Rabbis, Amorites, and the Ethnography of Superstition

• In Event: The Art of Nostalgia in Ancient Jewish Literatures

Abstract

The category of superstition, both ancient and modern, is often defined by a temporal hierarchy of present over past, progress over regress. Superstition is often framed as a "survival": a past practice in conflict with reason, a subversive means of survival in defiance of dominant norms. It is also identified with lower and marginal social groups: "old wives' tales" and healing arts, folk beliefs and practices, as opposed to higher vehicles of elite cultural production. In this rhetoric of superstition, it faces backward and down the social ladder; its opponents thereby point themselves forward and up. This polemical use of the pastness of superstition has rightly been criticized. As a result, however, its creative uses are less widely appreciated.

This paper explores the rabbis' laws on a category akin to superstition, "ways of the Amorite", from second- to fourth-century Roman Palestine, as compared to roughly contemporaneous authorities (Pliny, Augustine, and others) and modern scholars (ethnographers, missionaries). It argues that the polemics associated with supersitition–e.g., the confinement of superstitions to an inferior but irritatingly persistent past–are not its sole or even primary rhetorical function. Rather, with its imagined pastness and social distance from the elite authorities who represent it, superstition offers a potent rubric for antiquarian and ethnographic inquiry. By comparing devices that rabbis and other scholars use to represent superstition, and by seeing how these devices integrate their observations of superstitious practices into normative theories, we can better appreciate the specificity of the rabbis' contribution to the history of this problematic category.

Author

• James Adam Redfield, Stanford University