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This chapter introduces the reader to the theme of “Jewish and Christian relations in Late Antiquity,” as treated by students of early rabbinic Judaism. It describes recent developments in scholarly views of the relations between classical rabbinic texts and early Christian texts, and critically discusses especially the contributions of Israel J. Yuval and Daniel Boyarin to the field. It suggests that the early rabbinic reaction to Christianity should be seen as part of the rabbinic discourse of minut, which, following a theory current in sociological literature, should be understood as a discourse responding to an identity crisis and re-establishing group identity, by the ousting of some of society's member and their placement beyond the pale. The chapter concludes with explicating the book's historical approach to rabbinic texts and their interpretation.

This chapter introduces the arguments of Boyarin, Lieu, and van Henten concerning martyrdom and identity construction among Jews and Christians, arguing that the death of Stephen should be considered through this theoretical lens. As supporting argument for considering Stephen alongside second-century martyrologies, it situates Acts as an early second-century text. Appropriating Castelli’s arguments concerning martyrdom in Christian cultural memory, it argues that scholarly assertions concerning the historicity of Stephen’s death are more indebted to the force of cultural memory than to the historical-critical method. While concurring with Penner that verisimilitude, not “historical accuracy,” is the coin of ancient historiography, it then moves to suggest that this is not a reason to abandon the historiographic project but rather to frame historical narrative differently, in terms of rhetoric and ethic, as has been long argued in biblical studies by Schüssler Fiorenza.

This chapter evaluates From a Ruined Garden (1983), which was translated and edited by Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin. How does one commemorate the destruction of millions of people, indeed of an entire nation, without being overwhelmed by the enormity of the numbers? How can one grieve for and honour so many human beings on an individual plane and accord to their memory the dignity which they were denied? Jewish survivors of the Holocaust responded to this by creating a unique tombstone — a collection of yizker bikher, memorial books. A large majority of these books, around four hundred volumes, commemorate Polish Jewish communities, providing an extraordinary insight into the life of the shtetl. From a Ruined Garden is an anthology of fragments from over 60 memorial books of Polish Jewry. The translators and editors of this volume have done a most important job of introducing yizker bikher to a wider, English-speaking audience.

Topics discussed in this chapter include the Jewish calendar, the controversy over the major kosher slaughterhouse in the United States, and the synagogue known as Congregation Anshei Mezritsh on East Sixth Street.

This introductory chapter examines the supposed relation of Christianity to Judaism. It begins by showing how Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber defended the validity of the Old Testament as part of the Christian Bible. Faulhaber also provides a supersessionist account of Christianity's relation to Judaism, which most modern Christian theologians would likely reject. The discussion tries to determine whether there is a kind of Christian reading of the Old Testament that might express the relation of Christianity to Judaism, while respecting the independent religious identity of the Jews. The chapter also introduces the four thinkers who are studied in detail in the other chapters of this book: Daniel Boyarin, Hans Frei, Origen of Alexandria, and Erich Auerbach.

This concluding chapter summarizes the lessons that can be taken from Daniel Boyarin, Erich Auerbach, Hans Frei, and Origen on their figural extensions, biblical interpretations, and figural readings. It notes that Origen has intervened throughout this book in several guises: first as a target of the three other modern interpreters of figural reading, second as a critic of the three modern representations of figural reading, and finally as a figural reader and theorist.

This chapter studies four important Pauline texts that were used by Daniel Boyarin to build his claim on Paul's allegorical reading. It argues that the poststructuralist assumptions of Boyarin lead him to underrepresent the side of Paul's thought where he expresses the continuity of his new commitment to the risen Jesus with his permanent identity as a Jew. It looks at Boyarin's reliance on poststructuralist conceptions of meaning and it says that the text obscures Paul's efforts to preserve his Jewish identity. The chapter also looks at how Boyarin transforms the complicated Pauline formations of continuity and discontinuity into mutually canceling binary oppositions.

This chapter provides an alternative analysis of a key passage from Origen's commentary and places it in the context of Origen's allegorical reading of the Song. It begins with an outline of Boyarin's comments on the passage and then studies how Origen understands allegorical reading. This chapter claims that Origen approaches texts to enhance, not evade, embodied human life. A comparison of Origen and Boyarin reveals that the precise character of the body as such is still a matter for debate.

Benjamin Jowett, in his rendering of the Symposium, concedes the obvious as a condemnation: “It is impossible to deny that some of the best and greatest of the Greeks indulged in attachments, which Plato in the Laws, no less than the universal opinion of Christendom, has stigmatized as unnatural”. Daniel Boyarin's rereading of the Symposium brings us back to Jowett's claims. Boyarin's (Platonic) Socrates does condemn male–male copulation. This chapter looks at the juxtaposition of Alcibiades's courtship of Socrates with Saint Augustine's account of his “conversion” in Confessions, a piece of relatively early Christian writing full of consequences for Christian sex. In Socratic teaching, there are no unambiguous transits from the love of one body to all physical beauty, then to minds and customs or institutions and knowledge, so that one can swim at last in beauty itself. This chapter perceives in the highly ironized and powerfully seductive exchange between Alcibiades and Socrates with which the Symposium concludes an unsettling of the certainties of all of the prior speeches—not least Diotima's cited doctrine of radical sublimation.

Chapter 5 illustrates an alternative to the hypermale ego by attending to more sensitive, creative male characters through the concept of Edelkayt as discussed in the work of Daniel Boyarin. The chapter begins with a transition into the subject through focus on one final alcoholic, Ned Seton in Holiday (1938). The tragic fate of the character exemplifies the importance of challenging hypermasculine norms by exploring alternatives that can offer a potential queer feminist countertype. To explore this figure, I discuss Cukor’s own identity within Hollywood alongside several of his most complex masculine characters: Macaulay “Mike” Connor in The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Paul Verrall in Born Yesterday (1950).

This chapter examines the theory advanced by the American scholar Shaye Cohen stating that the Greeks played a role in the formation of Judaism, and that Hellenization is the process that created the Jews. In his 1999 book The Beginnings of Jewishness, Cohen argues that it was the Judeans' imitation of Greek culture during the Hellenistic Age that transformed their culture into Judaism. Essential to the idea of the Hellenistic Age as conceived by scholars is the notion of hybridity, symbiosis, or melting together. The chapter considers Cohen's theory as another option for understanding Jewish origins as well as the role of foreigners in the origin stories that scholars tell about the Jews. It also compares Cohen's theory with that of Daniel Boyarin, who claims that Judaism developed into an ethno-religion under the influence of Christianity.

Chapter 1 examines how the interpretation of Song of Songs in the tannaitic midrashim should be characterized—as an allegory, as a mashal(rabbinic parable), or as something entirely different. To frame this exploration, it first examines the various approaches to early rabbinic interpretation of Song of Songs, typified by the work of Daniel Boyarin and David Stern, before offering its own proposal. It contends that figural interpretation, akin to the form of typological interpretation practiced in early Christianity, provides a better description of tannaitic interpretation of Song of Songs. Using a typological mode of interpretation, the first rabbinic interpreters read Song of Songs as an idealized figuration of God’s loving relationship with Israel, which they located in the framework of Israel’s national narrative.

This chapter examines discursive developments in twentieth-century European thought with respect to the question of the reality, metaphoricity, and exemplarity of Jewish displacement. Throughout the centuries, the Jews have been the epitome of the displaced, wandering, and exposed stranger, the rootless intruders, or an example embodying the forfeiting of fixity, dominance, and ownership associated with territorial emplacement. In modernity, Jewish exile, beyond being a theological, historical, and political issue, became a discursive theme, a literary motif, and a loaded philosophical concept. As an embodiment of discreditable rootlessness, it appears in the antisemitic depictions of the wandering, homeless outsider rejected from the nations of the earth. The chapter considers the views of European thinkers such as George Steiner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, Jonathan Boyarin, and Paul Celan regarding displaced Jews.

Definitions for and tests designed to demonstrate female virginity have as much to do with cultural ideals of masculinity as they do with concerns about sexual practices or women’s bodies. A wealth of scholarship in recent years on masculinity in late antiquity generally and Rabbinic Judaism specifically is thus helpful in framing this study. Unlike earlier studies, however, attention to chronological and geographical variety within late antique Judaism helps sharpen our understanding of masculinity in this work. The introduction concludes with brief discussions about the problem with the terms “virgin” and “hymen,” and about methodological issues concerning working with edited Rabbinic texts. An outline of the book’s contents follows.