- United States
Naomi Janowitz
University of California, Davis, Religious Studies, Faculty Member
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Research Interests: Poetics and Linguistics
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Three of the earliest extant Jewish exegetes, Aristobulus, Aristeas, and Philo, all state that King Ptolemy was responsible for a Greek translation of the Hebrew sacred writings. Scholarly discussion has focused on finding the historical... more
Three of the earliest extant Jewish exegetes, Aristobulus, Aristeas, and Philo, all state that King Ptolemy was responsible for a Greek translation of the Hebrew sacred writings. Scholarly discussion has focused on finding the historical kernel in these stories, or linking their creation to a particular event such as the official promulgation of an original or corrected Greek translation. The Letter of Aristeas is usually considered the most accurate version, in large part because it later was used as an introduction to the Septuagint. These discussions have overlooked the fact that in each case the basic plot is fine-tuned to suit each exegete's own ideas about how the Torah was written, how the text and its translation should be read and interpreted, and by whom. A comparison of the three versions reveals that each writer embellishes this bare-bones plot in a distinct manner. In particular, “historical” details are created by each writer that support the very exegetical endeavor he is undertaking. The story of the translation becomes a vehicle for creating all the components necessary to justify the exegete's role, from the creation of a unitary “Torah” out of the multiplicity of versions and stories to the motivation for the particular interpretative moves “demanded” by the very qualities of this Torah. Comparing the three stories gives us valuable insights into the self-perceptions of the exegetes and the emergence of what will become a standard model of text-author-exegete in Judaism.
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... Page 11. ABBREVIATIONS Rabbinic (m=Mishnah, j=Jerusalem Talmud, b=Babylonian Talmud, t=tosefta AZ Avodah Zara BabaB Baba Batra BabaK Baba Kamma Erub Erubin EsthRab Esther Rabbah GenRab Genesis Rabbah Git Gittin Hag Hagigah Hul Hullin... more
... Page 11. ABBREVIATIONS Rabbinic (m=Mishnah, j=Jerusalem Talmud, b=Babylonian Talmud, t=tosefta AZ Avodah Zara BabaB Baba Batra BabaK Baba Kamma Erub Erubin EsthRab Esther Rabbah GenRab Genesis Rabbah Git Gittin Hag Hagigah Hul Hullin Ket Ketubot Kid ...
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Despite the extensive information known about suicide bombings, widely-varying intentions have been used by many scholars to explain the religious motivations for the violence: these events are framed by participants as religious... more
Despite the extensive information known about suicide bombings, widely-varying intentions have been used by many scholars to explain the religious motivations for the violence: these events are framed by participants as religious experiences, raising complex questions about the relationship between religious experience and violence. Recent studies use the vocabulary of religious studies—sacrifice, martyr, witness—to locate “cultures of violence” in a specific psychic structure, in a specific religion, or in religion in general; this paper compares three major studies that are representative of contemporary debate about religious experience. Ivan Strenski’s approach offers the broadest view, grounding suicide bombings in specific Islamic shaping of religious experience by a (non-normative) view of self-sacrifice emboldened by notions of jihad. Gideon Aran reconstructs a much narrower frame, a mutual attachment by bombers and their enemies around motivations from the redemptive capaci...
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Drawing Down the Moon is an outstanding contribution to the contemporary debate about ritual practices and magic. My review focuses on two intersecting points, the definition of magic as discourse in Chapter One and the analysis of “love... more
Drawing Down the Moon is an outstanding contribution to the contemporary debate about ritual practices and magic. My review focuses on two intersecting points, the definition of magic as discourse in Chapter One and the analysis of “love charms and erotic curses” in Chapter Four. I begin with the second issue, the category love magic, and will return to the first, magic as discourse, at the end. I have a fairly narrow point to make about the category love magic: the modern classification incorporates but does not sufficiently analyze ancient notions of agency. On the issue of definitions of magic, Edmonds’s careful study reveals the problems of classifying rituals based on a narrow notion of discourse.
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Inventing the Scapegoat: Theories of Sacrifice and Ritual No figure appears in studies of sacrifice more often than the scapegoat. Numerous societies, the argument goes, have a seemingly innate need to purge sins via an innocent victim.... more
Inventing the Scapegoat: Theories of Sacrifice and Ritual No figure appears in studies of sacrifice more often than the scapegoat. Numerous societies, the argument goes, have a seemingly innate need to purge sins via an innocent victim. The killing of this victim constitutes the core of sacrifice traditions; explaining the efficacy of these rites outlines in turn the inner workings of all sacrifices, if not all rituals. I do not believe, however, that the enigmatic figure of the scapegoat can support a universal theory of sacrifice, especially if the general term “scapegoat” turns out refer to a variety of rituals with very different goals. Rene Girard’s extremely influential theory of the scapegoat includes a biological basis for the importance of the figure (Girard, 1977). According to Girard, humans are naturally aggressive, a la Konrad Lorenz. This innate aggression was channeled into an unending series of attacks and counterattacks during the earliest periods of history. A bett...
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Lusting for Death: Unconscious Fantasies in An Ancient Jewish Martyrdom Text Abstract We examine the story of the martyrdom of a mother and her seven sons from Second Maccabees 7:1-42, a Greek text from the First Century BCE . The story... more
Lusting for Death: Unconscious Fantasies in An Ancient Jewish Martyrdom Text Abstract We examine the story of the martyrdom of a mother and her seven sons from Second Maccabees 7:1-42, a Greek text from the First Century BCE . The story recounts the sons’ refusal to eat pork, their torture at the hands of the king, the king’s attempts to recruit the mother, her admonition to the sons that they should better die, and finally their deaths (all in one day). The mother and sons gain eternal life (merger) through their submission to the violent human king, an earthly father figure. Unlike animal sacrifice, which completely excluded women, the willingness to sacrifice one’s life via martyrdom gives women an odd sense of agency. The mother plays a major role, but it is the role of giving away “motherhood” while instantiating the idealized object of the divine father. Martyrdom fulfills the same unconscious role as animal sacrifice, displacing the human mother in favor of a divine father, a...
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Do Jews Make Good Protestants? The Cross-cultural Study of Ritual Usually a ritual becomes the object of critical investigation only when it is perceived to be exotic, bizarre, nonsensical or absurd: that is, when it is someone else's... more
Do Jews Make Good Protestants? The Cross-cultural Study of Ritual Usually a ritual becomes the object of critical investigation only when it is perceived to be exotic, bizarre, nonsensical or absurd: that is, when it is someone else's ritual. 1 The someone else has classically been an indigenous person; most of the investigators, Europeans, in particular Protestants. The distorting lens of these Protestant-derived theories is addressed elegantly in S.J. Tambiah’s work Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality. He presents a thorough critique of scholars such as Edmund Tylor and James George Frazer, demonstrating the straitjacket that their theories of magic constructed for analyzing indigenous rituals. Their legacy continues to shape debates about rituals, and whether or not terms such as “magic” are useful analytic tools. Using Tambiah’s work as a guide, in the first part of this paper I will explore his formulation of the problem. In the second part I examine a tes...
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Envy of Maternal Functions in Sacrifice Rituals Naomi Janowitz Over two decades ago Jeffrey Andresen (1984) challenged analysts to pay more attention to themes of sacrifice appearing in their clinical work. According to Andresen, Freud’s... more
Envy of Maternal Functions in Sacrifice Rituals Naomi Janowitz Over two decades ago Jeffrey Andresen (1984) challenged analysts to pay more attention to themes of sacrifice appearing in their clinical work. According to Andresen, Freud’s insight into this issue has been unduly neglected. Freud recounted throwing a slipper across the room and breaking a statue as a “sacrificial act” directed towards his daughter’s recovery (Freud, 1901, p. 169). He saw this as one among many everyday activities which acted out sacrificial fantasies. Andresen is no doubt correct that sacrificial fantasies appear often in clinical material; sacrifice traditions are so central in most religious traditions it is hard to imagine otherwise. Yet, Andresen proposed a fairly limited set of sacrificial fantasies. He presents several clinical vignettes in which something of value was given up or destroyed by a patient in hopes of restoring a relationship with a loved one. He thereby highlights his patients’ wis...
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... Page 11. ABBREVIATIONS Rabbinic (m=Mishnah, j=Jerusalem Talmud, b=Babylonian Talmud, t=tosefta AZ Avodah Zara BabaB Baba Batra BabaK Baba Kamma Erub Erubin EsthRab Esther Rabbah GenRab Genesis Rabbah Git Gittin Hag Hagigah Hul Hullin... more
... Page 11. ABBREVIATIONS Rabbinic (m=Mishnah, j=Jerusalem Talmud, b=Babylonian Talmud, t=tosefta AZ Avodah Zara BabaB Baba Batra BabaK Baba Kamma Erub Erubin EsthRab Esther Rabbah GenRab Genesis Rabbah Git Gittin Hag Hagigah Hul Hullin Ket Ketubot Kid ...
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Research Interests: Protestantism and Numen
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Water, Word and Name: The Shifting Pragmatics of the Sotah/Suspected Adulteress Ritual Forthcoming in Literature or Liturgy? Early Christian Hymns and Prayers in their Literary and Liturgical Context in Antiquity Liturgy is a special kind... more
Water, Word and Name: The Shifting Pragmatics of the Sotah/Suspected Adulteress Ritual Forthcoming in Literature or Liturgy? Early Christian Hymns and Prayers in their Literary and Liturgical Context in Antiquity Liturgy is a special kind of conversation, words sometimes addressed to the gods and sometimes about them. These conversations are part of complex performances that combine words with the use of all sorts of objects. While, as we will discuss below, some ritual acts do not include the use of any words at all, this paper examines the Sotah/Suspected Adulteress Rite where liturgy is of central importance. Liturgy is a compelling example of the multi- functionality of language because words are spoken to bring about concrete results. That is, participating in liturgy is a direct mode of social action (blessing, marrying, etc.). These modes of action overlap with but are distinct from that of other types of texts (novels) because of the many different ways what-is-said maps ont...
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Notions of ineffability, what cannot be put into words, vary depending on the historical and cultural context and, in particular, on shifting linguistic ideologies about the capabilities and limits of language. In recent decades... more
Notions of ineffability, what cannot be put into words, vary depending on the historical and cultural context and, in particular, on shifting linguistic ideologies about the capabilities and limits of language. In recent decades psychoanalysts have embraced a modern notion of ineffability centered around traumatic bodily experiences that are thought to be inexpressible. However, these ideas break with Freudian ideas about language and, most importantly, with his understanding of the processes of interpretation that give meaning to both psychic pain and attempts to heal it. Contra Freud, current theories of ineffable trauma re-inscribe a dominance of the body over the psyche and over-simplify Freud’s ideas about the retro-determination of trauma.
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We examine the story of the martyrdom of a mother and her seven sons from Second Maccabees 7:1–42, a Greek text from the first century BCE. The story recounts the sons' refusal to eat pork, their torture at the hands of the king, the... more
We examine the story of the martyrdom of a mother and her seven sons from Second Maccabees 7:1–42, a Greek text from the first century BCE. The story recounts the sons' refusal to eat pork, their torture at the hands of the king, the king's attempts to recruit the mother, her admonition to the sons that they should better die,
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Jesus' act has been classified as everything from magic to proto-scientific folk medicine. This range of opinion mirrors the range of Late Antiquity positions on agency and causality in healing, reflecting debates that were always... more
Jesus' act has been classified as everything from magic to proto-scientific folk medicine. This range of opinion mirrors the range of Late Antiquity positions on agency and causality in healing, reflecting debates that were always highly rhetorical, complex and contested. For an entrance into Late Antique debates about saliva, Pliny is a particularly rich guide. Pliny reports that Marsi males who inhabit the mountains of central Italy have very special bodily fluids. The Marsi are lauded for giving the Roman army free passages through their territory. The Marsi goddess passed on a multi-modal heritage that included both powerful rituals and body fluids, that is, different means for healing snakebites. These stories locate the origin of special powers in passed-on special knowledge, inheritance of a bodily trait due to a special genealogy and a mixture of both. Keywords: healing; Late Antique debates; Marsi goddess; Pliny; proto-scientific folk medicine; saliva; snakebites
Publisher Summary This chapter highlights that with Tambiah's schema it should be possible to re-examine the multiple linguistic functions of ritual language. Among the variety of rituals, one particularly interesting type is the rite... more
Publisher Summary This chapter highlights that with Tambiah's schema it should be possible to re-examine the multiple linguistic functions of ritual language. Among the variety of rituals, one particularly interesting type is the rite consisting of a consciously articulated discussion of the very means and methods by which such a rite is completed. The hymns in Maaseh Merkabah seem to have been constructed in conjunction with a tradition that places the divine Name and the power that it entails at the center of their language system. The solution offered in these hymns is to introduce a variety of Name substitutes. The use of semantically depleted words is an effective device to focus maximal attention on the sound quality of words. A simple but important preliminary observation about the functions of the frames is that they make the formulas into speech. It is important to remember the underlying theory that motivates the text and to realize that the structure of the text is dominated by the necessities that arise from this theory.