Jonathan Boyarin

Jonathan Aaron Boyarin (Yiddish: יונתן אהרן בוירין‎; born September 16, 1956) is an American anthropologist whose work centers on Jewish communities and on the dynamics of Jewish culture, memory and identity. Born in Neptune, New Jersey, he is married and has two sons. In 2013 he was appointed Thomas and Diann Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University. His brother, Daniel Boyarin, is also a well-known scholar, and the two have written together.

Boyarin was educated at Reed College, the New School for Social Research and the Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language before earning his doctoral degree in anthropology at the New School for Social Research. In 1998, fourteen years after receiving his Ph.D., Boyarin received his J.D. at Yale Law School. He has taught at Cornell University, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Kansas, Dartmouth College, and The New School. He is the founding co-editor of the journal, Critical Research on Religion. In 2016, Boyarin was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research (AAJR).

Boyarin has investigated Jewish culture in a range of ethnographic projects set in Paris, Jerusalem, and the Lower East Side of New York City. Much of his work is in interdisciplinary critical theory, from the perspective of modern Jewish politics and experience. He has extended these interests into comparative work on diaspora, the politics of time and space, and the ethnography of reading.

As a student of modern Jewish experience and culture, he has investigated comparative and theoretical questions that help illuminate the lives of Jews and others. He has conducted fieldwork in cities where those “Jews and others” live, including Paris, Jerusalem, and New York’s Lower East Side. Much of his work has also been in historical ethnography, primarily of nineteenth and twentieth-century Polish Jewish life. He is also a Yiddish translator.

The Ethnography of Reading

Boyarin edited an influential set of essays published in 1993 titled, The Ethnography of Reading, exploring how people read and talk about reading. In contrast to the older tendency to classify entire cultures as oral or literate, most of the essays explore the intermingling of silent reading, collective reading and commentary, recitations, and other text-related practices in a particular tradition or setting. Overall, the volume is concerned with how "insiders" and anthropologists talk and write about reading.

In his own essay, Boyarin describes collective reading practices in the New York City yeshiva where he studied Bible and Talmud. He relates the multivocality of the texts to the "dialogic" speech events in which students intermingle mass culture and vocabulary with sacred speech as a way of negotiating their own relationship to these highly authoritative texts. According to Brinkley M. Messick:

The volume operates at a refreshing distance from the worn controversies of oral verses literate and from scientific slants of evolution and cognition. Its basic contribution...is to "expand the archive" of our knowledge of reading and other text-reception practices. ... For Boyarin, the study of reading challenges the "lingering anti-textual bias among practitioners of cultural anthropology."

Influence of Walter Benjamin

Boyarin writes that the work of Walter Benjamin helped him to "bridge the gap" between his interests in anthropology—German traditions of critical, interdisciplinary scholarship—and the preservation and transmission of East European Jewish culture. Boyarin writes:

Two things above all struck me on first reading Benjamin’s essays [in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections], and they stay with me almost forty years later. The first was that, for the first time, someone was telling me how I could engage a culture in ruins, based upon its fragments, and indeed without any pretense of recreating an image of it whole. And Jewish Eastern Europe was a culture in fragments par excellence. The second lesson was that the lives of those ancestors I so desperately wanted to touch could be made to matter today, and not just for purposes of creating a personal identity, but in the shaping of political perspectives and rhetorics as well. This I learned above all from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1939 as the storms of war were gathering, and never published during his lifetime. In that text Benjamin analyzes the failure of the mid-1930s Popular Front to defeat the Nazis, and ascribes it at least in part to a philosophy of history that maintained a naïve faith in the ultimate inevitability of progress and the triumph of Reason. Instead of that philosophy of linear progress, Benjamin put forward a much more contingent notion of history and temporality, one in which at any moment a point or points from the past might be articulated with a present situation to reveal a Messianic opening “in the fight for the oppressed past.” On the other hand, faced with the ongoing triumph of Fascism, Benjamin was hardly optimistic. As he wrote, in another of his eighteen Theses, “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And that enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”