The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 16 (2013) 91–132 brill.com/rrj

Recovering the Straight and the Good: Jose Faur, The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism1

Alan J. Yuter Midreshet Devora, Jerusalem, and the Institute for Traditional Judaism, Teaneck, New Jersey [email protected]

This two volume work is in reality several books in one, encompassing many methods and modes of discourse as it addresses and explicates radically differ- ent constructions of social and religious reality. Jose Faur writes as a secular, critical scholar, decoding the past, arguing his theses, and presenting an anthropology of the Judaism that he contends is encoded in Israel’s sacred library. However, Faur personally, normatively, and passionately identifies with that canonical library’s encoded religious culture, which serves for him as the normative benchmark by which other Judaisms are measured, decoded, and evaluated. This modern, scholarly work is also aderasha , an exercise in the rhetoric of rabbinic argument, analysis, and non-authoritarian intellectual persuasion. Faur’s magisterial derasha both explicates and exemplifies Judaism’s canonical version,2 which is conceived as a horizontal society of covenanted Israelites

1 2 vols.; Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008. 2 This Judaism is corresponds with what Jacob Neusner calls the “Judaism of the Dual ,” defined in his Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981). See pp. 14–22 for a discussion of evidence and 22–24 for a method- ological exposition. Neusner defines the social and theological construction of Jewish reality envisioned by the Mishnah based upon internal evidence that the Mishnah actually provides. Faur argues that this Judaism is preserved in old Sepharad and has its source in the Written Torah, the Aramaic Targum Onqelos, and was made explicit by Maimonides. Just as Neusner rejects the dead end paths of G.F. Moore and E.E. Urbach, who used categories borrowed from Christian theology that are not intrinsic to the Mishnah’s world construction, Faur contrasts the phenomenology of this Judaism to its competitors, those Judaic systems that sought to supersede the Judaism of the Dual Torah. For a statement of this terminology, see Jacob Neusner, Econom- ics of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 12. See also Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, p. 14, for an appreciation of Moore’s seminal efforts that also exposes Moore’s inappropriate conceptual paradigm. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15700704-12341251 92 A. J. Yuter / The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 16 (2013) 91–132 who are citizens but not subjects, all of whom are endowed with the image of God and are subject to God’s law that takes priority over the human tyrant’s self-interested power-driven caprice. Using historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, philology, and anthropology, Faur decodes the normative culture encoded in and prescribed by this Judaism’s sacred canon and then contrasts the horizontal, egalitarian society that this canon projects and commends, with special and explicit attention to the politics of pagan structures, to Chris- tianity as a theological political construction of reality, to post-Dual Torah as it presents itself in Jewish non-rabbinic mysticism, also known as the anti-Maimonidean movement,3 and, as I argue in the footnotes, by clear implication, to the contemporary religion of Orthodox Judaism’s “street culture” folk religion. In other words, Faur’s description of events past intimates an implicit polemic that exposes what is [mis]taken to be the succes- sor “Orthodoxy” of Dual Torah Judaism in modernity. The narrative deals with academic, descriptive explication; thederasha pres- ents the argument, based on explication, and an apologia defending the canon- ical Covenant that constitutes the polity called “Israel.” Faur applies academic methodology when addressing and appears as a precise, astute, and very accomplished philologist throughout the monograph. How- ever, as a matter of nationalist Jewish pride, Faur refuses to submit the canon- ical to secular, critical analysis. Avoiding even the lower criticism of R. Abraham ibn Ezra, Faur even treats Isaiah as a singular, unified document.4 Nevertheless, he cites higher critics approvingly on occasion,5 indicating that he is keenly aware of the critical school as well as its non- academic, and what he takes to be occasionally anti-Jewish, cultural biases.6 By affirming that the Hebrew Bible is best read with the tools applied to

3 See Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons,” in Review of Rabbinic Judaism 6 (2003), pp. 3–52. 4 See ibn Ezra to Is. 40:1. While many critical scholars regard Ephesians, Timothy I, II, and Titus to be post-Pauline, many fundamentalist Christians regard the ascriptions to be divinely inspired and therefore accurate. Faur, on ideological grounds, refuses to treat his sacred canon, or “Book,” as a pedestrian document. Indeed, he treats all New Testament books ascribed to Paul as Pauline, because, even as an adversary, he is meticulous regarding manners and protocol. 5 On p. 59, n. 31, Faur uses Diqduqei Soferim, the variant readings from the Munich MS. He applies academically defensible and responsible lower text criticism to study Rabbinic literature. 6 See for example p. 63, n. 57, where he castigates Rimon Kasher, formerly affiliated with Bar Ilan University, who argued that to be considered sacred, books of Scripture were said to have been composed with the Holy Spirit. But see T. Sot. 13:3. For Faur, academic critics often internalize a Christian hermeneutic that is alien to the ethos of Israel’s canonical library, a criti- cism that Neusner has astutely identified in the writings of Moore and Urbach (n. 1, above). For Faur, “ ‘Jewish history’ needs to have been first regurgitated by non-Jews” regarding the issue of canonization [63], which, for Faur, is a term not found in Israel’s Dual Torah canon. Critics