The third volume of the Jewish Cultural Studies series, edited by Simon J. Bronner, makes a distinctive mark in the fields of Jewish studies and folklore studies. Published for the American Folklore Society by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (Oxford) in 428 semi-glossy pages, the book’s fourteen essays contain contemporary analysis and research on the perpetuation, adaptation, and reinterpretation of Jewish ritual practice. While one may trace how Jewish ritual has been dictated, designed, debated, and documented from the time of the Torah (Hebrew Bible), this volume distinctly highlights perception in the practice of Jewish ritual, offering performance-oriented, ethnographically based perspectives on the relationships between individuals, their ritual practices, and their social environments.
This substantial volume opens with an illuminating introduction by Simon J. Bronner entitled “Ritualizing Jewishness,” contextualizing the notion of ritual within the histories of folkloristic and anthropological discourse, and specifically within Jewish history, religion, and culture. Regarding the variety of ritual forms within the Jewish context, Bronner highlights an important emic distinction between minhagim (customs) and mitsvot (commandments) in Talmudic and rabbinic writing—a distinction that separates customs derived from popular usage, from divinely decreed rules of conduct. He further points out that the Hebrew term minhagim does not distinguish among the nuanced genres of folkloristic inquiry, the “rites, rituals, initiations, ceremonies, and customs that are enacted as parts of localized traditions” (7). Recognizing the variety of ritual performance that falls within the concept of minhagim, Bronner explains that this volume provides “ethnological distinctions [that] are useful for objectifying and broadening the understanding of tradition as lived experience” (7). The book’s commitment to defining the varied ritualistic performances within the broad category of minhagim thus bridges a gap created by linguistic and analytic discrepancies when Jewish ritual is examined as cultural expression.
Bronner’s important distinction between the emic and etic genres of ritual performance also evokes a historic issue within cultural study. With this differentiation, the book contributes a nuanced appreciation of Jewish ritual to the field of Jewish studies, and also honors a performance-centered approach to cultural study within the field of folklore. Folklorist Dan Ben-Amos observed that, “The inquiry into the names for genres must extend beyond the limits of etymological interpretation. Historically and geographically the same names may mean different things in the same language in separate periods and in distinct regional dialects. Conversely, two different words may acquire the same meanings in different periods. Moreover, with usage, the names may develop a complex semantic structure, for which etymology alone would not account. Hence the study of the ethnic system of genres must combine the cognitive, expressive, and behavioral levels of genres in each culture” (1976, 237). Ben-Amos’ recognition of the relationship between performance-centered studies of cultural expression and the terms used to describe them characterizes a theoretical shift in the field of folklore studies that the authors in this book respect through their socially and culturally situated studies, highlighting dynamic interactions between text and context.
The book’s structure is derived from its theoretical approach—that of interactionist cultural study, or the study of lived experience. Bronner reframes Jewish ritual from a primarily religious to a cultural context to explain the book’s structure, noting that, “Taking away the organizing principle of biblical source, rituals can be alternatively summarized by their cultural connection to contexts of (1) liturgy and prayer, (2) time and yearly cycle, (3) passage (or life course) and initiation, and (4) performance and practice” (15). The book’s four sections are thus entitled, The Ritual Year, Revisioning Weddings and Marriage, Revisioning Mourning and Death, and Ritual Performance. The fourteen essays placed in these categories develop out of the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, folklore, Jewish studies, English, Rabbinics, and religious studies, and present original research on Jewish rituals from Israel, Ethiopia, North America, Tunisia, Canada, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Despite the volume’s diverse geographic and disciplinary representation, its unified perspective emerges from the emphasis on the cultural context of ritual as well as the thematic threads that knit each section’s essays together. Part I, The Ritual Year, presents essays on a Tunisian Jewish initiation ritual (Harvey E. Goldberg and Hagar Salamon), Israeli Independence Day prayer rituals (Seth Ward), the purimshpil as theater of conflict (Jean R. Freedman), and Jewish heritage and tradition in New England boarding schools (Michael Hoberman). Each of these essays highlights Jewish difference within a dominant society as a factor in ritual practice, examining how Jewish/non-Jewish relations are expressed through calendrical celebrations. Contextualizing the purimshpil in the modern day, Jean R. Freedman observes that, “as societies become increasingly multicultural and the myths of racial purity sound increasingly threadbare, this story of ethnic conflict has a host of new meanings” (128). Her comment, echoing this section’s theme, underscores how ritual serves as a continually renewed resource for cross-cultural communication and interethnic mediation in increasingly globalized societies.
Part II, Revisioning Weddings and Marriage, and Part III, Revisioning Mourning and Death, contain seven articles that examine lifecycle transitions and social rites of passage through the lens of change, particularly the adaptation of Jewish ritual structure to accommodate changing social standards, and the preservation of Jewish ritual structure in the face of changing socio-economic environments. Gail Lobovitz, Vanessa L. Ochs, and Irit Koren address gender prescriptions in Jewish ritual practice, highlighting feminist efforts to reread narrow definitions of Jewish law. Their articles present conscious “re-inventions” of gendered Jewish rituals through “reconstructed” heterosexual wedding ceremonies and newly created Jewish same-sex marriage ceremonies. Rachel Sharaby further illustrates the inevitable transformation of the Ethiopian Jewish marriage ritual that has accompanied Ethiopian Jews’ immigration to Israel, “from a traditional patriarchal system into a modern Western society with an egalitarian ethos” (257).
The focus on change in ritual process, structure, and function, whether effected by conscious design or otherwise, presents ritual as a dynamic experience in tense dialogue with its surrounding environment. The mourning and death rituals examined in Part III are similarly sustained and affected by their distinct social circumstances. Agnieszka Jagodzinska’s historical ethnography of Jewish funerary rituals in nineteenth-century Warsaw, Alanna E. Cooper’s study of Bukharan Jewish mourning rituals in Israel and the United States, and Jillian Gould’s analysis of creative shiva rituals in an institutional home in Canada, all emphasize the power of ritual to create a sense of belonging in environments marked by vulnerability and change.
The book’s last section, Part IV, Ritual Performance, includes three essays that case-study a range of ritual forms, all with particular focus on their moral and political implications. Sander L. Gilman considers Jewish ritual slaughter for its moral character and political reverberations. He notes its continued relevance today by stating that, “The debate about the meaning of ritual slaughter continues in a world now attuned to the claims of ‘animal rights’ and to a heightened anxiety about Islam” (353). External socio-political movements constantly reframe ritual practices even as they maintain their own internal structure and function. Shaul Kelner’s essay confronts social movements directly as “engines of ritual change,” investigating how the twentieth-century American Soviet Jewry Movement “scrutinized ritual after ritual to identify ways whereby each could be moulded into a means of mass mobilization” (360-2). And finally, Nina S. Spiegel analyzes an Israeli dance festival on Kibbutz Dalia as a secular ritual symbolic of national and political values as the new state was forming. Each of these essays addresses the potential of ritual performance to enhance the power of political and social agendas.
At the close of his introduction, Simon Bronner asserts that, “Jews are hardly alone in relying on ritual to provide them with an inventory of social meanings that have to be constantly negotiated, but as this volume shows, they are keenly aware of the duality of the perception and enactment of ritual from within their community and from outside it” (33). This volume’s emphasis on perception and lived experience in the study of Jewish ritual offers rich material for students, scholars, and general readers alike interested in the power of ritual to make change, and to respond to it. It is a leading contribution that refines and advances Jewish cultural study and the study of ritual practice.
Work Cited
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1969. "Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres." Genre 2/3:275-301.
--------
[Review length: 1364 words • Review posted on October 3, 2013]