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A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (1994) is a book by Daniel Boyarin.

Abstract

<Daniel Boyarin turns to the Epistles of Paul as the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jewish cultural critic. What led Paul--in his dramatic conversion to Christianity--to such a radical critique of Jewish culture? Paul's famous formulation, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, no male and female in Christ," demonstrates the genius of Christianity: its concern for all people. The genius of Judaism is its validation of genealogy and cultural, ethnic difference. But the evils of these two thought systems are the obverse of their geniuses: Christianity has threatened to coerce universality, while ethnic difference is one of the most troubled issues in modern history. Boyarin posits a "diaspora identity" as a way to negotiate the pitfalls inherent in either position. Jewishness disrupts categories of identity because it is not national, genealogical, or even religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with one another. It is analogous with gender: gender identity makes us different in some ways but not in others. An exploration of these tensions in the Pauline corpus, argues Boyarin, will lead us to a richer appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Jew and Palestinian--and as human beings.>--Publisher description.

<As a (post)modern confessing and professing Orthodox Jew, Boyarin seeks not only to recover the historical meaning of Paul's message, but also to appropriate the apostle's social and cultural critique of first-century Judaism in order to address contemporary cultural issues of Jewish (and non-Jewish) identity in Western society. Boyarin contends that Paul was extremely disturbed by the particularism and ethnocentricity which he saw in Judaism, and advocated for the oneness of humanity in which Jewish difference was overridden but unity and univocity among Jews and Gentiles could be appreciated. Paul, motivated by a Hellenistic desire of the One, produced through platonist allegorization an ideal of an universal human essence, one lying beyond difference and hierarchy. For Boyarin, the advantage of such a theology lies in its universality and call for parity among Jew and Gentile. The downside remains in its ultimate call for the eradication of any real, bodily, corporeal (and Jewish)difference, the elimination of the Other, a political discourse which has dominated European Christian history and often violently translated itself into policies which have sought to destroy dominated minorities (e.g., Jews, Africans, Native Americans, etc.). Rabbinic Judaism, for its part, resisted Paul's (and the subsequent Christian) call for univocity, positively affirming the bodily difference of the Jew, inscribed nowhere else than on the circumcised male penis, which Paul had tried to allegorize into an ideal undifferentiated phallus. The strength of the rabbinic anti-thesis to Paul lies in its ability to value cultural difference, but its particularistic proclivities can also lead the Jew to neglect the Other and generate into a form of racism, especially if the Jewish people finds itself in a position of power as in the case of the revival of modern Jewish state. In order to avoid this danger, Boyarin argues that the state of Israel must ultimately be structured on individual and cultural rights, no longer coded as a Jewish state but as a bi-national, secular, and multicultural one in which Judaism will continue to exist but no longer dominate nor oppress the Other.>--Isaac W. Oliver, University of Michigan.

Editions

Published in Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.

Online reviews

• Review of Biblical Literature (2000) / Neil Elliott

Contents

• Introduction: Wrestling with Paul
• 1. Circumcision, Allegory, and Universal "Man"
• 2. What was Wrong with Judaism? The Cultural Politics of Pauline Scholarship
• 3. The Spirit and the Flesh: Paul's Political Anthropology
• 4. Moses; Veil; or, The Jewish Letter, the Christian Spirit
• 5. Circumcision and Revelation; or, The Politics of the Spirit
• 6. Was Paul an "Anti-Semite"?
• 7. Brides of Christ: Jewishness and the Pauline Origins of Christian Sexual Renunciation
• 8. "There Is No Male and Female": Galatians and Gender Trouble
• 9. Paul, the "Jewish Problem," and the "Woman Question"
• 10. Answering the Mail: Toward a Radical Jewishness

External links