The Society for the Humanities

This working paper has three modest aims:

(1) To present, in a succinct and accessible but not distorted fashion, ancient religious Jewish sources about a human-like entity called the golem and some of their later interpretations;
(2) To distinguish our sources from the popular modern representation of the golem in Ashkenazi Jewish fiction and folktales, which has played a greater role in recent Jewish contributions to bioethics;
(3) To suggest why our ancient sources on the golem, if we try to locate them in their own interpretive contexts, have a new relevance to anyone who is curious about the ethical significance of humanity’s rapidly increasing ability to intervene in biological
creation.

The paper is organized in three parts. The introduction offers a critical synopsis
of dominant ways that experts in Jewish bioethics have recently invoked the golem. As
will be shown, these experts have a high degree of consensus about the golem’s
significance, they refer to a narrow range of sources, and they use a similar interpretive
procedure to determine the meaning of their sources. These facts are related. They result in an interpretation of the golem that equates one nineteenth-century Eastern European legend with an image spanning millennia, scores of texts, and much of the Western world. Key variables, with divergent implications, have been lost in this equation.

Therefore, in the second section, a broader picture of the golem is provided. Beginning
with the noun’s sole appearance in the Bible (Psalm 139) and looking at a few rabbinic
and Jewish mystical writings, we will use the work of scholars and close readings of
canonical sources to reveal several neglected ways that Jewish sources have used the
golem image in order to reflect upon the ethics of creation.

In our conclusion, we will summarize the empirical and methodological consequences of these readings. Rather than pronounce on what the golem tells scientists (not) to do with biology, we will synthesize new ways that this image might help them, or any open-minded reader, to think about this vital issue.

NB: The Introduction to this paper, written in 2011, advances a critique of certain bioethicists' uses of the golem that I now see as valid in some ways but unnecessarily overextended in others. My principal argument-- that their interpretation of the golem image is far narrower than the range of historical possibilities allows-- is unaffected.

Laid out in the style of the Vilna shas, these notes for a 2013 lecture at Stanford include a new American translation, excerpts from Foucault's seminars on the text, explanations of keywords, and an appendix on Moses Mendelssohn's alternative response to the same question.  May it be used freely for teaching, etc.
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Addendum : the final sentence of Kant's essay retranslated here ("man, who is now more than a machine") alludes to Julian Offray de La Mettrie's L'homme machine (1748). See Robert B. Louden, "General Introduction," in Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, eds. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, Cambridge, 2007, 1-17, at 4.
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The Hebrew Bible’s narrative style has impressed interpreters
of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension between fragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auerbach’s famous thesis that the Akedah is “fraught with background.” But is it possible to give a coherent account of what the Bible does not say? This article offers a comparative critical analysis of attempts to do just that, starting with Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) and continuing through the contemporary work of James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Avivah Zornberg, and others. It claims that, rather than the text itself, the Bible’s “background” serves as a metaphor by which the biblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normative construct of the reader’s mind. This comparison concludes with practical considerations about its potential for research and teaching in biblical poetics, understood as rigorous intersubjective communication, rather than as either method or ideology.

This very short paper attempts to describe the complementarity between realism and surrealism in Michel Leiris' ethnographic memoir, L'Afrique fantôme (1934). It was originally given as a paper in James Clifford's graduate seminar at Stanford some years ago. I am sharing it in the hopes that someone will find it useful.

Since the Epistle of Sherira Gaon (986/7 C.E.), a handful of traveling sages, called nachotei or nechutei (Hebrew: yordim) after their " descent " from Palestine to Babylonia, has been granted a special role in the complex transmission of talmudic material between these two regions during the third and fourth centuries. This study reexamines key data for Sherira's venerable portrait and casts it in a new light: the formula " When X arrived, he said… " under which the Bavli introduces many of their dicta. Part I canvasses this formula's attributions, distribution, relative stability, and typical variants in Bavli manuscripts, establishing that it is almost entirely limited to one pair of sages, but rarely added or corrupted. Hence, its historical value cannot be discarded, but is limited primarily to the phenomenon of their coordinated transmissions of Palestinian dicta. In turning to these coordinated transmissions, Part II argues that the formula does not only introduce Palestinian halakhah that appeared incorrect or redundant in the eyes of Babylonians, but is also a literary and rhetorical device that the Bavli's redactors used in order to convert Palestinian dicta– especially by the eminent R. Yochanan– into more complex dialectical set-pieces. In sum, this " arrival " of the nachotei can be interpreted dramaturgically as well as historically, applying recent advances in source-criticism of the Bavli. The conclusion considers further points of divergence and convergence between these two interpretations of the formula and, ultimately, how one might reconcile them in terms of the experience of reading the Bavli.

Since the late 1960s, scholars of ethnography and of talmudic sources have developed comparable frameworks for analyzing how each literary tradition represents authority, despite apparently radical differences in media and ideologies. These literatures can be compared more specifically at the level of genre. Reading the Babylonian Talmud as dialogic ethnography through the prism of a key ethnographic convention (the arrival scene, in which an ethnographer encounters the field) shows that (post)modern ethnographers’ strategies for representing their own authority are comparable to those of the Talmud’s author-redactors. A case-based study of arrival scenes in light of the Talmud’s compositional process—the redaction of smaller units into larger arguments—illustrates
the redactors’ different ways of representing their own authority. Their techniques fall along a scale of reflexivity, from minimal (self-reflectively ironic) to more disruptive. Their degree of reflexivity is defined by three literary variables: transparency (showing their artistry as such), choreography (intensifying relations among the dialogue’s players
as well as with its audiences), and excess (pushing the limits of the dialectic’s initial or apparent framework).

Key words: reflexivity, dialogue, ethnography, redaction criticism, Talmud

A study of the integration between the autobiographical and literary-critical features of Auerbach's classic Mimesis (1946), written mostly in the Dominican monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in Istanbul. The essay argues that Auerbach integrated his own life into his work by drawing on a figural hermeneutic, partly due to his encounter with the monastery library. This integration sheds light on the political project behind Mimesis, namely, its ethical universalism. Read in its autobiographical light, Mimesis is thus more closely connected both to Auerbach's postwar cosmopolitan writings and to his longstanding leanings toward Christian ethics, rather than a polemical assertion of his Jewish identity per se.