(Deleuze & Guattari) Jews + Jews + Jews (Cynthia Baker)

A giddy dive into the elaboration of a concept, Cynthia Bakers Jew will lend itself
inevitably to two kinds of weak misreadings among many of its readers. The first possible
misreading mirrors Foucaults once provocative contention that the homosexual did not
exist prior to the construction of the concept as a fixed medical identity at some point in the
nineteenth century. The parallel genealogy would map the critical contention that Jew, a
symbolically freighted word that evokes much aversion in western culture. Bakers claim is
that the word Jew is not one actually owned by Jews prior to the modern period, reflecting
instead the imposition of a Christian construct for absolute and deviant difference to
Christian norms. The second possible misreading mirrors a kind of Derridean jouissance,
dissemination, and messianic enthusiasm. Identity, once modeled as closed and fixed,
gives way in free, floating signifiers, open and hospitable to anything and everything. No
longer a clear object determined by reliable positivist taxa known to historicist scholars,
Jew is subjected to new tricks from the scholars workshop in the wake of post-
structuralism. This includes Bakers decision to write out through the entire study the word
Jew in italics, an orthographic decision meant to de-familiarize the concept.

A scholar of rabbinics and late antique Judaism, Bakers careful organization of Jews begins
in the first chapter looking at critically important and well-trodden controversies regarding
the Greek term Ioudaios in relation to the Hebrew yehudi and Aramaic yehudai. Whats the
right translation in ancient/antique contexts? Is an Ioudaios a Jew or Judean? The same
question holds for the translation of the Hebrew term. Is a Yehudi a Jew or a Judean? In
addition to the critical question of translation at stake is the determination of ethnicity
(ethnos) and religion (religio), also in relation to gender. Does Judean signify a neat
geographical meaning? Is the term Jew primarily a religious designation, as presupposed
in the scholarship written under Christian conceptual rubrics? Are women even Jews?
These weighty questions are in turn complicated by the fact that ancient and medieval Jewish
texts refer to the Jews, not as Jews but as Israel. (For insight regarding these arguments
regarding late antiquity you can find here the first Jew forum at Marginalia, with critical
contributions from Adele Reinhartz, Steve Mason, Annete Yoshiko-Reed, and others.)

The difference between Jew or Judean in ancient and later antique Jewish, Greco-Roman,
and Christian sources is undoubtedly an urgent problem for scholars of ancient texts,
especially translators who are forced in their craft to choose between the one or the other
word in European target languages. But the conclusion that Jew is primarily a Christian
construct might have been made too quickly (pp.3, 42). In ordinary conversation, speakers of
European languages can toggle back and forth between words like Jew and Judean,
religion and ethnicity in such a way as to maintain the approximate value of multiple
sets of terms prior to any one concept with a single meaning. Scholarly debates between
Jews and Judeans among late antique scholars have enriched those discussions. Pity the
expert. Baker herself contends that ethnicity and religion are woefully inadequate to
the subject at hand (p.46), whereas a different approach entirely to names and concepts might
assume that neither are fixed in such a way as to completely determine the meaning of any
given term. It could be that under the right limiting conditions religion and ethnicity
might be neither woefully inadequate nor completely adequate to talk about Jews and
Judeans but more or less adequate. It could be that Jew just sounds better, feels better
on the tongue in the European target language regardless of the variable distortions carried
by the word.

But is it possible to bring too much light, too much clarity to a subject? Philosophically there
is reason to suppose that any sensible object makes sense only in the shade and shadows; that
is to say that objects, including conceptual ones, require a degree of vagueness. In the
terminology developed in Enlightenment epistemology and epistemological aesthetics, the
apperception of a phenomenon must be both clear in the distinctiveness of parts in relation to
a whole, but also indistinct, even con-fused in that relation between parts and whole for us to
be able to apprehend the phenomenon at all. Now submitted to the scholars gaze, has too
much clarity, too much light, too much distinction obscured any adequate view of our object,
the Jews. Does the object dissolve under the bright light of the scholarly gaze, with no
longer any thing to see here. Jew or Judean represents the dead-end of ancient and
antique history in chapter 1.

Focused as it is on the ancient and Christian sources, chapter 1 goes nowhere. By this I only
mean to say insofar as the confusion between Jew or Judean is left unsatisfied even
before we begin to look past the ancient source material. I am not sure if this was intentional
on Bakers part; if not intentional, then at least I offer this as a friendly reading of the books
structure. By the end of chapter 1, a reader might almost be tempted to throw up his hands
with Adele Reinhartz. Historically, are we to conclude that there are no Jewish actors or
actors operating within ancient cultural contexts? Is there reason to wonder if the Jews been
made to disappear from the historical record by an act of scholarly fiat? Is this indeed an
ethical act meant to free the Jews from Christian calumny or an apologetic act to liberate
Christian sources from the scourge of anti-Semitism? Does not the term Jew map onto and
match up, not one to one, but unevenly with an overlapping word-set that includes the
Hebrew Yehudi, the Greek Ioudaios, or the Arabic Yahud? Has the term Jew been isolated
in such a way as to allow the conclusion that the concept goes no further than to signify for
Christians the difference between Jew and Christian as a figure of the not-self and absolute
otherness (p.4). That is the logic of chapter 1.

If chapter 1 goes nowhere, then chapters 2 and 3 would be as if designed to take us out of a
conceptual morass. In chapter 2, Baker beings to chart how the Jew was rehabilitated by
Moses Mendelssohn, the eighteenth century Jewish Enlightenment savant, and by Jews in
America and Israel to a variety of ideological purposes (liberal-assimilationist or nationalist)
and also by French theorists in the twentieth century. In 1970s French theory, the Jew or
the jews are now valorized, no longer condemned, as figures of absolute difference. But
Bakers primary contention in chapter 2 is that, in the west, institutionally recognized
knowledge about the Jews is now actually owned by Jews, not Christians. Jew is now
appropriated as a name for the self, not for the other. In chapter 3, the Jew is unpacked
in such a manner as to be open to anyone and everyone. For instance, Europe Muslims have
been described rhetorically as the new Jews of the continent, while in America a Jew can
be anyone, given all the attendant mixings that happen here in this country. More to the point,
now theorized as rooted and at home in the places they live, the Jew has been liberated
from the confining difference the term once inhabited. Intermarried, multiple and diverse,
joined and divided, mixed and guarded, shared and discrete, Jews are no longer other.
As an act of judgment, the delirious conclusion is that now Jews look like the peoples of all
the lands, nations, and families of the earth (pp.126, 148).

Empirically, this may be true or not true, the claim that Jew is now a slippery construct and
that Jews look like everyone else. That may be more true for some and less of others, which
means that the claim would have to be assessed in relation to culture and context, subcultural
and subcontext. Clearly though, Bakers overarching point is excellent. This is that what we
call Jewish identity is recognized today in our own global environment as much less fixed
and distinct, more intensely variegated and con-fused than might have otherwise seemed to
be the case. Read in relation to the structure of Bakers book, once freed from the
disciplinary shackles of the study of ancient Judaism and of Christian frameworks in chapter
1, Jews (Bakers book) and the Jews (the concept) begin to shake and move as a living
form, not dead substance.

Without wanting to go into the historical weeds, my own question regarding Jews and
Jews is primarily theoretical. Genealogical works intended to interrogate identities and
concepts by ascribing them to some hegemonic, sovereign gaze are by now ubiquitous in
academia. Bakers intervention is a welcome addition. But while any proposed genealogy
might be more or less adequate, the question that remains is whether the genealogical
analysis effects in one way the coherence of the concept under analysis. Neglected is the
possibility that super-imposed concepts do important work in lending at least provisional
coherence to a subject at hand.

Against the genealogical impulse, that Jew/Juif/Jude are European and Christian constructs
for yehudi and Ioudaios does not mean anything. It certainly does not necessitate the view
that such terms do nothing to illuminate Jewish culture and Jewish religious culture,
assuming that one can, in fact, employ them in carefully and critically, and not just in
retrospect. Against anachronism, scholars are right to reject the thoughtless projecting
backwards what turn out to be Protestant and other Christian categories like Jew or
religion onto Jewish and ancient Judean source material. One allow nonetheless that
concepts drawn from ancient source material might, by way of another kinds of anachronism,
be projected forward, and, in doing so, open up and make better our own contemporary
understandings of these very terms. If in fact, Jew is a colonial term, perhaps implicit in
chapters 2 and 3 of Jews there is the possibility that loan concepts like Jew or religion
can be re-colonized by Jewish users in ways that approximate more or less well (i,e overlap
with) ancient source material, Christian as well as Jewish.

Wary of the disciplinary rigor of Foucault and the open-ended post-structuralism of Derrida,
I am suggesting in this post that we try to suss this all out by way of Deleuze and Guattaris
famous essay on the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus. I do this in order to grasp better how
the Jews could constitute an example relating to the formation, deformation, and re-
formation of concepts.

To begin: a rhizome refers to an acentric subterranean plant stem system composed of stems,
roots, stems, and nodes that carry over across a wide horizontal surface plane. Deleuze and
Guattari will mean something a bit more technical, but the botanical figure remains a fine
starting point from which to unpack the term. Deleuze and Guattari turn to the rhizome as a
better concept with which to model their own book (A Thousand Plateaus), indeed their own
thought as a whole and to the phenomena that catch their attention. It is my own view that
the concept helps articulate how we might better conceptualize the Jews as a variable,
changing social-religious identity in terms of a foundational difference.

Deleuze and Guattari maintain that the problem with the tree-root model of identity is its
elision of difference. The single root model of system renders difference secondary to the
identity of a One. Deleuze and Guattari describe how, the Tree or Root as an image,
endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four.
On the side of the object, it is no doubt possible, following the natural method, to go
directly from One to three, four, or five, but only if there is a strong principal unity available,
that of the pivotal taproot supporting the secondary roots. That doesnt get us very far (p.6).
Viewed as an identity with a tree like structure, the Jews would start as a stable identity at
one fixed point of time, as One, that then splits and variegates over time. (This model was
popular in nineteenth century liberal and then twentieth century Zionist historiographic
writing about Judaism and the essence of Judaism or Jewish nationhood. Judaism for
instance was compared by Abraham Geiger to a tree whose main trunk is the religion of
ethical monotheism.) Deleuze and Guattari reject a related model based on radicles or
fasciculars: these, also, start with a single root, which then breaks, and onto which secondary
roots are then grafted. Both models start with a single root in much the same way that
scholars of Judaism might go back to an ancient meaning with which to understand Jews
or Judeans, particularly in terms of Judean or Jew, ethnicity or religion, that
model Judaism or the Jews branching off one basic or essential root. Conservative religious
thinkers do the same with law. One could follow Deleuze and Guattari here and reject any
conceptual work meant to establish the priority of any one term or value to the other and to
others. Indeed, these models go not so far with the Jews.

In contrast to models based on a putatively deep, original root unity, Deleuze and Guattari
propose the sprawling surface form of a rhizomatic structure. To understand them properly,
it is important to note that what they mean by rhizome is a formation understood as the
coming together of at least two heterogeneous elements that are at once distinct but now
inseparable. Examples they offer are the contraction of wasp and orchid, or baboon
and cat, or book and world (p.11). These rhizomes are intertwined assemblage
formations whose spiraling movements would then be traced out by the theorist as they fold
and unfold across territories or temporal durations. The score from Sylvano Bussoti that
illustrate this post at the top of the page appears as the epigraph, as it were, of Introduction:
Rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus.)

As a rhizome, the Jews would be modeled as a relational modality consisting of what

Deleuze and Guattari call an outside where they form a rhizome with something else (p.12).
At the very least, this could mean historically with other peoples and their cultures, including
religious cultures, in different social political contexts and constraints. About the Jews and
their histories, about the Jews as a mobile people, one could do well to follow Deleuze and
Guattari when they advise, Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and
relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous
of lines of n dimensions and broken directions Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a
first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see
whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points
located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your
territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an
abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency (p.12).

This is the most obvious way to plot out the Jew as a rhizome, an almost subterranean
force moving across time and place, popping up in most unexpected places. This kind of
structuring (territorializing) movement would be to see the Jew always already defined in
combination with the world, the Jew and the gentile as a single unit formed at a foundational
point of difference. This is the typical model in Jewish Studies as an academic discipline
traditionally dominated by historiography. Jew-Persian (Yehud) would be a rhizome and also
Jew-Greek-Roman (Ioudaios), Jew-Israel (rabbinic), Jew-Christian (Jew/Juif/Jude), Jew-
Arab (Yahud), Jew-Polish-Russian (Jew/Zhid/Yid), and any variety of the Jew-Israeli
(Ashkenazi and Mizrachi), Jew-American, Jew-Canadian. Like wasps and orchids, Jews
enter into rhizomatic combinations in relation to larger host cultures. But against classical
tradition in Jewish historiography, while the term Jew threads through the entire differential
system, there is no one single root identity that determines the meaning at any one nodal
point in this sprawling series and the complex set of differences conveyed by that one single
name as it repeats itself in a serial form.

But does the Jew fall under this single name would be the question posed by Baker.
Another way to map rhizomatic Jewish identity formation would be internal to the name-set
itself. We could map out the difference between Yehudi, Ioudaios, Israel, Yahud, Jew-Juif-
Jude, Yisraeli. Jewish identity, the identity of the Jews, would be modeled as always formed
in some relation to internal features of nominal, overlapping points of difference. This would
cut against the standard theory of identity that seeks to map out manifold difference
stemming from a putative unitary identity of a single original name. Instead of seeking to
locate difference in an original identity, a rhizomatic model would seek out identity as it
emerges in and out of the very unfolding of difference. As Deleuze always understood,
identity is the secondary term, no less real or actual for being secondary, but not the first. To
see the relation between Jew, Judean, etc., as rhizomatic would be to say that no one
term comes before the other. The difference between Jew, Yehudi and Iodaious are
foundational as is their contraction one with the other over time. In this respect, Jew is not
woefully inadequate as a concept, assuming that there is no way to decide the difference
between place and non-place, ethnos and religio, in the formation of a complex model of
Jewish identities.

When a catastrophic lightning strike splits a tree-like formation into splinters, all thats left is
a more or less dead root system. Better able to sustain damage, the rhizome model provides a
way to map out Jewish difference along the ruptured lines of historical locations,
dislocations, and relocations. For Deleuze and Guattari, A rhizome may be broken, shattered
at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can
never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again
after most of it has been destroyed. Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according
to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines
of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome
whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the
rhizome (p.10). Looked at as such, Jewish difference and identity are always radically
segmented.

Consider lastly the opposition between religio and ethnos now as contracting elements
intertwined in the form of a rhizome. Most contemporary scholars of religion at work today
will themselves recommend when talking about religion that one toggle constantly back
and forth between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the social, without having
to prioritize one term vis--vis the other. While we are stuck with the words we inherit from
dominant and powerful political-social actors, we are not stuck with the way one has to use
and understand those terms. For their part, scholars and students of Judaism learn to navigate
with relative ease the difference between social form and religion. The differential
relationship is there deep in from the very start. As Deleuze and Guattari present this relation,
one does not go from either one to the other as if from 1 to 2. The relation is always 1-2 from
the very start, maybe even 1-2-3, and so on. The problem confronted by Baker and other
scholars of ancient Judaism is with inherited patterns of modern, western thought that
demands establishing some original and prior point (an identity in the narrow sense of the
term) from which to start tracing out a series. And they have to struggle with preconceived
notions that the Jew is a simple and undifferentiated religious designation or with
contending notions that social identity is absolutely prior, meaning that Jewish ethnos is
ethnic before becoming religious.
Following Deleuze and Guattari, the starting point is always the difference established in the
contraction between two points. What follows in the form of repitituon is diffence, or a
secondary identity whose foundation is difference. Impossible to disentangle except
heuristically, religion + ethnos are rhizomatic, and so too is the relation between Jew + Jew +
Jew + Jew throughout the entirety and variety of its iterations.