SPoT ~ Jeremy Stolow's Dissertation Research Workshop Abstract

Dissertation Research Workshop

Abstract for Jeremy Stolow's's Presentation
"Nation of Torah: Proselytism and the Politics
of Historiography in a Religious Social Movement"

April 28, 2000; 231 Northrop Frye Hall

Victoria University, University of Toronto, 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. (note small time change)

My dissertation explores a series of inter-related questions about religion and politics, social authority, communicative strategy, knowledge-production, and historiographic practice. These questions have converged in the context of my engagement with a corpus of popular history literature produced and disseminated by a transnationally situated English-language haredi [or "ultra-Orthodox"] Jewish publishing house, ArtScroll-Mesorah Publications (hereafter, ArtScroll), and directly linked with Agudat Israel, one of the pre-eminent political and social movements promoting haredism "world-wide." This work is an attempt to intervene into a large, and rapidly growing body of literature on so-called "fundamentalist" religious movements on the contemporary world stage, and some of the principal theoretical assumptions which have framed this literature about religion and modernity, belief, and ideological dissemination.

In Part I of my thesis, I focus on the production of knowledge-claims about haredism as an instance of so-called religious fundamentalism. My overriding concern here is to situate the radically divergent accounts of the "meaning" of haredism as propagated, among others, by metropolitan academics and haredi authors. I situate these debates within a single field of production, according to which different interested parties collaborate and compete for representational authority. This account moves through a series of discussions about the dominant sociological accounts of religious fundamentalism, the influence of Weberian categories, specific haredi rejoinders to their academic critics, and my own methodological orientation to these debates, drawn, inter alia, from the work of Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and de Certeau.

In Part II, I examine the social field which frames the ArtScroll press, and specifically the conditions of emergence of its reading public, with particular attention to the way print technology has helped to forge "modern" public spaces, and to re-articulate political efficacy in terms of "influence among the masses." The rise of the printed book has been crucial, not simply for nation-consolidation (as Anderson and others have stressed), but also for various non-state-centred, extra-institutional, and transnational actors, and especially for religious movements like the haredim. This emphasis adds a new wrinkle to the common story about how "traditional" European Jewish corporate community structures were dissembled in "modernity" (e.g., through "emancipation," the Holocaust, intercontinental migration, the founding of the State of Israel), paving the way for new regimes of voluntary association and new taxonomies for the expression of "modern" Jewish identity. Operating within these emerging constraints, Orthodox elites predicated their "defence of tradition" against competing forms of Jewish identity upon the need to "win the allegiance of the masses," as has been registered in the proliferation of Orthodox presses, publishing houses, and other media organs over the course of the past 100 years or so. Increasingly, with the acceleration of textually-mediated, transnational public spaces of modernity, "traditionally" defined haredi social authorities have had to cede their place to those within the movement who possess expertise in "effective communication." Within this emerging social field, popularizers, publishers, proselytes, and other intermediary or subordinate members of the haredi intellegentsia do not passively mediate unchanged, timeless religious doctrines and ideas. On the contrary, they now play a key role in the reconstituting haredi social practices in the present, specifically by establishing and defining the bases for contact between haredim and "outsiders."

This new importance of "effective communication" is evident in a new concern among haredim with "outreach:" calling upon non-haredi Jews to cultivate a more intense identification with their "Jewish heritage," and thereby to transform themselves from "unregenerate" or "unobservant" Jews into practicing and observant members of the contemporary haredi community. The ArtScroll popular literature, one of various outcroppings of this Jewish outreach effort, is thus constituted as a kind of proselytizing literature, which suggests that non-haredi Jews are "lost," and that they must "return" to the Nation of Torah, as defined haredi forms of social practice and haredi authority. This "return" is figured as a a form of exchange, whereby the unregenerate Jew is exhorted to replace the fragmentary and disconnected tapestry of his or her personal past with what is offered as the much greater and comparatively seamless canvas of an "authentic" Jewish tradition.

In Part III, I take up the central theme of "tradition," and the modes production of past, as they exist in tension between haredi and non-haredi sources of authority, and also as a medium of exchange between haredi recruiters and popularizers and their "unregenerate" Jewish interlocutors. History-writing is one of the key arenas in which haredim and non-haredim meet, compete for social authority and legitimacy, and seek to win the attention and the allegiance of "the masses." Haredi uses of history, therefore, are crucial indices for charting the specifically innovative character of those defensive struggles of "tradition" waged by haredim against other competing tendencies in Jewish society and on the world stage. Thus I focus on some of the narrative mechanisms which enable haredi social authority to be constituted and inflected through categories of historical imagination. This leads to a concluding discussion about the significance of the ArtScroll literature, both as a contribution to a more nuanced understanding of the way so-called religious fundamentalist discourses are actually mediated, and also with respect to a variety of political practices which frame the encounter between religiously-committed actors and the secular institutions of modern states in the global present.

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Jeremy Stolow

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