Defying the Binary: Relationships Between Jews and Non-Jews

Defying the Binary:Relationships Between Jews and Non-Jews Klaus Hödl (bio) As Emory University historian Ellie R. Schainker's thorough research demonstrates, Ivan Bondarev was one of almost one hundred thousand converts from Judaism to Christianity in Imperial Russia during the nineteenth century. He abandoned his faith in 1867 while serving as a soldier in the Russian Army. After being discharged from the military, he settled in the Bialystok region. Due to a medical impairment, he had difficulty eking out a living and establishing permanent residency. He drifted from one job to another and constantly relocated. His social life was similarly restless and volatile. Bondarev socialized with Jews and non-Jews, and although—as a Christian—he never went to a synagogue, he kept tzizit and a Jewish prayer book in his pocket.1 There seemed to be no religious or ethnic boundaries that Bondarev did not cross. Bondarev lacked distinguishing features that would have allowed others to categorize him as unequivocally Jewish or non-Jewish. One could also say that he shared so many traits with people comprising his immediate social environment that differences between them receded beyond recognition. Bondarev defied the numerous laws, decrees, and ordinances issued by religious and state authorities to keep Jews and non-Jews separate and distinguishable. He was, in other words, similar to all of them. This similarity proved to be highly troublesome to officials, because it called into question normative rules. It also caused confusion among ordinary people, because it posed a radical challenge to how they conceived of their social environment. People usually comprehend their surroundings through binary categorizations.2 According to some scholars, such as the late Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the disposition toward bifurcating classifications "may lie deep within the architecture of the human mind."3 Dichotomous reasoning thus seems to be an anthropological constant that is difficult, if not impossible, to discard.4 In keeping with this tendency, the absence of classificatory traits allowing for binary categorizations (often) confounds people's sense of order. Thinking in dichotomous terms resonates in the works of historians, particularly in the case of historiographical work on the Jewish past, as well. We [End Page 107] can see dichotomies of this sort above all in conventional historical accounts that dominated Jewish studies until the 1970s.5 According to traditional Jewish historiography's central premise, Jews largely lived in isolation from non-Jews, and the contacts they did have tended to be restricted to business matters.6 In the last third of the twentieth century, a growing number of scholars, however, began to revise this proposition.7 The greater part of them emphasized multifarious exchanges between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures. Other historians documented multitudinous individual Jewish and non-Jewish interactions. In depicting the cultures, experiences and life-ways of Jews and non-Jews as interrelated and mutually constituted, both the "exchange" and "interaction" historians, as I wish to subdivide the new generation of scholars with respect to their respective focus of research, have brought Jewish historiography in line with epistemological concepts and methodological approaches of so-called general history. With respect to conventional historians' dichotomous perspective, however, the exchange and interaction historians showed little innovative ambitions. Instead, they retained the binary view of Jewish and non-Jewish relations.8 As I see it, there are two major reasons for its perpetuation. The first reason is related to many exchange historians' hesitancy to follow through on their revision of the traditional historical narrative. Although they amassed extensive evidence on Jewish and non-Jewish cultural entanglement, they did not draw consequential inferences from their analysis, such as questioning the importance of interethnic and interreligious boundaries and thereby Jewish and non-Jewish polarization. Debra Kaplan, a historian at Bar Ilan University, may serve as an exemplary representative of this group of scholars. Despite the many references to Jewish and non-Jewish cultural involvement that she unearthed in the course of her research, Kaplan maintains that "Jews were still seen as others by their Christian neighbors, and they continued to see Christians as other. … All of the exchanges and parallels that historians have traced did not eradicate the very real boundaries that were...