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Dybbuk and Maggid: Two Cultural Patterned of Altered Consciousness in Judaism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Yoram Bilu
Yoram Bilu
Affiliation:
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
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Extract

For many years scholars of Judaism were reluctant to employ the analytic tools distilled in anthropology for studying Jewish culture. One reason for this reluctance was that the classical ethnographic field, consisting of a small-scale tribal society with no written tradition, did not appear pertinent to the study of the text-informed “great tradition“ of Judaism. In addition, the notion of comparative research implicit in most anthropological studies appeared dubious to many scholars of Judaism, who were alarmed by the sweeping, methodologically unfounded comparisons evident in the treatment of biblical material by such precursors of modern anthropology as Robertson Smith and Frazer.1 This methodological consideration was augmented by an emotional unwillingness to equate the “primitive’ religious systems of “savage’ societies with concepts and rituals pertaining to the oldest monotheistic religion.

Type
Articles
Information
AJS Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , November 1996 , pp. 341 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 1996

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References

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58. Ibid.

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