Judaism WAS a Civilization: Towards a Reconstruction of Ancient Jewish Peoplehood.

On the afternoon of December 4, 2017, Professor Jonathan Klawans (BU Department of Religion) spoke at the fall semester’s BUJS Research Forum. Elie Wiesel Center Director Michael Zank introduced Professor Klawans to a large and engaged audience of scholars and students. Klawans presented his sabbatical research on Mordecai Kaplan and Jewish antiquity with his talk “Judaism was a Civilization: Towards a Reconstruction of Ancient Jewish Peoplehood.”

Klawans spoke not just on how we think about Jewish antiquity, but also the particular frames that scholars use to shape that thinking. By using the work of Mordecai Kaplan, who wrote about American Jewish identity as well as Jews of the Second Temple period in the 19th century, Klawans argues that we should embrace anachronism. The terms we use to study ancient people did not exist when those ancient people were alive, he argues, and that defining Judaism as solely a “religion” in a Protestant sense (absent from race or ethnicity) ignores the nuance in how Jews have identified themselves. Kaplan encouraged the use of the term “peoplehood” in order to understand Jewish identity as a “social heritage.” Klawans argues that this utilitarian term allows us to study Jewish history with a flexible way of categorizing.

This terminology opens up the usefulness of primary sources when looking at early periods of Jewish life, and the context of folk art and traditions that have been associated with certain groups of Jews. The study of Jewish peoplehood releases the baggage, Klawans claims, of terms like “nation” or “religion.”

The event concluded with a Q&A session about Klawans’ research and how he plans to expand these definitions in his upcoming book.