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The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism. By HOWARD EILBERG-SCHWARTZ. Bloomington and Indianapolis. Indiana University Press, 1990. xii + 290 pp.
The Torah has something to say about most areas of human life, even the act of relieving oneself. Deuteronomy 25, verses 13-14, enjoin the Israelites to defecate outside the camp, mincing no words in telling the Israelite to dig a hole, sit over it, and bury the excrement there. The explicit reason for the rule is expressed in the next verse: "For the Lord your God walks to and fro in the midst of your camp ... so your camp must be holy." Holiness is meant to permeate everything Israel does.
But while the Bible and later the Talmud treat the most mundane habits of Israelite and subsequent Jewish culture, scholarly writing about the holy texts tends to shrink from the oozing of blood and other topics to be avoided at the table. The Biblicist Hans Walter Wolff's Anthropology of the Old Testament (1974), for example, avoids discussing various body functions, and deals with circumcision only in its figurative usage, when it is applied to the heart.
Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, a scholar of ancient Judaism teaching at Stanford University, in his ambitious and daring book, The Savage in Judaism, rushes in where the decorous fear to tread. Using the tools of a contemporary anthropologist, he reaches back in time and across cultures to expose what he suggests are the concepts and motives that underlie the laws and customs of the ancient Israelites and Jews in a number of areas: social and human-animal relations; circumcision; menstruation and other bodily discharges; ritual pollution; and the classification of the holy. After proposing the significance of the diverse norms in the Bible, Eilberg-Schwartz traces their development or interpretation in classical Judaism and, to some extent, in early Christianity. Throughout his analysis a two-pronged agenda is clear: to break down the dichotomy between Judaism (and Christianity) and the so-called "savage" -- pagan -- religions, and to confront the deeper meanings of the Jewish regulations concerning the so-called "lower" realms of behavior.
Exemplifying an admirable courage to traverse a variety of disciplines, Eilberg-Schwartz divides his project into two equally demanding parts. In the first, he endeavors...