Theater of Acculturation by Kenneth R. Stow

Author:Kenneth R. Stow [Stow, Kenneth R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295996240
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2015-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

ONE FINAL ASPECT of this bifurcated process of Roman Jewish acculturation requires our attention. In so many instances, acculturation occurred after a significant gap in time. I am not referring to the obvious—that, by definition, one acculturates to “something” that already exists. I mean a demonstrable hiatus of decades and even generations prior to adoption, adaptation, and absorption. Furthermore, in many instances, Jewish behavior, notably with respect to such things as the rights of women both to inherit and to determine heirs, often seems to have exhibited patterns that some Christians once, but no longer, observed—indeed, patterns that Christians, at least statutorily, had openly rejected.70 Hence, Jewish acculturation was selectively conservative, often restrained, among other things, by a concern for Jewish law or traditional practice. Put otherwise, between Jews and Christians there existed an acculturational gap. I caution that this gap measures the distance between “what was” and “what is.” It does not refer to issues such as “modernization” or the flight from it.

This “acculturational gap” or “selective absorption” created unease among Christians. But selective absorption also had implications for Jewish stability. For what this process illuminates is that central consequence of Jewish acculturation at Rome: rather than fueling assimilation—cultural negation and disappearance—it promoted a viable subculture. In their collective mind’s eye, so to speak, the Jews were not accommodating to the ways of the dominant (Christian) society. They were first selectively adopting individual practices and then domesticating them by subtle modification so that they could be inserted into, and under, the rubrics of Jewish law and custom.

Yet, however Jews understood the process of selective absorption, it must be appreciated as one of cultural creation, of converting the external into something Jewish, something part and parcel of normative Jewish practice, such as on those rare occasions when Jewish lawyers cite specific Jewish laws in their briefs, which they do opaquely, with the intent of making an opposing party, lawyer, or even a judge despair of tracing the citation’s source. This device was ubiquitous among Christian lawyers of the day.71 The Jews’ “Romanness” had thus become an adjunct of even their scholarly Jewishness, and vice versa, which thereby enhanced, albeit somewhat perversely, Jewish cultural integrity.

Conversely, such selective absorption persuaded the Jews that their behavior conformed to the standards of their neighbors, even while the halachic wrapper in which they enveloped their actions assured them that the seemingly extraneous was intrinsically their own. By extension, therefore, no matter how much the Ghetto physically separated the Jews from Christians, psychologically the Jews never perceived it as hermetically sealing off the outside. At times, it seems that the Ghetto did not affect Jewish attitudes or behavior at all. Did it not take thirty-five years for the Jews to invent the pun-metaphor of the ghet, the Hebrew bill of divorce, to describe their newfound state? And who knows whether even Roman Jewry’s great impoverishment after its loan banks were closed in 1682 awakened it to the full dimensions of the gap separating the Ghetto Jew from the Roman Christian—assuming, which is not at all certain, that a true caesura ever existed.

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