A bit much.

This is getting a bit ridiculous.

Because of a misspent youth, I ended up having to learn a whole bunch of languages.  French, because you needed a language in high school.  Latin and Greek because I was a Classics major.  Italian because, uh, actually, just because.  I got to live in Florence for a month which was a lot of fun.  Biblical/classical Hebrew, because in seminary I already had Greek, so why not?  Syriac because... uh, well, because by that time I was kind of collecting languages, and it was really interesting to not only learn a new language but also a new Christian tradition.  Modern Hebrew because JTS requires all their students to learn it because Jewish (and most Israelis I've ever spoken to insist that Modern Hebrew and Classical Hebrew should really be categorized as different languages.  Just like I wouldn't say I can speak Modern Greek).

So I'm up to ... 8 languages.  4 modern (yes, English counts even if it is my native language), and 4 ancient.  And that's still not enough to satisfy PhD requirements.

I'm taking German this summer.  And my department wants me to take either Aramaic or another ancient language.  If I could learn Palestinian Jewish Aramaic instead biblical Aramaic, I'd rather that.  Palestinian Jewish Aramaic is the language of the later Amoraic rabbis, after the Mishnah, and after the Roman empire went Christian.  It's the language the later Midrashim are written in, as well as the Yerushalmi Talmud, not the Babylonian Talmud, which is the famous one.  I'm trying to keep my research focus on the eastern Roman empire, and I'm interested in Jewish belief and practise before the hegemony of the rabbis and the Babylonian Talmud.

And I'm kind of thinking of learning Arabic because it seems like it might be useful, and also because of world events, etc.

So that would make it... 11?

Uh, yeah.  This is getting a bit much.  But it is also interesting and fun.  The more languages I learn, the more literature opens up to me, and also more people and cultures to learn about and understand.  And I feel like in our current socio-political environment, understanding other people and cultures and being able to speak their language is a good and important thing.

Finished, sort of.

Well, that's over.

Thesis written and approved.

Last class paper written, submitted, and graded.

Final exam taken.

I'm done with another Master's degree.

I never really wanted this degree, and parts of it have been a huge pain in the ass and disappointment, but despite having to take a bunch of courses I never wanted to, I can't really say it's been a waste of time.  I did learn a lot that I wouldn't have otherwise, and I made some very good contacts who probably helped me finally get that PhD admission.

On the other hand, a number of the courses I took were really fascinating and I learned quite a lot that I wanted to and acquired new academic tools.  I now have a credible background for handling rabbinic texts, which will only be beneficial moving forward.

What has been most fascinating to me, and what I think has actually been the most helpful, has been learning to navigate the subculture of Jewish academics.  (Gentile) Christians read some of them, but there are whole subtexts that I think are being missed, because the Jewish scholars are fundamentally asking different questions and coming at the texts from a slightly different way.  Whereas (Gentile) Christian scholars either come from a faithful Christian perspective or pretend to be interested in dispassionate history, Jewish scholars almost always have the question, "What does it mean to be Jewish?" hovering in the background of their writing.  In many ways (except maybe for the colour of skin), Jewish scholarship really does fit better with minority/minoritized scholarship instead of "mainstream"/"unhyphenated" scholarship.  I am certainly asking this Jewish question, and I am unapologetic about it.  All scholarship is biased; it's better to acknowledged our biases up front than either hide them and pretend they're not there, or to completely ignore them and be un-self-conscious about them..

So.  On to the next degree!  I've worked really hard to get here.  I'm finally a PhD student.

6 million is a lot of people.

On Yom HaShoah, I am once again pondering the effects of the Holocaust on twentieth and twenty-first century scholarly imagination.  I already posted about the "crisis in theology" that resulted among Christian scholars, but today I have a different thought.

We forget how many Jews there used to be.

6 million is a lot of people.  It's a number that gets thrown around, but I think it really is kind of incomprehensible to think of how many people that really is.  And then there are, to my surprise, almost 200,000 survivors living in Israel alone today, not to mention how many there have been over the last few decades.  These are even more people that were removed from the European population.

I once preached a sermon, I forget which one it was now, and a visitor (who therefore didn't know I was Jewish) came up to me afterwards and said to me, "I always resisted calling us 'Judeo-Christian' because I didn't think there was anything really Jewish about who we are and I didn't want to be associated with Jews.  But you've kind of changed my mind."  I was... a little flabbergasted, to be honest, and responded with a smile and something polite about the accuracy of history and how many Jews there were in the Roman Empire.  He laughed and said, "Yeah, all point-three percent of them!" and went on his way.

But he was wrong.  Jews weren't 0.3 percent of the Roman Empire.  By some estimates, 10% of the population of Rome in the first century BCE were Jews (I think.  I know I've read that somewhere but I can't find a source at the moment...).  Jews were a significant portion of the population in Alexandria, and all over the eastern Mediterranean.

We, today, are so used to the decimated Jewish population in Europe that we really don't have a sense for how big and apparently influential the Jewish population was in the ancient world.  I say influential, because there had to be a reason Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Herodotus, and Suetonius, at a minimum, mentioned and wrote about Jews.  Claudius' expulsion of the Jews from Rome was a momentous enough event that Suetonius included it in his biography a hundred years later.  The Jewish population was not always the small minority it is now, but was a much more significant minority which had political standing and enough weight that special legislation was written for it.

This has led to some interesting scholarly reactions.  The one I'm thinking of right now is recorded in Cynthia Baker's chapter "'From Every Nation under Heaven' Jewish Ethnicities in the Greco-Roman World" in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings (eds. Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza) where she points out that all the people "from every nation" in Acts 2 were probably all Jews.  Christian scholars have such a hard time wrapping their minds around the phenomenon of a) lots and lots of Jews from all over the ancient world, inside and outside the Roman Empire and b) Jews who speak other languages.

This is, in an odd way, both the triumph and tragedy of the success of Zionism and its projects of both the modern state of Israel and Modern Hebrew.  It has become so ingrained in the contemporary imagination that Jews are focused on Israel and have some knowledge of Hebrew.  The Holocaust and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel so drastically changed the face of Europe's Jewish population that people today have problems conceiving of any other way of things being arranged.