“Holy Envy”? : The Judeo-Christian Borderland and its Implications for Jewish Studies

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

In 2011 The Jewish Annotated New Testament appeared to great acclaim. Celebrated in a host of Jewish publications, JANT was heralded as a watershed achievement, ushering in a new moment in interfaith relations by providing wide public access to the fruitful outcomes of the kinds of inquiries that have absorbed the attention of numerous scholars, who have worked to show how Judaism and Christianity have long been interestingly and messily entwined. But even as JANT makes a crucial contribution to expanding our understanding of the Judeo-Christian borderline, it poses an interesting problem when its editors (Amy Jill Levine and Marc Tzvi Brettler) end by suggesting that Jewish readers may experience moments of “holy envy” in the course of encountering the Christian “other.” With this evocative term, the editors raise important questions about the kind of relational stance informing any sort of cross-religious inquiry. To begin, the introductory pages of JANT suggest that its target audience skews decidedly Jewish. And that by reading the New Testament through a Jewish lens, we (Jews) will become not only better consumers of Western culture, but better Jews--as we will understand “why most Jews did not follow Jesus or the movement that developed in his name.” In this way, the introduction works to defuse the very envy from which the readers may also suffer. It is a fascinating move that affords a powerful occasion not only to engage specific questions about the role that interreligious inquiry plays in the making of Jewish studies, but to think through some of the charges that Aaron Hughes quite recently leveled in the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education, when he provocatively accused Jewish Studies, as exemplified by the AJS, of being methodically and theoretically parochial and self–absorbed.
This roundtable brings together a range of scholars working on different aspects of Judeo–Christian interrelations to address two central questions. One, how do works like JANT impacts their chosen fields of expertise? Two, what are the implications of this kind of work for the changing contours of Jewish Studies?

Sub Unit

• Interdisciplinary, Theoretical, and New Approaches

Moderator

• Jonathan Freedman, University of Michigan

Discussants

• Laura S. Levitt, Temple University

• Neta Stahl, Johns Hopkins University

• Jeffrey Spencer Shoulson, University of Connecticut

• Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University

• Maeera Shreiber, University of Utah