In 1962, J. L. Austin published a set of lectures entitled How to Do Things with Words. In this founding document of speech act theory, Austin argues that language not only can say things, but it can also do things (what he calls the illocutionary force of language). Austins signal example of the illocutionary force of language is the wedding ceremony, in which words properly recited actually create a marriage. Later students of speech act theory have expanded the application of this insight: all language, written or spoken, has an illocutionary force that depends on the context of the speech act. All language not only, or even primarily, says; it also does.

Converts to the faith have often been perceived as somewhat problematic by Judaism; apostates even more so.1 This was especially true in medieval Christian Europe, where the adversarial relationship between Christianity and Judaism made apostasy, particularly apostasy by choice, more than mere defection; it cast aspersions on the rejected religion.

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.