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The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish. In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity. There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by \"border-makers,\" heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border—and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion.

In this article I attempt to lay out at least the bones of an argument for a shift in the terms of world Jewish life. Against the Hobson’s choice of “religion” or “state,” I offer an older paradigm of diaspora nation, the Yiddishe Folk. Because I am opposed to both the mononational state and cosmopolitanism (of the classic Appiah-like variety), I work out a description (not fully defined) of diaspora that comprises dual loyalties, to the place where I am and especially its oppressed people and to others of my nation scattered in many places (ideally!). This statement constitutes a vade mecum to a longer manifesto to be published by Yale University Press, late in 2022.

I will begin by thanking Professor Quayson and all of the contributors to this forum with the deepest of gratitude. I deem it a great privilege to have been engaged with in such depth and seriousness by such a group of superb interlocutors, all of whom seem nearly completely to have understood my project, even when more negatively reflecting on it. As a version of the Talmud would have said: it is far better to be understood by one’s opponents than to be misread by one’s supporters. Even those who have most highly approbated my thinking here have done so in ways that have taught me much and challenged me to match the precision of my thinking to theirs. So I welcome both the approbation and the reprobation. In this response—and following the guidance of Professor Quayson—I will not answer or comment point by point or even author by author but give a somewhat expanded account of what I am about that will show, I hope, the manner in which I concede some arguments to the opponents and understand myself better having read carefully the proponents of my views.

In translating a word without fully describing its use we are only, to use Ludwig Wittgenstein's wonderful metaphor, giving a check, promising something, something that we must finally deliver. Now, historian Daniel R. Schwartz takes pains to demonstrate the correctness of this translation in several passages of Josephus. Below, however, I will show that his argument on this point fails with respect to Josephus as well. Here I propose to afford from my own research for the two examples out of many and then to come back briefly to Josephus before concluding with more methodological reflections. The first example is drawn from the Roman-Greek writer Plutarch and the second from the Jew Philo, who wrote in Greek. In both of these I will show that the translation \"religion\" is actually precluded.

Exploring law's articulation in everything from road signs and billboards to Supreme Court opinions, this volume opens up the possibilities of legal study beyond doctrine and official behavior.This broadly ranging volume shows the possibilities of studying law from many different angles: not only as rule or behavior, but as text, image, or culture, and in relation to religion, place, family, ritual, and performance. For many, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the \"wrong places\"-sites and spaces where no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law's constraints. InLooking for Law in All the Wrong Places, leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, they show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture. Many contributors examine places where there appears to be no law, fi nding not only refl ections and remains of law but also rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and about law's meaning and function. Other essays look in the more common places- statute books and courtrooms-but from perspectives that are usually presumed to have nothing to say about law. Looking at law sideways, upside-down, or inside-out de-familiarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can gain when law is denied its ostensibly proper domain. Contributors: Kathryn Abrams, Daniel Boyarin, Wendy Brown, Marianne Constable, Samera Esmeir, Daniel Fisher, Sara Ludin, Saba Mahmood, Rebecca McLennan, Ramona Naddaff , Beth Piatote, Sarah Song, Christopher Tomlins, Leti Volpp, Bryan Wagner An impressive line-up of leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines - law, but also anthropology, rhetoric, literature, history, geography, and race and ethnic studies.

My specific project in this paper is to combine several related and notorious questions in the history of Judaism into one: What is the nexus among the semidivine (or high angel) figure known in the Talmud as Meṭaṭron, the figure of the exalted Enoch in the Enoch books (1-3 Enoch!), \"The One Like a Son of Man\" of Daniel, Jesus, the Son of Man, and the rabbinically named heresy of \"Two Powers/Sovereignties in Heaven?\" I believe that in order to move towards some kind of an answer to this question, we need to develop a somewhat different approach to the study of ancient Judaism, as I hope to show here. I claim that late-ancient rabbinic literature when read in the context of all contemporary and earlier texts of Judaism—those defined as rabbinic as well as those defined as non-, para-, or even anti-rabbinic—affords us a fair amount of evidence for and information about a belief in (and perhaps cult of) a second divine person within, or very close to, so-called \"orthodox\" rabbinic circles long after the advent of Christianity. Part of the evidence for this very cult will come from efforts at its suppression on the part of rabbinic texts. I believe, moreover, that a reasonable chain of inference links this late cult figure back through the late-antique Book of 3 Enoch to the Enoch of the first-century Parables of Enoch—also known in the scholarly literature as the Similitudes of Enoch—and thus to the Son of Man of that text and further back to the One Like a Son of Man of Daniel 7.

Professor Hanan Eshel, in memoriam Ancient and modern readers have offered two basic interpretations of the “[One like a] Son of Man” () in Dan 7:13. One line of interpretation holds that the One like a Son of Man is a symbol of a collective, namely, the faithful Israelites at the time of the Maccabean revolt.1 The other basic line of interpretation sees the One like a Son of Man as a divine figure of one sort or another, a second God, a son of God, or an archangel.

MARTIN BUBER FAMOUSLY accused the translators of the Septuagint of having invented Christianity by “mistranslating” Torah as nomos and argued that it was the “Greek narrowing of the concept of Torah into law that makes possible Paul’s opposition of law and faith. ‘Without the change of meaning in the Greek, objective sense,’ Buber writes, ‘the Pauline dualism of law and faith, life from works and life from grace, would miss its most important conceptual presupposition.’”¹ Whatever Paul did or did not understand, I would exonerate the translators of the Septuagint from having perpetrated a “Greek narrowing” of Torah, suggesting rather

In this paper it will be argued that Thucydides's Melian Dialogue is best illuminated in the context of Socratic dialogue as given by Plato. Thucydides and Plato take directly oppositional positions on dialogue versus debate or philosophy versus rhetoric.