Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimiliation

Abstract

Boas's published writings on assimilation were deeply influenced by his German Jewish background. In particular, his unwillingness to recognize Jewish cultural identity as a reality was central to his persistent emphasis on human plasticity and his insistence that people not be "class~ied" in groups. In support of this argument, 19th-century German and German Jewish histoy is reviewed, focusing on the relation between Kultur ideology and anti-Semitism. It is suggested that this approach to Boas's statements offers fresh perspective on some of the apparent confusion in his ideas about culture and assimilation.

Georg Simmel’s Logic of the Future: ‘The Stranger’, Zionism, and ‘Bounded Contingency’

“…Simmel's conspicuous lack of acknowledgement of Zionism as a movement seeking political representation accords well with the attitudes and behaviour exhibited by some of his Jewish intellectual peers, such as Franz Boas (Glick, 1982). This was at least partially a function of their project of assimilating into German society.…”

Structuralism and Kabbalah: Sciences of Mysticism or Mystifications of Science?

“…The sentence that Lévi-Strauss chooses for the epigraph to his seminal essay "The Structural Study of Myth" basically sums it all up. The sentence comes from Franz Boas who, besides being the "Father of American Anthropology" and dying just a few feet from the young Lévi-Strauss at a luncheon both attended in 1942, was a German Jew-an identity that has been examined in terms of the influence it exerted on the field (Glick 1982, Frank 1997. The critical epigraph reads: "It would seem that mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments" (Boas in Lévi-Strauss 1963:206, my italics).…”

Anthropological Perspectives on Judaism: A Comparative Review

“…In addition to these reasons, Bunzl (2004), Dominguez (1993), Feldman (2004), Frank (1997) and Glick (1982) have chronicled in their respective accounts of the ‘Jewish question’ in anthropology, how, in the anti‐Semitic intellectual climate of early twentieth‐century academy, Jews were not eager to draw attention to the ‘Jewishness’ of their endeavors (or themselves). Thus, it should not be surprising that some of the first major anthropological accounts of Judaism were instigated by non‐Jewish anthropologists.…”