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Between Belonging and Identity in Ancient Judaism: The Role of Emotion in the Production of Identity - Reviewed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108499682.
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Reviewed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108499682.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2022
Abstract
This essay considers the vexed relationship between belonging and identity. Belonging is not an objective or unreflective association but rather an emotional assertion of attachment. That emotional connection is an indispensable component of identity, which, as Joseph David argues in Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging, is a relationship charged with meaning. Accordingly, the distinction between belonging as a privately held sentiment and the politics of belonging overlooks the fact that the emotions associated with belonging define group membership. Belonging is not a private matter but an emotional relationship that shapes social life, reinforces a group’s identity politics, and finds expression in a group’s practices. Analysis of two case studies from ancient Judaism—the writings of Philo of Alexandria and the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls—demonstrates the emotional, social, and discursive dimensions of belonging and the role it plays in producing identity. Belonging is not a stable concept but is rather one that assumes different forms depending on the emotional orientation of the group and the particulars of identity politics. For Philo, belonging reflects a universalistic love for all humanity that helps shape an identity embracing Jewish practice and Greek virtue. By contrast, the Dead Sea sect’s antipathy toward all other Jews requires that a sense of belonging express not only love for fellow sectarians but also hate for all outsiders.
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- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
References
1 On the dialectic “being–longing,” see David’s discussion at page 4.
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8 See Anne-Marie Fortier, Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity (London: Routledge, 2020), 2. Fortier views “institutional narratives of identity as part of the longing to belong, as constituted by the desire for an identity, rather than surfacing from an already constituted identity.” Fortier, Migrant Belongings, 2.
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22 See Hindy Najman, “A Written Copy of the Law of Nature: An Unthinkable Paradox?” Studia Philonica Annual 15 (2003): 54–63.
23 See Walter T. Wilson, “Pious Soldiers, Gender Deviants, and the Ideology of Actium: Courage and Warfare in Philo’s De fortitudine,” Studia Philonica Annual 17 (2005): 1–32.
24 Philo, On Abraham 4–6.
25 On philanthropia in Philo, see Peder Borgen, “Philanthropia in Philo’s Writings: Some Observations,” in Biblical and Humane: A Festschrift for John F. Priest, ed. Linda Bennett Elder, David L. Barr, and Elizabeth Struthers Malbon (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 173–88; Katell Berthelot, Philanthrôpia Judaica: le débat autour de la “misanthropie” des lois juives dans l’Antiquité [Philanthrôpia Judaica: The debate on the “misanthropy” of Jewish laws in antiquity] (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 233–321.
26 Philo refers to philanthropia as a virtue. Philo, On the Virtues, trans. F. H. Colson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 8:195 (51). (For the specialist reader or those accessing Philo’s works in different translations from those I use here, I include in parentheses the standard reference by book and/or section.) As David Konstan writes, by that time, philanthropia was “a virtue term in Hellenistic literature.” David Konstan, “Philo’s De virtutibus in the Perspective of Classical Greek Philosophy,” Studia Philonica Annual 18 (2006): 59–72, at 66. The Roman ideal of clementia, an ethic of humaneness with which philanthropia shared much in common, was listed among the emperor’s cardinal virtues beginning in 27 BCE; see Melissa Barden Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 76–125.
27 Philo, On the Virtues, 8:195 (51).
28 Gregory Sterling, “‘The Queen of the Virtues’: Piety in Philo of Alexandria,” Studia Philonica Annual 18 (2006): 103–23, at 110.
29 Philo, On the Virtues, 8:235 (119).
30 Philo, On the Virtues, 8:235 (120).
31 Philo, On the Life of Moses, trans. F. H. Colson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 6:463 (2.27).
32 Philo, On the Life of Moses, 6:471 (2.44).
33 Philo, On the Virtues, 8:235 (119).
34 On the concept of emotional practice, see Mermelstein, Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism, 221–57.
35 See Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: Their True Meaning for Judaism and Christianity (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 65–157.
36 My translations are based on that of Sarianna Metso, The Community Rule: A Critical Edition with Translation (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2019). References to 1QS are provided in parentheticals.
37 My use of the masculine pronoun throughout this article reflects the scholarly view that the community associated with 1QS was a group of celibate men. For a survey of the issue and discussion of the possibility that the sect also included women, see Ilan, Tal, “Women in Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Lim, Timothy H. and Collins, John J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 123–47, at 123–26Google Scholar.
38 The language of the blessing itself recycles a number of words from the first ten lines of column 1. See Mermelstein, Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism, 235n45.