Beyond Religious Difference: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Question of Rabbinic Polysemy

• In Event: Jewish Life in 19th & 20th Century Central & Eastern Europe

Abstract

The assumption of Jewish-Christian difference, that is, the conceptualization of Judaism and Christianity as two "commensurate and nonoverlapping units within a totalizing taxonomy of 'world religions'" (Reed 2018: 407) continues to motivate the kinds of questions scholars ask about the history of Mediterranean religions spanning multiple eras––from Second Temple period through the long Late Antiquity––and subfields––from Biblical Studies through Rabbinics and Historical Theology.

The first part of the paper will explore the ways in which the assumption of Jewish-Christian difference shapes the field of Rabbinics by considering recent conversations about rabbinic polysemy (Boyarin 2000, 2004; Fraade 2007, 2014; Yadin-Israel 2007, 2014; Tong 2020). I show how the assumption of Jewish-Christian difference effectively forecloses comparative analyses across rabbinic and Christian polysemy––for example, with the established work polysemy in Augustine (Glidden 1997). Instead, scholarship on rabbinic polysemy quickly falls into the “trap” of “insider baseball” by treating rabbinic polysemy as uniquely “nonoverlapping” with any outside hermeneutical tradition.

The second part of the paper is speculative in nature and proposes some potential scholarly practices for bringing to awareness the influence of such differential assumptions, like the assumption of Jewish-Christian difference, and how such assumptions may reveal more about the theological and philosophical values held by scholars (of Jewish Christianity/Christian Judaism) than an accurate history of religion (in the Ancient World). Finally, I imagine the kinds of questions that could be available to scholars (of Jewish Christianity/Christian Judaism) should scholars of religion treat religious difference as itself methodology, rather than as a universal category about which their proposed methodology illuminates.

Author

• M Adryael Tong, Interdenominational Theological Center