Defining Jewish Difference

This book traces the interpretive career of Leviticus 18:3, a verse that forbids Israel from imitating its neighbors. Beth A. Berkowitz shows that ancient, medieval and modern exegesis of this verse provides an essential backdrop for today's conversations about Jewish assimilation and minority identity more generally. The story of Jewishness that this book tells may surprise many modern readers for whom religious identity revolves around ritual and worship. In Leviticus 18:3's story of Jewishness, sexual practice and cultural habits instead loom large. The readings in this book are on a micro-level, but their implications are far-ranging: Berkowitz transforms both our notion of Bible-reading and our sense of how Jews have defined Jewishness.

• Challenges assumptions that religious identity revolves around ritual and worship by showing that Jews have historically defined themselves instead through sexual practice and cultural habit
• Shows that discourse about Jewish assimilation is not a distinctively modern phenomenon, but that it has a long and varied history within Jewish cultures starting with the Bible itself
• Maps out an important new genre of Bible reception history: by tracing the interpretation of a verse that is loaded with identity politics, the book explores the nexus between hermeneutics and history, or interpretation and ideology, in its sharpest, most dramatic iterations