Comment on JSSR's Book Review of "The Savage in Judaism"
Is there indeed "some degree of ethnic self-hate"in my book The Savage in Judaisr, as Murray Wax suggested in his review WJSSR 30:3 1991)? Wax's response to my book actually illustrates one of the biases I am trying to expose: The representation of Judaism as just one religion among other religions calls forth charges of "ethnic self-hate" which, like charges of anti-Semitism, have the effect of closing off legitimate inquiry without very much discussion. What kinds of criticisms count as "ethnic self-hate" and who in the end gets to decide? These are questions Wax fails to consider. I certainly am critical of a certain popular and dominant picture of Judaism that has been developed in post-Enlightenment discourse. What disturbs me about that picture is the apologetic motives (of both Jews and Christians) who privileged Judaism as a higher religion over primitive religions with which Judaism was contrasted. That bothers me because I find morally and intellectually problematic the ways in which European discourse carved the world into savage and civilized peoples. One effect of that distribution of peoples and traditions was to rule out an anthropological study of Judaism. Various kinds of discourse were reserved for various kinds of traditions. Anthropology developed as the discipline that focused on living, illiterate peoples. Furthermore, similarities between Judaism and "savage religions" were suppressed, marginalized, excised, or treated as survivals of a stage that Judaism had superseded. The Savage in Judaism succeeds, I think, in undoing this segregation of traditions and in challenging this representation of Judaism. One might argue with these reasons, that they are historically inaccurate, that other responses are more appropriate, and so forth. Yet to call this critique self-hating, as Wax does, is to rule out the possibility of there being any legitimate reasons to criticize the picture of Judaism that dominates among its interpreters. If I am right about how and why this picture of Judaism developed, then I am criticizing not Judaism per se, but one of its constructions that has emerged in the modern period. To challenge this version of Judaism is to criticize a representation that continues to serve very powerful apologetic purposes. Wax then is defending not Judaism in the abstract, but one version that has been bequeathed to us from the Enlightenment. Perhaps this is why my book