The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 15 (2012) 203–241 brill.nl/rrj

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

Alan J. Yuter Institute for Traditional Judaism, Teaneck, New Jersey [email protected]

This two volume work is in reality many 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 formally 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 culture, which serves as the benchmark by which other Judaisms are measured, decoded, and evaluated. This formally modern, scholarly work is also aderasha , an exercise in the rhetoric of rabbinic argument, analysis, and non-authoritarian 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 identical to what 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. 14–24. Neusner defines the social and theological construction of Jewish reality envisioned by the Mishnah, based on a New Criticism reading, i.e., based upon internal evi- dence 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 addresses 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 encoded world construction, Faur contrasts the phenomenology of this Judaism to its competitors, those Judaic systems that sought to suppress and supersede the Judaism of the Dual Torah. For a statement of this terminology, see Neusner, Economics of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 12. See also Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, p. 14, for a gracious appreciation of Moore’s seminal efforts, which also exposes Moore’s inappropriate conceptual paradigm.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/15700704-12341238 204 A. J. Yuter / The Review of Rabbinic Judaism 15 (2012) 203–241 who are citizens but not subjects, all of whom are invested with the image of God and subject to God’s law over and above the human tyrant’s self-inter- ested caprice. Using historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, philology, and anthropology, Faur first decodes the normative culture prescribed by this Judaism’s sacred canon and then contrasts the horizontal, egalitarian society that this canon commends, with special, explicit attention to the politics of pagan structures, to Christianity as a theological political construction of real- ity, to as it presents itself in Jewish non-rabbinic mysti- cism, the anti-Maimonidean movement,3 and, as I argue in the footnotes, to the contemporary religion of Orthodox Judaism’s street culture. In other words, Faur’s description of events past is an implicit polemic opposing what is [mis]taken to be Orthodox Dual Torah Judaism. The narrative’s secular academic format deals with descriptive explication; the derasha presents the argument, based on explication, and an apologia, defending the canonical Covenant that constitutes the polity called “Israel.” Faur applies academic methodology when addressing and appears as a precise, astute, and accomplished philologist. However, as a mat- ter of nationalist Jewish pride, Faur refuses to submit Biblical Hebrew writing to secular, critical analysis. Avoiding even the lower criticism of R. Abraham ibn Ezra, Faur even treats Isaiah as a singular, unified document.4 However, Faur cites higher critics approvingly on occasion,5 indicating to the astute reader that the author is keenly aware of the critical school as well as its non- academic and occasionally anti-Jewish culture biases.6 By affirming that the is best read with the tools applied to fiction, and by astutely noting that as long as the Jew observes the mitsvot, which are presented not as commandments but as teachings/precepts of covenantal Judaism, Faur the

3 See Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons,” in Review of Rabbinic Judaism 6 (2003), pp. 3–52. 4 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 iner- rant. Faur, on ideological grounds, refuses to treat his canon, or “Book,” as a pedestrian docu- ment. Indeed, he treats all New Testament books ascribed to Paul as Pauline, because, even as an adversary, he is meticulous regarding protocol. 5 On p. 59, n. 31, Faur uses Diqduqei Soferim, the variant readings from the Munich MS. Faur does not flinch from academically defensible and responsible lower text criticism. 6 See, e.g., p. 63, n. 57, where he castigates Rimon Kasher, 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 criticism that Neusner has astutely identi- fied in the writings of Moore and Urbach (see 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 whom Faur treats with respect are William F. Albright, Elias Bickerman, Robert Gordis, E. Speiser, and Mayer Gruber.