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Anthropology and the Study of Traditional Jewish Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Harvey E. Goldberg
Harvey E. Goldberg
Affiliation:
Hebrew University, erusalem, Israel
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Extract

The analytic tools of anthropology originally were fashioned on smallscale tribal groups that possessed no written traditions. After World War II, as anthropologists became involved in the study of complex societies in different “developing areas,” the discipline began to relate its findings to the concerns of other fields. Simultaneously, scholars from other social and humanist disciplines, who previously had assumed that anthropologists focused only on “primitives,” began to incorporate anthropological methods and concepts into their tool kits. As part of these general trends, there were anthropologists who turned to the study of Jewish society and culture. One natural expression of this trend has been the study of contemporary Jewish communities. There are now dozens of studies of Jewish life from one or another anthropological perspective, most of them dealing mainly with Jews in the United States of Ashkenazi background or with communities in Israel whose origins were in the Middle East. A very different trend is found in the analysis of classic texts, notably the Bible but with some attention being given to rabbinic literature, using structuralism and related methodologies. At first initiated by anthropologists who were not themselves specialists in the biblical period, these approaches have now been adopted by some students of ancient Judaism, who combine them with the more standard methods used in research on biblical and rabbinic texts.

Type
Articles
Information
AJS Review , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 1990

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References

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31. Orah Hayyim 583.

32. Herzog, Yiddish Language pp. 32–33, 48n., documents a custom of this genre among Yiddish speakers of northern Poland involving the preparation of sweet carrots (= mem. which also means “to multiply”). He notes the absence of a parallel custom among the coterritorial non-Jewish population, but his discussion ignores the basis of the custom in the “great tradition,” as do the references to the same practice in Weinreich, Max, History of the Yiddish Language, trans. Noble, S. with J. Fishman (Chicago, 1980), pp. 4–5, 182.Google Scholar

33. See n. 31 above.

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