jews and Judaism, Eribon’s intellectual disposition can be viewed with less sympathy. Armed with a critical anthropological toolkit that warns against models of harmonious cultural identity, the ethnographer of Jews and Judaism avoids searching for Jewish roots by casting a wide net for questions and answers that might open onto a conversation of cultural experience. Jewishness for the ethnographer is not a checklist to be filled with details from kinship studies, ritual description and national membership. Ethnographically, Jewishness is a cultural process whose very terms are in flux.

In his classic essay on the tension between Jewish ethnography and conceptions of Jewishness, Jonathan Boyarin laments: “My story begins in a community, with an illusion of wholeness” (Boyarin 1996:8). It is the fracturing of his sentence into two opposing segments that makes Boyarin’s phrase such an apt description of the circumstances that elude Eribon in his work with Levi-Strauss. The ethnographer enters a Jewish community-comma-well aware that the cultural wholeness of that community or any of its members is illusory. Spatial conceptions of the community, movement in and out of a cultural location, an assumed consistency of a cultural group- in the ethnography of Jews and Judaism these elements cannot be taken for Jewish identity, but must be deployed as methodological strategy. The same strategy and awareness must apply to the cultural historian who searches for Jewishness in the life of the anthropologist.

The Jewishness File

To assume that Jewishness is consistent and singular, as Eribon has done in his interviews with Levi-Strauss, is to lose one’s footing in the conversation. It is not, I would argue, a matter of disposition towards Jews-anti-Semitism or racism. Rather, it is a heuristic flaw made fatal by nostalgia for an imagined past. Given the twin vortices of decimation and reconstitution that have given shape to localized expressions of Jewishness in the modern global system, assumptions of consistent Jewish identity can only blind ethnographers and biographers, or worse: lead them inexorably to interpretive paralysis. Eribon, ultimately, is left stumped by Levi- Strauss’s comments on his own Jewishness. Biographers of anthropology’s Jews, much like ethnographers who focus on “the rites of the tribe,” to borrow Jack Kugelmass’ phrase, must theorize culture at the intersection of Jewish rites and Jewish routes. In this gray zone where action is both familiar and unfamiliar, the ethnographer of Jews and Judaism must find a way to move closer to the Jewish subject by engaging first-hand the diversity of cultural expression that transpires in one lifetime.

Sometimes ethnographers and historians search for this gray zone and never find it, while in other instances the paradoxes of the Jewish subject present themselves to the anthropologist because their intellectual predisposition and interests enable them to see it. Reading the Jewishness of the anthropologist, as in most ethnographic problems, demands a combination of method, patience and serendipity.

While researching his essay on the life and work of Sol Tax, for example, George Stocking came upon an archive box labeled “Jewish- ness File,” a label that had apparently been assigned by Tax himself (Stocking 2000:223). Such a discovery is at once a dream and nightmare for the historian of anthropology. The self-portrait and the portrait are rarely drawn with similar lines. However, Stocking did not shy away from this tension, but made good use of it. Tax is, thus, revealed as a pivotal figure in the history of anthropology, not simply for his ethnographic work, but for the interplay between his anthropology and his Jewishness.

Similar to my reading of Eribon’s interviews with Levi-Strauss, my point in reading Stocking on Tax is less to focus on the Jewishness of Tax alone, than to cast light on how Stocking’s reading of Tax gives rise to a particular idea about Jewishness. In this case, the intellectual perspective Stocking assumes in his reading of Tax allows the conversation to advance much farther than was the case with Eribon. If Eribon exemplified the limits of an essentialist approach to the Jewishness of the anthropologist, Stocking’s essay on Tax reveals the full potential of a critically grounded, historical and ethnographic approach.

Within Tax’s history, Stocking treats “Jewish-ness” as a trajectory in its own right, neither assigning it the status of a dominant variable nor relegating it to the rose-tinted background. Stocking listens to Tax and he speaks back. Jewishness is not just identity, but credo, context, and the tension between the two. In the end, Stocking alternates between historian and ethnographer-of Jewishness and of anthropological activity-a complicated task that conjoins relativist and critical perspectives on Tax’s words and deeds. One learns from Stocking’s reading of Tax precisely because he does not search for Jewish roots, but instead finds bridges between biography and bibliography.

The details of Tax’s Jewishness that emerge in Stocking’s history span the full period from his childhood to the end of his professional life at the University of Chicago. Tax was born to a “mildly Zionist” family and was related to, but had not personal experience with, a line of Russian rabbis (Stocking 2000:173). His parents spoke Yiddish and identified as Orthodox (Ibid, p. 223). Sent to religious school at a young age, Tax learned Hebrew language and Jewish texts. A photograph circulated with Tax’s Bar Mitzvah invitation captured Tax dressed in suit and knickers, with a traditional blue-on-white boys tallit (prayer shawl) draped over his shoulders with fringes dangling at mid-calf, the dress he wore to read from the Torah in synagogue in 1920 (Ibid, p. 224).

Reflecting that he had always identified as Jewish, Tax described himself as a lifetime atheist. Nonetheless, he always observed major Jewish holidays as well as a nominal version of Jewish dietary regulations (Stocking 2000:223). His resistance to Jewish traditionalism, however, began at an early age, setting him in religious conflict with his teachers and his parents. As a student at the University of Wisconsin, Tax attended functions at the local Hillel chapter where he experienced for the first time a Jewish social world based on intellectual perspective rather than religious ritual. Arguing in a Hillel Review editorial that the anti-Semitism in Madison was a deep “gentlemanly” prejudice, Tax argued that Jews should not be shamed by their Jewishness, but should be sensitive to the public friction it may cause (Ibid, p. 225). I\n words pulled from his personal comments and reflections as well as his later autobiographical writings, Tax reveals an image of himself as a traditionally educated Jew who sought non-radical ways to navigate the anti-Semitism of the academy.

Ultimately, Stocking’s approach allows him to examine the question of Jewish influence on anthropology without reifying Judaism. The point of departure is a letter in the file in which Tax, ironically, warned of the dangers of future scholars exaggerating the importance of his Jewishness (Ibid, p. 223). This caveat leads Stocking to re-examine the details of Tax’s Midwest upbringing against his anthropological scholarship, which in turn leads Stocking to identify a 1930 expedition to Algeria as a “critical moment” in the history of Tax’s Jewishness (Stocking 2000:225). During that trip, Tax prepared a “Jewish style dinner” for the crew (Ibid, p. 226), an event that the expedition leader boasted about in conversation with a local Jewish merchant. Upon learning of a Jewish member in the expedition, the merchant seized the opportunity to satisfy the mitzvah (torah commandment) to host foreigners for the first and last day of Passover by inviting Tax to dinner. Tax obliged the invitation and the experience led to his first publication (Ibid, p. 226; Tax 1931).

Tax would later claim that the Algerian Passover experience taught him of the “great, great similarity” between his own Jewishness and that of the Jews of Ain Beida (Stocking 2000:226). In a 1988 essay on “Jewish Life in the United States: Perspectives from Anthropology,” Tax describes how this fieldwork experience and the subsequent writing of his first professional publication-an essay on Algerian practices for the holiday of Passover-led him to generally view “cultural continuities as stronger” than environmental changes (Tax 1988:308-309; 1931:548). Stocking, thus, reveals how expressions of Jewishness dovetailed with fieldwork experience to shape Tax’s early position on culture to a far greater extent than might be deduced simply by taking the “Jewishness” file as the final word. But the story does not end in Algeria.

Tax’s position on Jewish ethnicity developed further in the years prior to beginning graduate work in anthropology at the University of Chicago. In these intervening years, Tax described himself as a Jewish “segregationist,” believing deeply in the importance of keeping Jewish culture “intact” and arguing that Jews should not mix “culturally or biologically” with non-Jews in the face of strong social prejudice (Stocking 2000:227). Together with this strong cultural identification with Judaism, Tax questioned the branch of Zionism that sought to colonize British mandate Palestine as a Jewish state. As a younger student, during a college debate in Madison, he cast doubt on the hypothesis that Jewish emigration to Palestine offered a solution to world anti-Semitism (Ibid, p. 227). In these years as his Jewish identity was changing, Tax was unable to advocate for Jewish settlement in Palestine without also drawing attention to the injustice this would cause through the displacement of Arab families (Ibid, p. 228).

Stocking does not use the 1930 trip to Algeria to anchor Tax’s cultural views in one particular disposition with respect to Zionism, anti-Semitism or other tenets of Jewish identity. Rather, Algeria and the University of Chicago frame an important period in Tax’s life where his interest in fieldwork, travel and cross- cultural encounter germinated with his interests in global Jewish identity politics. Indeed, it is this moment that seems to have had a lasting impact on him. At the same time, Stocking makes clear that, for Tax, having Robert Redfield (1897-1958) as a mentor was ultimately a far more significant fact in the development of his career at the University of Chicago than his views on Jewishness (Ibid, p. 228). The development of Tax’s Jewishness, in this respect, is but one important aspect of his journey to becoming a Hyde Park intellectual.

At this point, it is critical to remember Boyarin’s observations as an ethnographer of Jews and Judaism. Indeed, Stocking’s strategic engagement with the “illusion” of Jewish wholeness allows him to reveal the multiple points of intersection between Tax’s changing Jewishness and evolving anthropology. Jewishness for Tax was a family theology that he rejected, and a set of rituals that he obliged more than embraced. To this extent, Tax’s domestic upbringing was similar to Levi-Strauss. However, unlike Levi- Strauss, Jewishness for Tax seemed also to have been a public identity, a set of culinary habits, the basis for civic activism, a line in his Curriculum Vitae, and-most curiously-a box of archived letters. Even in the single case of the Algerian Passover, Jewishness engages Tax’s anthropology on many of these multiple levels at the same time. The model of Jewishness that emerges from Stocking’s reading of Tax, thus, engages a range of methodological and theoretical questions far beyond nostalgic notions of Jewish parentage, rabbinic kinship and nationalist orientation. Stocking’s essay, thus, makes possible a remarkable view of the Jewishness of the anthropologist. Jewishness, both as it is experienced and as it influences the practice of anthropology, describes a range of possibilities-often contradictory-not only between groups, but also within the lifespan of the individual.

Conclusion: Towards A New Routine

As Erving Goffman once suggested: “That is the introduction. Writing one allows a writer to try to set the terms of what he will write about” (1974:16). Barring the unlikely scenario that Tax’s perennial reflexivity and auto-archival habits should suddenly manifest themselves throughout the history of anthropology, where then should we begin to resolve the Jewish problem? Given that no single element of a professional habitus can be isolated, it is unlikely that the hallway conversations that play such an important role in anthropology will be reinvented over a short period of time, if at all. The conditions for change, however, are in place.

When Dominguez first posed the question of a Jewish problem in anthropology, she linked to the very important dynamic she called “the epistemology of the Jewish closet” (1993:622). Accordingly, part of the problem with regard to anthropological attitudes towards the Jewish subject lay precisely in the broader cultural situation of Jews in the West. Ten years later, can we say that the same dynamic persists?

In this strange confluence of post-colonial and post-September 11 epistemologies that defines the current moment of anthropology, the ethnography of self is no longer the road less traveled. Hence, the decision to study Jews as a Jew can no longer be readily linked to the dynamics of closeting. This is not to say that textual and professional expressions of Jewishness are without risk in anthropology. If Jewish closeting is still a problem in anthropology, the places and processes of hiding have most likely changed. Yet, as I have argued, the challenge today is less to search for the Jewishness that is hidden in the closets of the profession, but to question the forms of Jewishness that are expressed in full view. As is the case for all introductions, however, my discussion has left many questions unanswered.

Foremost among them is the question of Jewishness itself. While Levi-Strauss’s remarks to his interviewer and Tax’s notes in his file may offer starting points for discussion, do they constitute Jewishness by themselves? Should anthropology look for ways to uncover the utterances on Jewishness in the discipline? Should we stop talking and start listening to the conversation?

In answer to these questions, the two cases examined in this paper demonstrate that listening is often not enough. Statements about Jewishness at best offer entree into a dimly lit room. To understand what Jewishness has meant for the anthropologist-and by extension for anthropology-it is far more valuable to examine the paths that bring Jewish experience and anthropological research into conversation, than to search for a social science that has bloomed fully from the roots of Jewish identity.

What fascinates me about Levi-Strauss’s discussion of family history, his experience of racism, and Israeli politics, is his dogged avoidance of being contained by an enduring concept of Judaism. Membership, in fact, does not seem at all to be the metaphor by which Levi-Strauss “knows” himself to be Jewish. Instead, he constructs an image of family tradition based on the rejection of religion. He reflects with pride on his grandfather’s collection of Jewish antiques not as a connection to Jewish art, but as a point of pride in his family’s ties to the ancien regime. He posits the idea of a Jewish mentality not as an intellectual tradition stemming from ritual or texts, but as symptom of the alienated citizen. He invokes the myth of an historic Jewish bloodline in order to highlight his generational dissonance to it. Levi-Strauss defines cultural membership by proximity and transformation, concepts familiar to the many phases of his anthropology.

The history of Sol Tax’s Jewishness and the doors it opened for his life as an anthropologist is equally compelling. For Tax, his intellectual development takes place on a stage where Jewishness exists in many interrelated media: a brand of education, a set of embodied practices, an element of civic persona-the list is wide and varied. Periodically comfortable and uncomfortable with these aspects of his social makeup, Tax’s modes of being Jewish and his modes of being an anthropologist play off each other and change positions over a lifetime in letters. His intellectual development as an anthropologist seems to emerge out of his shifting from a more reticent view of public Jewish behavior to a broadly universalistic separatist-but not pathologically \colonialist-view of Jewish difference. These concepts, too, as Stocking was able to demonstrate, intersect on many levels with the method and theory of Tax’s anthropology.

As Clifford has demonstrated in the case of the Mashpee, the postmodern politics of cultural identity must avoid investing too much in linear conceptions of cultural continuity and take stock in historical inconsistencies, ritual disconnect, and intergenerational caesura (Clifford 1988). This caveat applies with equal vigor to the question of Jewishness in anthropology. In the historical ethnography of Jewish anthropologists, text must always be read in relation to context and meaning must be evaluated as both variable and contingent. To produce a clear picture of the relationship between anthropology and Judaism, one must listen to and look beyond statements by the author, a difficult task because contradictory, marginal, and evasive types of Jewishness are not often recognizable as such, testing the limits of cultural taxonomies in normative discourses on Jewish history and religious practice. This task becomes ever more difficult as awareness of the contingent nature of Jewishness enters more frequently into the reflexive discourse on the ethnographer’s self. Here, questions of Jewishness themselves unfold in specific historical contexts and are framed by particular, cultural and moral concerns (Orlove 1997: 26). For the discipline of anthropology, inquiries into the Jewishness of anthropologists must be seen within the broader attempt to reconcile a history of Jewish exclusion from civil society with a post-modern present where Jewishness-as subject and objec-is broadly represented in anthropology and the academy at large.

For post-Holocaust Jewish history and ethnography, the greatest challenge is to move beyond theoretical models of Jewishness defined in and in reaction to the highly racist environments of the pre-and post-War period. Ideas about Jewish identity based solely on prejudice, ritual, enduring family tradition or political experience have been useful in locating and valorizing Jewish presence in intellectual history, and for analyzing some of the social dynamics at the foundation of modern Jewish experience. The questions that face Jewish studies from this point forward, however, will emerge not only from these critical contexts, but also from an awareness of the dynamism of Jewishness.

Neither the prevalence of nostalgia nor the false inductive reasoning of the history of Jewish intellectuals is a problem that threatens the moral fabric of current anthropology. Rather, they are best understood as interpretive dispositions that have yielded certain ideas about Jewishness, while impeding others. The difficulty of understanding exactly what Jewishness and anthropology are in social practice simply requires a new starting point and a new routine.

To ask whether or not anthropology has a Jewish problem is in many ways a rhetorical device that marks a particular period in the discipline that in some ways has ended, and in other ways endures. With an increasing number of ethnographers working on Jewish topics, the question of a Jewish ghetto in anthropology will inevitably change. Yet, as I have argued, the rising tide of field-work on Jewish topics does not by itself change the perception or construction of anthropology towards its own Jewish roots. Assertions of Jewish identity by anthropologists-however important that personal and political maneuver might be-will not alone resolve the issue of how Jewish identity is imagined by anthropologists.

The emerging subfield of Jewish ethnography, thus, raises the specter of a problem that is, perhaps, more systemic and enduring in the profession of anthropology than overt displays of prejudice. It demands that as anthropologists we become better historians of anthropology, both in our research and in the everyday routines of our professional lives. Should a large enough portion of the profession insist on this routine level of engagement, perhaps this will transform the habitus of a profession. The next ten years will prove the true test.

ENDNOTES

1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented in this 2002 panel that I mention here, and at the University of Illinois Jewish Studies workshop (30 January 2003). For their comments and constructive criticisms, I wish to thank Edward Bruner, Matti Bunzl, Virginia Dominguez, Richard Handler, Debora Hoehne, George W. Stocking and Adam Sutcliffe. I extend particular gratitude to Jonathan Boyarin for his very thoughtful reading of this manuscript, and for his numerous suggestions as to how I might strengthen the links between my argument and the much wider conversation on Jews and Judaism underway in anthropology.

2 Here, I mean to reference very recent works published in English-references from the past five years and texts soon to be published when this article was written (July 1993). New ethnographic areas in the anthropology of Jews and Judaism include assisted reproduction in Israel (Kahn 2000), Jews and queers in Austria (Bunzl 2004); Jews in post-Soviet Russia (Goluboff 2003), Orthodox women’s literacy in Israel (EI-Or 2002), Black Hebrews in Israel (Markowitz 2003) and New York (Goldschmidt 2001), the politics of Jewish heritage (Feldman 2001; Lehrer 2003).

3 Anthropologists and linguists have argued that “Jew” is not always recognizable as imagined by the analyst. This inability to see Jewishness beyond preconception is often a result of the idea of the “Jew” having been constructed relative to “Judaism” in terms similar to the way that “native” has been constructed relative to ‘culture’ (Weinreich 1967; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994; Segal 1999).

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Jeffrey D. Feldman

New York University

Copyright Institute for Ethnographic Research Winter 2004