A Tale of Two Jewish Studies: From Ron Meshbesher to the Rashbam

Abstract

This speculative essay counterpoints a post-classical version of Jewish Studies, prompted by a 2010 AJS conference session on the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man with the more Wissenschaftlich discipline-driven and canonical model devoted to the classical sources of Judaism and Jews’ diachronic development. Premodern and postmodern strategies of narrative, or, as this essay terms them, renarration and denarration, will offer twin foci and points of contact, as I reflect on internally dialogical possibilities for Jewish Studies even beyond the “conversation across disciplinary boundaries” envisioned for the field by the editors of the “AJS Review” in respect to the 2010 session above. Particular attention is given to the 11th c. Torah exegete from Troyes known as the Rashbam on one hand and to Walter Benjamin and Derrida on the other, towards a Jewish Studies-inflected vision of what the latter called the “Humanities of the future.”