Judaic Technologies of the Word : A Cognitive Analysis of Jewish Cultural Formation 9781317543459, 9781908049841

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JUDAIC TECHNOLOGIES OF THE WORD

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Judaic technologies of the word A cognitive analysis of Jewish cultural formation Gabriel Levy

For my teachers, especially Maria, Emanuel, Ella Adina, Michael, David and Margaret

First published 2012 by Equinox, an imprint of Acumen Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Gabriel Levy 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

ISBN 978-1-908049-84-1 (hardback) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levy, Gabriel, 1977Judaic technologies of the word : a cognitive analysis of Jewish cultural formation / Gabriel Levy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-908049-84-1 (hardcover) 1. Judaism—History—Philosophy. 2. Literacy—Religious aspects—Judaism. 3.  Judaism and culture. 4. Communication and culture. I. Title. BM157.L48 2012 296.01'9—dc23 2012008145 Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

Contents

Acknowledgements 1 Introduction

vi 1

2 What is cognition?

27

3 Control

47

4 Networks

67

5 Rationality

79

6 Names

97

7 Hypertext

117

8 Environment

145

Conclusion

175

Notes Bibliography Index

185 194 211

v

Acknowledgements

There are many people I wish to thank for making this book, and the thoughts within it, possible – though of course all errors are my own. Aside from the people listed in the dedication, I also thank David Beitchman, Ehud Benor, Vincent Biondo, Joseph Bulbulia, Finbarr Curtis, Nancy Frankenberry, Roger Friedland, Randy Garr, Armin Geertz, Giles Gunn, Elvin Hatch, Barbara Holdrege, Hamish Ironside, Jeppe Sinding Jensen, Janet Joyce, Corby Kelly, Robert Lewis, Anders Lisdorf, John McGraw, John Lardas Modern, Sophia Pandya, Hans Penner, Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Jenna Reinbold-Alfonso, Kevin Reinhart, William Robert, Mark Sedgwick, SpearIt, Jesper Sørensen, Ann Taves, Andreas Lieberoth Wadum, Robert Welsch, Wendy Wiseman, Lise Yde, Jesper Østergaard and especially Panagiotis Mitkidis. I owe a very special thanks to Peter Westh for his intellectual openness and brilliance as a conversation partner over the years.

vi

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The body is still the elephant in the room for disciplines in the humanities such as religious studies. Scholars have written books on the representations of religious bodies, and pay lip service to the idea that there are living and breathing human beings to which such religious systems ultimately refer. But unfortunately scholarship has not been able to cross the chasm that separates representation from reality. I would never argue that science crosses this chasm either, but I do think it gives us some tools to talk about bodies in new and relevant ways. This book is about how technologies of literacy interact with bodies and minds over time. Pointing to literacy as a decisive shift in religious history is not a completely new idea, but integrating that shift with vocabulary from the mind sciences is. The book thus builds a hybrid form of humanities scholarship that incorporates vocabulary and states of art from the harder sciences. Both biological and religious systems are dynamic. They are constantly changing and developing in relation to one another. I view the relation between them much the same as the relationship between genotype and phenotype, between the genetic “code” and how the code is expressed. The case has recently been made by Day (2007) that the anomalous relation between genotype and phenotype parallels the anomalous relation between neurons and mental states. While genes may loosely be said to code for the observable and outer characteristics of an organism, outside the laboratory they never do so in a deterministic fashion. Context, environment and personal history – what have been termed epigenetics – play a mediating role. Without the story of epigenetics, genetics means nothing. Similarly, neural firings and chemical processes in the brain could never neatly correspond to mental states. Neurons and mental states do not have a one-toone relation but a dynamic and non-linear one. They are not the same for every individual, and they do not map onto one another in a deterministic fashion. In fact, we understand very little about this so-called “hard problem”: how neurons make us who we are. In such a way, any complex system on one level of ontological stability could never be purely reducible to another level of complexity (Geertz, A. 2010). Philosophers have found various ways of dealing with this problem. On the one hand, many argue for some version of the idea that higher ontological levels are “multiply realizable” (McCauley and Bechtel 2001). Donald Davidson (and

1

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W. V. Quine to some extent), on the other hand, argued for the notion of anomalous monism that will be given considerable focus throughout this book (Glock 2003). Though some form of reduction is necessary for science to progress, both of these approaches make it quite clear that the normative limitations put on us by language make outright reduction between levels impossible. Most works attempting to understand and explain Judaism focus on both universal (or global) and particular (local) characteristics of Jewish life-ways. For example, Judaism is often characterized globally as a “religion of the book”, but this fact is expressed differently in various geographic and historical contexts. The idea of “Judaism” thus changes depending on historical and cultural circumstance. In this sense, it is wrong to think one could characterize one essential form of Judaism. Nevertheless, surely Judaism has some characteristics that persist over time. If it did not, how could we talk about a “history of Judaism”? The conceit of this book is that Judaism does not exist in an abstract space of reflection. Judaism, whatever it is, exists both in artefacts of the material world such as texts, and in the bodies, brains, hearts and minds of individual people. This text is about how Judaism persists in those artefacts, bodies, brains, hearts and minds. One core argument is that there is biocultural feedback between Jewish bodies and texts, both oral and written. In pursuit of this argument, I examine the emergence of “Judaic minds” in both phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms, by examining the historical emergence of literacy in the so-called “axial age” and the developmental emergence of literacy in childhood in the context of the so-called “age 4 transition”. To put it simply, Judaic minds are minds that grow up within Judaic systems, which I will define subsequently.

HERMENEUTICS OF UNCERTAINTY IN JUDAIC SYSTEMS

The Coen brothers’ film A Serious Man (2009) is one of the most compelling media representations of Judaism in the last 50 years or so. To be more specific, it is about a particular form of Judaism characteristic of late modern North America, but nevertheless captures some universal aspects of Judaism. I will return to the film throughout the course of this book because I think it says something very important about Judaism, but should note at the outset that one of the core thematic elements in A Serious Man is the notion of mystery (Coen and Coen 2009). The protagonist, Larry Gopnik, is a professor of physics who specializes in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The mathematics does not lie, but it leads to paradoxes that the human mind is simply not capable of understanding. The uncertainty principle is actually an issue about perception: we cannot know both the location and speed of an electron, for example, at the same time because it order to see where it is we must “shine a light on it”, thus putting more energy into it. Given the limitations of our conceptual system, in other words, we cannot perceive location and speed at the same time. 2

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The same sort of logic applies in the film to the Jewish god, HaShem, whose logic is unfathomable to humans.1 In a particularly poignant moment in the film the Coen brothers convey this idea through the father of a Korean student who has given Larry a bribe so that he could pass his class. The father both asserts that his son gave the bribe and that he did not give the bribe, concluding with the suggestion: “accept the mystery”. Spinoza, like a great many Jewish mystics and philosophers, had a similar idea about how limited we are in trying to understand the nature of the universe. While I do not plan to be a mystic in the course of this text, I strongly assert that there are limits to the scientific method – there are mysteries that science cannot solve. Science can either get over these mysteries or leave them alone; humanistic approaches by contrast cannot ignore such mysteries. It is the humanities’ role to interrogate such mysteries in the hope of attaining wisdom. In understanding our own religious minds we are faced with a similar problem: an uncertainty principle of the mind. We are always faced with trying to understand our own minds, bodies and brains, with our own minds, bodies and brains. Science has ingenious ways of getting around this problem, particularly with the use of computers and statistics, but ultimately we are always faced with a limit point at language. What we learn from the science eventually should be cashed out in a language we can understand, and our language is severely constrained – some would say limited – by the folk psychological notions we wish to understand. I contend that folk psychology, those concepts we use to understand our own and others’ minds, is a by-product of the way language is used – a by-product of communicative technologies – and not necessarily the result of selection pressures from our hominid past. Though theology and science attempt to escape folk psychology, we cannot do so if we hope to understand ourselves as human selves.

(ANTI-)REPRESENTATIONALISM

There are at present two dominant modes by which scholars have incorporated cognitive, brain and biological sciences into the study of religion: the cognitive science of religion, and neurotheology. I reject both these positions. This book is not meant to be a contribution to the cognitive science of religion as the field is now understood, because that field for the most part suffers from an unacceptable reliance on representationalism and methodological individualism. These are related problems. Representationalism has many guises, but the basic core is the idea that units of communication are neatly packaged meanings that exist in one head and are transmitted from one head to another. Representations are thought to be digital: they have a one-to-one, clearly delineated relation to one another; there is some logic or algorithm by which they are easily transformed into one another. Communication, in this model, is about moving distinct packets of information from one source to another. So, as applied to the persistence of Judaism, 3

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representationalism would argue that concepts like Torah, monotheism, or commandment, are located in individual Jewish heads and are transmitted as wholes from one person to another and one generation to another. However, representationalism leaves out the role that context, interaction and noise play in meaningmaking practices and performances. In other words, I think communication is mostly analogical, though it can be augmented digitally. Representationalism is also rampant in the study of religion, and Judaism in particular. On the basis of misplaced representationalism in the study of Judaism people often wrongly argue that Judaism is only a form of “orthopraxy”. Judaism is mostly about behaving in certain ways they say, whether in terms of ethics or ritual, and it does not so much matter what one “believes”. In other words, scholars in Jewish studies argue that Judaism does not persist because of the passing down of some form of “information” from one generation to the next; rather, Judaism persists because children tend to behave similarly to their parents with regard to ethics, prayer and ritual practices. While I think this is true, I also think that if we give up the false idea of representationalism we can return to the idea of Judaism as a form of orthodoxy as well; not in the strong sense of the word as beliefs and concepts one must affirm, but merely in the sense of a centre of gravity to the belief system of the tradition. If we give up the idea that there are distinct units of representation then a “belief system” no longer has to be discovered in individual Jewish heads. Instead, I argue that the belief system is distributed across individual minds in the tradition. Inside bodies and heads there is an analogue – or “continuous” – mess, while outside the head are neat digital – or “discrete” – systems, and it is the latter that are passed down. This book examines the relation between analogue and digital forms of Judaism. Following this line of reasoning, the other fallacy of the cognitive science of religion is that the unitary, solitary individual’s head is only where cognition takes place. In other words, practitioners of the cognitive science of religion think that the mind is in the head. In contrast, I think mental operations take place with and within human bodies moving in space and time – so minds have spatial and temporal dimensions – though they may be most centralized in humans at the centre of the central nervous system. Bodily movement is a crucial part of cognition that the “only in the head” or even “mostly in the head” crowd missed or ignores.2 This book is also not meant to be a contribution to the field of neurotheology. Though I think there are some valuable insights to be gained from religious reflection, or what is often termed “mystical” reflection, on the phenomenology and nature of experience, this approach strikes me as too apologetic and rigid. Regardless of the insights that might be gained from mystical reflection, I do not think neurotheology helps us much at understanding normal, everyday religious experience (and history), but instead conflates that experience with what “mystics” do. In other words, while I am interested in what happens in bodies and brains when people are religious, I do not regard the states that theologians and mystics 4

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describe as central to their practice to have very much necessarily to do with religion. So placing less value on neurotheology may be a matter of my definition of religion, which I will get to subsequently. Neurotheology often ends up being a trumped up “new phrenology” (Modern 2008). In point of fact, we simply do not understand neurological correlation to mental states. In this way, neurotheology tends to conflate levels of description that have no nomological relation between them (Levy 2010b).

ALTERNATIVES

So what is an alternative to these two approaches? The model I would like to follow is to examine Judaism on multiple interacting levels at one time. This is a paradigm already set out in the interdisciplinary fields of the mind sciences, which incorporate research not only from psychology, but brain science, engineering, computer science, anthropology and other fields. My model exemplifies, I hope, the newly emerging field of “grounded humanities”. This field retains humanistic impulses towards creativity, ethics and art as a kind of “thinking in advance”, at the same time as incorporating science, taking it seriously, and not necessarily as the bogeyman of western imperialism (though that it may be).3 The study of any religion, and especially Judaism, is a multidisciplinary enterprise. I merely wish to incorporate a broader array of disciplines into the mix. Not only do we avoid ontological reductionism, we get a richer interpretation of Judaism in the process. This book represents a first initial step, or lurch, in that direction. The main effort herein will be to use state-of-the-art research in cognitive, brain and biological sciences to understand Judaism in its many forms. In other words, the scientific theories are to be integrated into the study of Judaism along with the theories from traditional fields of the study of Judaism, such as linguistics, history and sociology. Just as we would evaluate a theory in linguistics, say about the development of the Hebrew language from proto-Canaanite, based on its relevance for understanding Jewish cultures, so must we evaluate theories from cognitive science and biology in the same light. The theories are there for our convenience to be used (and not used), depending on how far we think they get us in approaching Judaism. We need not “fear” reductionism (Slingerland 2008). Reductionism is a necessary part of doing science, so humanists need not fear it. However, humanists should fear colleagues who would want to force them into the scientific methodology, as if that is the only game in town. If anything, discoveries in the mind sciences – in which I include biological, cognitive and neuroscience – make Judaism more complicated. They add another layer. So, in this sense, the method followed throughout this text is not reductive but additive; the goal is not to reduce but to adduce. Logical reduction, meaning to translate one proposition to another of 5

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approximate form, is necessary to my approach, while ontological reductionism is to be avoided. At the same time, the writing presented in this book is meant to be experimental, to challenge readers of philosophy, Jewish studies, cognitive science and the study of religion. In order to cross disciplinary lines and bridge humanities and sciences, compromises must be made. I am putting a lot on the table, so I am bound to make mistakes that more uptight scholars would consider quite damning. Richard Rorty has dubbed individuals who traffic in these petty academic squabbles “blowhards”: scholars who refuse to “find a way to talk about matters of common concern with people who are not accustomed to playing [their] own preferred game” (Rorty 2000: 106; Day 2006). Without abusing the blowhards too much – like whom we all behave from time to time, and without whom we negotiators would be out of jobs – we can say that this type of territoriality stands in the way of open enquiry. In this sense, this book is for scholars of religion, most of whom will be young or youthfully minded, looking for new vocabularies and new ways of talking about religion that take scientific perspectives into account without being swallowed up by them. In a recent book that fits in neatly with my own argument, New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion, Richard Ling (2008) argues that new technologies such as mobile phones reshape social cohesion. Specifically, he argues these technologies reshape everyday ritual processes because they transform the basic systems under which people act and are present with one another. My approach is analogous with regard to the origins of literacy. Though past scholars have taken great strides in understanding the impact of literacy, few thus far have noticed the impact it must have had on religion; that is, on myths and rituals about gods, souls and spirits. This text seeks to fill that lacuna by arguing that Judaic systems are a “by-product” of that revolutionary technology of literacy. In this sense I am not offering a strictly scientific explanation, because though literacy is a necessary condition for the emergence of Judaism, it is clearly not a sufficient condition. In other words, one can have literacy in a society and not generate a Judaic system. The term “Judaic system” comes from Jacob Neusner, one of the most prolific and influential scholars of Judaism. Neusner (2004: 9–10) defines a Judaic system to have three primary characteristics: (i) “a worldview, by reference to the intersection of the supernatural and the natural worlds, accounts for how things are and puts them together into a cogent and harmonious picture” (in other words, myths, belief systems and propositional attitudes); (ii) “a way of life which expresses in concrete actions the worldview which is explained by that worldview” (in other words, rituals, habits and routines); and (iii) “a social group calling itself ‘Israel’ for which the worldview accounts, which is defined in concrete terms by the way of life, and which, therefore, gives expression in the everyday world to the worldview and is defined as an entity by that way of life” (in other words the concept of “Israel” provides the conditions under which the belief systems and practices make sense). 6

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The first two characteristics are relatively innocuous feature of any religious system, and are reminiscent of Clifford Geertz’s approach to religion, which is not without criticism (see Frankenberry and Penner 1999), seeing religion primarily as a way of ordering the conceptual world and inculcating that order with emotional valence (moods and motivations; Geertz, C. 1993). Only Neusner’s last characteristic could be said to be specific to a Judaic system, and it is defined first and foremost by a social group that calls itself “Israel”. According to this definition, Rastafarianism and Mormonism can be considered Judaic systems. Since this is a stipulative definition and not something that cuts nature off at its joints, the broad reference is not a problem. The definition does not capture a natural kind, but rather institutes a definition for the purpose of the subsequent analysis. Judaic systems entail beliefs and practices transmitted over time, and include that community of individuals that regenerate that system, with changes over time, from generation to generation. This book focuses on the origins and development of Judaic systems, and in that context, we can say more precisely that Judaic systems entail groups that have a social relationship, and the requisite attitudes and practices, towards the “God” of Israel – the god who puts the “El” in Israel (Cross 1973). The deity’s proper name eventually came to be “Yahweh”, but since early Judaic systems refused to pronounce the name, it has been replaced by other titles, such as Lord and HaShem (literally, “the name”). The name was not pronounced, but it was written, so perhaps that is the closest referent we have for the “God” of Israel – a god, a name, manifested and embodied on scrolls of leather and parchment – as ‫יהוה‬.

BIOLOGY MATTERS

Any attempt to juxtapose biology and cultural identity is politically controversial. In the case of Judaism, this prospect is particularly dangerous. Debates still rage over whether Judaism is a culture, a religion, an ethnicity, or some measure of all three. Since these are normative terms, the question will never be resolved at the descriptive level. For this reason the book operates with a stipulative definition of Judaism or “Judaic systems”. I do not impute universal characteristics to Jews or Judaism that apply everywhere at all times. Rather I attempt to trace broad underlying (some may say “genealogical”) currents over time in the matrix between biology and culture. Belief systems and practices, for example about whom a person can marry and procreate with, have consequences for populations of bodies that adhere to them. In recent years, advances in genetics have made the biology of ethnicity quite useful in the treatment of human diseases. In the case of people who identify themselves as Jews, genetic testing of the so-called “breast cancer” gene has been useful in the treatment of this form of cancer in Jewish populations. Heritable mutations on BRCA1/BRCA2, a gene that repairs damaged DNA, have been 7

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shown to be associated with breast and ovarian cancer. Three specific mutations found among Ashkenazic Jews, but not among the more general human population, result in a woman having an 85 per cent risk of developing breast cancer in her lifetime. These mutations arose in the population about 600 years ago (Tonin 1996; Antoniou et al. 2005). Though identifying health risk based on ethnic groups is controversial because it could quite possibly lead to health discrimination, and other forms of discrimination (among other reasons), the benefits of the information may outweigh its social risks. Most researchers regard “ethnicity”-based health risk to be the result of the “founder effect”, where mutations occurring among a small number of group founders can spread if the group becomes isolated for some reason. In the case of Judaism, genetic evidence indicates three distinct bottlenecks in Jewish population size, which are markers of founder effects: these were around 75 ce, 1100 ce and 1400 ce (Slatkin 2004). Throughout this book, I concentrate on the first of these bottlenecks, while I touch on the last two in the final chapters. There is also evidence that throughout their history in Europe the Jewish population was isolated from the more general Christian population. Of course, Jews have always married “outside” their ethnic group; the point is that there is a statistically significant sense in which the Ashkenazic population was isolated from the rest of Christian Europe. Historical evidence, religious laws – especially those about Jewish descent – and other norms, all point towards this conclusion. As Nebel and his colleagues claim, recent genetic studies argue against large-scale male-mediated gene flow into the Ashkenazi community during the Diaspora (Nebel et al. 2005). The proportion of non-Jewish Europeans coming into the Ashkenazic population was estimated to be 0.5 per cent per generation, indicating that Ashkenazim remained, to a large extent, genetically isolated during their history (Nebel et al. 2005; Hammer et al. 2000). It is this difficult nexus, between biological health risk and cultural isolation, that forms the core of the type of questions I wish to engage in this book. It is not that I will spend a great deal of time on the biology of Jewish populations; the point of introducing the concepts of biology and ethnicity at this point is to establish, right off the bat, that biological bodies interacting in time and space provide the background for the claims I make throughout. I consider cultures to be made up out of individual bodies. Each individual body and brain is the way it is because of both the individual’s unique developmental life pattern and the evolutionary history of our species. But that unique individual body is also the product of quite recent evolutionary “forces” that have been acting on human populations since the last great wave of Homo sapiens out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. Previous notions of race provided the scientific justification for racist politics. But more recently we have learned a great deal more about the physical differences between human populations. The crucial questions we have to ask is: what difference do these differences make? And: do they justify drawing sharp boundaries between populations, when such cookie-cutting was partly responsible for many of the greatest injustices of the twentieth century? 8

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Judaism was at the centre of race matters in the twentieth century. Since racist ideology was partly to blame for the shoah, many Jewish scholars would rather forget the idea that Judaism is an ethnicity. I think this impulse must be respected. At the same time I think the biological sciences have advanced far enough that at this point they serve as an antidote to racism rather than a cause. Perhaps I am being too optimistic, but since racism is partly the result of ignorance (about “race” and in general), if the general public were better informed about biology, they would be less likely to become racist. Differences in populations do not say anything about a human being's location on the great chain of being. There are not higher and more primitive ethnic types. As Bellah puts it following Stephen J. Gould: “religious evolution does not mean a progression from worse to better” for “complexity is not the only good. Simplicity has its charms” (Bellah 2011: xxii–xxiii). The differences biologists point to are much more specific and refined. Phenotypic differences, those differences that affect outward characteristics of an organism – such as behaviour – between populations, may be successful in one environment, but not in another. In other words, genetic markers are local to specific environments, illustrating the movement of our ancestors over time, the isolation of certain populations, their exposure to different environmental conditions. Some of these stories are encoded in the DNA. My own purpose for including these stories in a book about Judaic systems is that I think they are relevant kinds of data. Since religion involves the beliefs and practices of those very individual bodies noted above, in some cases those beliefs and practices are better understood in relation to biology. Beliefs and practices affect biology at the same time that they are affected by biology. The concepts of race and ethnicity have been increasingly important subjects for scholars of religion, for they are the most vexing and complex forms of identity in the modern age. Though these concepts are surely constructions, real physical bodies lie behind such constructions. Part of the purpose of this text is to show that it is possible to incorporate studies of ethnicity into the humanities without being racist. It is thus a model on how to avoid the so-called “naturalistic” fallacy, which falsely reasons that how things are in nature are how things ought to be. There is a strong reason to be wary of scholars or politicians who assert that there is one innate and basic form of human nature and attempt to plan societies based on that nature, leading to something like Plato’s Republic. In contrast to that fascist picture, better scientists recognize that “human nature” is constantly changing and almost unlimited in its plasticity. In this book I thus explore some fundamental themes in Jewish religious history from a “non-reductive” cognitive perspective. This is a perspective influenced by a school of thought in the study of religion that approaches religion holistically, at the same time that it takes insight from biology, medicine and psychology to be fair game for students of religion. Religions are patterns of propositional attitudes and practices pronounced and enacted by human animals (that is, biological bodies whose conditions of existence are grounded not just by politics and cultural predicament, but by the long history 9

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of life on this planet). In light of these facts, to ignore the biological background of religion is ruinous to our understanding of religious phenomena. This is where the mind sciences come in – not as the end-all to cultural studies of religion, but as an important tool that must be brought in to the cultural conversation.

THE NEUROHISTORY OF JUDAISM

The book is made up of a series of philosophical essays that reconceptualize Judaic systems with what Daniel Lord Smail (2008) has recently called a “neurohistorical model”: a “grand explanatory paradigm, proposing that some of the direction we detect in recent history has been created by ongoing experiments with new psychotropic mechanisms that themselves evolved against the evolutionary backdrop of human neurophysiology” (Smail 2008: 187). Psychotropy is Smail’s term for those technologies, whether drugs like opium or foods like chocolate, we use to alter our minds and brains. Literacy (reading and writing) is also a form of psychotropy. Smail, for instance, touches on the fact that in the modern episteme (since about the eighteenth century) reading for pleasure became an increasingly common pursuit for the middle class, a form of what he calls “autotropy”. The obsession with the new medium of mass-print was described as “reading fury” or “reading fever” (Smail 2008: 181). In the early years when novels and newspapers appeared on the scene women were discouraged from reading because it was thought to “inflame the passions” (182). Craving for “news” was similarly described as a mania. In my case, I am pointing to the origins of this phenomenon in an earlier age, a grand explanatory paradigm about Judaic systems in which the technology of literacy is itself the predominant psychotropic mechanism. My approach is decidedly analytic, which means I tend to deal with conceptual issues surrounding Judaic systems at the expense at times of nuanced historical analysis. In this sense, my project is more like historical genealogy, a selective reimagining of the past, than historiography proper. The difference with standard Foucaultian genealogy, however, is that instead of describing underlying discursive assumptions that pervade epistemic logics – though I no doubt consider this an important historical project – I am characterizing the relatively non-discursive social-cognitive mechanisms behind such logics. Though my goal is to provide a more grounded form of genealogy, even Foucault did not think that anything goes: there are limits put on epistemic processes that derive from historical circumstance, bodily experience and the primitives of human interaction.4 I could never claim to capture anything close to the whole of Judaism in this analysis, especially since conceptions of Judaism and Jews have changed over time, sometimes dramatically. As noted, I suggest following Neusner for a working definition of the subject, so that we can be on the same page as the argument goes on. To repeat, then, I regard religion as a communal system of propositional attitudes 10

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and practices that are related to superhuman agents.5 In the case of Judaism, then, we have a communal system – a “Judaic system” – of propositional attitudes and practices related to “the god of Israel”, or more properly, to the tetragrammaton ‫יהוה‬, and the related host of angels, demons, prophets and other superhuman agents that form the background to lived forms of Judaism. The Torah scroll should be understood as a vehicle for the divine name. Judaic systems invest a great deal of energy, in the form of emotion, language and action, around the written scroll. It is adorned like royalty, paraded around and kissed at least once a week, and enthroned when out of use in an Ark (Aron Kodesh) behind a decorative curtain. The scroll is never defiled by a human hand; rather a metal pointer shaped like a hand (yad) is used to keep one’s place in the text. These rituals dedicated towards the Torah scroll ascribe it status as an independent agent. Judaism is thus indeed a system of beliefs and practices towards “God”, but more precisely towards the divine name as represented in the Tetragrammaton, inhabiting the Torah scroll.6 This definition should make it clear that I am interested in the communal system of propositional attitudes and practices in Judaic systems, not the word “religion”, its popular use or misuse. Attitudes are theoretical placeholders we use to keep track of others and our own mental states. We regard such attitudes often as having content, or conveying meaning. This is another way of saying that we tend to attribute propositions to other people’s mental states. These types of propositions, such as the proposition that Solomon built the Temple, or God is one, are part of the subject matter of scholars of religion. Most Jews regard such propositions as true; that is, they believe them.7 But there are other attitudes we may take towards propositions, such as hopes, desires and wishes. Judaic systems as I have defined them include all these types of attitudes.8 As noted, religion is more than just linguistic propositions; it also includes practices, intentional acts dictated by or dedicated to superhuman agents. In the case of Judaic systems, individuals within them interact with superhuman agents other than “God”, such as angels, demons, ancestors and others, so these practices must also be included in our definition. My definition is meant to capture those elements necessary if we want to call something a Judaic system. This is admittedly a normative project. Trying to define those necessary elements has a long history in the tradition. For example, there is Hillel’s famous response to someone wishing to convert to Judaism and taught the whole of Torah while standing on one leg; Hillel replied: “That which is hateful unto thee do not do unto thy neighbor. This is the whole of the Torah. The rest is commentary.” More recently, the Hebrew writer Ahad Ha’am’s (1921: 42) response to the question was, “‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness’ (Ex. 20:4). This is the whole of the Torah. The rest is commentary, Go and study”. There have been many pages written about representations of Judaism, including representations of Jewish bodies and minds. While I think this enterprise is valuable, when taken to its extreme it leads to self-contradiction and paradox. 11

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On the one hand, the method can lead to infinite regress when forced to ponder the question of the reality of representations. In other words, scholars end up representing representations of Judaism; but why distance ourselves so much from our subject matter? I do not want to head down that rabbit hole. Instead I simply acknowledge the fact that my own representations of Judaism are fallible. As noted, I am not naïve enough to believe I can reach an authentic reality behind representation. I simply want to examine different types of representations, and thus possibly develop new insights into Judaism. The representations I study are in part based on scientific methods and theories that have been arrived at through experimentation. To repeat, I do not think scientific representations capture reality better, but they do offer a different perspective on religious beliefs and practices. On the other hand the typical humanist approach to Judaism might also lead one to suspect that there is no reality behind the representations of Judaism at all, except power (McCutcheon 2003). I think this approach is itself reductive and falls into the trap of infinite regress noted above. It is better for a scholar to admit plainly his gendered, Eurocentric social location and move forwards provisionally as best he can, than to falsely assert a path behind language with access to the power games that supposedly animate it. It is ironic that this attempt to somehow get beyond language to something more authentic is the goal of many cognitive scholars of religion in addition to their more politically minded colleagues. To be clear, Judaism is not a race, for the very concept of race has been so discredited by biologists in the past 50 years it is doubtful the concept can be recovered. However, as noted Jews are a statistically distinct ethnic group, made up of the two statistically distinct groups – those descended from early Jewish migrants to Europe called Ashkenazim, and those descended from the Middle Eastern and African diaspora, called Sephardim. These groups are statistically relevant in the sense that if you tested any individual “Jew” they may have few of the genetic markings of what is normatively defined as Jewish, but if you test enough people who define themselves as Jews strong genetic patterns start to emerge. The way in which a genetic discourse has become part of the construction of Jewish identity will be discussed throughout the chapters that follow. Because the attitudes and practices in Judaic systems concern sexual practice and social regulation, they have tended, over time, to produce something like an ethnicity – though the precise nature of the ethnos is a matter of great debate. Given this characteristic of Judaic systems, as hybrid between ethnicity, religion and culture, the neurohistorical model seems an apt tool to use in our enquiry because it seeks to understand the complex interaction over time between cultural practices and biology – in what Clifford Geertz once described as a reciprocally creative relationship (Geertz, C. 1973: 68, cited in Smail 2008: 8). The goal is not to let one field usurp the other, but rather to utilize the recent advances in the fields of biology and neuroscience to inform our study. Though these tools do “not necessarily change the nature of the things observed”, they do change “the pattern of our explanations and the focus of our attention” (Smail 2008: 159). 12

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Smail notes three criticisms of evolutionary psychology, first noted by Buller (2005a), which I want to highlight to dispel any rush to judgement about my argument. The main point of these criticisms is that human nature is not unitary, nor static. First of all, “natural selection in no way works to homogenize psychological traits” (Smail 2008: 145). Nearly a quarter of human genetic material is polymorphic, meaning that variation in phenotype (biodiversity) is an essential part of the system, having obvious adaptive advantages. Second, the human body (including the brain) is not simply a fossil of adaptations from our deep ancestral past in the Pleistocene; it has been continuously adapting. This leads to the last criticism, the rejection of the idea “that the human brain has undergone no significant change for the past 100,000 years or more” (147). Smail notes that if we follow E. O. Wilson’s premise that one hundred generations are enough, substantial change “could have taken place in the human genome since the time of the Roman Empire” (147). I would finally like to point out that Darwin’s evolutionary theory, despite its popular perception, is not a teleological science; it is not deterministic. Smail sees the co-emergence of sociobiology and cultural historiography in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the same drive away from the essentialism that defined the previous generation of social science and history. This is because “Darwinian natural selection … has a fundamentally anti-essentialist epistemology. That is the whole point” (Smail 2008: 124). A beautiful illustration of how natural selection operates "on the ground" comes in Jonathan Weiner’s Pulitzer-winning The Beak of the Finch (1994). In his detailed study of Darwin’s favourite example he shows the tremendous role that randomness and the details of historical contingency play in the evolution of species. He shows how phenotype and genotype are locked in a continual and unpredictable feedback loop. Natural selection is indeterministic because environmental change and species interaction are unpredictable, in what Weiner calls the “stutter-step” character of the day-to-day, detailed processes of species evolution (Weiner 1994: 106). Much like the tornado (whirlwind) that concludes A Serious Man, Weiner notes the irreducible role that random acts of nature, like weather change, play in evolution. Statistical or probabilistic models are the only way to capture the impact of such phenomena scientifically, because they are by nature unpredictable. The weather is notoriously subject to chaos effects (Gleick 1987: 16). In light of these initial warnings, another purpose of this text is to try to understand Judaism in the light of the extraordinary longue durée of human evolutionary history. This history should go back at least to the Pleistocene. For those who would need a refresher course on that history, a few important books to recommend are: Relethford’s The Human Species, Wells’s The Journey of Man: A Genetic Oddysey, Dawkin’s The Blind Watchmaker, Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind. This list is far from exhaustive but it would be a good start for the novice reader. As Smail would advise, we must be sure not to separate this prehistory from the history of Judaism: the same natural and social forces are in place. 13

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Age (m illion years ago)

E u ro p e

A frica

0■

A sia

Hom o sapiens" Homo ieanderthali» » ■'•v-‘ rtf?3 70s rx p y who^eeornohc'JnSKi ■v r» r» orrcieo'ppcrc munei »fD njJ flfnro TDtO poo: pw rip-rcT^hm s 1 miioo'p^nmiioco g-cnit erotm a r * | p i n n ivnro-w t* o* rao ? 57« P n S jr w - 1 7 > T t r « S k w h 1 3 -1 n t t n - r p > / t o t fc Sc s n J r : t j > n , 7 * 3 * ■ ■ ?? ? rresnrroBraiiairiPTo-rTpn-rny cwwawia/oipSE Pi »-.. JnWgh^pO; OW WO ^ j. PTS P»X«n tfcTJIB 71* w«K3» mScorctfrp T. tT-TT - . I .T. ■ /lPhOjnjKh.'OTpipr*. ™’ " -nonphnpc*tn (TM «7 T J ^ lycroy rowna by rt* ro w -d m f.*w) ?m rtm w pnS" ** jnCo^moTO!'-rJ«>» ' 11 t-— is -ro7 m ?v i ? yrso tr-cxi r a n xi m —c ?»■)yo: » y ™ •>. sro-m ro w psc.ts -rj* art rti ••-ntm :«sv rt-aoxwctfii; 0*, “ 'tkTpSoSrsiS'U ' 'T.^d.WiM.oxriiTOOTO irrwrippoft O w iT rtfsw ncd rnT osta’XTpiscpicrniorr 133 WTO-TTOTOSStt*OTti u n ! K r^-ro » on' ’ 1 jwro^xcploiTK-xn r w n W ) i n s no-ya »jm wr tnwn> •!o-i«o M» oito Oh «co (•orl |npi pntP, -ppca* 2TOT -«p jnpj* « n *trrO*°’t-e*n o w i ? PT.n ’S'fL >m»mnKoOiiwMOpio'x'iiO n3>ppn™ror-p prpnp'yr"pp2l' OiOx'-pjooThnfC' rn „ i« . t g rrTBTiTp aiTC pcrnrQVortro^c-jpnrnprormt noOhfoc»»wentoowin•»

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Figure 6.4 Layout of a typical page of the Babylonian Talmud.

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Rashi’s commentary

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Cross-references

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relatively constant at least since the editions printed by Joshua and Gershom Soncino, an Italian Sephardi Jewish family of printers, at the turn of the fifteenth century. Davies gives us a nice story about the way in which texts move through time and space. I would characterize their production as a form of distributed cognition, the gist of which is the idea that thought or mind makes no sense when confined to the inner workings of individual brains. As we see in Davies’s example of the filing system based on names, names fit into this paradigm by organizing information in distributed networks. Filing uses the physical features of a shelf, for example, as a way to organize information. Material tokens, such as names, are used to do the tagging. But how in particular does this tagging work?

MATERIAL SYMBOLS

Though he is mostly concerned with spoken language, a possible answer may come in seeing names in Judaic systems as what Andy Clark (2006) calls “material symbols”. He argues that instead of an inert translation device between an inner and outer form “the role of public language” is “more like that of the spade” (292). Material symbols like language play a double role. Crucially, they do “activate” cognitive processes and mediate with bits of “neuralese” or “mentalese”. But more importantly, they play an irreducible role in cognition as the material symbols they are. This is a hard idea to grasp until you recognize its simplicity. What he means is that the material symbols qua material symbols – a formation of letters in black ink, or patterns of sound waves travelling through space – have their own irreducible percepts, and their own particular physics. In this view language as a material artefact “is a complementary resource that works with the more basic machinery without installing any fundamentally new styles of representation or processing within that machinery” (Clark 2006: 293). Language thus “occupies a wonderfully ambiguous position on any hybrid cognitive stage, since it seems to straddle the internal-external borderline itself, looking one moment like any other piece of the biological equipment, and at the next like a peculiarly potent piece of external cognitive scaffolding”. I propose that the use of names in the Bible, and the evolving tradition concerning the name of God in later Judaic sources, is a particularly poignant example of the kind of irreducible interaction with material symbols that Clark and others have discussed at length. The pertinent question is how does the use of this form of distributed cognition with regard to names in the Judaic case compare with other modes of life and forms of religion? Interaction with written texts especially appears to alter the way we conceptualize language. Though both oral and written language are material symbols in the way Clark describes, the physics involved in hearing and seeing are very different 111

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and contribute to quite different cognitive affordances. It is not that one is right and one is wrong, or one is primitive and another is progressive. Rather, written technologies change the way we are embodied as subjects in the world, what opportunities are presented to us; but they also limit thought in profound ways. I view Judaic texts as some of the earliest technologies that ramp up the digitization of human thought, a phenomenon that has only accelerated in recent years (Bellah 2011). I think Clark is right when he notes that language was the first and most powerful digital technology. Language is of course made up of many analogue elements, and it is in their combination with digital format that makes it such a game changer. To see how materialized language accelerates the movement between analogue and digital we need to look at Andy Clark’s (2006) examples of three “orders” of the use of such technology to offload resources from our working memory. Clark takes as an example of the first-order cognitive involvement of materialized language the case of Sheba the chimpanzee, who has undergone numerical training and thus knows about numerals (that is, digits). In an experiment Sheba and an untrained chimpanzee named Sarah are shown two piles of treats with unequal number. What Sheba points to, Sarah gets. Sheba points to the larger pile, and Sarah gets more treats, to the annoyance of Sheba. However, “when the treats arrive in containers with a cover bearing numerals on top, the spell is broken and Sheba points to the lesser number, thus gaining more treats” (Clark 2006: 293). Clark argues that the material symbols, by being simple and stripped of most treat-signifying physical cues, allow the chimps to sidestep the capture of their own behavior by ecologically-specific fast-and-frugal subroutines. The symbol loosens the bond between agent and world, and between perception and action, and it does so not in virtue of being the key to a rich mental representation (though it may be that too) but rather by itself, qua material symbol, providing a new target for selective attention and a new fulcrum for the control of action. (Clark 2006: 293–4) Human beings appear to possess a critical mass of neurons dedicated to working memory that allows our spoken language to function like Sheba’s numerals. But there is a limit to the metarepresentational capacities of human working memory. The offloading is indeed possible with oral speech – especially when mediated through complex ritual traditions such as memorization and performance, whether the Vedas or ancient bards – but is much more powerful when written language comes into the picture. Clark categorizes this example of Sheba as one of labelling; we could also characterize the process as inventing a ‘mark-up’ language. He encourages us to think of this process as the first step of digitization, the placing of a higher-order label such as 0 or 1. Clark recalls a similar experiment as illustration. In this experiment, language-naïve chimpanzees are trained to associate simple plastic shapes with 112

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relations of sameness and difference. A pair such as cup–cup would be associated with a red triangle and cup–shoe with a blue circle. Amazingly, by this simple act of labelling, the chimpanzees are then able to judge higher-order relations that they would not be able to manage under normal circumstances. Thus, they interact with the concept of “higher-order” sameness and difference in their judgement, for example, that the pair cup–cup and cup–shoe are different. For the chimpanzees this is primarily made possible by the easing of constraints on working memory; “by mentally recalling the tags” they can “reduce the higher-order problem to a lower-order one”. In this case the move from type to token solves the problem because the token is more easily manipulated than the higher-order concepts. The reason this is important will become apparent, but it is precisely this layering of relations that make digital media like literacy so powerful. Skipping ahead in Clark’s argument, he goes even further to what he calls the third grade of cognitive involvement: “language as providing some of the proper parts for hybrid thoughts”. In this part of the story, the primary example is mathematical language. He asks, “what is going on when you think the thought that ‘98 is one more than 97’?” (Clark 2006: 297). The answer comes from the work of Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues (1999), who argue that “precise mathematical thought” emerges at the “productive intersection of three distinct cognitive contributions”. The first is a basic biological capacity that some non-human animals also possess to individuate small quantities, that is 1-ness, 2-ness, 3-ness and many-ness. The second is another basic biological capacity for “approximate reasoning concerning magnitudes” (Clark 2006: 297): a basic sense of greater and less than. The third, “not biologically basic, but arguably transformative” (Clark 2006: 297), is the learned use of number words; that is, language, which for Clark is the externalized use of irreducible material symbols. This third feature leads to “the eventual appreciation that each such number word names a distinct quantity” (Clark 2006: 297). But Clark advises us to: “notice that this is not the same as appreciating, in at least one important sense, just what that quantity is. Most of us can’t form any clear image of … 98-ness (unlike, say, 2-ness). But we appreciate nonetheless that the number word “98” names a unique quantity in between 97 and 99” (Clark 2006: 297). As in the previous chapter, I want to point to the connection between numeracy and literacy. That is, we can know about things (numbers) of which we do not necessarily have an intuitive grasp. Names appear to operate on a similarly hybrid level, especially written names. Written letters, as I noted, served as the first symbols of numbers. These symbols were able to deal with greater levels of mathematical abstraction. Fully digital numbers were only possible after the rediscovery of 0 (zero). A fourth element that Clark adds concerning these quantities is “the rough appreciation of where that quantity lies on a kind of approximate, analogue number line (e.g. ‘98’ is just less than halfway between 1 and 200)” (Clark 2006: 298).5 That is, we start with a sense of the number line and later go on to digitize the line when we learn about precise numeric quantities. When we combine all 113

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Table 6.2 Depiction of analogue, digital and hybrid numerals. Analogue

Digital

Hybrid

four of these we find a dynamic interaction between analogue and digital systems that forms the basis of both literacy and mathematics. It is precisely the arbitrariness and orthogonality of material symbols in language and mathematics that gives it computational power. Material symbols are able to sidestep, to greater and lesser extent the capture of biological evolutionary systems. As you can tell by now, I am essentially equating this sidestep with the notion of digitization. The power of such a public system of digitized, “essentially context-free, arbitrary symbols, lies … in the way such a system can push, pull, tweak, cajole and eventually cooperate with various non-arbitrary, modality-rich, context-sensitive forms of biologically basic encoding” (Clark 2006: 295). Why is it that modern computers use binary digits instead of an analogue system? The main reason is that it is far more efficient to build a computing system on a physical differentiation like off/on. All stored forms digital media must eventually cash out in a physical differentiation of a similar type for the reasons Clark describes. For example, most computer memory is made up of microscopic magnetic fields on its hard disc that represent the zeros and ones of the binary code. Modern computing started with vacuum tubes that performed the same function, though with different constraints (or affordances) on the technology (the tubes easily broke). In the same way, in Clark’s case, it is the fact that material objects can be manipulated in space that gives them their power. Mathematics would not be possible without the use of material, written numerals. Of course, some mathematicians can do everything in their head, but the nuts and bolts work has to be done outside the head, with material manipulation. Nowadays most of this type of manipulation is done with calculators and other types of computers. However, this hybridity between cognitive technologies and brains is not something new, but probably something that characterizes the genus Homo to the core, beginning with Homo habilis, “handy-man”, from about two million years ago (Wrangham 2009). It is the hybridity between analogue and digital, the ability to move back and forth between levels, in technologies like language, writing or computers, that give them such immense power. Digital signals interact primarily through numeric manipulation – and this marks the source of their power in terms of copying and transmission. I see a very close analogy here between Sheba’s labels and names. Names in general, but especially in the case of Judaic texts, condense much more complex 114

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information into a device of simple reference. The names themselves can then be manipulated, which affects the much more complicated elements for which they stand. By manipulating the names instead of the information they condense, the computational demands of the problem are eased. Judaic systems build circuits with these names in order to solve broader intellectual and existential problems, and eventually, as these networks develop, the names become indispensable to solving those problems. The juxtaposition of the names El Shaddai and Yahweh solved the problem about changing conceptions of divinity in light of changing material circumstances. The analogical or indexical relation between material symbols qua material token and a particular object in the world (reference) does indeed represent a primitive mimesis at the heart of language that is digitized when grammar and metarepresentation kick in. Following Smith and Gasser (2005), Clark (2006) addresses this by asking “Why, given that human beings are such experts at grounded, concrete, sensorimotor driven forms of learning, do the symbol systems of public language take the special and rather rarified forms that they do?” In other words, Clark asks, why does language seem to lead us to such digital abstraction if intuitive forms of learning are based on analogically concrete forms of embodiment? One possible answer, he says, “is that language is like that because (biologically basic) thought is like that, and the forms and structures of language reflect this fact”. In other words, digital language is like that because biological operations are also complicated digital operations. But Clark does not like this answer; rather, he says “just the opposite. Language is like that … because thought (or rather, biologically basic thought) is not like that” (Clark 2006: 295). In other words, for Clark the space between analogical and digital formats is what gives language such power. Names serve as indexes for other objects. They thus lie on a middle grade between symbolic meaning and iconic form; their arbitrariness allows them to conform to a digital network, but they are non-arbitrary to the extent that to have content there must be a referential baptism in human experience. Names access those fast and frugal brain subroutines at a level that symbolic language as a whole does not. I have argued that, in its combination of distributed cognition and more biologically basic encoding, naming takes on “numinous” qualities that religion can plug into. The Judaic use of written names foreshadows the Internet in terms of the way they are ‘marked-up,’ linked and spatially organized. Chapter 7 explores how they do so in more detail.

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CHAPTER 7

hypertext

Within the few hundred years after the closing of the Biblical canon and the flowering of rabbinic Judaism, the process of interpretation within Judaic systems transformed. As the locus of religious power shifted from diviners and priests to teachers, the divinatory search matured into outright textual research, midrash. As the corpus of hermeneutic experimentation expanded, the digitization that had been applied to single letters and names transformed into a practice of referencing whole sentences and stories. For the ancient rabbis whose debates are recorded in the Talmud, the true study of Torah could only take place in the context of a plurality of debating friends and loved ones. The heart of their hermeneutics involved a method of enquiry that today should be characterized as a form of sampling. The image below, for example, of the story of the oven of Aknai – from one of the oldest manuscipts of the talmudic tractate Baba Metzia (59b) – is a sample, coming at you through a series of technological processes: memorization, writing, copying, transcription, printing, scanning, cutting/pasting (Figure 7.1). In his intriguing book The Talmud and the Internet, Jonathan Rosen (2000) compares the modern technology of the Internet with the ancient technology of the Talmud. He argues that the Talmud – which was often described as an endless sea (‫ – ימ‬on which one could surf?), and where the word for “tractate” (masechet, ‫ )מסכת‬literally means “webbing” – anticipated the digital and hypertextual nature of the Internet. There is a hybridity to the Talmud in the way commentaries are layered and juxtaposed, parsed, cut, reoriented. In replacing the loss of the temple and place, the Talmud served as a virtual homeland. For Rosen, “the Internet, which we are continually told binds us all together”, engenders “a similar sense of Diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere” (Rosen 2000: 7, 8, 14). Rosen’s juxtaposition of the two technologies enlightens our understanding of each of them. The Talmud helps us understand the power and possibility of the Internet, while the Internet helps us understand the revolutionary technology of the Talmud and its significance for Judaic systems. So a productive way to think about the revolutionary technologies involved with literacy in ancient times is to see them in comparison with modern forms of sampling that are equally as revolutionary. In his recent book Remix, Lawrence Lessig (columnist for Wired and the chair of Creative Commons) argues that

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Figure 7.1 One of the earliest dated Talmudic manuscripts. Babylonian Talmud: Codex Firenze, Florence National Library, shelf mark: II 8–9, page CCXXX (reproduced by kind permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali della Repubblica Italiana/Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze).

the era of digital media has ushered in not only a major cultural shift towards a “remix” culture, but also has decisive legal ramifications (Lessig 2008). The original provisions of American copyright law set out in the Constitution sought to protect intellectual property by focusing on the copy. In pre-digital era media, the copy served as the trigger for copyright protections because copies were the exception, and thus were the most obvious source of control. Copying was a slow, painstaking process; it was an event that took place in historical time and could thus be regulated. Lessig argues that this system is woefully outdated in the digital age because digital networks are predicated on copies in the network. In other words, with digital materials copying has become so easy and automatic that it is no longer the exception but rather the norm. In this shift, not only does what is intellectual about “intellectual property” change, but I would argue that the notion of property itself changes dramatically in relation to the new technologies. 118

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But what is it specifically about digital media that allows for this? As we saw in previous chapters, most media systems involve an interaction between digital and analogue formats. In fact, the difference between the two formats, though useful analytically, is perhaps more of degree than kind. We use the modifiers analogue and digital to differentiate two kinds of “signals”, energy patterns that “carry information”.1 For example, human perceptions are primarily based on analogue signals. The word analogue gives us a clue here in the sense that the “information” on one side of a medium is analogous to that on the other side; it is related to it by some physical process, it is an impression. Etching is thus a good example of a baseline analogous process, where the contours of an object directly cause gradations in the etched image. A similar kind of etching takes place when creating phonographic records. These records record the variations of physical sound patterns directly in the medium. There is of course a conversion of sorts taking place: a conversion of sound patterns, sound waves, into physical marks on a record. But those physical marks are physically analogous to, and directly “caused” by, the sound waves. I labour these points because it is important that we get into the fine details in order to really appreciate the differences between analogue and digital. As noted, in the case of digital signals, there is not a physical, direct relation between the two media. A digital signal, as the name suggests, involves a digitization process – usually in terms of numerals, but not always – whereby analogue samples are converted into arbitrary values (see Figure 7.2). These values are often called “discontinuous” or discrete. So we can see that the primary differentiation concerns whether values are discrete or indiscrete. The distinction appears to reduce to the fact that digital signals necessarily utilize the “off ”. Analogue signals, we might say, are always “on”. The “information” they convey is primarily that of form. Most often it would appear that analogue coding is metonymic, where the higher the fidelity, the more of the “essence” of the original signal persists. Digital signals, by contrast, are not waves, they are not energy as such, but second-order descriptions condensing the wave according to, for example, a pattern of ons and offs. For example, the dots and dashes of Morse code are the basic elements of a digital signal.

Figure 7.2 Depiction of the way digital signals code for analogue signals (Wikimedia Commons public domain image, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zeroorderhold.signal.svg).

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Lessig begins the introduction to his book with the following example of the way in which present-day copyright law, and the cultural norms that surround it, must change in light of the new digital technology. He tells the story of Stephanie Lenz, who recorded her eighteen-month-old son Holden’s impromptu enthusiastic dancing to Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy”. Holden had first heard the song during the championship game of the National Football League (the Super Bowl), where Prince performed the half-time show, and had been hooked on it ever since. The video was incredibly cute, so Stephanie naturally wanted to share it with her family and friends. The easiest way to share the 20-megabyte file was by uploading it to Google’s YouTube. But as her family and friends watched the video, they too wanted to share it, and eventually it became one of those YouTube hits. Universal, the owner of the rights to many of Prince’s songs, was not so amused and demanded that YouTube take the video down, threatening a lawsuit. Lessig takes this as an example of the system gone awry – the upholding of an outdated principle about the nature of intellectual property. Lessig thinks the war on this form of piracy, along with other forms of file sharing, is a lost cause and is liable to stunt creativity and prosperity if it continues (Lessig 2008: 1–4). Lessig calls the new form of creativity RW culture, using the metaphor of “read/write” file permission protocols in computing that allow a user to both read a file and change it as she sees fit. He thinks RW culture is replacing RO (“read only”) culture, the culture of media consumption that has characterized media since the phonograph, but has recently become institutionalized in the age of television (Lessig 2008: 28). Before the RO age, cultural forms were rarely restricted by legal norms; rather, there was a constant borrowing and copying, as forms reshaped and evolved. Thus, for Lessig, RW culture is not so much a new phenomenon as a return to the predominant mode of cultural expression and interaction that had perhaps become warped over the past four score years or so. Lessig also cites John Philips Sousa’s testimony before the US Congress in 1906 that new forms of mechanical reproduction of music would rob, and in fact already had robbed, America of its valuable folk forms of music. People would simply become media consumers, unable to play instruments, sing and create culture. For Lessig, this means that mechanical technology made culture less democratic, while the digital revolution is ushering in a new age of democratic culture. This new culture is a “hybrid” culture of “mash-up” and “remix”, where new technologies cut up and parse analogue and digital material of the past, allowing the pieces to be put together in new and dynamic ways. The new culture thus challenges the nature of media consumption to the core (Lessig 2008: 25, 34). Judaic systems prefigured much of this movement. But I want to be sure that, in making this argument, I do not romanticize either rabbinic or modern forms of democracy. Ancient Judaic systems were obviously not “democratic” in the strong sense of the word. Relative to other religions and forms of politics of the time, however, the religious requirements for male literacy in Judaic systems discussed in previous chapters suggest some measure of hermeneutic freedom. Many scholars have noted that the requirement of male literacy in Judaic systems led to a 120

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kind of democratization of the Word. Each individual (male) subject becomes the arbiter of God’s Word (Preus 1998, 1991). In Greece, by contrast, apparently only citizens and a lucky few others received training in literacy. For my purposes in this book, I am most interested in the conceptual relation between media technology, cognition and religion; in this respect new technologies such as literacy, the printing press and the Internet create both hazards and opportunities with regard to human freedom. European history since the Reformation has also been characterized as a kind of democratization of the Word. An enlightened electorate is most importantly also a literate electorate, marked by the ability to read their Constitution and make informed electoral decisions.2 Thus literacy, when universal, is part of that democratic culture whose loss Sousa was mourning. The kind of remix culture Lessig is calling for is one of general media literacy. This argument calls to mind Demsky and Bar-Ilan’s suggestion (noted in Chapter 1) concerning the historical relationship in Judaism between media technology and religion. The full quotation from their study is as follows: The reciprocal influence of writing and monotheism can be seen in the biblical rejection of the plastic representation of the deity, a commonplace in all contemporary pagan religions: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heaven above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth” (Exod 20:4). It is most instructive that this opposition to an iconographic object of veneration is expressed in the written tangible sign of His presence. Stored in the Ark, the footstool of the divine throne, the tablets were the focal point of cultic service in the Tabernacle and Temple and their later synagogal copies formed the centre of Jewish worship. By attributing the tablets of the covenant to divine authorship, the mundane treaty model was transformed and infused with a non-mythological holiness and became the means of comprehending God. The medium of writing therefore provided the solution to the problem how to represent physically an invisible and transcendent deity. Henceforth, not only the content of the covenant, but also the medium of writing became an influential factor in Israelite religion and in later Judaism. (Demsky and Bar-Ilan 1988: 19; emphasis added) As noted, these scholars see a connection between literacy and monotheistic iconoclasm. In other words, an abstract invisible superhuman agent may be better captured or referenced by an abstract systematic representation of symbols, or a code, rather than a “plastic representation”. This superhuman agent is visible, in effect, in the visible letters of a text. Thus writing allowed for a kind of cognition about intuitive religion that was not possible previously. Judaic systems came to be second- or even third-order reflections on primary religion. First we have the Judean temple in Jerusalem, which functioned like a typical Middle Eastern temple of a god. But already in the murky history of ancient 121

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Judaism, a series of catastrophes had detached this god from that particular place in Jerusalem. That god was one who worked out his will in the course of human history. He was far more concerned about humanity than most of the surrounding gods. He was invested in human beings, and “Israel” in particular. He was a moralizing god, immensely concerned with the internal mental states of his subjects, in addition to their behaviour. The other gods were also invisible abstractions to some degree. What stands out about ancient Judaic practice is that it did not involve a plastic representation of the deity, a token of the deity himself (aside perhaps from the written token of his name: ‫)יהוה‬. That is, in most cases in ancient religions, the plastic representation of the deity was the deity. There was some anthropomorphic form, or incarnation, of the deity. The deity could take an analogue format, easier input for many of our most basic mental systems. In the case of Judaic systems, the god is either essentially invisible, or simply has no representation – but perhaps this amounts to the same thing. Or perhaps the Judaic god simply cannot incarnate in such a way. The formats are off; there is an encoding error. This tranformation from analogue to digital god mirrors the transition in religious hermeneutics, from divination to midrash, that I have been aluding to throughout this text. So this god was already stepping outside the role of the deity in the typical Middle Eastern temple by the time the Jerusalem temple was destroyed for a second time in 70 ce. Stepping out of a temple role meant stepping into a far more virtualized state anyway. Judaic law was derived from commentaries on the Mishnah, which was itself a set of virtualized temple instructions; the Mishnah was an effort to order life in response to the destruction of the temple (Neusner 2004). The Talmud was the next definitive statement of the Law, and was itself a commentary on the Mishnah. The name of the god is also deferred in the same way, in the sense that it is replaced with a number of stand-ins, such as “HaShem” – literally, the name. It is in this sense we can say that Judaic systems have always been digitized. The systems were ever-ready to export to different formats. This is because they “went digital”, off format, almost since the beginning. The rabbinical system represents an ancient remix in response to the invention of writing. It incorporates analogue and digital processing in a way that made previous religion unrecognizable. Rosen makes a similar point about the transformation that I am characterizing as a movement from analogue to digital religion; he argues that the process “makes the embrace of a visible deity more elusive and less important … since God lives in the twists and turns of applied intelligence and in the very process of imaginative striving that studying Talmud involves” (Rosen 2000: 91). However, at the same time that Judaic systems went off format, they instituted rather strict rules about membership. The contrast with early Christianity is noteworthy, for early Christian groups did not appear to develop the same rules about membership; instead they reformatted the Word into the person and matter of Jesus, the dead Jew. As Rosen reports the distinction: for Judaism the Word “was never made flesh”, rather “the flesh became words” (Rosen 2000: 54).3 122

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WRITING, QUOTATION AND SAMPLING

At the start of a chapter called “RW Revived”, Lessig notes that the act of quoting someone in print is a form of sampling that has never needed copyright protection, and that it would be “weird” to think you needed permission to quote someone. He suggests this has something to do with the nature of writing itself, for it would be impossible to write if we needed special permission to quote every time we used someone else’s thoughts for inspiration. But writing, he argues, is not the only form of expression that should be freely remixed. All media, Lessig thinks, should follow this basic paradigm of written quotation (Lessig 2008: 51–4). In this section I argue that sampling represents the core of the ancient form of rabbinic remix and present some material from the philosophy of language and literacy on “quotation” in order to understand how sampling works. Quotation is the most basic form of linguistic sampling and was an integral part of ancient media cultus; most religions, whether their revelations are oral or written, depend on it to some degree. But in order to really have quotation one must have the concept of literal meaning, because quotation relies on the ability to represent, or say, the literal words that someone said. The concept of literal meaning forms the basis for distinguishing what someone says from what they mean and what their words do. Quotation is thus a core feature of metarepresentation and semantics. However, quotation has a natural history; with the emergence of literacy in the ancient world, the technology of quotation changed. Though early rabbinic practice was largely orally performed and transmitted because its audience was not so literate (although this is debated), the rabbis themselves were quite literate men who were operating with a distinctly literary conception of the Word. Reported speech, though rarely examined analytically in the study of religion, is a core feature of Judaic revelation, whether the speech of God, prophets or sages. Indeed, reported speech forms the very core of Judaic religion (in addition to Christianity and Islam, religions based on prophecy). However, as alluded to earlier (especially in Chapter 5), the emergence of literacy in the ancient world provoked at least two divergent conceptions of the Word: the rabbinic and the Platonic, east and west. David Olson, the world’s expert on the psychology of literacy, has demonstrated that learning to read changes one’s recognition of the spoken word, because writing helps bring the phonological-structural qualities of speech into consciousness. However, Olson finds that phonological awareness is not the only form of metalinguistic awareness encouraged by literacy. Citing studies that link indirect quotation to literacy, he finds that “writing pries open a conceptual gap between sentence and utterance”. He notes an anecdotal, though helpful, example: the game “Simon says”, which is common among young school children. This game tests precisely a child’s ability to understand metarepresentation; in this case, it tests the ability to recognize a proposition outside of its normal use, for one is not supposed to obey what the speaker in the game says but only what Simon says. The association of the game with school-age children is not a coincidence for Olson, because education 123

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into literacy “makes the recognition and interpretation of quoted expressions, that is, texts, routine” (Olson 2001: 249). Olson has found further that in literate contexts children’s developing conception of “word” is based on a model derived from literacy. Children who are exposed to writing from a young age tend to think that words are graphic signs such that “some understanding of written text mediates children’s concept of the word”. The concept is a product of experience with writing because it “is developed as children discover how written signs carve up the more continuous structures of speech”. In other words, children learn to understand their oral speech by analogy with its visual form, which is made up (at least in most western languages) of distinct visible semantic units (morphemes and words). The word comes to be understood as a reified, material entity (Homer and Olson 1999: 117–19). Literate people (of varying skills) thus have a tendency to model spoken language in terms of written language, for better or worse. More generally, Olson finds that not just their concept of “word” but also the host of “children’s early metalinguistic concepts are influenced, if not determined by, experience with writing”. Metalinguistic concepts are second-order concepts that apply to language, such as grammatical concepts like noun and verb, semantic concepts like meaning, and phonological concepts. While there may be other ways to reflect on these concepts, Olson’s point is that literacy encourages and influences their development. The main point to emphasize with Olson is that writing had two main consequences that I think mark a distinct watershed in the history of religions: The first, well known, is that writing is sufficiently fixed and permanent that it can be read in a context other than that in which it was produced, by readers for whom it was not intended. Secondly, writing systems map onto language rather than onto either the world or ideas or meanings directly. (Olson 2001: 243) Olson, citing Donald Davidson’s 1984 essay “Quotation”, thus postulates that cognitive displacement is the most fundamental consequence of writing. Writing should be understood as a second-order process that is “intrinsically reflective” and is “in principle metalinguistic”. Another way to say this is that the displacement that occurs inherently with writing is a form of sampling: it is sampling speech. Olson elaborates on this point further, comparing the psychological displacement of writing to that of quotation or of overhearing speech, for both involve an essential disembedding of propositions from their normal use, that is, “lifting words and expressions from their normal usage thereby turning them into objects of attention” (Olson 2001: 246). He notes that quotation has been understood by linguists and philosophers to lead to “the property of referential opacity, the nonsubstitutability of co-referential expressions within the quoted clause”. We touched on the notion of referential opacity in Chapter 3 in our discussion of Baron-Cohen’s “theory of mind mechanism”. Thus writing (in most cases), like 124

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quotation, is a case of mentioning or sampling speech, not using it. Here are Olson’s examples of different forms of disembedding through quotation: (1) Can you say “chicken”? (2) Did you say “I am crazy”? (Direct quotation) (3) Did you say that you are crazy? (Indirect quotation)

(Olson 2001: 244)

In these cases, like those noted in Chapter 5 concerning divination, we do not find normal uses of language. The first example refers to the word “chicken”, not the concept chicken; the second example refers to an utterance; and the third example refers to a proposition. Olson’s point is that writing, as in these examples, is implicitly a form of metarepresentation. Writing is implicitly metarepresentational because, like “both direct and indirect quotation”, it is a “means of representing an idea without oneself asserting it as true”. This leads Olson to suggest, following Frege, “that such devices make thought, i.e., entertaining some content without either asserting or denying it, possible”; in other words, “thinking is seen as a kind of saying to oneself ” and writing, similarly, is quoting oneself (Olson 2001: 245–6). In this sense, though the phonetics of language may be closer to the memory storage of spoken signs, writing may provide a better analogy for propositional thought. Writing, unlike speech, is a form of composition, akin to a musical score. In summary: Writing should be seen neither as completely different from speech nor as identical to speech but rather as being related to the reflexive property of speech exploited in quotation. This in turn suggests that writing is in principal reflexive and meta-representational while direct speech, typically, is not. (Olson 2001: 247)

RABBINIC MONISMS

In linking Olson to rabbinic hermeneutics I want to suggest that sampling – the parsing, splicing, pasting, and repackaging of “chunks of information” – is actually the phenomenon Olson is isolating at the heart of thought. With this brief cognitive point as background, I will now move more directly into the subject of rabbinic hermeneutics. In their book Zweierlei Diaspora: Zur Spaltung der antiken jüdischen Welt, Doron Mendels and Arye Edrei (2009) argue that two Jewish cultures were present during the initial phase of rabbinic Judaism: in the “east”, a Hebrew- and Aramaicspeaking Judaic culture under the authority of rabbis; and in the “west”, a Greekspeaking Judaic culture not familiar with the oral teaching of those eastern rabbis. In other words, within the logic set up so far, two distinct Judaic systems come to dominate the conceptual landscape of late Biblical religion. 125

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They argue that most of the latter (western) culture was eventually assimilated into the expanding Christian denomination.4 It was not until the eighth or ninth century of the Common Era that these two Jewish cultures merged, with the eastern form becoming dominant. This kind of conceptual dichotomy was surely more complicated on the ground; there was surely a great deal of interaction and exchange between those two cultures. However, it sets up a useful distinction between the more Greek-influenced philosophical trajectory of some forms of Judaism, most notably perhaps Jewish mysticism, and another form more solidly centred in the argumentative method represented in the Babylonian Talmud, and profoundly influenced by Persian culture.5 I do not wish to claim that one or the other is a more “authentic” form of Judaism, nor reproduce an ancient polemic against “foreign” Hellenism. I think culture and thought are far more porous and interpenetrating than could be captured in such a polemic. The distinction I draw below may characterize any hermeneutic system where there are both centripetal and centrifugal forces acting at once, forces of determinacy and forces of indeterminacy. Thus the distinction is not so much between Greek and rabbinic language but between theory, or philosophy as such whose goal is scientific truth guided by logical axiomata, and a method meant to interpret a capricious mind. No system fully possesses one or the other but instead lies somewhere on a continuum between the two. Jewish mysticism, with its Neoplatonic influence, was on a quest to experience the divine and explain the origins of the cosmos (among other things). In this sense, as noted in previous chapters, it has more in common with science than the rabbinic techniques of interpretation and knowledge seeking. The philosopher Samuel Wheeler (2000) makes a similar distinction in the seventh chapter of his book Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, “A Rabbinic Philosophy of Language”, where he argues that two sorts of implicit philosophies of language exist within what I have called Judaic systems: a rabbinic one and a Greek, “Platonically” influenced one, culminating in Maimonides. The former philosophy he sees more in line with that of Derrida, Davidson and Wittgenstein, where some degree of institutionality and normativity is embedded in the relation between propositions and the world, while the latter is more akin to what he calls a “magic-language theory” (Wheeler 2000).6 As he says in comparing Davidson to Derrida: The fundamental point of agreement between Derrida and Davidson, as well as other thinkers in the analytic tradition, such as Quine and Wittgenstein, is their denial of what I call the “magic language”. This is the language of nous, a language that is, in Wittgenstein’s terms, self-interpreting. The magic language is the language in which we know what we mean, think our thoughts, and form intentions … Derrida argues that the presupposition of some form of magic language has determined the very project of philosophy from the beginning. Direct access to the Platonic Forms, Aristotle’s deliverances of nous, the ideas of the empiricist philosophers, and the sense data of 126

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the Vienna Circle are all versions of the magic language. We have a magiclanguage theory whenever a kind of term is alleged to be by its very nature “present” to the mind. Accordingly, Derrida characterizes such positions as “presence” theories, “presence” being what Wilfred Sellars has termed “the myth of the given”. (Wheeler 2000: 3) In light of this argument we can extrapolate that the two forms of Judaism differ in their implicit conception of the relation between language and the world. In Greek-inspired Judaism, God speaks this magic language. His words are logoi, the furniture of the natural world: “complete specifications of sets of possible worlds in which they were true” (Wheeler 2000: 142). The rabbinic philosophy of language, by contrast, is partly contingent on human decision. God’s speech, written down in the Bible, was incomplete and underdetermined. The rabbis tended to read God’s speech and actions more literally, tended to interpret God as an agent in the world, and thus had no need to read deep scientific principles into his speech as the philosophers would do. For the rabbis, understanding God was more a project in moral psychology, and had less to do with ontology. God’s speech was more like our speech, and his thoughts were more like our thoughts, “in that they are not complete in every detail” (Wheeler 2000: 143). This was not to say that God was not all-knowing, but rather that the future was not real, and in that sense could not be known. It was left to the rabbis to fill in the gaps, particularly with regard to the future application of Biblical laws. Wheeler bases his analysis on the famous story of an argument that took place among the rabbis and was eventually recorded in Baba Metzia 59b. The story concerns a dispute among some Tanna’im, the earliest generation of rabbis, about an oven that becomes ritually impure. The oven is broken into pieces and the debate is over whether the oven retains that ritual status after it is put back together. Wheeler rightly notes that the identity status of objects is an interesting philosophical question in itself, but that issue is somewhat peripheral to the narrative in question. In the story, Rabbi Eliezer contends that the oven loses its ritually impure status in its breaking down and reconstitution, while the majority of the rabbis around him think it retains that status in its reconstitution. Along the way, the dispute also addresses the question why the oven, and by extension the story about the oven, is called the oven of “Aknai”, the Aramaic word for snake. This is because the sages coiled arguments around Rabbi Eliezer like a snake. But the story goes on. In divinatory fashion Eliezer performs a series of feats – uprooting a carob tree, reversing the course of a stream, and bending the wall of the school – to demonstrate that his argument is correct. These amazing feats do not convince his peers, so he finally appeals to a “daughter of a voice” (‫בת קול‬, Bat Kol: an echo or “voice from heaven”), a sort of hotline to heaven still in place despite prophecy no longer being active in Israel. This voice also declares Eliezer correct. Rabbi Joshua stands up and quotes a verse from Deuteronomy (30:12) saying, “It is not in heaven”. The Gemara, the commentaries on the Mishnah, asks what 127

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he meant by that, providing the answer given by Rabbi Jeremiah: since the Torah is already given, already there for anyone to see, we do not pay attention to such voices, but follow majority opinion. At this point, Rabbi Nathan reports that Elijah told him God laughed. The story of the oven of Aknai makes a powerful statement about the nature of rabbinic interpretation, and for this reason it is a favoured sugya, which is a narrative unit in the Talmud, for subsequent commentators, most notably Maimonides in Mishneh Torah.7 Jason Rosenblatt and Joseph Sitterson (1991) discuss the story in the introduction to their book “Not in Heaven”: Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative. The title is an obvious reference to the Biblical verse (Deut. 30:12) that Rabbi Joshua cites: ‫כי המצוה הזאת אשר אנכי מצוך היום לא־נפלאת הוא ממך ולא רחקה הוא׃‬ ‫לא בשמים הוא לאמר מי יﬠלה־לנו השמימה ויקהה לנו וישמﬠנו אתה ונﬠשנה׃‬ ‫ולא־מﬠבר לים הוא לאמר מי יﬠבר־לנו אל־ﬠבר הים ויקחה לנו וישמﬠנו אתה ונﬠשנה׃‬ ‫כי־קרוב אליך הדבר מאד בפיך ובלבבך לﬠשתו׃‬ For this commandment that I command today is not too difficult, nor is it too far out. It is not in the heavens, lest you should say, “Who will go on up to the heavens for us and get it for us, and make us listen to it and do it?” Neither is it beyond the sea … Rather, the word [ha-davar] is very near to you; in your mouth and in your heart for you to do. (Deut. 30:11–14; my translation) Rosenblatt and Sitterson see the argument between Eliezer and his colleagues as a “struggle for primacy between poetics and hermeneutics”, with Eliezer representing conservative poetics and Joshua revisionary hermeneutics, because the latter draws on the verse from Deuteronomy to prove his point, despite the fact that God and heaven think otherwise. However, I think these scholars miss something crucial in terms of the social context in which the Talmud was composed. They also seem to miss the fact that the Talmud condemns Eliezer and endorses his adversaries.8 I agree with Wheeler that a more important tension is between “science” and rabbinics, for divination was the dominant way to gain knowledge about things unseen in that day. The debate was about whether truth is an epistemic or a semantic concept: whether truth depends merely on some correspondence between language and the world, or on some complicated arrangement of correspondence and coherence. Eliezer does not rely on Written Torah as his proof. He simply asserts something and proves his point with recourse to nature. For the other sages nature is irrelevant, and thus both Joshua and Jeremiah quote from the Written Torah to illustrate their point. Eliezer is subsequently excommunicated for his behaviour. And we may ask: What did he do that was so wrong? To answer this question we have to address the admittedly opaque cultural context of the last phase of the compilation of the Talmud. 128

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Jeffrey Rubenstein (among others) has argued for a literary-historical analysis of the Talmud Bavli (Babylonian Talmud) that identifies three layers in its formation (Rubenstein 2003). The initial layer is the Mishnah, which as noted is made up of rather concise rulings about temple regulations and civil relations, among other things. The next layer is the Talmud Yerushalmi (Jerusalem Talmud), which amounts to legal and homiletic interpretations of those rulings, primarily with a report of the majority opinion among the Tanna’im. The last layer is the portion of Talmud Bavli that is not present in Yerushalmi. Rubenstein contends that this layer was composed in the last phase by the Stamma’im, or anonymous ones, who recorded both majority and minority opinions and who seemed to value the argumentative method for its own sake. The second layer was concise enough that it was likely preserved in oral form among the Amora’im, in the context of very small-scale schools (bet midrash), which were probably simply the home or a room in the home of a “Master” (rav). But the final layer, which Rubenstein attributes to the newly formed institution of the Babylonian rabbinic academy, was probably quickly inscribed in written form (Rubenstein 2007: 66). In sum, we see a corresponding institutional form for the development of the hermeneutic trope represented in the story of the oven of Aknai. Rubenstein and others locate a central ethos of the Stamma’im in the method of “dialectics”, the give-and-take style of debate so esteemed in the Babylonian Talmud. He shows that this method was not so lauded in the Palestinian Talmud and thus conjectures that it developed out of the more institutionalized rabbinic academies in Babylonia. For the Tanna’im and the Amora’im, argumentation was a means to an end and thus they mostly transmitted the conclusions of their debates, whereas for the Stamma’im argumentation was “an end in its own right” (Rubenstein 2007: 176, note 31). The great scholar was the one who could not only raise numerous objections but also provide answers. Debate was a form of intellectual warfare. For example, King David is called a “warrior – he knows how to engage in give-and-take in the war of Torah” in b. Sanhedrin 93b. The Stamma’im even looked forward to “an eternity of debate in the next world”, with one’s reward tied directly to his intellectual acumen (Rubenstein 2003: 46). There can be no doubt that an extremely high value was placed on critical reasoning in the rabbinic academies of Babylonia, a system of education that has lasted for the past 1500 years in Judaic systems. Debate was not the only form of Torah study in the academy – other activities included “determination of law, study and repetition of Tannaitic traditions, scriptural interpretation, even homiletic craft” – but debate was the most central, thus the supreme importance of the study partner and friend (hevruta) (Rubenstein 2003: 48). It was in the context of face-to-face intellectual combat that the swords of the war of Torah were sharpened. The Bavli explicitly praises joint study and condemns private study, as opposed to the Palestinian Talmud, which seems to praise private study (y. Berakhot 9a). For the Babylonians, one can only learn Torah properly in the context of intersubjective, dialectical conversation: “Form 129

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yourselves into groups when you study Torah, since Torah can only be acquired in fellowship [friendship]” (b. Berakhot 63b). These points put the account of the oven of Aknai in a new light. Rabbi Eliezer’s interpretation not only went against the consensus, but his method of confirmation involved no fellowship with his peers. The rabbinic dialectic method relies on weaving one’s argument through the Written and Oral Torah, quoting it in the way that Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Jeremiah did. This argument is supported by Rubenstein’s detailed interpretation of the sugya and its context in the Talmud in Talmudic Stories (1999). He argues that the context is the discussion of ’ona’a or “wronging” in the Mishnah and that the sugya is focused on the “personal-emotional angle” (Rubinstein 1999: 41) of the harsh treatment that the other rabbis impose on Rabbi Eliezer. The moral is, in effect, one about the impropriety of bullying. Akiba is the hero of the story because of his compassionate treatment of Eliezer after the others have treated him so harshly. In summary, according to Rubenstein this sugya is about the balance between the legal process and communal harmony, where “the treatment of other human beings, and especially competitors or colleagues in the academy, is inseparable from legal activity” (Rubinstein 1999: 61).9 Talmudist Daniel Boyarin has shown that the form of argumentation they favoured had a very distinctive nature. The dominant rhetorical trope is ‫משׁל‬ (mashal) or “exemplification” (Boyarin 2003: 93). Talmudic argumentation is a layering process: verses from the latter parts of Written Torah (Tanach) are juxtaposed with the Torah proper (Pentateuch) and used as interpretive tropes; that is, they are sampled. Or, the verses from the Written Torah are juxtaposed and used to understand rulings from the Mishnah. Boyarin translates mashal as “example”, “parable” and “sample”. I prefer the last of these because it calls to mind more modern forms of sampling, such as in blogs or hip-hop, that function in quite a similar way. Though he does not quite put it in these terms, for Boyarin rabbinic sampling is also a metonymic, not metaphorical, process where the actual physical piece, or some essential element of it, is moved around and placed into a new medium. Some basic character of the material form remains; it is “a small portion of a substance that serves as a way of communicating to others the properties of the substance” (Boyarin 2003: 96). As noted in the previous section, sampling is a basic form of metarepresentation. That is, this is how quotation works: if you want to talk about something someone said, you can paraphrase him or you can quote him. In the latter case, the physical form of their expression has to be carried over in some way. This form of textual interpretation does not then try to remove the material form to get to its spiritual essence. In this sense, the rabbinic method did not read Biblical myth as metaphor. As Boyarin puts it: “there is no abstraction (in either a nominalist or a realistic sense) but a placing of a concrete entity beside another concrete entity in such a way that characteristics that are obscure in the one are revealed by association with the same characteristics of the other, where they are obvious or explicit”

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(Boyarin 2003: 99). In other words, in the model I am proposing here, mashal involves the analogue juxtaposition of texts. In the case of the Written Torah, the written text cannot change: as noted above, it is not in heaven, its material form is given. Similarly, for the Amora’im and Stamma’im, the Mishnaic form was also given. What is left to do is juxtapose the written form with the Mishnaic form and develop further oral law from that juxtaposition. In the Talmud the paragraph is the cognitive unit, the smallest piece of text that carries semantic information, as Neusner has noted – but it is important to recognize that the sample is also a cognitive unit: the Talmud speaks by juxtaposing the paragraph with the sample. This is the method the rabbis used to interpret God, for “until Solomon invented the mashal [sample], no one could understand Torah at all” (Boyarin 2003: 111).10 The first layer of the story of the oven of Aknai is a basic Mishnaic ruling (Kelim 5:10): “If an oven was cut up into rings, and sand was inserted between each pair of rings, R. Eliezer rules: it is clean; but the Sages rule: it is unclean. Such an oven is known as the oven of Aknai.” In the Bavli (Baba Metzia 59b) it is juxtaposed with further quotations: We learnt elsewhere: If he cut it into separate pieces, placing sand between each piece: R. Eliezer declared it clean, and the Sages declared it unclean; and this was the oven of ’Aknai. Why Aknai? – Said Rab Judah in Samuel’s name: [It means] that they encompassed it with arguments as a snake, and proved it unclean. It has been taught: On that day R. Eliezer brought forward every imaginable argument, but they did not accept them. Said he to them: “If the halachah agrees with me, let this carob-tree prove it!” Thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place – others affirm, four hundred cubits. “No proof can be brought from a carob-tree”, they retorted. Again he said to them: “If the halachah agrees with me, let the stream of water prove it!” Whereupon the stream of water flowed backwards – “No proof can be brought from a stream of water”, they rejoined. Again he urged: “If the halachah agrees with me, let the walls of the schoolhouse prove it”, whereupon the walls inclined to fall. But R. Joshua rebuked them, saying: “When scholars are engaged in a halachic dispute, what have ye to interfere?” Hence they did not fall, in honor of R. Joshua, nor did they resume the upright, in honour of R. Eliezer; and they are still standing thus inclined. Again he said to them: “If the halachah agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!” Whereupon a Heavenly Voice cried out: “Why do ye dispute with R. Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halachah agrees with him!” But R. Joshua arose and exclaimed: “It is not in heaven” [Deut. 30:12]. What did he mean by this? – Said R. Jeremiah: That the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, After the majority must one incline [Exod. 23:2]. 131

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R. Nathan met Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour? – He laughed [with joy], he replied, saying, “My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me”.11 Wheeler uses this sugya to attribute to the rabbis Donald Davidson’s philosophy called “anomalous monism” (in addition to Derrida’s “deconstruction”, which he sees as an allied philosophical movement). As noted in previous chapters, Davidson’s idea was that although the material and the mental are identical, the mental is not reducible to the material according to any laws. In other words, there is an anomalous, non-lawlike, non-linear relation between the material and the mental. Human reason cannot escape the mental and should not pretend to do so. This is why Davidson saw physics as perfectly adequate for explaining the world when we regard it as mindless, but “natural” science could have less to say about the world when we regard it as mindful. Davidson did not think that the “methods of the poet, the critic and the social scientist” were necessarily opposed to “the methods of the sciences of (the rest of) nature”, but rather that the former relies on teleological forms of causality, while the latter depends on a “nomological– deductive” form of causality. As noted in Chapter 5, the former case finds that the understanding of the thoughts and actions of people involves the imaginative adjustment of the interpreter’s beliefs and values to the attitudes of the interpreted, a process that requires the accommodation of one normative system within another. [In the latter case, however,] such considerations are beside the point: physics strives to find categories from which norms, even causal concepts, are excluded, categories which lend themselves to incorporation in a system of laws with as few ceteris paribus [all else being equal] clauses as possible. (Davidson 1993: 296) It is for this reason that Davidson called himself “Spinozistic”: because he emphasized somewhat as Spinoza had, that the two domains – of mind and body, intension and extension, law-governed events and thoughtful actions – were parts of radically distinct but equally legitimate ways of describing, understanding, and explaining phenomena, but that they nonetheless applied to a single ontology of events and objects. (Davidson 1993: 296)12 Spinoza found that no (nomologically deductive) causal relation exists between the two, but rather God sets the two in motion as an act of will. God, in effect, fills in for the anomos, the anarchy between the mental and the material. Since God is an intentional agent, literary psychology does a better job filling this gap than ontological reductionism. Natural laws do not fill the void, only that capricious non-human person. This philosophy does appear to capture the rabbinic hermeneutic, a literary triangulation that does not abstract itself out of the 132

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communicative situation, as opposed to a philosophy that strives to take the perspective of heavenly forms. In terms of the Davidsonian paradigm worked out above, the nomological–deductive was far less useful to the rabbis for understanding their god and his inscriptions in the Biblical text. It should be noted that Spinoza was quite critical of the rabbis of his day (in seventeenth-century Amsterdam) precisely because he thought they were too constrained by the text. Despite this, there is a strong case to be made that Spinoza favoured a form of interpretation similar to the one outlined here. As Levinson notes: Nevertheless Spinoza’s concerns in [the latter portion] of the Tractatus were not to void the text of significance and authority. That such is the prevalent understanding of Spinoza, however, accounts for the unease about his work that endures among scholars of Judaica … The latter chapters, whose concern is freedom, share a common conceptual structure with the earlier chapters, whose concern is hermeneutics. Spinoza argues in chapters 1–15 that neither philosophy nor theology should be subordinate to the other … Spinoza’s concern is to permit the reader to deal with the biblical text on its own terms and thereby emancipate the Bible from two forms of alien hermeneutics: first, the reduction of theology to philosophical truth … and second, the reduction of philosophy to theological truth … Spinoza argues that contradictions that cannot but engage the Bible’s attentive reader must not be explained away through allegorical exegesis (Maimonides) nor be used to contradict reason itself. (Levinson 1991: 134) As noted in the Introduction, Day (2007) has taken this argument one step further, noting how anomalous (or pluralistic forms of) monism also applies to complexity in nature, such as the relationship between phenotype and genotype. This anomism amounts to the “maddening complexity” the philosopher of biology Alexander Rosenberg finds “once we have climbed to the level of physical organization at which natural selection is a causal factor”.13 Part of Day’s argument is that complex sciences are “instrumental” rather than “realist” because there is a limit to human understanding. I made a similar case with regard to the cognitive science of religion in Chapter 2. Similarly, rabbinic hermeneutics depends on the recognition of that limitation, attributing the madness to a non-human person, while modern science has other methods of dealing with the complexity. We need not countenance the latter stance by default, though it is probably the most powerful and parsimonious manner for interpreting natural complexity. This argument is not intended to lend any credence whatsoever to “intelligent design”, but quite the contrary. I simply want to point out that there are alternative hermeneutics that scientists may use to understand and explain nature that are not nomological-deductive in form. Darwin’s dangerous idea was a breakthrough precisely because it could explain such complexity without recourse to a designer. 133

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RABBINIC WORDS

Rubenstein describes the particular methods by which Judaic systems interact with writing technologies. The rabbis did not write history or philosophy; they apparently wrote very little. However, we should hesitate in construing this as an opposition between oral and literate cultures, whether Hebrew/Aramaic or Greek. If literacy studies has taught us anything in the past twenty years it is that oral and written discourses intermingle in a diversity of ways.14 The primary difference between oral and literate modes of being concerns the specific technologies of literacy involved and their affordances. The oral discourse of the rabbinic method relied on the written, though incomplete, word of Torah as the ultimate basis of authority. As I noted above, Wheeler insightfully argues that the Torah serves as fundamental reference, just as “nature” does in Greek discourse. For Greeks, truth is found in nature, while for the rabbis it is some hybrid species, a mixture of acknowledged normativity in argumentation (majority opinion), written word and nature. Eastern (rabbinic) and western (Greek) conceptions of prophecy differed in precisely the same way. The rabbis did not regard themselves as prophets, but as heirs to a degraded divinatory tradition, diviners of the texts as represented in the movement from divinatory dāraš to Midrash (Preus 1991: 442). In contrast, Judaeo-Christian prophets, like those envisioned by Philo, are mediators of the logoi.15 David Halivni’s study of rabbinic exegesis also gives us some clues about the differences between the emerging rabbinic and Christian methods of interpretation. He notes that both confronted the problem that the “literal” or “surface” meaning of the text was often intolerable to contemporary views, such as the “eye for an eye” clause in Exodus 21:24. When the church confronted problematic texts it “allegorized their meanings”, turning them into metaphors and figures of speech. The “rabbis of the Talmud, in contrast, when confronting a legal text whose surface meaning needed to be revised, changed it, read in a different meaning” (Halivni 1991: 6). His distinction between “reading in” and “allegorizing” has resonance with my argument. Allegorizing, for Halivni, “adds to” the text while reading in “excludes the simple, literal meaning”, or rather, as he says later, simply changes the literal meaning. This was possible precisely because the Torah was not in heaven, whereas the Church retained the Platonic mission of getting behind the text to its ultimate meaning in heaven. Halivni also refers to the oven of Aknai, arguing that it resembles modern forms of reader-centred hermeneutics (Halivni 1991: 160). He notes what he calls the “bizarre” story in Baba Metzia 86a, where fourth-century Babylonian Amora’im mediate a Halakhic dispute between God and the “Heavenly Academy”. Apparently, not only does God study Torah (for three hours a day; see Avodah Zarah 3b), he debates it like the rabbis. Halivni thinks that the account of the oven of Aknai is mostly about the importance of practical matters of the majority over and above the logic of the minority. Minority opinion “may have verity in the realm of intellect, in the realm of logic, but not in the realm of everyday behavior. In the realm of practical decision, the majority rules” (Halivni 1991: 109). 134

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PRAGMATISM

Is there anything to this pragmatic reading of the rabbinic method? Pragmatism, as a theory of action predicated on the contingency and uncertainty of human interaction, helps illuminate the distinct nature of rabbinic hermeneutics. Hashkes (2008) has argued for some strong affinities between American pragmatism, especially the works of Dewey and Peirce as understood by Menand (2002), and rabbinic “Torah Study”. Hashkes’s argument is similar to Wheeler’s in the sense that anomalous monism developed out of American pragmatism. Thus Hashkes does us a service in tying the other pragmatists up with the red thread of my argument concerning anomalous monism and sampling. The major tension that both pragmatism and rabbinism grapple with is “between the idea that our conception of Reality is a human construct and the recognition that there exists an independent factor that influences it” (Hashkes 2008: 151). More concretely, she notes five basic similarities between the two “quests”. Both are (i) hermeneutical in nature; (ii) continual (meaning never-ending); (iii) practical; (iv) communally conditioned; and (v) holistic (Hashkes 2008: 162–4). These aspects, however, characterize any intellectual or religious quest. What truly ties these two streams together is the idea that “Reality knocks at the door of the Pragmatist exactly in the manner in which God’s will knocks at the door of the Torah student” (Hashkes 2008: 161). The manner in which this knocking takes place is in a provisional, underdetermined context of dialogue and criticism. The watershed for the pragmatists came in their break with logical positivism, which – like the standard model of CSR (see Chapter 2) – was trying to create the perfect language in which every term had a singular reference, in which we could finally pin down the world. Logical positivists failed to recognize that language is “always already” integrated with the world, with no further reality behind it. In other words, there is no escape from our provisional, sloppy language games. In the same way, for the rabbis God is no longer active in the world except through Torah, a message or a vessel, of his will. But its language too is messy and provisional, and there is no more essential reality behind it, for even God studies Torah. However, this is where I fear Hashkes gets into trouble and steps over the line, because she seemingly wants to postulate both a “religious Reality” and a “natural” or scientific “Reality” (Hashkes 2008: 151), a dualism that would surely not be condoned by the pragmatists, especially when it comes to Quine and Davidson. Quine famously denounced two dogmas of empiricism, Davidson a third, and Sellars a fourth. The first dogma is the analytic–synthetic division. Quine argued that there is no fundamental cleavage between so-called synthetic and so-called analytic truths: “truths of reason” and “truths of fact”. There is no separable linguistic and factual component of a statement. The second dogma is a combination of reductionism and the principle of verification. Quine argued that reductionism, and the principle of verification on which it is based, is hopelessly flawed. Part of the latter argument is Quine’s famous 135

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assertion that “our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body”. Thus the meaning of a statement, even a scientific statement, can only be understood in the context of multiple other sentences in that language, such that “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (Quine 1953: 40–42). Davidson suggested a third dogma, which I noted in Chapter 2: the schemecontent dualism, or the idea that we can distinguish between a conceptual scheme and some empirical content (Davidson 1984b). Davidson took Quine one radical step further by denying there is any way, even in principle, to distinguish language and concepts from experience. Davidson argued that while the analytic–synthetic distinction was a crucial step, it is still problematic because it is “explained in terms that may serve to buttress conceptual relativism, namely the idea of empirical content”. In Quine’s model, language serves as a scheme that organizes empirical content. However, Davidson urged “that this second dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized, cannot be made intelligible or defensible”. In other words, for Davidson there is no neutral point of reference to judge the difference between an organizing scheme and its content. We cannot step outside of our language and world and project ourselves into another. (Davidson 2001b: 189). When we do so it is an act of fantasy and even self-deception. Thus for Davidson, an heir of American pragmatism, there could be no distinction between “religious Reality” and “natural Reality” (Hashkes 2008: 151) because in order for something to count as a language, in order for us to count something else as Reality, it must be translatable in some way, and thus not a distinct reality after all. In other words, the very idea of a language (or conceptual scheme) requires that it be translatable. In order for us to call something a conceptual scheme, we must be able to translate it into our scheme, so there can be no such thing as an alternative conceptual scheme. But neither can we assert that there is only one scheme, for that is either false or trivial. Thus the very idea is unintelligible (Bearn 1989: 210). Davidson’s third dogma is the basis for Sellars’s argument concerning the fourth dogma of empiricism: the myth of the Given. This is the mistaken belief that there is anything given to experience, such as sensations, in pretheoretical form, that provide the ground for knowledge. For Sellars even something as basic as seeing is propositional because it always also entails a “seeing that”, (i.e. seeing that something is the case). Evidence need not rest on experiential foundations. Knowledge is holistic: though experience in specific instances may happen to play a role in arriving at knowledge, examination of specific instances misconstrues that holistic process. Evidence and therefore knowledge rest on a process of epistemic justification in which experience has no a priori claim (DeVries et al. 2000: viii). I think we can conclusively say that the four dogmas of empiricism are the logical outgrowth of American pragmatism. Even the originators of the tradition would be reticent to separate off one realm of “experience” from any other realm. 136

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This is where Hashkes gets things wrong in her appeal to the role of basic “experience” as a way to differentiate religion from other forms of “Reality” (Hashkes 2008: 153, 161). The pragmatists would surely not countenance the idea of a wholly other playing any role in human experience. With all that said, if we give up talk of numinous experience, Hashkes is right to talk about a tension between rabbinic discourse and natural discourse. The rabbis do not look to nature for empirical confirmation, but to Torah. Like the pragmatists, their intellectual pursuits direct towards future action in open systems. Overall, the main thrust of the similarity concerns monism. Both systems tend to mix propositional and empirical knowledge (or analytic and synthetic) so thoroughly that nothing much is left of the original dualism. They stand in stark contrast to positivist traditions that think if only we could rid ourselves of language (or propositions and ethics) we could find out what is really going on in Nature. Trying to “recover” that originary language is akin to the folly of the tower of Babel.16 Let us go back again to Wheeler who, like Hashkes, argues that the rabbinic philosophy of language – at least the one represented in the tale of the oven of Aknai – is “a way to think about language and the world without adopting either the idealist’s or the realist’s fantasies” (Wheeler 2000: 137). Wheeler proposes that the Torah is analogous to nature in the sense that some interpretations may be empirically confirmed by nature or Torah. The gap in this underdetermination is filled in by human choices – judgements “not necessitated by anything in the situation” – in particular interpretive contexts. He argues that the imperative contents of Torah, the halakhot, though binding, have “truth conditions that are either unknowable or indeterminate until the Rabbis make a decision”. Wheeler contrasts this indeterminacy and incompleteness of rabbinic exegesis with the Greek concept of language, logos, which falls victim to the “illusion that implicit in any act of speech or writing is a complete specification of the set of possible worlds meant”. As we saw in our discussion of the social context of the rabbinic Stamma’im, they avoided this illusion through their recognition that the world is thoroughly mixed up with Torah; that is, the normative is inextricably tied up in the real (Wheeler 2000: 139–40, 145). Wheeler goes on to point out, following Heidegger, that western philosophy, and the West, have adopted this problematic Platonic “onto-theo-logy”, even after the secularist renounciation of God. That is, the laws of nature are Greek-god-like Platonic words, “in which every detail of every possible circumstance is already implicit” (Wheeler 2000: 143). But, he notes, Heidegger was wrong if he equates this with the Judaic God, because rabbinic Jews, at least, were not operating with such a deterministic sense of the Word. Of course, many Judaic systems did come to incorporate Gnostic and Neoplatonist elements, especially through the influence of Islamic sources.17 The Greek logos was adopted by some Jewish philosophers, most notably Philo, Maimonides and many Kabbalists.18 The main difference as I see it concerns whether truth is a natural correspondence between language and nature: whether there are universal, eternal truths or 137

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truth is radically and partly contingent on human decision. I leave open the historical question of whether the anonymous commentators who crafted the story of the oven of Aknai really thought their collective decisions over-rode heavenly realities. Two crucial points are worth noting. First, the rabbis of the Talmudic period probably did see Torah as a “blueprint” for the creation of the world to some extent and thus may have more in common with mystics than I have acknowledged. I contend that they did not see it merely as a blueprint for the creation of the natural world, but rather as a blueprint for the creation of a hybrid social world. Second, Torah as a “blueprint” also probably did connote the idea that the letters of the Torah themselves make up the furniture or stuff of the world as expressed in an ancient text like Sefer Yetzirah. I myself take this text to be saying something slightly stronger as noted in the previous chapter, that the letters of the Torah are the stuff of the physical and social world. That is, the rabbis literally live within the Torah, within the letters themselves. This point is consistent with my argument about the Torah not being in heaven. Boyarin’s insightful points about the nature of rabbinic interpretation allow us to distinguish it from Hellenic Jewish and Christian practice. The latter understood prophecy as direct access to the Platonic forms with which language strove for correspondence. By contrast, the rabbinic project consisted of integration through the method of exemplification, juxtaposition and “sampling”. I attribute this difference to the fact that the rabbis were trying to understand the Written Torah, where God often behaves in such a strange manner. The rabbis, in effect, were trying to understand a “non-human person”, in Stewart Guthrie’s sense of the term.19 “God” was “non-human”, for example, because his body was bigger than the universe (Job 11:7, 9), which was perhaps another way of saying that he was invisible.20 In distinction, Greco-Christians were not trying to understand a person’s behaviour, they were trying to understand the nature of the world and the way in which language did or did not correspond to it.21 The Hebrew text had been fulfilled: they knew what the Word referred to and subsequent interpretation only had to decode it. This distinction led to an entirely different production of oral and written texts. In other words, Christological hermeneutics had to be conducted through a world-historical and ontological lens, whereas for the rabbis the Torah was a historical act of writing. They were thus open to a type of literary hermeneutics in which one tried to access intentionality and agency behind the given word. So, what is the heart of the particular form of Judaic hermeneutics I have tried to isolate throughout this chapter? How does it differ in its commodification and reification of the Word compared to other forms? Mendels and Edrei think the rabbis kept things “oral” as a way to protect their turf, and there is something to be said for this point, but it does not get to the core of the issue. The core involves their ideal-typical distinction between “eastern” (Talmudic) and “western” forms of Judaism. The distinction involved more than just intellectual property – the distinction did not simply arise from the fact that the eastern rabbis had memorized 138

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a great body of oral literature and would only disseminate it for their students in the right context. To answer these and other questions in this chapter, I have used modern parallels with Internet technology as a source of comparison to argue that ancient Judaic systems foreshadowed some aspects of modern digitized read/write culture. I tried to locate the rabbinic hermeneutic of sampling in the context of cognitive and technological changes brought about by the emergence of literacy. I argued, following Olson, that literacy technologies can tweak some of our most basic conceptual operations. I pursue the environmental contexts of such processes for Judaic systems in more detail in the next chapter. In this chapter, I have noted that such tweaking can lead hermeneutics in different directions, towards the two ideal types that I have alluded to throughout this book: the Greek (or scientific) and the Judaic (or what I have called “rabbinic” in this chapter). Despite the nomenclature, we now see that both of these types can characterize Judaic systems. The former bridges the apparent gap between language and the world through attempts to make language correspond to nature, and truth is epistemic.22 The latter presents a hybrid picture, where language is messy and complicated, and truth is semantic, emerging through argumentation and fellowship. I have argued further that the “Spinozistic” method provides insight into Judaic systems. Following Wheeler and others, I have tried to show that sampling is at the core of Judaic hermeneutics as an attempt to understand Torah and communicate with superhuman agency. Anomalous monism, the philosophical perspective attributed to Judaic hermeneutics, also gives us some clues towards understanding how metarepresentations change in the context of new media technologies. As new media technologies emerge they become integrated into communicative processes. Judaic systems were an early attempt to integrate written texts, where there was a danger of falling into a “read-only” paradigm. Similarly, the invention of the transistor – the basis of modern computing – and the Internet have changed the picture once again, providing an opportunity and a danger. But what is it, in particular, about rabbinic practices that anticipates Internet technologies, and specifically Lessig’s notion of read/write culture? In comparing the Talmud with the Internet one finds minor differences, such as the core material of the technology (transistors versus ink) and the nature of their metalanguages (HTML versus Gematria). As Rosen (2000: 10) notes, we also find a major difference, for the Talmud was produced “by the moral imperative of Jewish law” and “the self-conscious need to keep a civilization together”, such that “nobody was trying to buy airline tickets or meet a date”. In other words, the Talmud is religious scripture, while the Internet is not. Despite these major and minor differences, Rosen makes a number of insightful points about the similarities between the Talmud and the Internet. Both involve an “infinity of cross-referenced texts” (Rosen 2000: 8), such that there is a “disjointed” approach to reading that takes practice to get used to. Indeed, in both cases there is too much information, such that one’s method of searching/ 139

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dāraš, the search engine as it were, becomes paramount. Both involve a feeling of “being everywhere and nowhere” at once (14). Both then are “ways of dealing with the loss of our own center” (109). Both involve a strong aspect of communal collaboration, especially with the invention of Web 2.0, for “the Talmud isn’t read like a book but studied aloud, chanted, lived” (55). We might also add that both are obviously “external memory stores”.23 I think these similarities between the Internet and the Talmud are important and insightful for helping us understand both technologies. In this chapter I have been pushing one similarity in particular, which Rosen does not describe explicitly, although it is related to those mentioned in the preceding paragraph: the phenomenon of sampling.24 But is sampling unique to Judaic systems as opposed to other religious systems? Most forms of media are combinations of analogue and digital technologies. Spoken language, for example, involves both semiotic manipulation (think Saussure), in addition to analogical processes such as the volume, timbre and tone of the voice, which do not so much encode signs but are signals in themselves. Their form is their content. As noted earlier, the difference between analogue and digital encoding is not that sharp. For example, a modern computer works digitally but it is still based on a physical medium, such as the presence or absence of magnetic grains on a hard disk that code for 0s and 1s. For my purposes, the strongest distinction between analogue and digital involves the notion of levels. When analogue processes can be abstracted and represented in binary form (or using other symbols), that level of description and manipulation is digital. The brain, for example, mostly operates through analogue signals (electrical waves, chemicals); cognitive scientists are on the hunt for the digital representations that will make sense of such signals. The relation between digital and analogue is extremely important because it explains how different systems in the body “communicate” without, in effect, speaking the same language. A digital level thus samples elements from the analogue level. The sample or “token” itself is analogue, but it is taken as a digital sign at a different level. That is, it takes a chunk of analogue “information” and makes that information relevant by making it into a digit, a unit of digital information.25 For example, the presence of a discrete amount of glucose in the bloodstream can act as a “signal” for the pancreas to produce more insulin. There are two points I want to make clear in bringing up the distinction between analogue and digital (token/type) once again: describing the interaction between ontological levels requires the postulation of analogue and digital processes, and the digital process eliminates noise by focusing on what is relevant to a particular level. Concerning the first, anomalous monism argues that the analogue and digital tokens (the tokens of two different levels) are identical but irreducible to one another; thus it has often been called a “token identity” theory. Concerning the second, noise is a natural part of religious communication. Religion entails layers of temporally structured events, whether in the form of myths or ritual. In this respect religion is an “entrainment” (or synchronization) 140

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machine, entailing the coordination of such events through interaction (for more on the concept of entrainment, see Clayton et al. 2004). There is some evidence, and very strong anecdotal opinion, that rhythm and structure are important components to good health, especially for children. Children can become overwhelmed when there is not enough structure to their daily lives. This may have something to do with the fact that structured events ease some of the cognitive and mnemonic burden. When events become predictable and a matter of habit it allows children to turn their attention to other aspects of their own development. However, as Clayton et al. (2004) note, while some biologically stable rhythms such as the heartbeat are essential for life, stable patterns are not always a sign of good health. For example, in the case of neural patterns: “stable brain waves may indicate a pathology (epilepsy) while unstable waves may indicate a healthy state” (Clayton et al. 2004: 6). A certain amount of “noise” is necessary for neural processes to run smoothly. Similarly, Glass (2001) notes that the extremely regular patterns involved in “abnormally rapid heart rhythms, cyclical blood diseases, epilepsy, neurological tics and tremors” can be quite dangerous. This noise element has been tied recently to quantum dynamics within neurons themselves.26 There must be quantum-level processes going on in the brain because electro-magnetic energy is the primary medium for the transmission of neural “information”. Neurological processes are noisy chaotic processes. Similarly social cognitive processes are noisy and chaotic. The noisy aspects of religion are an essential component for understanding how it works in the wild. In other words, I am arguing noise is an essential and constitutive feature of religion. Scholars of religion tend to reify the noise surrounding rituals and call it religion or myth or the sacred. They systematize it and try to understand it. If my argument is correct a more valid approach to understanding religion may regard much of it as noise, which in turn provides the environmental space for neurological and bodily rhythms to function in ritual. Michael Goldfarb, for example, notes that the early Jewish reform movement in nineteenth-century Germany was faced with a problem, because: Jewish prayer seemed formless. People worshipped at their own pace and in their own way, some silently rocking back and forth, others crying out at the top of their voices. A cantor occasionally chanted out bits and pieces of scripture or a prescribed prayer but there was no liturgy, no organized call-and-response praying between minister and congregation as there was in Christian churches. For reformers this pious chaos reflected badly on their community. Outsiders saw the synagogue not as a “house of God but a madhouse or a saloon”. (Goldfarb 2009: 124) Digital representations take short cuts in the process of transcending analogical form, as represented in Figure 7.2 (page 119). In taking the short cut, or “compressing” the analogical format, digital encoding often eliminates noise and other effects thought to be beyond normal human perception. This is also the reason 141

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why many people insist on listening to vinyl records, rather than CDs or MP3s, since these are analogical codes that retain much of the subliminal energy that digital music eliminates. Just as music that is too perfect and orderly does not sound as good to human ears, orderly brain patterns are not always healthy, but rather may be a sign of pathology. We can think of this aspect of noise as analogous in some respects to the “humanizing function” in music sequencing software where a random element is introduced in order to make the music sound natural (i.e. better). Noise thus appears to be endemic to how human beings must experience and process the world. Reading/writing is both an analogue and digital process. Written letters were originally strongly analogical because their form was tied analogically (metonymically) to the basic staples and shapes of the ancient Near Eastern world; in many cases the signs started as pictorial representations, for example, the letter bet/beta/B was originally shaped like a house (the word bayit- also meant house in ancient Hebrew). Western letters have since lost their basic connection in form with the agricultural world of the ancient Near East (I will return to this in Chapter 8). As Olson and Lessig argue, robust writing is a form of sampling or quoting oneself; it is a form of sampling thought. Thought can come in a variety of chunks: the sentence, the paragraph, the sugya, the tweet. The Talmud and the Internet especially represent hybrid forms of analogue and digital, which allow them to take full advantage of the technique of sampling. Recent inventions – in particular the production of smaller and smaller transistors, which allow for faster manipulation of 0s and 1s – are what enable the Internet and modern computing technologies to take off in the way Lessig describes. Digital representations, unlike analogue ones, can be broken down into pieces and numerically manipulated, making them much more easily and efficiently transmitted. Lessig calls this “nature remade”, for “with the introduction of digital tokens of RO [read-only] culture and, more important, with the widespread availability of technologies that could manipulate digital tokens of RO culture, digital technology removed the constraints that had bound culture to particular analog tokens of RO culture” (Lessig 2008: 38). The analogue format protected cultural representations from being copied because copying was difficult and time consuming, if not impossible, while digital technologies now make such copying ubiquitous. Writing has often been accused of being too digital, in a sense, because much of the richness, context and even noise of spoken language is lost in the writing process. If this is true, both the Internet and the Talmud are attempts to retain the noise of oral life. Sampling is the central way that they do so. As noted, sampling is the basic component of analogue information processing between levels. In the case of the Babylonian Talmud, because it moves through the medium of whole samples, whole quotations, it retains analogical noise that would be lost in a digital format. The samples themselves do not contain any essential digital code or “magic language”, for interpretation is not a matter of 0s and 1s, but of the spaces between. This is what makes the Talmud so earthy, mundane, pragmatic and parabolic. It 142

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retains the semantic noise of human conversation and fellowship. The Talmud thus has always been a way of retaining analogue feelings in the context of the new digitality of writing. Chapter 8 continues with these themes of digitized forms of communication, and locates the changes discussed so far with regard to literacy and the movement from token to type in a biotechnological context. I utilize the notion of niche construction borrowed from the biological sciences, and in particular from developmental systems theory, to offer an integrative account of the relation between biology and culture in Judaic systems.

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CHAPTER 8

environment

DNA [is] a work of literature, a great historical text. But the metaphor of the chemical text is more than a vision: DNA is a long skinny assembly of atoms similar in function, if not form, to the letters of a book, strung out in one long line. (Pollack 1994: 5) Though it is an extremely controversial line of argument for obvious (though nonetheless important) reasons, there is good evidence to indicate that human mental functions, and perhaps corresponding brain structures, have changed in the past 40,000 years, even the past 2,000 years (Smith 2007; see also Hawks et al. 2007). There is some wiggle room in the vagueness of the concept of “mental function”, for we know so little about the mental, particularly when it comes to describing the historical past. However, it is certainly safe to say that minds have changed throughout human history, even very recent history. As noted briefly in Chapter 2, if one approaches history from the perspective of traditional evolutionary psychology, the fact that minds have changed presents somewhat of a problem.1 Scholars in this field usually insist that we essentially have a Pleistocene mind, and what has changed is not biology, but culture. Surprisingly, this static picture of the mental echoes arguments made by the so-called ‘standard social science’ paradigm that many evolutionary psychologists strongly resist. In that paradigm, all human discoveries, products and characteristics are social constructions, including the findings of biology. In an ironic twist, perhaps to provide cover in the culture wars, many evolutionary psychologists of culture and religion similarly insist that human beings have no biological differences and that the illusory trappings of culture produce any apparent differences. Culture is inessential at best and illusory at worst; best to forget it and concentrate on innate dispositions. But this idea must be challenged: culture is not the outer, inauthentic manifestation of biology, but an essential substance that feeds back into evolutionary history. We must give up the idea that this question is one of either/or. The postmodernists argue that we are either natural or cultural beings and take the side of culture, while the evolutionary psychologists take the opposite view. Taking up points made in previous chapters about the digital potential of literacy, in this chapter I argue technological forms such as writing that persist long enough over time can in principle have stable biological significance (Clark 2004). In other

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words, this chapter tries to draw non-linear relations between cultural practices involving textual technologies and biology. In this sense, I hope to offer a middle position, one that I admit is a dangerous one to broach within the culture wars. It is dangerous because when cultural studies mix in biological models, it can have disastrous consequences. Primarily, the danger comes in equating cultures or populations with species, and arguing that these cultures are in some kind of natural war against one another according to Darwinian logic. I want to be clear that this is a bankrupt integration of cultural and biological theory. I also want to be clear that from a biological perspective human beings are massively similar. Even from a cultural perspective I think this is true, for example, if one compares universals across cultures (see Brown 1991, especially chapter six). I am simply arguing against a naïve and simplistic parsing of culture and biology. If my arguments entail a political point, it is that an overly deterministic narrative that seeks to integrate biology and culture is the wrong way to go. Culture is radically underdetermined by biology and, just as biology affects culture, so too culture affects biology. Furthermore, if we are going to mix biological and cultural models as a rhetorical trope, we should do so extremely carefully and with the recognition that causal models in biology are quite different than those employed in historical narrative. Historical causation is closer to what I refered to as intentional and narrative causation in Chapter 5, where I argued that divination mixes physical, intentional and narrative forms of causality. On the one hand, since we do not have a Pleistocene brain around to study, we only have weak evidence to make any sort of argument about the nature of ancient minds and how they might or might not have changed. On the other hand, we have an abundance of material artefacts from the past 100,000 years. The cognitive niches that humans have constructed over time have changed dramatically, for example, with the emergence of urban centres. Perhaps some of these changes are instantiated in the body and brain.

CHANGING BRAINS

Regarding the question of how much effect a technology such as literacy would have on ancient minds, it should be clear by now that I think the analogy with the Internet is illuminating. A great deal of pixels and ink have been spilled recently arguing that the Internet will have negative or positive effects on human cognition. Scholars from a variety of fields in the social sciences and humanities recognize that technological change not only has social-structural consequences but that new technologies also often change the way we think. Recently scholars and journalists have argued that such technologies as the Internet, including the whole cultural, technological and institutional apparatus that surrounds the Internet – to quote the subtitle from Nicholas Carr’s book – 146

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“changes our brains”.2 Similarly, a great deal of research has also come out in the past few years concerning the biological effects of technologies like television (Miller et al. 2007; Anderson and Pempek 2005; Escobar-Chaves et al. 2005; Van Evra 2004; Vandewater et al. 2005). Some scholars even believe there is at present a divide between digital “natives” (Homo sapiens digitalis) born after 1980 who have grown up embedded in digital technologies, and digital “immigrants”, their teachers and elders born before 1980, who experience a radical gulf between online and offline experience (Palfrey and Gasser 2008). If these modern technologies “change our brains”, how much more so would literacy, a technology on which these are based? The primary sticking point from a biological perspective is that it is not obvious that these technologies are persistent enough to have an evolutionary biological effect. The case of literacy is different from those above, because in populations such as most Judaic systems, literacy – though it has evolved and changed over time – has been a relatively stable cultural formation for a few thousand years. Thus, in some cases literacy may provide mechanisms to talk about the continual feedback between biology and culture.

CONTROL OF SEX AND FOOD

In a story about Jacob in Genesis 30:35 we find an excellent parable for the case to follow. This is a story about sexual selection. To cut a long story short: Jacob goes far and wide to try to get the proper wife, and he winds up with two after a series of negotiations. Somewhere along the line Jacob’s father-in-law, Laban, tries to trick him. Laban says he will give Jacob goats of a certain colour, but Laban removes the goats from the flock before Jacob will get them. Jacob in turn devises a way to breed the goats he needs. Jacob peels poplar and other sticks to make white streaks on them, and then uses these sticks to organize the breeding of the flock (33:41). Later in the story, Jacob will be renamed Israel and become the father of the Twelve Tribes. Jacob’s miraculous fortune is owed to his use of symbolic forms (the white streaks), but also involves the skilled manipulation of economic, social and biological domains. On the surface this is simply an example of domestication or “artificial breeding”, but as scholars since Darwin have known, artificial selection is merely natural selection with environmental constraints imposed consciously under human controls.3 To be clear, the concept of race has been thoroughly debunked as a biological category. So, there is no such thing as the Jewish race. However, we cannot deny the existence of discrete genetic forms or inheritances in different human populations. This fact is attested in the growing phenomenon of genetic ancestry tracing. For the most part, these tests (often imprecisely) determine where a person’s ancestors came from, and often little else. Geography is an important influence on evolution because the geographic isolation of certain populations tends to lead to adaptations to that particular 147

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environment and thus produces characteristic genetic forms. In the case of Judaic systems, to put it bluntly, the question is whether a cultural technique of isolation could have effects similar to geographic isolation. Indeed, the ghetto wall and the shtetl were culturally imposed forms of geographic isolation. It is still an open debate the extent to which Judaic systems were isolated in Europe over the past 2,000 years, though in the case of the Ashkenazic communities most researchers now come down on the side of genetic isolation (Nebel et al. 2001, 2005: 388). Thus the genetic evidence indicates that the real and virtualized isolation of the Jewish Diaspora through their religious practices in Europe has had direct consequences at a biological level. Susan Kahn has recently noted that Ashkenazi Jews in particular have been a boon for genetic researchers because, apart from their willingness to be tested, the population also exhibits some classic mechanisms in the theory of evolution, namely (i) the founder effect, “in which a population that is descended from a small handful of ancestors historically shuns intermarriage or is forcibly ghettoized, thereby maintaining genetic lineages (including disease-causing mutations)”, and (ii) “the theory of genetic drift or bottleneck, which occurs when a genetic mutation becomes common because the population in which it is found dwindles due to famine, war, epidemic, or other event, as has happened frequently among Eastern European Jews” (Kahn 2005: 180). Thus, concerning the “Levite Haplotype” in Ashkenazi populations, the data point to a common (or relatively few) male ancestor for Ashkenazi Levites within the past 2,000 years (Nebel et al. 2005). The mitochondrial evidence in Jewish women is more variable; thus “the striking dissimilarities in the genetic signatures of these women suggest that diasporic Jewish communities were established when Jewish male traders from the ancient Near East intermarried with local non-Jewish women along their trade routes” (Kahn 2005: 182, citing Thomas et al. 2002; for the debate on the Cohen Modal Haplotype, see Zoossmann-Diskin 2001). Indeed, there is an immense literature on this subject, exploring such questions as the prevalence of Tay Sachs disease in Ashkenazi populations. Tay Sachs is a genetic disease where a fatty acid derivative called a ganglioside accumulates in the nerve cells of the brain. Cochran et al. (2005) argue that the disease is tied to Jewish “intelligence”, but there are also other theories that explain it, such as genetic drift, or adaptation to TB (Slatkin 2004). Murray (2007: 3) notes in his study Human Accomplishment that there were only seven Jewish “significant figures” from 1200 to 1800 ce (see also Murray 2003). After Jewish emancipation in Europe, however, when they were no longer excluded and no longer excluded themselves from broader European society, there were 170 (by 1950). Murray notes that in the first half of the twentieth century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of the Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. (Murray 2007: 3) 148

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In the second half of the century that figure more than doubled. Since Jews constitute 0.2 per cent of the world population, these numbers seem staggering. In terms of intelligence quotient (IQ), Jews are about average on tests of visual-spatial skills, “but extremely high on subtests that measure verbal and reasoning skills”, so their overall average is about “one standard deviation higher than the north-western European average” (Murray 2007: 3; Cochran et al. 2005: 659). Murray (2007) notes two popular genetic explanations for these facts: “winnowing by persecution”, and “marrying for brains”. He dismisses the former as cutting both ways because “the kind of intelligence that leads to business success or rabbinical acumen” is not of much help when the “Cossacks are sweeping through town” (Murray 2007: 4). The latter explanation also does not help very much, as the data are simply not there to address how much the “attractiveness of brains” played in selecting marriage partners. Of course we do not need to point to one single factor; rather, some combination of both is probably active. Murray, however, offers the research of Cochran and his colleagues (2005) as the most parsimonious explanation. They propose that the high intelligence test scores observed in the Ashkenazi Jewish population are, “a consequence of their occupation of a social niche over the last millennium that selected strongly for IQ … that there was an increase in the frequency of genes that elevated IQ as a by-product of this selective regime, which led to an increased incidence of hereditary disorders” (Cochran et al. 2006: 659). The popular media have recently taken up Cochran’s theory, stirring up a great deal of controversy.4 There are at least three camps involved. One camp is evolutionary biologists, who either agree with Cochran and his colleagues’ use of evolutionary theory or do not. Among these are many Jewish biologists who have a much deeper investment in the question. The second camp are Jewish organizations whose goal is to guard against anti-Semitism, such as the Anti-Defamation League and Jews in general, who react harshly to the idea of Jewish biology because of the devastating history such an idea has had.5 The third camp are neo-fascists who try to use evolutionary theory to justify their idea of a biological race war. In this ludicrous narrative, whites are at war with other “races”, and Jews play the role they usually play in anti-Semitic propoganda: controlling money supply for their own benefit, as if Jews as a whole acted as one giant organism (or species). Though we can dismiss this latter camp with respect to their misunderstanding of science, it would be naïve to dismiss them as a political force, since this rhetoric seems to be a growing trend and, judging by their Internet presence, has many vocal attractors. A key to understanding the “social niche” Cochran et al. and Murray point to is the forced transition Jewish communities underwent from agricultural trades to urban trades. Beginning approximately 900 years ago in Europe, most Jews were no longer allowed to join guilds or own land. Jewish communities were forced to adapt and often turned to the managerial (sales, trade, finance) occupations of urban life. This phenomenon is common historically among other groups, where a minority takes up a particular social and economic niche within urban centres, often related to trade and at the service and sponsorship of powerful rulers.6 149

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These scholars argue that the Malthusian collusion between economic, intellectual and biological success meant that wealthier families tended to have more offspring. In turn more children tended to survive into adulthood in the “successful” entrepreneurial families. In the case of Judaic systems that tended to equate biological and intellectual fecundity, such as rabbinic Judaism, this process may have set up a feedback loop; this point represents an especially stark distinction from most forms of Christianity, whose scholars remained celibate until Luther let the dogs out. I recognize just how controversial the equation of economic and biological success is, and I will not go too much into the argument here.7 My purpose is to show that religious identity is not simply the explanandum to be explained away, but is an institution that sets up a “downward” influence on biology; persistent identity is thus an integral part of understanding non-teleological human evolution. Indeed, the integration and interaction of cultural technologies (such as those of different occupations discussed throughout this book involving literacy and numeracy) and biology goes back to the very origin of Homo sapiens. These economic findings point to the inherent plasticity of the human mind/brain – its ability to adapt to different cognitive and ecological niches relatively quickly. In this case, I am less concerned with the controversial points about Jewish biology than I am in giving an example of downward causation in Judaic systems (Bøgh Anderson et al. 2000). Written language has been the primary mechanism for the creation of the cognitive niche in which Judaic systems have been so “successful” – namely late twentieth-century liberal societies. These societies are the ultimate form of what Merlin Donald calls “theoretical culture”.8 In another world we might expect that those specific forms of cognition noted in previous chapters would not be very beneficial. It just so happens that present-day societies find Nobel Prizes extremely valuable. In most arguments about Jewish “intelligence”, literacy is a crucially important factor. For example, Cochran et al. note that the key cultural precondition among the Jews was a pattern of social organization that required literacy, strongly discouraged intermarriage, and that could propagate itself over long periods of time with little change. Literacy (which does not itself require high intelligence) was probably important in the shift from a nation to an urban occupational caste. (Cochran et al. 2005: 667; see also Botticini and Eckstein 2005) Murray even goes so far as to argue that the difficulty of interpreting the Biblical text would increase the number of “low intelligence” deserters (Murray 2007: 8). But what is it about literacy that makes it a characteristically Jewish form of intelligence, and how does it relate to verbal and mathematical reasoning? What is the connection between these managerial trades and cognitive changes in intelligence? What is the process under which a cultural niche can have such effects? The preceding chapters have attempted to answer these questions to some extent 150

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already. In what follows I will present some more conclusive answers by returning to the origins of written language.

THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING SYSTEMS

Writing systems and the corresponding inventions of science and higher mathematics are forms of intelligence that the world had never seen before. That is, these mark a particularly distinct form of cognition one step removed from the cognitive processes that predominated in human cultures for the past 100,000 years. The fact that so much of modern post-industrial life revolves around these forms of technology should give us pause, and we should be working hard to think of ways to understand post-industrial brains with the new tools from the mind sciences. As I have noted, the origins of Judaic written culture go back to the ancient Near East, where we find an implicit connection between writing and accounting. We find evidence for a ratcheting effect9 in the early story of writing from about 8000–3000 bce as told by Schmandt-Basseret (1992: chapter four). In the protostage, human beings sculpted figurines representing various gods and animals for ritual purpose. In the next stage tokens of basic geometric shapes representing simple food staples were made out of baked clay. Next, more complex tokens emerged that represented complex staples. These tokens were sealed in clay envelopes for

Figure 8.1 Envelope showing the imprint of three ovoid tokens with an incised line representing jars of oil, from Habuba Kabira, Syria, ca. 3300 bce (© Museum für vor- und Frühgeschichte, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin; reprinted with kind permission from Kay Kohlmeyer and the Archive Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft).

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accounting purposes in the context of the rise of agricultural surpluses and urban centres. Since there is no way to tell what was in the envelope, in the next stage someone came up with the idea to embed tokens on the outside of the clay to tell what was inside, and thus a system of marks was developed for the same purpose (see Figure 8.1). This facilitated a transition from three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional scratches. It is interesting to note that this is around the time we find the emergence of ASPM (abnormal spindle-like microcephaly), a gene thought to regulate human brain growth. Martin (forthcoming: 16–17) points out that the evolutionary argument that ties brain variation with cultural abilities is extremely speculative. In other words, it has not been shown that the emergence of ASPM corresponds to any real phenotypic changes. However, this is an open question; these genes may indeed express themselves as variation in certain types of cognitive abilities (see Mekel-Bobrov and Lahn 2007). Incidentally, Hawks et al. (2007: 20,756) find the “radical new selective pressures” of agriculture as a contributing factor for the acceleration of human adaptive evolution over the past 10,000 years. Up to this point there was a one-to-one correspondence between an object and token, so, for example, three jars of grain were represented by three tokens in or on the envelope. A sign represented the token inside the envelope, which in turn represented a commodity/staple. In the next stage, clay tablets replaced clay envelopes and a sign mark on the tablet was used to represent a token, marked either with a stylus or the corresponding token. The first recordings of numerals occur with these tablets. In other words, there was no longer a one-to-one correspondence. Here the sign represents a concept, not the particular object in question, and we move to greater degrees of abstraction. This story should sound familiar, for it is precisely the same process of digitization I have been discussing throughout this text. Thus, in the next stage, signs go from representing objects or concepts (pictures) to representing the sound of the first syllable of the word for the concept (acrophonic principle), and eventually signs represent sounds.

EVO-DEVO

In line with the current revival of evo-devo (evolution of development), a field of biology that examines ontogenetic development to find insight into evolution, I find it extremely relevant that this “evolutionary” trajectory is similar to the developmental progression of literacy in young children. Homer and Olson studied pre-literate children’s developing conception of writing (Homer and Olson 1999). There are striking similarities between this form of the development and the one noted in the case of writing. The basic gist of their finding was that most children move from a “token”-based representational schema to a “type”-based one as they get older. 152

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When pre-literate children were asked to write “one dog, two dogs, no dog, red dog, blue dog” many used the individual word dog as a token one-to-one representation. Thus “two dogs” was written as “DOG DOG”, and many claimed “no dog” could not be written. This points to the fact that many pre-literate children believe there is some intrinsic non-arbitrary relation between the written word and the concept/thing to which it refers. As children age they learn that the sign “dog” can be annotated and modified with other signs, namely numerical ones. The fact that both cognitive systems develop from an iconic stage to an indexical one has precedents in many other fields. As noted in previous chapters, complex informational systems must, by definition, be built up out of simpler systems, for it would be impossible for the symbolic relation to emerge without a more basic layer of one-to-one relations. The iconic perspective would seem to be the default

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Figure 8.2 A “token writing strategy” (from Homer and Olson 1999, reprinted with the kind permission of David Olson).

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cognitive position that must be modified with training. Furthermore, we know that the relation between token and type is a key property of any informational or programming system, from MS-DOS to DNA (see Deacon 2004; Clark 2006). In contrast to much of the scholarhip on the predominant effects of writing on the mind, I have been arguing throughout this book that the most revolutionary innovation for human development was the robust recognition of the type–token distinction. As we saw in the last few chapters, the distinction is an “ontological one between a general sort of thing and its particular concrete instances”. Training in literacy is training in higher-order characterization and organization, especially with regard to words and numerosity; for this reason the earliest forms of writing rarely distinguished between letters and numbers.

TRANSFORMATIONS

Following this line of reasoning about how token/type concepts develop in children, but applied to religious domains, this section turns to rites of passage, or rituals of status transformation, which have been one of the most commonly examined phenomena in the study of religion. I view rites of passage from a new angle, by integrating findings about the evolution of the human life cycle into the discussion. Like most of the phenomena examined throughout this book, I do not argue that Judaic systems are necessarily unique, but rather attempt to place these systems within the context of more general systems. I argue that the rituals that have persisted in Judaic systems for long periods of time have biological feedback effects. Anthropologists Barry Bogin and John Locke have argued that human language could only emerge after childhood evolved. Childhood, they argue, is unique to the human species. Other primates move from infancy to juvenility without passing through the phase of childhood: “a biologically and behaviorally distinct, and relatively stable interval between infancy and the juvenile period that follows” (Bogin and Locke 2006: 260). Locke and Bogin surmise that childhood first evolved with Homo habilis about 2 million years ago, but the phase continued to extend to the point where for Homo sapiens it is twice as long as it was for Homo habilis (Bogin and Locke 2006: 273). Bogin and Locke (2006: 262) note that childhood is a phase of development characterized by: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 154

slow and steady rate of body growth and relatively small body size a large, fast-growing brain higher resting metabolic rate than any other mammalian species immature dentition dependence on older people for care and feeding motor and cognitive advances.

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To cut a long story short, only human primates have a life period where they are not breastfeeding but nevertheless completely dependent on adults for their food and survival. This period, known as the “feeding crisis”, where “older members of the social group provide specially prepared foods that are high in energy and nutrients” (Bogin and Locke 2006: 262), lasts for a few years, and is the primary phase for language and cultural acquisition. The cultural knowledge they gain is necessary for their survival. Lancaster and Lancaster (1983) call this type of childcare and feeding “the hominid adaptation”. It is thus no coincidence that food has such emotional significance for human beings throughout our lives. It is the primary mode of human auto-domestication, a source of survival not only as the reservoir of nourishment, but also because humans are the only natural species who must be domesticated to survive. Of course domesticated animals, who are products of artificial selection, are dependent in a similar way. Though most cultures have responses to this life stage, the passage into childhood varies. In Judaic systems there is some evidence that the phase has been marked consistently with initiation into letters, texts, and a life of schooling (Levy 2011a). In contrast, some philosophies of development such as that of Rudolf Steiner, who is the inspiration behind Whaldorf and Steiner schools, find it better to put off such schooling until a later time (Ogletree 1974). The theme of the evolution of childhood also forms the core of another critique of the ‘standard model’ in the cognitive science of religion touched on in Chapter 2. In summary, the argument is that cultural practices can feed back and have evolutionary consequences for a species. In the case of developmental cycles, there has been a continual dynamic interaction in human evolutionary history between phases of development, environmental cycles, and cognition. As Garstag argued as far back as 1922, ontogeny is no “animated cinema show of ancestral portraits”. In other words, ontogeny does not only recapitulate phylogeny in humans, it also deeply affects phylogeny (Bogin and Locke 2006: 277). Getting back to our main theme, we can see that for the transition into childhood food plays an especially important role, in contrast to the transition into adolescence, the other uniquely human life stage, where sex does. The technologies surrounding weaning may have been some of the very first known to our hominin ancestors. There is some indication that the necessity for H. habilis to supply special weening foods during childhood “may have intensified its dependence on stone tools” (Bogin and Locke 2006: 273), thus sparking other innovations with regard to technology. It is within this long view of history (longer than most histories of religion at least) that we should understand the life cycle rituals in Judaic systems. For millions of years before Judaic systems emerged the genus Homo had been locked in a continual interplay between changes in life cycle and the unforeseen behavioural and cognitive changes that would ensue. These changes would in turn be recycled into the process of natural selection, repeatedly, for millions of years, generation after generation. The life stages became, in effect, technologies that 155

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could be manipulated consciously by human populations, and unconsciously by natural selection. As time went on, the cycles came even more into the grasp of human consciousness until eventually myths and rituals were constructed around the phases. For all practical purposes the phases marked by these rituals are as real as can be, and play a direct role in evolution. The rituals that surround these phases are not illusory, they do exactly what they say, by changing the social status of individuals who participate in them, moving the individual along these ancient phases.

NORMATIVE DEVELOPMENT

John Searle (2005) has described a parsimonious way to understand how cultural changes of status work.10 He has provided a formula for the creation of institutional facts, which are “the glue that holds societies together”. Changes of status are one type of institutional fact. Such facts are made up of status functions, which are of the form X counts as Y in context C, and when elaborated further we accept (S has power (S does A)). Searle conveys the notion of a status function with an allusion to the game of chess, where the possession of a queen is not a matter of my having my hands on a physical object, it is rather a matter of my having certain powers of movement within a formal system (and the formal system is “the board”, though it need not be a physical board) relative to other pieces. Similarly, my having a thousand dollars is not a matter of my having a wad of bills in my hand but my having certain deontic powers. (Searle 2005: 16) The same applies to changes in status during an individual’s lifetime; such changes initiate us into different cultural instutions. For Searle, “an institution is any collectively accepted system of rules (procedures, practices) that enable us to create institutional facts”. Institutional agency is a “higher level set of status functions”. In other words, social status is an institutional fact. When status functions are iterated and built on one another, they can assemble just about any of our most complicated institutional facts, such as the 2008 global financial crisis. Searle finds that changes in social status occur through rules that “typically have the form of X counts as Y in C, where an object, person, or state of affairs X is assigned a special status, the Y status, such that the new status enables the person or object to perform functions that it could not perform solely in virtue of its physical structure, but requires as a necessary condition the assignment of the status” (Searle 2005: 21–2). In the case of religious rites of passage, they universally involve institutional transitions where a community recognizes a status transformation. As Searle 156

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notes, in order to be recognized, status functions must involve what he calls “status indicators”. These are artefacts such as “uniforms, wedding rings, marriage certificates”. These indicators themselves can, under certain circumstances, take on “a kind of life of their own”, through the institutions that they themselves indicate (Searle 2005: 15). Searle argues that human beings are the only animals who possess the ability to recognize status functions. This is because “in order to perceive the man score a touchdown, or to perceive that he is president, or to perceive that this is a dollar bill, we have to think at two different levels at once”: the physical level and the “symbolic level”. Thus, the core cognitive component of status functions again points to the digital mind, which has two primary components: the recursive building of status function on top of one another and the “decoupling” of analogue and digital modes of thought. Recursion has been a focus in cognitive science almost since its inception, because it was of great interest to one of the early pioneers of the field of biolinguistics, Noam Chomsky, who thought it was the key to solving many puzzles about language (see Corballis 2011). Recently, he and his colleagues have updated these ideas. Chomsky famously outlined the cognitive operation MERGE, the point where human beings go (and went) digital as much as 200,000 years ago, in the sense that the concept marks the emergence of what Chomsky calls “discrete infinity”. Discrete infinity is the basis for generative grammar and infinite semantics. Chomsky, and his colleagues Hauser and Fitch (Hauser et al. 2002), argue that while most of human language has analogies with non-human animals, MERGE probably does not.11 Chomsky sees recursion/MERGE mostly in an algebraic sense, such that certain grammatical rules take shape as operations in the human linguistic system. Chomsky is fond of pointing out that the infinite capacity of language is equivalent to learning the sequence of natural numbers. Once a child masters the rule (n+1), he or she can go on counting forever. Other animals, it appears, must learn and memorize the concept of each individual number (1, then 2, then 3, etc.). In this connection, Chomsky and his colleagues think that the MERGE cognitive operation evolved before external language, and the latter is largely a by-product of it. They suggest three possibilities in terms of the evolvability of MERGE: it evolved in relation to the capacities for (i) number, (ii) navigation and/or (iii) social relations. In their article, “Unravelling Digital Infinity”, Chris Knight and Camilla Power (2008) associate decoupling between digital and analogue precisely with the socalled “great leap forward” when linguistic thought or consciousness emerged in our hominid ancestors. Their argument for how this must have taken place is based on Chomsky’s MERGE, “the irreducible first principle of ‘discrete infinity’” (Knight and Power 2008: 180). However, they offer a slightly different explanation. Another way to see this leap, they argue, is as a movement from analogue to digital thought. This is because in order to have discrete infinity one must have discrete, bounded units – that 157

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is, digital units – subject to infinite recursion. Much as we saw Clark argue in the previous chapter concerning Sheba’s symbols, those units must be stripped of more basic biological marking. Knight and Power, however, go on to point out that, contrary to Chomsky, they see the digital part of the system as outside individual heads, structured according to external principles equivalent to Searle’s notion institutionalization (Searle 2005). Without this external element, Knight and Power note, the digitizing aspect of linguistic thought, and thus its essential element would be impossible. Joseph Poulshock (2006) takes up this argument and applies it to moral reasoning. As noted, Chomsky and his colleagues argue that recursion, or more precisely what they call the FLN (faculty of language narrow), “may be the only characteristic that distinguishes human language from non-human communication systems”. In applying it to moral reasoning, Poulshock argues that morality is based on that faculty (FLN) because, “recursive language makes human morality creatively recursive” (Poulshock 2006: 275). This characterization applies well to moral reasoning in Judaic systems. Recursion played an important role in the transmission of teachings, but it also played an important role in the formation of rabbinic commentaries; the Mishnah is not really a book of religious law, but rather a set of virtualized instructions and rules to reconstruct the social and intellectual context for the debate of the law. That is, it is a set of principles and parameters for the debate of the law, and its application in new contexts, in the future. Status functions create social and historical conditions of possibility that cannot be reduced purely to biology or psychology. Clearly cognitive mechanisms form part of the ability to follow second-order rules. But as we saw with Locke and Bogin, these mechanisms themselves depend on developmental conditions that must be timed precisely or they will not “turn on”. Again, the temporal (developmental and systemic) dimension is crucial to keep in mind. In terms of religious rites of passage, status functions are one element of their deep structure. The material elements of the ritual often serve as status indicators and status-shift indicators. Rites of passage do what they say they do; for example, they “create Brahmans”, (Penner 1975) or as in the case of the Judaic rites discussed below, they “create students”. These are not physical facts, but they are socially objective facts. Given the right context, they are objectively efficacious.

THE AGE 4 TRANSITION

Human life stages are not illusions that culture hoists on biology. They are as real as can possibly be. One truly interesting question concerns whether the transitions are relatively continuous or abrupt transformations. Throughout this book I have focused my “ontogenetic” argument on cognitive development around the age of four (for example, in my discussions of Olson, Baron-Cohen 158

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and Davidson), and argued that Judaic systems focus on this period in particular to begin training in literacy. To tie things in a bit tighter, the very same cognitive abilities that produce religion, such as theory of mind, decoupling and pretence, also form the basis for status functions. In the case of age 4 rites of passage we have status transformations that mark a child’s ability to recognize status functions; a monumental step indeed. For the purposes of this chapter I want to focus on the so-called “age 4 transition”. This is the period around the age of four when humans begin exhibiting quite novel abilities. These abilities derive from “decoupling” and recursion, what I have focused on as the levav concept of mind in the previous chapters. The philosopher Mark Bickhard has thought about this period extensively. In his “Commentary on the Age 4 Transition”, he argues that this is the phase when previously functioning cognitive systems can themselves be taken as inputs to higher-level systems (Bickhard 2003). In effect, it is as if the mind/brain is running “programs” on other programs. Bickhard thinks the age 4 transition is unique because, logically speaking, “the first step from level 1 to level 2 requires not just a functional development – which requires level 2 be already present – but an architectural change: an architecturally, not just epistemically, second level system” (Bickhard 2003: 4). In other words, the age 4 transition is going to require rewiring the cognitive architecture. Similarly, as Levinson notes of Singer’s research, in the evolutionary history of the brain: The evolutionarily new areas of the brain, although composed of much the same tissue, are secondary association areas, which take their input from older primary sensory areas. The new areas seem to be especially dedicated to multimodal metarepresentations, realized as massive assemblies of cells that bind lower-level representations through synchronicity of firing. It is these metarepresentations, indefinitely stacked, that make possible a theory of mind. (Levinson 2005: 11) As noted also in Chapters 3 and 4, Baron-Cohen and Leslie associate this age with passing the false belief task. This is the point at which mentalizing becomes recognizable in development, in what Baron-Cohen calls the fourth stage in the development of theory of mind – the stage in which we can build “epistemic mental states”. So in terms of the logic Bogin and Locke set up, it is just at this moment when children first become aware of the propositional nature of their environment, that they are thrust into the world unable to properly provide for themselves. They must rely on the help and knowledge of adults. Young children are reliant on adults for both nutrition and cultural “information”; nutrition and information come packaged together. Benoit Dubreuil, in an essay called “The Cognitive Foundations of Institutions” (2008) provides a frame for understanding the cognitive basis of status functions, and thus what I think is the raison d’être of rites of passage. He rightly takes issue with Searle’s relatively naïve position that “language” generally speaking allows for 159

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human symbolic behaviour. Recent advances in the mind sciences have allowed us to parse exactly what cognitive mechanisms make it possible. Dubreuil points out that two separate problems often become conflated in the discussion of the emergence of metarepresentation. The first is mindreading, which appears to be present in some primates. The second is recursion, a syntactic operation we saw Chomsky place considerable focus on above, and which many scholars see closely connected with understanding false belief. Recursive syntax allows us to embed propositions within one another and thus forms the foundation for metarepresentation (see Levy 2012). Dubreuil surmises further that since two-year-old children can pretend play, certain elements of decoupling have already emerged by then. What is it, then, that allows full-fledged theory of mind and linguistic complexity to enter the picture? Dubreuil argues that it is largely a matter of working memory, much as we saw in the Chapter 6 concerning Sheba the chimpanzee. Children under four can understand what is going on in other minds, and so can some other animals as well. The issue, however, is simply one of quantity, not quality. At a certain age children are able to keep track of other minds “online”, at the same time. Dubreuil thus points to “modest differences” (Dubreuil 2008: 9) in working memory and inhibition, which are mainly “located” in the prefrontal cortex, as the key cognitive mechanisms: “understanding false beliefs implies that one is able to hold in mind different frames of reference (working memory) and to suppress at will salient though irrelevant representations (inhibitory control) (Carlson et al. 2002, 2005)” (Dubreuil 2008, 8). So the human ability to engage with institutions, to understand and create status functions, arises in both ontogenetic development and phylogenetic evolution when working memory and inhibitory control become robust enough to draw inferences across different frames of reference. The cognitive and genetic changes that allow for this expansion may have been relatively modest. Indeed, most, if not all, of the set of abilities that we build up towards our robust theory of mind are to be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Thus any one of the mechanisms behind the theory of mind may be necessary but not sufficient for it to develop. I want to argue that the specific form that working memory takes in H. sapiens lies behind our robust form of theory of mind. In some sense this is a truism, since what defines our theory of mind is the ability to understand multiple embedding. There must have been a “tipping point” in terms of the processing power of the human neocortex that allowed for this.

THE SHAVUOT TORAH SCHOOL INITIATION RITUAL

Like most other religions, Judaic systems have a typical life model for males and females. These life models are normative in the sense that they represent the idealized developmental pattern of individuals. We saw in our earlier discussion that human animals actually do have qualitatively defined developmental stages. This 160

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chapter is concerned with the way these “biological” stages interact and are modulated by “cultural” development over the long course of human history. I argue that ritualized developmental technologies have actually fed back into the genome in the way that Bogin and Locke describe. Thus, life models are an intermixture of basic biological development or ontogeny and cultural development. I am interested in the fact that all cultures have some developmental model about how lives should progress. However, there is a lot of wiggle room in that story. These cultural models vary in their stability over time – some are extremely persistent, some are not. In the case of some Judaic systems, we have a relatively stable pattern over a very long period of time (at least 1,000 years). Thus, this is a useful test case for examining the interaction between cultural and biological systems. We may be able to talk about gene–culture evolutionary interaction over long periods; and here, to be clear, I mean evolution in its strictest sense (that is, without teleological direction). The major statement on the Jewish life cycle comes from Pirkei Avot 5:21, which Marcus (1996: 43) calls a “pseudo-mishnaic passage appended some time in the Middle Ages to Mishnah Avot”. It reads (with my English translation): He said: :‫הוא היה אומר‬ age five for Scripture; ;‫בן חמש שנים מקרא‬ age ten for Mishnah; ;‫בן ﬠשר למשנה‬ age thirteen for Mitzvot (commandments); ;‫בן שלוש ﬠשרה למצות‬ age fifteen for Talmud; ;‫בן תמש ﬠשרה לתלמור‬ age eighteen for the bridal canopy; ;‫בן שמונה ﬠשרה לחופה‬ age twenty for vocation; ;‫בן ﬠשרים לרדוך‬ age thirty for power; ;‫בן שלושים לכוח‬ age forty for understanding; ;‫בן ארבﬠים לבינה‬ age fifty for counsel; ;‫בן חמישים לﬠצה‬ age sixty for old age; ;‫בן שישים לוקנה‬ age seventy for grey hair; ;‫בן שבﬠים לשיבה‬ age eighty for strength; ;‫בן שמונים לגבורה‬ age ninety for bending; ;‫בן תשﬠים לשוח‬ age one hundred – as if one has .‫בן מאה באלו מת וﬠבר ובטל מן הﬠולם‬ already died, passed on and departed from the world. Marcus notes further that this passage could not have been part of the original redaction of the Babylonian Talmud in 500 ce because the editor of b. Baba Batra 21a does not mention it in a discussion that age six or seven is the proper age to begin schooling (Marcus 1996: 44). Even Avot de-Rabbi Natan, the first geonic (a later period) commentary on Mishnah Avot, does not comment on the passage. Thus Marcus sees it first emerging by the twelfth century, when some Tosafists – rabbinic scholars in France – note the contradiction between the Talmud and the 161

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Avot passage. They resolve the apparent problem by arguing that a father should begin schooling at home at five, and formal schooling should begin a year or two later. The most common versions of the medieval European rite require that it begin on Shavuot, the “festival of weeks” commemorating the story in Exodus when the Torah was given to Israel. Let us focus on this rite as a primary example of biosemiotic socialization in Judaic life cycle rituals. As we can see, the evidence indicates that the ritual began to be practiced about one thousand years ago in Judaic systems (it may be older). Its centre of gravity concerns a rite of passage marking a boys entry into “school”, that is, into education in Torah. Every male child, and perhaps some female children, were initiated into some version of the rite. I will summarize two data sets describing the rite. The first is the description of the ritual glossed by Marcus from his studies of texts from the Middle Ages. The second is a contemporary ethnographic description of the rite. There is a question about how continuous this tradition was in those thousand years. Did it go through phases of popularity? Did it die out at some point and re-emerge? I argue that some form or another of this ritual has persisted in Judaic systems throughout those one thousand years. If this is the case, the question becomes to what extent the practice could have persistent epigenetic effects? Obviously from a developmental standpoint, in the course of an individual’s lifetime, such rituals have a strong cognitive effect, an influence on the way individual lives are led and the things they value. The fact that Judaic systems through the years were so concerned with childhood education must have dramatic consequences. The deeper question is whether these types of practices could have genetic consequences in the way Locke and Bogin describe. This is a radical proposition no doubt, but one we should confront. Though the ritual integrates elements from earlier “Torah mnemonics and early medieval magical traditions”, Marcus (1996) finds that the Torah initiation ritual form itself was only first performed in northern France and Germany during the medieval period. It was performed “on the late spring festival of Shavuot (Pentecost), the time rabbinic Judaism taught that God gave the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai” (Marcus 1996: 69). The ritual was a polemical response to Christian rituals going on at the same time, for it denied the efficacy of those rites, and instead affirmed “the truths of Jewish learning of the Torah, expressed through food symbols and their associations with the Torah as God’s word” (Marcus 2004: 69). The tradition is attested in six extensive written versions, one illuminated manuscript, and some fragmentary manuscripts. The best description comes from Sefer ha-Roqeah (Book of the Perfumer) by R. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (ca. 1160–1230), where Biblical verses are written on and with sweet things. As noted in Chapter 6, the ritual begins as follows: a tablet is brought over with some letters on it and two Biblical verses. The child sits on the teacher’s lap and “reads the letters first forwards, then backwards, and finally in symmetrically paired combinations” (Marcus 2004: 69). Honey cakes with Isaiah 50:4–5 written on them are brought out and the verse is recited. Then a cooked 162

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peeled egg with the verse Ezekiel 3:3 is brought out and that verse is recited. Next “they feed the boy the cake and the egg because it is good for the opening of the heart (li-petih.at ha-lev)” (70). The child then recites an adjuration of “the prince of forgetfulness” (sar ha-shikheh.ah) and eats fruit and other delicacies. Finally the child sits by a river bank and is told the Torah, “like the rushing water, will never end” (70).12 We also have a contemporary ethnographic example of this ritual documented by the anthropologist Yorum Bilu, who conducted research among a haredi – or ultra-orthodox religious community – in Israel. In this case, the school initiation ritual, or “entering the world of study”, is closely associated with a boy’s first haircut. Furthermore, according to Bilu, we should see this ritual in the context of the important ritual that preceded it, namely circumcision (brit milah), which occurs eight days after birth. The word ot means both the mark of circumcision and letter, while the word milah means both circumcision and word (Bilu 2003: 174). So we see that in Judaic systems, this marking is literally tied to the written word; there is no stronger case of “downward causation”, no stronger case of an “external memory store”, than that of circumcision, which points to narratives from the Torah about setting the people of Israel apart from the rest. In haredi communities, the haircutting ritual at the age of three marks the beginning of schooling. Soon after the haircut an individual school initiation ritual takes place, while on the following midsummer, the first day of school in the month of Ellul, the collective school initiation ritual occurs. The individual ceremonies evoke the memory of circumcision: the child is placed on the lap of the teacher, in front of a tablet on which the Hebrew alphabet is printed. The teacher recites aloud each letter in the alphabetical order, signaling the letters with his finger, and the child is encouraged to recite them after him. This exchange is then repeated backward, from tav (the last letter of the alphabet) to alef (the first letter). Next the teacher recites a biblical verse, “Moses charged us with the Torah as the heritage of the congregation of Jacob”, followed by a Talmudic phrase, “May the Torah be my occupation and God my aid”, and again the child is urged to reiterate. The same exchange takes place with the first verse of Leviticus … (Bilu 2003: 186) Other elements of the ritual follow the medieval tradition quite closely: First, the teacher sprinkles drops of honey on the tablet with the alphabet, and the child licks with his tongue the honey from the letters. Second, a cake kneaded with honey and decorated with a passage from Isaiah (50:4–5) … is brought over. The third part of the ritual concerns a peeled hard-boiled egg, on which a verse from Ezekiel (3:3) is written, describing the eating of the scroll by the prophet. (Bilu 2003: 186) 163

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At the outset of this section we saw how crucial the supply of food was to understanding the uniquely human phase of childhood. Childhood is a liminal period between food supply by the mother (breastfeeding) and independent food gathering in the juvenile phase. It is a period ripe with brain plasticity, and also the period when children are consciously dependent on the adults around them for food. It is a dangerous period, when children develop their tastes and preferences for much of their lives. This period of food provisioning, “the hominid adaptation” is the period when a great deal of socializing takes place (Bogin and Locke 2006: 260). Religions in general, and Judaic systems in particular, use this period as a focus of socialization, and the socialization occurs with food. In this case, the association is sweetness, good thoughts, with religious study and the Torah. This period of inscription on the child’s “heart” (‫ )לבב‬in Judaic systems is strongly associated with cognition. Thus Marcus translates “heart” (lev/levav in Hebrew) as MIND in the passages above. The ritual occurs within a window after the age of four that is of particular importance for robust theory of mind development.

THE LAW OF GOD IS IN THE HEART

Much of the ritual surrounding children in Judaic systems involves the idea of binding Torah on the heart, expressed, for example, in Psalms 37:31: “The Law of God is in his heart”. In this case, I would like to discourage a wide gulf between the etic, or scholarly “objective” perspective, and emic, or “participant” perspective, on these rituals. I think in Judaic systems these perspectives are largely about the same thing. What we have is a form of operant conditioning associating emotion with particular memories. These food associations primarily bind memories with somatic processes, notably metabolic and endocrine regulation. The new field called behavioural endocrinology aims to understand the evolution of human and non-human endocrine systems and explain how they work (Gray and Ellison 2009). A few historians have got in on this act as well, most notably David Smail (2010), who argues among other things that high-status individuals in medieval European societies, more or less intentionally, modulated the population’s hormones by orchestrating stressful situations for their subjects. For the animal kingdom, “power has always emerged from the capacity to deliver both stress and reward” (Smail 2010: 121). The endocrine system is responsible for the regulation of hormones, which are chemical “messengers” secreted in the blood by specialized cells. Most hormones are peptides or proteins, which are amino-acid chains. Hormones are responsible for many long-term functions of the body, including growth and development, metabolism, regulation of the internal environment, and reproduction. Hormones act on their target cells in three basic ways: (i) they control the rates of enzymatic reactions, (ii) they control transport of ions or molecules across cell membranes, 164

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and (iii) they control gene expression and the synthesis of proteins (Silverthorn 2003: 209). Hormones are generally secreted by endocrine glands, for example the pineal, adrenal or thyroid glands; though also by some clusters of neurons, for example the hypothalamus; and some cells or tissues such as the liver. The pineal gland secretes the hormone melatonin, whose target cell is unclear in humans, but the main effect is the regulation of circadian rhythms (night– day, sleep–wake, balance). The adrenal medulla gland secretes epinephrine and norepinephrine, whose target is many different tissues and affects the fight-orflight response. The thyroid secretes triiodothyronine, thyroxine and calcitonin, which regulate metabolism, growth and development. Two of the most important hormones, testosterone and oestrogen, are secreted by the testes and ovaries, respectively, and affect secondary sex characteristics. The hypothalamus regulates the release of pituitary hormones, which in turn effect milk production, growth, metabolism and sex hormone production. Many endocrine reflexes involve the nervous system, which overlaps in structure and function. The neuron is the most rapid form of communication within the body, its electrical signals travelling as fast as 120 metres per second, while endocrine signals are slower and for greater duration. Neurons function through chemical reactions that transport ions across cell membranes and thereby propagate electrical signals (sodium, Na+; chloride, Cl–; calcium, Ca2+; potassium, K+). If its threshold energy is not reached the neuron will not propagate the signal. A neuron may thus be “on” or “off ”. So hormones are chemicals secreted by endocrine glands into the blood, neurotransmitters are chemicals secreted from neurons to a target cell, while neurohormones are chemicals released by neurons into the blood. The nervous system thus uses a combination of chemical and electrical signals and “the similarities between neurohormones and hormones secreted by the endocrine system blur the distinction between the nervous and endocrine systems, making them a continuum rather than two distinct systems” (Silverthorn 2003: 174). Neural, neuroendocrine and endocrine reflexes should thus be understood as a continuum. The diffuse modulatory systems are classified according to the neurotransmitter chemical they secrete: noradrenergic (norepinephrine), serotonergic (serotonin), dopaminergic (dopamine) and cholinergic (acetylcholine). The diffuse modulatory systems influence attention, motivation, wakefulness, memory, motor control, mood and metabolic homeostasis (Silverthorn 2003: 305). Dopamine, for example, triggers motivation and reward response, the feeling of pleasure linked to food, sex and drugs. The fact that food and drugs activate common reward pathways has given physiologists clues concerning the present obesity epidemic (Volkow and Wise 2005). Though dopamine is classified as a neurotransmitter, in general motivated behaviours work in parallel with the autonomic and endocrine systems, such as the hypothalamus (Silverthorn 2003: 309). A major goal of behavioural endocrinology has been to attempt to explain the relation between an organism’s development and endocrine regulation. The explanation entails interspecies comparison and behavioural dynamics about how 165

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the endocrine system affects and is affected by social relationships within species (Gray and Ellison 2009). In the human species in particular, sexual dimorphism and the major differences in behaviour between the sexes is one of the most persistent research topics. The consensus is that human sexual dimorphism is primarily related to the sexual division of labour among the earliest human socieities. This sexual division of labour is part of what Kaplan and Lancaster call the “human adaptive complex”, a holistic network of feedback effects and interrelations between behaviour, evolution and ecology (Lancaster and Kaplan 2009). Though we are only in the initial phases of understanding the endocrine system, particularly how it relates to human development and evolution, I want to suggest that rite of passage rituals such as the one conducted during Shavuot Torah should be understood as part of the human adaptive complex that changes in the context of agriculture and literacy. Indeed Kaplan and Lancaster note that the sexual division of labour and the associated life courses have changed drastically in the past 50,000 years due to: (1) the development of extrasomatic wealth and the monopolization thereof that led first to variance in male quality and then to social stratification, (2) the growth of technology that reduces the value of sexual dimorphism in the division of labor by making male and female labor and skill sets substitutable, and (3) a reduction in fertility and family size so that active reproduction and child care compose increasingly smaller portions of the total human life span. (Lancaster and Kaplan 2009: 117) Let us return to the Shavuot Torah ritual and look at it in the context of the endocrinology of social relationships. First, we see a clear discussion of themes related to the transition from hunting to sedentary life within Judaic texts, especially the Hebrew Bible. Though there are only echoes of a movement from prey into hunter, a clearer theme is the movement from hunter into scholar. For Judaic systems develop in the midst of the first waves of urbanization and domestication of human societies. A new human adaptive complex develops that channels, in the earliest stages, male energy in new directions. Humans began domesticating honey bees (genus Apis) some time during the first milleneum bce in the Levant; the bees were usually housed in “vertical, waxen combs within wooden boxes or more commonly cylinders made of clay or mud” (Engel et al. 2009: 23). In the Talmud, honey represented a problem because it should be trief (not kosher), unclean, since it is derived from insects. To get around this, the Talmud rules that honey is not produced by bees but simply gathered by them (Bek. 7b). Composed of fructose and glucose, honey was the primary sweetening agent for food until very recently. For the rabbis such sweetness led them to consider it one sixtieth of the heavenly food, manna (b. Berakhot 57b). These sugars are absorbed directly into the bloodstream during digestion. Such sugars are highly 166

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implicated in constraining or manipulating the will; as Baumeister and Tierney argue, will power “consists of circuitry in the brain that runs on glucose” (Pinker 2011, reviewing Baumeister and Tierney 2011). The first Biblical verse most prominent in the ritual, Isaiah (50:4–5) is predominantly about obedience and learning. Isaiah is preaching the righteous path, and states that God gave him the ability to teach and to listen to “those who are taught”, the taught ones (kallimmûdîm). He then says, “Lord Yahweh has opened my ear, for I was not rebellious, backwards I did not slide”. In the second verse read during the rite of passage in question, God tells Ezekiel (3:3) to eat a scroll, which he does, and it tastes like honey. So the ritual itself draws many elements together. First, it incorporates products of agriculture and domestication such as scrolls – made of parchment, the skin of domesticated animals – bread, honey, and eggs. Second, the ritual recalls circumcision, the initial rite of passage for male Jews. Third, it includes thematic elements regarding the modification of the will. Fourth, it invokes the sweetness of teaching and being taught. Finally, it revolves around a kind of pretend play of the learning process, involving text and teacher.

NICHE CONSTRUCTIONS

In discussing the emergence of the “age 4 transition” further, Bickhard (2003) points out that knowing is an interactive, functional, relational property between systems and their environments, and … such interactive systems … themselves instantiate properties that could not be known (interacted with) by the systems themselves, but could be interactively known by systems at the next higher level … The hierarchy of potential knowing levels is generated by iteration of the basic relationship of representational ‘aboutness’ – each level’s interactive representations are about properties of the lower level. (Bickhard 2003: 2) So types are higher-order labels that apply to a configuration of tokens. Bickhard points out that the hierarchy of interacting systems can be climbed only in a particular sequence because, to paraphrase, lower order arrangements provide the content for higher-order systems. Though Bickhard applies this argument to the age 4 transition, we can equally well apply it to the “emergence” of writing. As we saw, research in the psychology of literacy has shown that literacy tends to enhance or change precisely the theory of mind/cognitive embedding abilities that make their robust appearance in children around the age of 4 (Olson 2001). David Olson, our literacy expert from previous chapters, was the first to point out that claims about the enormous effects of literacy during the 1970s and 1980s 167

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were somewhat exaggerated. Since then, literacy has been shown to “play less a causal role than an ancillary or instrumental one in psychological and social change”. Thus, “literacy played more of a role in the elaboration and adjustment of pre-existing structures and practices than in the actual creation of novel ones” (Olson 2001: 240). As noted, Olson does leave room for one extremely important locus of change that literacy brings, and this concerns precisely the theory of mind mechanisms, or levav concepts, that are so central to Judaic systems. Literacy is in principle metalinguistic because complex forms of written correspondence are forms of quoting oneself – one must disembed her own utterances from their normative environment of present speech in order to communicate in writing (Olson 2001: 243–4). So, to put it more concretely, the idea is that literacy not only helps organize lower-order representations like words and numbers, but robust literacy also helps to organize “higher-order” cognitive activities and propositions. Dunbar (2006: 176–7) also makes the connection between “cultural evolution” and theory of mind. The evidence indicates that the neocortex grew in correlation (perhaps causally) to the size of human groups. The inference to take here is that the neocortical, non-modular, brain grew to keep track of social relations. A social relation is not a physical object; it is invisible. From keeping track of invisible social relations, it is a smaller step to keeping track of relations in general. Cognitive disembedding is a higher-order form of this ability. It takes the outputs of lower-order relation tracking as the inputs to higher orders of relation tracking (Corballis 2011). Thus the marked outcome of this cognitive process in most adult humans is the ability to retain comprehension while embedding up to five or six propositions within a sentence. “I believe that you think that I want you to suppose that I believe that the world is flat” (Dunbar 2006: 173). Dunbar finds this embedding essential to teaching and learning, and thus to cultural transmission in general. The points made above concerning perceptions about writing in young children should also be understood in relation to development. It is not that children who use the token method for accounting for writing are wrong, it is rather that at a certain stage when robust literacy emerges children are able to take higher-order inputs, such as theory of mind concepts, into processes of communication and thought. The emergence of writing as a historical phenomenon must have gone though a similar process. But the development of various “knowing levels”, in Bickhard’s terminology, are not one-dimensional, linear events. Knowing levels are processes where higher levels are made up of a variety of lower-order processes, which themselves do not reduce to one another. This is so because the organization itself of each microsystem is a key property for higher-order processing (Bickhard and Campbell 2000: 342–3). Bickhard’s model gives an extremely compelling framework for making sense of the age 4 transition in neurological terms. There appears to be a consensus from a variety of angles, including Baron-Cohen, that theory of mind takes as its input simulations of interactions between social agents – thus the organization of the interaction, similarly, will be key (see Baron-Cohen 1995: 38–40). 168

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Literacy offers new possibilities for the tracking of people and social relations, but it certainly did not begin as a way to augment the reading of minds. As Jared Diamond (1997: 234) has pointed out: “anyone hoping to discover how Sumerians of 3000 bce thought and felt is in for a disappointment”. The first forms, as noted, were extremely cumbersome; they were what Diamond calls “telegraphic”, by analogy with another somewhat cumbersome communicative technology that has since been modified. Diamond reiterates Levi-Strauss’s point that the main function of ancient writing was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings” (Diamond 1997: 235). The shift to expressive forms of resistance and poetry would come much later. In the limited uses of early forms of writing, Diamond finds a clue for the reason why writing appears so late in the human narrative: it was for management and control of complex institutions. He notes that all forms of writing seem to have evolved in the context of “socially stratified societies with complex and centralized political institutions” (Diamond 1997: 236). Similarly, Whitehouse, Goody and Boyer also connect writing to complex polities, though they disagree concerning causes and consequences. While Whitehouse favours the idea that writing emerged in the context of other technological and demographic changes, Goody and Boyer indicate writing was the cause of the changes (see Whitehouse 2000: 172–80; Boyer 2001: 313–15; Goody 2004). I think both answers are probably right, since there was feedback between writing technologies and social structure since the emergence of inscribed tokens. A fruitful way to look at these changes is within the context of the emergence of a novel “ecological” niche. For our purposes it is sufficient simply to point out that higher-order phenomena, such as literacy (which is only of high-order from a certain perspective), are composed of a causal lattice among various interacting levels (Lemke 2000). A crucial element in this causal lattice is the social environment in which literacy develops. Indeed, Diamond goes further to say that the change in food production technology was a necessary condition for the emergence of writing. This is not a trivial condition, for we saw that Schmandt-Basseret has shown the empirical connection between surplus storage, accounting techniques, and the emergence of writing. The store of surplus allowed for the emergence of cities: “early writing served the needs of [complex and centralized] political institutions (such as record keeping and royal propaganda), and the users were full time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants” (Diamond 1997: 236). Thus we find the movement and development of a “naturally” occurring ecological-social niche. Literate guilds slowly moulded the social environment to be conducive to their own particular skills. Goody pointed to these connections long ago, between domesticating the savage mind and writing. But can we be more precise about the mechanisms by which biological and cultural ecology interact? Indeed we can. Levinson notes a number of relevant mechanisms of “twin track evolution with feedback” from culture (Levinson 2005: 4). 169

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The first is natural selection in an environment that “can be partly constructed by the organism itself ”. For example, the invention of fire “lies behind the progressive reduction of dentition” in Homo sapiens, due to the fact that fire softens food. The second is the Baldwin effect where “behavioral changes can feed back into the genome by exposing the organism to new environmental pressures”. The example Levinson gives is clothing, which encouraged humans to move into colder climates, which in turn led to physiological adaptations. These first two probably fit under the rubric of niche construction illustrated by Odling-Smee et al. (2003). The third is group selection, which occurs when a group can act in concert to affect the fitness of other groups; this process is a likely scenario for the extinction of the Neanderthals in northern Europe (Levinson 2005: 6). Related to group selection, the fourth is “kin selection in culture-bearing kindreds”, where the wellknown mechanism of altruistic behaviour towards others of sufficient biological relatedness is regulated and modified by the perception of common culture. The fifth is sexual selection, or the “choice by females of their mates”. Indeed much of culture and language has recently been understood in terms of sexual selection (see Martin forthcoming; Deacon 1997: 379–81, 384–9). For example, Levinson notes that if a culture erects boundary conditions for reproduction, like the payment of a bride price, “it translates the biological foundation for those skills into reproductive success, thus ultimately fixing those skills in the genome”. Similarly, the last form of feedback Levinson terms “auto-domestication”, by which he means selective breeding in human populations, though there are “distinct limits to the extent to which humans have applied breeding techniques to their own kind” (Levinson 2005: 7).13 Applying this to literate religions such as Judaic systems, we may say that such systems do not evolve in a technical (biological) sense, but they do make lasting changes to human ecology, which in turn have their own selection pressures. Indeed, there is a case to be made concerning sexual selection that much of the human decoupling/recursive ability, which would be so important to religion, evolved so that men could convince women and their fathers to give themselves over into a sexual relationship (marriage). In women, a pronounced cheater detector and false-belief detector would be crucially important for sifting the respectable men out from sexual cheaters and smooth talkers, respectively. These cognitive systems develop faster in girls and are more closely associated with oestrogen; indeed “in the brain centers for language … women have 11% more neurons than men” (Brizendine 2007: 5; in contrast, men have “two and a half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive”). However, knowing the mental states of potential suitors is crucial for all parties involved, not just the women. Wildgen makes a similar point concerning the origin of language. Citing Dunbar and Deacon, he adds that it is not just women who need to detect sexual cheaters, for while “females needed more and richer information on the males to select in order to be able to predict their future behavior in the caring for females and children”, males had to be able to trust women sexually “when they were on long hunting excursions” because they “do not want 170

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to invest in the children of other males” (Wildgen 2004: 19). With these points, we are reminded again of the story of Laban and Jacob, where language is tied back to food and sex. To put it simply, with literacy a new biological phenomenon emerges: the love letter (Shir ha-Shirim) and its more modern incarnation in email and online matchmaking. Apart from sexual selection, the classic example of cultural feedback and niche construction concerns diet: the phenomenon of lactose tolerance in human dairyfarming populations (Levinson 2005: 7). In human groups where dairying has been practised consistently, the enzyme lactase does not shut down after weaning, thus allowing people to continue drinking milk. Thus, Durham has shown that “distinct food-preparation techniques have resulted in microevolutionary adaptations in human groups” (Levinson 2005: 7, citing Durham 1991). Levinson finds that a thousand years, or about forty generations, is sufficient for the kind of feedback discussed above to take place. Other interesting examples of “cultural adaptation on the genotype” are the cases of type II diabetes and hypertension, which are found predominantly in agricultural populations; Diamond explains this fact as due to the “unconscious domestication of humans by agriculture” (Diamond 2002: 707; Levinson 2005: 8). With these mechanisms in mind, let us return to Judaic systems for a moment. The question as to whether such a system is a sufficiently bounded and unitary category to warrant examination will be left for the reader to decide. From my perspective Judaic systems fit quite well into Levinson’s notion of “culture-bearing kindreds”. In other words, we are dealing here with a cultural unit with borders policed by individuals and groups, from both the inside and outside. The individual may identify as a Jew, but the institutions of the group may reject that identity. Outside institutions, like states (the Third Reich or the State of Israel), may also police the system’s borders, defining who is and who is not a member. The idea that “Judaism” could be a distinct biological category is an illusion that emerges out of this dynamic model of border crossing and policing. These practices are not unique to Judaic systems, though it is perhaps the paradigmatic case. All of Levinson’s mechanisms of cultural feedback into micro-evolutionary processes appear to be present quite acutely in Judaic systems. The niche is the urban or village environment and its accompanying technologies. This new environment leads to different pressures on its inhabitants.14 One Talmudic passage is particularly poignant: “A man should sell all he possesses in order to marry the daughter of a scholar, as well as to marry his daughter to a scholar” (b. Pesaþim 49a). A more operative question here must be to what extent the cultural imperative to educate sons – notably to teach them to read a second language, which was in most cases a foreign alphabet, starting at a very young age (before puberty) – has a persistent biological effect. Botticini and Eckstein (2007) have recently proposed an intriguing model, which argues that Judaism as an identity selected itself (i.e. Jews selected themselves) to urban skilled occupations that most often required literacy or the manipulation of symbol systems (mathematical, monetary or legal). They argue 171

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that the implementation after the second century of the Common Era of the religious norm requiring Jewish fathers to educate their sons determined three major patterns in Jewish history: (i) a slow process of conversions from Judaism among illiterate Jewish farmers who lived in subsistence economies; (ii) a comparative advantage in urban skilled occupations in which the literate Jews selected themselves when urbanization and the development of a commercial economy provided them with the returns to their investment in education; and (iii) the voluntary diaspora of the Jews in search of worldwide opportunities in crafts, trade, and moneylending. (Botticini and Eckstein 2007: 886) Similarly, Murray also ties selection to urbanization in his attempt to explain the fact that American Jews perform significantly better at verbal and reasoning skill portions of IQ tests, and that Jews have won about 32 per cent of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the twenty-first century. He summarizes Cochran et al. (2005: 659–93) to say that economic success in these occupations is far more highly selected for intelligence than success in the traditional occupation of non-Jews: namely, farming. Economic success is in turn related to reproductive success, because higher income means lower infant mortality, better nutrition, and, more generally, reproductive “fitness.” Over time, increased fitness among the successful leads to a strong selection for the cognitive and psychological traits that produce that fitness, intensified when there is low inward gene flow from other populations. (Murray 2007: 5) An important qualification is that where Murray says “intelligence”, he means “verbal and reasoning skills” and significantly not “visuo-spatial skills” (nor necessarily other kinds of intelligence, such as emotional and social intelligence). In this sense, Judaic systems were probably the first highly distributed networks bonded in core beliefs of biological descent and common language. The technology of writing allowed for the network to expand intact. In one example of this point, Greif (1994) has presented a game-theoretical model that explains the success of Jewish traders in the Middle Ages. The traders had a “collectivist” mentality, as opposed to the “individualist” one of their neighbours. As such they “invested in the sharing of information and the Genoese did not … sending informative letters to them with the latest available commercial information and ‘gossip’”. In contrast, the local Genoese Christian merchants “seem to have held an opposite attitude regarding information sharing” (Greif 1994: 923–4). Botticini and Eckstein (2007: 890) contend that “the network externality among Jewish traders highlighted by Greif could not exist without a common written language (Hebrew), high literacy levels, and a common law (Talmud)”. It is sufficient to note in conclusion of this chapter that this particular case suggests an 172

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important amendment to the recent trend, exemplified in the excellent work of Bulbulia (2004, 2005), that would take into consideration the role of technology in general and religious technology in particular as offering a new class of constraints or resources in the game-theoretical machinery and evolutionary modelling. Judaic systems are an important test case for a biocognitive account of religion. I think bottom-up psychological processes tend to be overemphasized in cognitive accounts of culture and religion (see Chapter 2). Thus, the main purpose of this chapter has been to give the rudiments of a plausible account of downward forms of causation that also does justice to biology and cognition. It is for this reason that I have focused on mechanisms of niche construction and gene-culture co-evolution. These concepts are powerful tools for explaining institutions like writing in Judaic systems, a primary case of downward causation.

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Conclusion

In the film A Serious Man, which I noted in Chapter 1 is a key to understanding Judaic systems, Larry Gopnik goes to see three rabbis to try to find out “what HaShem is trying to tell him” by subjecting him to the struggles that frame the film (Coen and Coen 2009: 87). The second rabbi, rabbi Nachtner, begins their session together by answering Larry’s question with another question: “How does God speak to us: it’s a good question.” I will return to his answer to this question below, but for now it is sufficient to say that he continually reminds Larry the physicist about the limits to our knowledge. Larry persists in wanting an answer, until finally: rabbi nachtner: The answer! Sure! We all want the answer! But Hashem doesn’t owe us the answer, Larry. Hashem doesn’t owe us anything. The obligation runs the other way. larry: Why does he make us feel the questions if he’s not going to give us any answers? Rabbi Nachtner smiles at Larry. rabbi nachtner: He hasn’t told me. (Coen and Coen 2009: 89–90) Like Rabbi Nachtner’s parable, much of this book has been about the methodological limitations in studying minds with a mind. This limitation justifies the move we made away from “Platonic” magic languages that confuse us into thinking we know what we are talking about. With this anomalous background in place, we delved into the cognitive effects of literacy, some of which lead us down the path to just such an illusion. I described those effects in the context of the transition in Judaic systems from divination as the main means of knowing the mind of God, to prophecy, to midrash. I located this transition in the movement from divinatory dāraš to Talmudic dāraš. Throughout this text I have tried to show that literary technologies, and in fact all forms of communicative technology (even language), are double-edged swords. The ability to offload cognition as written texts, at the same time that it allows for digitized thought, nevertheless is always based on forms of thought control. Just as the difference between human and non-human forms of cognition is based on higher networks deactivating other neural systems, the same applies to robust forms of literature, which allow authors to closely monitor their own thought 175

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processes and those of other agents. It is not that such forms of self-consciousness are impossible without literacy, it is that such technologies, as Olson argues, make that process routine. Thus at the same time that literacy seems to have sparked a marked flourishing of human freedom, such technologies have the potential to enslave and corrupt. Throughout this text I have tried to balance optimism and pessimism in the shadow of digital technologies. This book has also examined the movement from analogue to digital forms of information processing, and how Judaic systems in particular modulate that transition through education into literacy, in both historical (phylogenetic) and developmental (ontogenetic) terms. Because they mark the originary moments of that transition historically and developmentally, I have tended to concentrate on the “axial age” and the “age 4 transition”. Though there are other digital technologies, especially in the modern age, literacy tweaks precisely the mentalizing most central to religion, such as MERGE, recursion and theory of mind. Literacy provokes the movement from analogue to digital thought, from token to type, for better or worse. Though other technologies – from Kanzi’s numerals to modern recording devices – also hold this potential, most digitization is grounded in the forms of literacy I have explored throughout. I have been interested in the particular ways that Judaic systems engender that movement, and how this leads to particular ways of thinking and being within those systems. So it is not that literacy, or even digital processing, is necessary for thought, but that it leads thought in different directions. I argued that some degree of “space–time control” is necessary for the movement to take place, because analogical signals must be captured and transformed and because institutional spaces are required for such a transformation. I suggested that digital thought fractures into at least two instutitional forms, the “Hebrew” and the “Greek”, the hermeneutical and the scientific. One considers nature a text, the other considers the text part of nature. One takes the relation between token and type to be irreducibly dynamic, complex and ephemeral; it takes that dynamism, complexity and ephemerality to be a sine qua non for understanding the history of religions. The other reduces that complexity so our simple, natural-born minds can know something about the world.1 I have argued that the Davidsonian/Spinozist method is the best way of approaching complexity because it can account for both the material level and the mental level. In this respect, I have claimed that there are real biological bodies that matter that put into thought and practice various aspects of Judaic systems. It is not that the biological aspect of Judaic bodies is a decided scientific fact, since our understanding of human biology and evolution is continually developing. For this reason a basic uncertainty lies at the heart of this enterprise. The fact that the science is uncertain does mean that this approach is a form of pseudo-science. Pseudo-science relies on a metaphysical doctrine by which scientific “truths” somehow correspond directly to the world. Such a doctrine is quite foreign to the one I have presented throughout this book. Pseudo-science makes science into an ontological rather than an epistemological enterprise; it makes science a theory of 176

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truth rather than one particularly poignant method (though no doubt culturally and politically constrained) for acquiring knowledge about the world. We must therefore not let uncertainty stand in the way of integrating the mind sciences into the study of Judaic systems. It is not that such an approach to culture is the end of the story, rather it is just the beginning of a genuine two-way collaboration between the humanities and sciences. My approach does not represent a threat to the traditional way of studying religion and culture. As Smail (2008: 159) suggested concerning the new neurohistorical approach from which this book owes much inspiration, it does not “change the nature of the thing observed”; rather “what changes is the pattern of our explanation and the focus of our attention”. In this sense, though we are studying the same objects (in this case religion and Judaism), our interests and “focus of attention” will be different. Thus, different aspects of Judaic culture will be relevant, though preferably with many points of overlap with traditional ways of studying religion and Judaism. In the eight chapters in this book I have examined a number of important Judaic texts. Among the most important were books of the Hebrew Bible such as Exodus (6:3ff.), Leviticus (20:6ff.) and Deuteronomy (6:4ff. and 18:10ff.), Mishnaic and Talmudic tractates such as Pirkei Avot and Baba Metzia (59b), and modern texts such as the script of A Serious Man. I have read these texts using the mind sciences as a hermeneutic lens, paying attention to representations of communicative technologies, but also imagining the bodies beyond them with the help of tools from the mind sciences. These texts all exemplify not necessarily unique, but certainly particular ways that Judaic systems interact with written texts – an interaction that has persisted for a very long time. I have argued texts like these present a particular mental environment in which Judaic minds have taken shape. I have returned to some basic themes throughout concerning the relation between literacy and Judaic systems. The first is decoupling, which I have glossed primarily using theories about the relation between analogue and digital information processing and token or type formatting. Both these modes of understanding decoupling point to different ways we can describe the interaction between ontological levels. I have argued that keeping such levels straight is a way of avoiding reductionism at the same time as countenancing the role that materiality plays in constituting Judaic systems. Second, I have used divinatory and textual (or “rabbinic”) hermeneutics as my two recurring examples of the way in which information is organized in Judaic systems. I used the former mostly in contrast to the latter, but also showed how new forms of textual divination emerge with written texts. Literate systems and minds are not necessarily better than oral or non-literate systems. By citing the example of divination I showed how ritual technologies generate the same movement from analogue to digital without robust forms of reading and writing. Third, I have sought to be specific about the affordances of literary technology. In the process, I presented working definitions of Judaic systems and religion. I argued that intersubjectivity was at the core of both, so examined the 177

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modification of intersubjectivity in literate contexts, focusing in both ontogenetic and phylogenetic terms on intersubjective technologies, cognitive effects and environmental niches. Scholars in the past have trodden in dangerous waters when they put Judaism and biology in the same boat. They succumbed to a version of the naturalistic fallacy, for they confused what is to what ought to be. They thought that what we find in nature is the way things are supposed to be (see de Waal 2009: 30). One of the main arguments that I hope has come out of this book is that “nature” and “culture” are so thoroughly mixed up, not only in human species but perhaps also in some primates, that we have very little ground to differentiate them. I have not used biological arguments to make explanatory claims but rather as hermeneutic tropes to guide more humanistic endeavours, understanding the particular historical forms that Judaic systems have taken. I have been careful not to offer a normative definition of what constitutes a Jew; thus, any particular folk definition of who counts as a Jew is not what interests me. What interests me is in part how Judaic systems do the defining for us, through a complex matrix of personal choice, law and biological descent. However, one element that persists through all forms and all individuals is a focus on text. Text, broadly defined, is central to Judaic systems. Of course, there has been wide variation of how texts are experienced by individual Jews, depending on geographic, social and historical circumstance. For example, in some Jewish traditions women are not trained to read the written Torah in the same manner as men. Similarly, at various times and places, impoverished Jews may have had a very infirm grasp of Judaic texts and rituals. Nevertheless I think the concept of text as the “Word of God” – set down in ink, yet accompanied by oral interpretations that are also authoritative, espousing the value of the interpretive process for understanding the mind of God – has a centre of gravity in Judaic systems that is impossible to replace. It is this interaction, between text and minds over time, that I have sought to understand in the course of the book. I have also sought to understand the interaction between text and mind over time. I do not think individual Judaic minds inside Judaic heads are the locus of Judaic systems. Neither is a Judaic system some disembodied superstructure floating in space. Rather, Judaic systems are embodied in minds that themselves are situated and distributed in space and time. Mind is simply the general concept we use when we interpret things (humans, gods, animals) as intentional agents. But since intentionality and agency are so thoroughly tied up, for humans at least, in a social fabric that includes language, it is probably only half right to say that our intentions, goals and desires are our own. Or, at least, it is difficult to extract our own intentions from the social matrix that surrounds us. Are there really Judaic minds, characteristically different from other minds? I do not know. Certainly many scholars agree that, in Europe at least, there was something of an “old ghetto psychology” (Goldfarb 2009: 322) or “ghetto of the mind” (24) that had come to characterize the Jews living in Europe in the pre-modern 178

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centuries; this fact had both positive and negative implications and consequences. We can also agree that something exceptional happened to European Jewry when the ghetto’s walls and shtetl highways were opened. As we have seen, many scholars attribute the exceptional flourishing of Judaism in the modern age to this mind. For example, Michael Goldfarb, in his book Emancipation, describes the flourishing as the result of three related factors. The first, an idea that he attributes to the nineteenth-century French literary critic Bernard Lazare, is that it was due to the Talmud as the “center of education and life”. The Talmud was “the unified theory of everything” that brought Jews “scattered to the four corners of the earth” together in a common language. The second, an idea he attributes to Freud, is the idea that being an outsider frees one from the preconceived ideas of a dominant culture; in other words, being Jewish in Europe led to a kind of iconoclasm that was rewarded in the modern age. The third, an idea that he attributes to the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, is that the dominant culture simply would not let Jews forget they were Jews, and that they were different (Goldfarb 2009: 348). It is quite common for minority groups in certain populations to become overachievers, so certainly this is not unique to Jewish history. In this case, probably some combination of the biocultural story told in the last chapter and Goldfarb’s social-historical story is right. It also happened that industrialization in Europe, the new age of science, and the dawning of civil rights for Jews were going on right as the walls came down in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. These disparate events are probably not all that disparate. Jews, confined to certain professions, especially professions of intellect, had for centuries valued those pursuits above all else. They did not look out into the natural world and see romantic wonder and beauty. There were no great Jewish estates where thinkers would go to commune with nature. Instead, subjectivity in Judaic systems was turned to the world of text and tradition. When the walls fell, this was the form of Jewish subjectivity that defined itself in the modern age. Other forms were to follow. In the modern period the virtual aspect of Judaic networks made Jews an easy target for anti-Semites who represented Jews as if they were in control of a clandestine organization that controlled the world. This tendency was exacerbated by the fact that Jewish networks were well positioned when they were finally liberated and were used to drive industrialization in Europe during the modern period. This was, of course, not due to a grand conspiracy, but systematic causes, such as the fact that Jews were both outsiders and insiders in European cultures. When the ghetto walls fell, in Germany for example, Jews did flock towards media, and mediated-money, trades. Towards the end of the nineteenth century in Germany, seventeen out of the twenty-one daily newspapers had “Jewish connections”, and 40 per cent of the directors and managers of banks were of “Jewish origin” (Goldfarb 2009: 262). This was partly because in those years Jews were still not afforded full civil rights to work in any occupation they wished. When the ghetto walls fell many Jews also took up other arts, primarily literature, drama and music, as the few trades they were allowed to pursue. In light of the conclusions of 179

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this book, the media arts were natural places for Judaic minds to turn because they fundamentally concern multilevel hermeneutic decoupling. In his magnum opus, which I have just had the pleasure to read before sending this book to press, Bellah struggles to some extent in trying to characterize “ancient Israel” as an axial culture/religion (Bellah 2011: 595). He struggles because he follows Merlin Donald’s assertion (see especially Donald 2001b) that the central aspect of the axial mood was theory in the Greek sense of “syllogistic reason”: logic-driven thinking about thinking (Bellah 2011: 283ff., 313, 595). Bellah equates the axial mood with what Donald called “theoretic culture”. For Donald, theoretic culture was built on top of, and was distinct from, the narrative culture that preceded it, and that Bellah equates with archaic religion. When Donald discusses theoretic culture, he is basically talking about science, and since there was very little indication that ancient Israel and early Jewish cultures had much interest in science, this represents a problem. Bellah loosens his definition to include ancient Israel because Israel clearly had a form of “secondorder” thinking as represented in stories of the Biblical prophets. Bellah argues that the meta-discursive criticism of kingship in the prophets, as well as the allegiance to divine covenant that crucially involves a personal relationship between an individual and God – representing a new type of reflection on the self – are both central to the axial mood. For once God is one the individual can be one too (Bellah 2011: 317). In particular, it is second-order thinking about ethics that sets Israel apart as an axial religion. In his conclusion, Bellah even goes so far as to suggest that rabbinic communities were closest to the axial utopia that is still the limit point for second-order ethical thinking, because rabbinic communities had no delusions of political power (Bellah 2011: 596). He is shrewd enough to see that the modern state of Israel changes this situation drastically, saying: it is perhaps ironic that as a result of the great emancipation of the Jews in modern times, the immemorial hope of return to the promised land could be combined with modern nationalism to create the state of Israel, which is no more utopian than any other modern nation – indeed, which faces all the tensions between ethical ideals and practical exigencies that are endemic to state organization. (Bellah 2011: 597) All of these points are well and good. Throughout this book, I have tried to describe the micro-evolution of this shift to second-order thinking as a movement between analogue and digital thought. But I do not think theory in the sense of logic-driven reason in particular is what set the axial breakthroughs apart. Bellah hints at a solution at some places in his massive text, particularly getting at it towards the end (he notes two kinds of theory on page 596). It is not theory in the sense of science but theory in the sense of criticism that marks the change, for he suggests that the “ancient Israelites … were using narrative in a new way, to do what today would be called ‘narrative theology,’ that was effectively the functional equivalent of theory” (Bellah 2011: 322). 180

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In concluding his section on ancient Israel, he takes the book of Job as an important exemplar of such thinking. If ancient Israel did not have science, it clearly had argument, even argument with God: “the idea that there are alternatives that have to be argued for” (Bellah 2011: 275). This argument was not presented in the form of a syllogism but in the form of a narrative. Furthermore, the narrative showed a meta-discursive awareness of the argument, and this in the end is what ancient Israel shares with Greek theory. Bellah’s view of the axial innovation towards theory thus ultimately locates a similar distinction as Bruner set up for us in Chapter 2, between analytic and narrative modes of thought (Bellah 2011: 274). Bellah rightly quotes Stephen Geller’s assertion that the tool for understanding Biblical thought is not “logical argumentation but literary interpretation, not abstract analysis but concrete exegesis. The result will be less a logos, a theory about God, and more a lexis, a reading of Him” (Bellah 2011: 314, citing Geller 1996: 31). All four of Bellah’s axial cultures indeed share forms of “second-order” thinking, or what Bellah also calls “offline” thinking. I have argued that what allows that thinking to persist is its institutionalization in schools or monastic orders, largely made possible, or at least “routine” by literacy as a form of meditation or contemplation that loosens the boundary between time, space and self (Bellah 2011: 591). For Bellah, what sets teachers in such schools apart is not that they are renouncers – though they share with them intellectual homelessness, mobility, the founding of schools or orders, and the pursuit of serious play – but denouncers, critical to power from the outside (575). This particular revolution, of “gymnasium and synagogue” (321), does not really get going until some centuries after the original prophets of the axial age such as Socrates, Jeremiah, Confucius and Buddha. We can be sure that each axial culture and religion is unique in its own right. In the Jewish case, the rabbis inherited the axial mindset. I have argued that the particular religious and ethical requirement of literacy in Judaic systems – which start in effect with ancient Israel and in particular the Deuteronomical tradition that Bellah lends considerable focus (305ff.), and from which rabbinic culture mostly derives – sets such systems apart even from other axial cultures.

BE A GOOD BOY

I would like to conclude by returning to our reading of A Serious Man, with which I began the book and have interspersed references throughout. Larry Gopnik’s troubles are framed by visits to three rabbis who are at various stages in their lives: the young rabbi, the middle-aged rabbi and the old rabbi. The characters in the film seem to agree that the older a rabbi is, the more wise his teaching. Larry is having marriage troubles, and is trying to understand why his life has taken such a turn. The physicist’s “why”, the why of causality and material relations, cannot answer such questions, so he turns to the rabbis for answers. The first rabbi 181

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offers a mystical answer to the question, referring to the Kaballah; he says that Larry is failing to recognize that HaShem is everywhere, even in the Shul parking lot. Larry’s problem is a problem of perspective, of not recognizing divinity in the mundane aspects of life. In other words, God is present even in negativity and suffering. Let us call this the distributive mode in Judaism, which asks individuals to give up the perspective of their individual mind and local situation and to try to see things from a godly perspective. This answer does not satisfy Larry very much, except when he gets stoned later in the film with his seductive neighbour. The second rabbi, Rabbi Nachtner, listens to Larry’s problems, which have intensified because someone he knows has just died in a car crash “at the same instant” that Larry had his own car accident. The second rabbi responds asking, “how does God speak to us?” He answers his own question with “the story of the Goy’s teeth”, which is narrated to the song “Machine Gun” by Jimi Hendrix. A Jewish orthodontist is doing routine work on a non-Jewish patient one day and discovers a Hebrew word engraved on the back of the patient’s teeth. The word is ‫הושׁיﬠני‬, “help me”. The doctor spends days and nights trying to figure out what it means. He cannot sleep or eat. Is this a message? A sign from HaShem? Should he be more helpful to his neighbours, a better person? The doctor eventually goes in to Rabbi Nachtner to ask for help, in the same way as Larry. The rabbi’s story ends at this point, and Larry asks, “so, what did you tell him?” The rabbi is surprised by the question, and wonders if it is relevant. On urging from Larry, he says, “a sign from Hashem? We don’t know. Helping others? Couldn’t hurt…” Larry cannot get in to see the third rabbi. Rabbi Marshak is too old and important, and at this point in his life he only consults with bar mitzvah boys after their ceremony. So Larry’s son, Danny – who also happens to be having his bar mitzvah while all of Larry’s troubles are going on (and this is not unrelated to his problems) – gets to see the third rabbi in place of his father. The old rabbi slowly begins to speak, and we recognize the lines from the Jefferson Airplane song that has been a theme throughout the film: “When the truth is found to be lies / and all the joy within you dies … den vat?” At the beginning of the film, Danny was listening to the song on his techno-magical transistor radio when his Hebrew school teacher took it away from him. The rabbi then gives the names of the members of the Jefferson Airplane and gives Danny back his portable radio. His last statement to Danny for the consultation is then: “be a good boy”. I see the third rabbi indeed as the wisest, providing an example of the way in which Judaic systems adapt to new technologies. The original new technology for Judaic systems was of course literacy. The core messages are about love (for the answer to “then what?” is: “don’t you want somebody to love?”) and being a good boy. Judaic texts are not defined by one particular medium alone, whether it is inscriptions on a goy’s teeth or some other technology. The message of the second rabbi conveys the impossibility of knowing the mind of HaShem, concluding with the pragmatic answer that in light of that uncertainty one should do good deeds (Mitzvot). We might call this Spinozistic position “Nachtner’s wager”. While the 182

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third rabbi has a similar message (love, be a good boy), he conveys it quite differently, by quoting lines from a text that Danny can understand. In an excellent review of the film, Jason Kalman (2010) has a similar reading, seeing the statement “be a good boy” as the fundamental moral of the book of Job, at least among post-Holocaust interpreters. For whether the calamities Larry experiences throughout the film are “the acts of a capricious diety, or are simply the result of the unfolding universe, the only appropriate response is to ‘be good’” (Kalman 2010: 54). In the face of uncertainty and chaos, “being ‘a good boy’ is about doing what is right without concern for reward or punishment”. This is a lesson Larry has not learned, since he cheats at the end, but Danny at least has the opportunity. We are obviously meant to compare Larry to Job in the film, one of the original theodical characters who asked why the righteous suffer. Kalman compares the Coen brothers’ answer (to “den vat?”) to Woody Allen’s, another great Jewish filmic genius. For Allen the answer had more to do with finding somebody to love. At least, this is the case in his film Manhattan, where Allen says to his lover “You’re God’s answer to Job. You would have ended all argument between them. He’d have said ‘I do a lot of terrible things but I can also make one of these.’ And Job would’ve said ‘OK, you win.’” As Kalman notes, Allen’s answer to the question involves no moral imperative and probably just leads to more suffering, hence Allen’s explanation of his affair with his adopted daughter: “the heart wants what it wants”. This heart must be the double heart (levav) that the rabbis discussed in the Talmud (noted in Chapter 1), with both its inclinations. For the Judaic systems that have been my basic concern throughout the book, rabbis are the teachers and guides, but they are also the primary authorities who police the system’s borders. They decide who gets in and who gets out. Focusing on rabbinic texts does not give us a perfect picture of Jewish life on the ground, especially that of women and people of low status. I do not want to discount that there are many other perspectives one could take on Judaism. The relation between Judaic systems and Jewish identity is complicated. As stated throughout, I think the category of Judaic system is much broader than we have come to understand in the modern age. Historical trends – most notably, the formation of nation-states following the Enlightenment, with the eventual establishment of the state of Israel – have had a deep impact on Judaic systems and subsequent Jewish identities that have emerged out of them. As we saw, Judaic systems go by the name “Israel”. In the modern era something new has happened, as Rich Cohen (2009) puts it in the title of his insightful book on modern Jewish identity, and echoing Bellah’s assertion about the modern state of Israel to some extent: “Israel is Real”. The future interaction between genes and culture, genome and epigenome in Judaic systems is completely open and indeterminate, so we cannot predict what will happen to them in the context of new technologies and new environments. If we are at the cusp of a new axial age (Bellah 2011: xix), we certainly would not know it, for it is for future historians to decide. We can be certain, though, that digital technologies are just the beginning of the story. 183

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notes

1. INTRODUCTION 1. I choose not to capitalize the word “god” in most cases throughout this text, since capitalizing it adds theological baggage I hope to avoid as much as possible. 2. Other species also cognize, even plants, which exchange “information” with their environment and make predictions in order to survive and reproduce. To say that plants have cognition is another way of saying that all living things have cognition on some level, because they are self-regulating systems that must interact with their environment in order to survive and reproduce (Calvo and Keijzer 2009). 3. I owe this formulation to the collective work of the young scholars at the Mellon Workshop in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience and the Humanities at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford University), Summer 2011, and especially Joshua Rothman. 4. For a useful picture of how Foucault’s views compare with a cognitivist way of thinking, see his debate with Chomsky, “Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky: Human Nature: Justice Versus Power”, in Arnold Davidson, ed. (1998). I think a proper examination of this productive meeting of the minds has yet to be written, though I cannot do so in the confines of the present text. 5. For more on this definition and the debates, see Frankenberry (2002). 6. For more on this idea, see Fine (2001). 7. For more on the complexities involved in such attributions, see Levy (2012). 8. See Penner (1999). 9. To be sure, the human brain is not disproportionately bigger than the brain of our closest fellow primates. This means exceptional human cognitive capacity is not the result of some remarkable explosion of neuronal capacity but more likely the result of a critical mass of neurons hitting a computational tipping point (Gladwell 2000; Ellis and Larsen-Freeman 2006). Much of the “control” in human cognition probably comes from the ability of some neural systems to inhibit the activity of other systems. Human cognition is thus less about where the brain lights up, and more about where it does not. 10. I think the technology of literacy gradually evolved/developed, and is still in that process, so it is wrong to refer resolutely to something happening “before” or “after” its emergence. The point is that literacy and cognition have continual feedback effects towards one another. 11. For his theoretical investigation of superhuman invisibility, see the illuminating description in chapters 2 and 4 of Faces in the Clouds (Guthrie 1993). 12. Note that the term “rabbinic thought” is a partly fictive term when applied to the formative period of Judaism, since it is likely teachers of that age did not refer to themselves as “rabbis”; more likely they referred to themselves as sages (h.akhamim). 13. Bellah follows Stephen Geller’s argument about Deuteronomy as crucial to understanding the axial transition in Judaism. The focus on the heart as the centre of the self in this respect

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comes out in both Bellah’s and Geller’s argument (see Bellah 2011: 314ff.). Bellah writes, quoting Geller (1996: 50), “The first part of Deuteronomy 4 established a new form of religion in which the text is raised to the level of God Himself, in a sense is God”. Bellah asserts, with Geller, that the Shema is a statement not only about the oneness of God, but also about the oneness of a self that has a personal covenantal relationship with God – thus setting up a breakthrough idea of the individual or soul. As Bellah notes, the “key term” for Jeremiah, the Deuteronomical high prophet, in this respect is “heart (lēb)” (Bellah 2011: 317). 14. For my own views about the relation between film and religion, see Levy (2011b). I think film (and television) has replaced literature as the main means of religious self-reflection.

2. WHAT IS COGNITION? 1. Chomsky (2005) lately takes the LAD concept, which he now terms the FLN (faculty of language narrow), in a different direction than psychological reductionists like Pinker. For Chomsky language did not evolve for communication but for “expression”. Religion might have come about through a similar process. 2. See Penner (1999) and Jensen (2009) for insights on this problem. 3. Prayer, in Judaism, is called the “worship of the heart”, see Benor (1995b). 4. Unfortunately, to develop these criticisms fully would require a book-length volume of its own, a worthwhile project in its own right but impossible to carry out here. Please consult the bibliography for further reading. 5. Indeed the notion of “genetic information” is a metaphor (Griffiths 2001). The contrast between the standard model and alternatives is analogous to the contrast already found in the domain of biological sciences between the standard gene-centric models of biology and alternatives such as developmental systems theory (or DST for short). It is not simply that this juxtaposition is illustrative as an analogy, but further, I would argue that we gain more than metaphorical insight into the biological foundations of religion by taking a deeper look at the comparison. 6. Davidson wrote in his intellectual autobiography: In 1993 I gave the yearly Spinoza Lecture in Jerusalem. I had always known that my view of the relation between the mental and the physical was Spinozistic in being ontologically monistic but conceptually dualistic, but on rereading Spinoza after many years, I discovered an interpretive puzzle and a convergence of my position with Spinoza’s of which I had not been aware. Spinoza was sometimes called a dualaspect monist, and so was I. He also claimed that there were two causal chains, one connecting mental events, and a parallel one connecting physical events. The puzzle was that he denied that there are causal relations between the mental and the physical. This seems an outright contradiction: if mental event A causes mental event B, and B is identical with a physical event, how could one deny that a mental event has caused a physical event? … The way to understand Spinoza, I decided, was to see him as not distinguishing between what I would call the (extensional) relation of causality and the (intensional) relation of causal explanation; what he was affirming was only that the second relation between the mental and the physical failed to hold. This would construe him as denying the possibility of definitional or nomological reduction of mental concepts to physical concepts. (Hahn 1999: 63–4) 7. For an interesting exposition on how the mind–body problem relates to Spinoza from a neuroscientific perspective, see Damasio (2003).

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8. See also Frankenberry (2007). 9. This is admittedly a very short summary of Pust’s robust argument. Please consult his paper for further reading. 10. For more on religion as niche construction, see Bulbulia (2008). 3. CONTROL 1. Thus access is primarily what differentiates the memorization technology that allowed for the Vedas and the writing technology that allowed for the Bible. For a critique of Goody concerning his overlooking the Vedas, see Holdrege (1996: 413–20). I treat Boyer’s discussion of “literate guilds” in Levy (2011a). 2. Though he does not cite him, “Portable Homeland” is a term coined by the Jewish German writer Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century (see Goldfarb 2009: 240). 3. This verse comes in the context of the banned practices of the “Holiness Code”, which is “generally thought to contain an originally independent legal corpus which was later edited from the perspective of the Priestly School”, where other forms of “magic” are also banned. As with most of the Hebrew Bible, scholars dispute the date of its composition. See Friedman (1996), entries “magic” and “holiness code”. The polemic also appears in 2 Kgs 21:6; 2 Chr. 33:6; Deut. 18:19–22; Lev. 19:26, 31; 20:1–6, 27; Exod. 22:17; 1 Sam. 28; Isa. 8:19; 57:3; Ezek. 22:28; Mal. 3:5. 4. For more on relevance and literacy, see especially Ramos (1998) and Clark, H. (1987, 1996). For Davidson, see Dasenbrock (1993). 5. Brink notes that for Davidson (1999) perceptual saliency is a contextual feature “connected to how much effort it takes to perceive an item. The most salient features are the ones that can be picked up with the least effort. Usually these are the ones that contrast against our expectations” (Brink 2004: 191). 6. It is best to read Davidson for oneself. For charity and radical interpretation, see Davidson (1973); for first meaning, see Davidson (1978, 1986); for triangulation, see Davidson (1984a); for a unified picture, see Davidson (1991). There is also a large secondary literature; see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson. 7. Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”, (season 5, episode 2) originally aired 30 September 1991. 8. Though Carston (2002) disagrees. 9. Simon Baron-Cohen confirms he knows of no studies examining the relation between autism or mentalizing and literacy (personal correspondence, October 2005). Three recent dissertations discuss the relation between theory of mind and literacy more explicitly (Knotek 1996; Anderson, W.-B. 1998; Holman 2004). See also three studies on the effects of literacy on the functional organization of the brain (Castro-Caldas et al. 1998; Morais and Kolinsky 2000; Petersson et al. 2001). There is little empirical research studying the effects of literacy on mentalizing abilities. There are, however, a few empirical studies on autism and literacy. One is Frith’s brief discussion in Frith (2003). She claims that autistic people who can read (i) tend to prefer written communication over face-to-face contact, and (ii) tend not to read for overall meaning, paying more attention to individual words (Frith 2003: 125–6). She notes a study she carried out on this topic (Snowling and Frith 1986). 10. Though Davidson is concerned primarily with belief, very early on he pointed out that the indeterminacy between meaning and belief is related to the indeterminacy between belief and decision. While semantics involves truth as a function of both meaning and belief, decision theory involves preference as a function of beliefs and desires. In this light he has called for a “unified theory of meaning and action” that involves a “heightened indeterminacy due to interdependence of meaning, belief, and valuing” (Hahn 1999: 530).

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11. The basis of my understanding of divination comes from Garfinkel (1984), Tambiah (1990), Zeitlyn (1990), Abbink (1993), Cryer (1994) and Tedlock (2001). 12. I would argue that in Abbink’s (1993) example, this “real” round takes place after the woman’s death (see his note 29). The diviner was successful in part because the participants believed that the divination predicted her death. This temporal dimension is crucial for understanding how divination works. 13. See Giddens (1984: 200–201, 260–61). Note that Giddens has a monolithic conception of “writing” as a blanket phenomenon; it is not situated in any way, though his approach (structuration theory) does not in general run counter to the idea of situated or embodied literacies. 4. NETWORKS 1. Strack and Stemberger (1996: part one, IV) dispute this also to some extent. 2. For a detailed account of the neuroscience of literacy, see Dehaene (2009). 3. Davidson (2001c) lays out the notion of triangulation primarily in a number of his famous essays, including: “The Second Person”, 119–21 “The Irreducibility of the Concept of the Self ”, 87–8; “Indeterminism and Antirealism”, 71–83; “Epistemology Externalized”, 201–3; and “Three Varieties of Knowledge”, 212–17, among others. 4. The Oxford English Dictionary defines triangulation as “the tracing and measurement of a series or network of triangles in order to survey and map out a territory or region, spec. by measuring the angles and one side of each triangle”. 5. Dimock’s article also addresses the role that the perceptive medium, ear or eye, plays in literature, though her points cannot be pursued here. Note also Ellen Spolsky’s critique of Dimock’s picture of resonance (Spolsky and Dimock 1999), finding fault with the theory because it is too metaphoric and focuses too much on the aural/oral dimension of noise instead of, for example, “kinetic-sexual awareness”. Spolsky thinks there may be a way to make it more empirical, concluding that, “different senses produce different kinds of knowledge, which are differently valued in different contexts; resistance or noise is important, but what counts as noise changes”. In the same article, Dimock replies to this critique by invoking Kuhn and saying that current natural science will have to be revised before the picture of resonance she lays out can be made less metaphoric, but she hints that the initial steps in this direction are to be found with cognitive scientists interested in semantics like Douglas Hofstadter, who have “devoted their efforts, not to the grounding of language in brain structures, but to the creation of a more-or-less free-floating register of fluid analogies”. 6. Ricoeur goes on to ask, “is writing only a question of the change in medium?” and answers, no, it is far more, enunciating four basic changes: (i) “the possibility of transferring orders over long distances without serious distortions” may be connected to “the birth of political rule exercised by a distant state”; (ii) “the fixation of rules for reckoning” is referred to “the birth of market relationships, therefore the birth of economics”; (iii) “the constitution of archives, history”; and (iv) “the fixation of law as a standard of decisions, independent from the opinion of the concrete judge”. 7. I am indebted to Roger Friedland for these points, which echo van der Toorn’s description of Mesopotamian sources. 5. RATIONALITY 1. For more on the notion of metarepresentation, start with Sperber (2000a, b). 2. As noted, for the first example, see Boyer (2001, 129). The term decoupling was taken up first in psychology, primarily by Leslie (1987).

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3. Suk. 28a; BB 134a. 4. For more examples, see Strack and Stemberger (1996: 29). 5. Dating of the text is disputed. Dates range from Kaplan’s estimate of the eighteenth century bce to around the sixth century ce by Graetz (Kaplan 1997: xiv; Graetz 1846: 102ff.). 6. It is interesting to note that in the latest competition between Google and Microsoft, Microsoft is trying to brand their search engine, Bing, not in fact a “search engine” but as a “decision engine”. 7. This, incidentally, is what distinguishes string theory from quantum science – because it has not yet come up with any testable predictions. 8. On CP clauses see the insightful points in Day (2007: 55, 60–61). 9. For a similar presentation of the two systems, Greek and Judaic, in relation to science, see Kauffman (2008: xii and throughout). 6. NAMES 1. My own exposure to this notion came from Tomasello, who gives credit to Gibson and Rader (1979); see Tomasello (1999: 84). 2. But, of course, the point is debated among philosophers just how distinct names are from other types of nouns, and whether we need a theory of names at all to account for them. 3. These data were gathered using the Accordance Bible Software Program, 2007 (Oak Tree Software). 4. For more on this argument as it relates specifically to religion, see Day (2004). 5. In an effect called SNARC (spatial numerical association of response codes), the direction in which one’s written language goes (right to left for Hebrew for instance), will determine the perception of the direction of one’s number line with regard to the relation between 0 and infinity (for Hebrew writers infinity is to the left). 7. HYPERTEXT 1. I place the notion of carrying information in quotation marks because I am not convinced it is an apt metaphor for what goes on during communication. I am suspicious of the very idea of information disconnected from a communicative context, just as Griffiths (2001) is suspicious the notion of genetic information when disconnected from an epigenetic environment. See note 5 for Chapter 2 above. 2. I have written more about this connection elsewhere (Levy 2006: 64ff.). For more on the relation between literacy, democracy and religion, see Benedict Anderson (1983), especially chapter 5. His ideas about the connection between media technology and religion probably come ultimately from Max Weber and Walter Benjamin. 3. Early (and late, for that matter) forms of Christianity should also be considered Judaic systems, though some of the details I claim apply to Judaic systems (such as attitudes towards Yahweh) obviously become modified in Christian attitudes and practices. A detailed comparison of the systems is well beyond the scope of this book. In other words, I consider both “Judaism” and “Christianity” Judaic systems. In terms of the logic of digitization, it makes sense to say such logic returned strongly to Christianity after the Reformation. Similarly, local forms of Judaism show analogue and digital elements to varying degrees. 4. For an English version of the argument, see Mendels and Edrei (2007). 5. Although Mendels and Edrei clearly provide some evidence for a distinction between “western” and “eastern” forms of Judaism, the consequences that I draw are probably more difficult to cash out in terms of the historical record. In this respect I plead guilty to the charge

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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of anachronism throughout this chapter. The distinction I am making between “Greek” and “rabbinic” forms of hermeneutics is as much a conceptual distinction as a historical one. Maimonides fits within what Wheeler and I are calling “Greek” philosophy because he thinks the truths of religion can ultimately be vindicated by philosophy, by nature. For more on Wheeler’s ideas about Maimonides, see Wheeler (2000: 265 nn. 15–16). For example, Wheeler argues that in distinction to Maimonides the rabbis thought God omniscient only about things that were knowable. In other words, Moses ben Maimon makes God a philosopher’s god, whereas the rabbis retained a more anthropomorphic conception. This is connected to the point about the magic language. For Wheeler’s rabbis, God speaks a human language, while for Maimonides, God speaks a magic language of forms, a perfect language of “metaphysically complete speech acts” (Wheeler 2000: 265 n. 16). Of course, neither Maimonides nor the great scholars of the Vienna Circle would accept that their philosophy appeals to magical language; this is precisely the reversal, following Wheeler, that I have in mind. With regard to the Talmudic period, I admit that ours is probably an idealistic reading of rabbinic thought and that there was probably a great diversity of opinions. But this is precisely the point, for Wheeler’s chapter is entitled “A Rabbinic Philosophy of Language”. For the long list of commentaries on this sugya, see Rubenstein (1999: 34, n. 1). Jonathan Rosen also mentions the story; see Rosen (2000: 86–9). Rosenblatt and Sitterson (1991: 2–3). Actually, the Talmud pretty much condemns everyone involved except Rabbi Akiba, because he showed compassion. This reading also highlights a distinction between rabbinic and mystical conceptions of language in the sense that the Talmud is very focused on the human dimension of such narratives whereas mysticism is focused on cosmic dimensions. See Song of Songs Rabba. Translation from The Soncino Talmud (Brooklyn, NY: Judaica Press, 1973). Davidson makes a similar point in his intellectual autobiography in Hahn 1999. See note 6 from Chapter 2 above. For more on the comparison, see Van der Burg (2007). See Day (2007: 55). The rabbinic and scientific modes perhaps come back together, after early modern Judaic the emancipation, in the notion of “Jewish Science”, the fascist label for modern physics. The main target of the polemic was Albert Einstein, who, though he believed God did not play dice with the universe, did postulate a fundamental and paradoxical relation between matter and energy that classical German physics never accepted. For an older (but good) summary, see Collins (1995: 75–93). For example, see Philo, De Vita Mosis 2.52. Of course I intend the parallels between the standard model of the cognitive science of religion and Platonic magic language to be obvious to the reader. See Derrida (1991), an essay that explores the indeterminacy of translation – that is, the idea that a translation is always overdetermined, always a confusion, and an act producing something new. Derrida pursues these issues through a reading of the Biblical story of Babel (Genesis 11), in which he sees Yahweh punishing humanity with the gift of difference – here, specifically, difference in tongue. Humanity is punished for trying to give itself a pure name – that is, one name. For Derrida a sacred text is translatable in epitome; that is, it begs for translation from those who read it. Each act of translation is the production of something new – not mimesis, but coordination. Though the problem is a characteristic of all language (idioms, metaphors, and other plays) for Derrida, it is shown most acutely in proper names, like Babel, that are by nature untranslatable. Derrida notes a double bind of translation: the command to translate, yet the “impossibility” of translation. This problem is most explicit in terms of the unpronounceable name of God. For an alternative to Wheeler’s or Heidegger’s interpretation of logos, see Wolfson (2004: chapter 8).

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18. See, for example, Holdrege (1996) and her discussion of the Torah as heavenly blueprint for creation (196ff.). See note 5 (this chapter) for my apologies about the ideal typical distinction I am drawing. 19. See Guthrie (1993: 241, n. 1). Guthrie provides this term as an alternative to “superhuman agent”. 20. The Midrash on Psalms, ed. S. Buber (New York, 1947: 452), cited in Boyarin (2003: 100). 21. Of course, Christians do try to understand the actions of Jesus, as a perfect exemplar. Elucidating the theological differences with regard to these points is well beyond the scope of this text. 22. To the extent that some rabbis, many of whom were mystics, accepted this idea, it is a misnomer to label the alternative “rabbinic”. Perhaps “talmudic” works better, but this designation still has problems. I have followed Wheeler in my terminology for better or worse. 23. In the sense given by Merlin Donald in, among other essays, Donald (1997). See Chapter 1 for more on Donald. 24. A number of books in recent years have argued that we would be better without Internet technology, most notably Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing our Brains (2010). Among other things, he argues that the ubiquity of sampling – and in particular the newest incarnation of sampling in the form of hyperlinks, which literally and figuratively transport readers – is a great distraction. 25. See Craver (2007), especially chapter 4. 26. See Basil and Pylkkanen (2005).

8. ENVIRONMENT 1. For some other related problems of traditional evolutionary psychology, see Buller (2005a, b). 2. See note 24 from Chapter 7 above. There has been surprisingly little investigation of brain behavior related to the consumption of the Internet. In Carr’s widely noted study, he ironically has sparse evidence to present about the effect of the Internet on brains. Much of his study is guesswork about the presumed effects of literacy based on the observation of behavior. An exception to this rule in Carr comes in a study he cites that compared the neural mappings of expert users of the Internet with novice users and found considerable brain difference in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Carr claims that the Internet is a source of distraction because we have to search and make decisions while reading, thereby overloading our cognitive resources. Hypertext itself has the distraction of links built right into it. However, it seems the critique of the Internet Carr and others make is not something inherent to the technology but a fallout of the way that the technology is used. 3. By pointing to Judaic systems as an example of the process I want to highlight, I am not making the claim that it is only in the Judaic case that processes like it are in place. Bellah (2011) makes the case for four transformative axial civilizations: Israel, Greece, China and India. Literacy was an important factor in all four. Furthermore, in making the case for a biological account, I am not claiming that historical factors, such as the emancipation of Jews in Europe during the nineteenth century play no role in the story about modern Judaic minds. Quite to the contrary, I am looking for a suitable way to integrate insights from the mind sciences into the study of Judaic systems that does justice to both biological nature and the irreducible contingency of history. 4. For a good summary, see Senior (2005). Senior notes, among other things, that Cochran is involved in the new eugenics movement. The primary controversy is around whether the

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

four sphingolipid diseases that target Ashkenazi Jews and are related to intelligence developed through random selection processes or directed selection. Senior (2005) reports her surprise at the head of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman’s rather favourable response to Cochran’s argument: “‘If it’s a genetic condition,’ he says, ‘it’s not for us to embrace or reject. It is what it is, and that’s the way the genetic cookie crumbles.’ I detect a note of pride in his voice.” For a somewhat controversial take on this point, see Chua (2004). For more on this Malthusian logic, see Clark and Hamilton (2006). Though I cannot develop it here, I think the last chapter of Donald (2001b) has profound implications for the argument I make. For the term “ratcheting” as applied here, see Tomasello (1999: 37–40) and Levinson (2005: 10). The theory is laid out in detail in Searle (1995). For example, songbirds can imitate and invent vocalizations, chimpanzees can attribute mental states, tamarins and macaques may even be competent at limited serial order learning. However, “no species other than humans has a comparable capacity to recombine meaningful units into an unlimited variety of larger structures, each differing systematically in meaning” (Hauser et al. 2002). (Hauser et al. do note, however, that with regard to MERGE, “little progress has been made in identifying the specific capabilities that are lacking in other animals”.) This “heart of language” does so as a powerful interface between the sensory motor system and the conceptual-intentional system (Hauser et al. 2002: 1576). As Chomsky writes elsewhere: An elementary fact about the language faculty is that it is a system of discrete infinity. Any such system is based on a primitive operation that takes n objects already constructed, and constructs from them a new object: in the simplest case, the set of these n objects. Call that operation Merge. Either Merge or some equivalent is a minimal requirement. With Merge available, we instantly have an unbounded system of hierarchically structured expressions. The simplest account of the “Great Leap Forward” in the evolution of humans would be that the brain was rewired, perhaps by some slight mutation, to provide the operation Merge, at once laying a core part of the basis for what is found at that dramatic “moment” of human evolution, at least in principle; to connect the dots is no trivial problem … Perhaps the earlier steps really took place, but a more parsimonious speculation is that they did not, and that the Great Leap was effectively instantaneous, in a single individual, who was instantly endowed with intellectual capacities far superior to those of others, transmitted to offspring and coming to predominate, perhaps linked as a secondary process to the sensory-motor system for externalization and interaction, including communication as a special case. (Chomsky 2005: 11–12; see Corballis 2011 for an argument for a more gradual transition)

12. See “Food Magic and Mnemonic Gestures” in Marcus (1996) for his extensive descriptions of the ritual in various texts. 13. For a fuller picture of these mechanisms, they should perhaps be juxtaposed with Tomasello’s points about the ways in which uniquely human forms of culture modify previous (animal) forms of social cognition; see Tomasello (1999: 210). 14. Though the point is debated, I think religion in general is not an evolutionary adaptation, and is neutral or detrimental often with respect to fitness. Harris (2006) gives the example of Catholic priests discouraging the use of condoms in Africa, despite the HIV and AIDS epidemic. For more on the strange logic of adaptation, see Moalem with Prince (2007). For

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the most recent critique of the use of functionalism in the study of religion, see Penner (2003: 390–92).

CONCLUSION 1. This is not to say that similar digital processes were not active in other parts of the ancient world. Indeed, China and India, according to Bellah (2011) and others, were the two other axial breakthroughs.

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210

Index

A Serious Man 2, 25, 60, 79–80, 175, 177, 181 the three rabbis 26, 60, 103, 175, 181–3 Abbink, J. 60–61 abstraction 49, 75, 102, 107, 113, 115, 130, 152 accounting 20, 151–2, 168–9 acrophonic principle 152 adaptation 16, 148, 155 adolescence 155 affordance(s) 98, 112, 114, 134, 177 age-4 transition 2, 158–9, 167–8, 176 agriculture 14, 93, 152, 166–7, 171 and control 47 Allen, Woody 183 alphabet 84, 163, 171 analogue/digital 16, 25, 69, 100, 140–43, 157, 176–7, 180 continuous versus discontinuous 4, 119 gods 122 number line 113 “on” versus “off ” 114, 119 analytic–synthetic distinction 135, 137 “antilanguage” 73 anti-Semitism 149 archive(s) 50, 67, 86, 109 Apollonian versus Dionysian 33 artificial selection 147, 155, 170 ASPM 152 astrology 92–4 as “strange worship” 94, 134 attention 12, 58–60, 177 in communication 54, 108 and divination 60–63, 87, 94 joint 57, 64, 69 and literacy 124 to mental states 16 attribution 22, 47, 54, 59, 60, 81, 108 authority 34–5, 49, 64, 75, 76, 82, 134

autism 58n auto-domestication 155, 170 axial age 2, 65 Bellah, R. 15, 64, 168, 180–81 “breakthroughs” 52, 182 Eisenstadt, S. 51 Jaspers, K. 52 new 183 Baron-Cohen, S. 58–9, 69, 158–9, 168 Bellah, R. 9, 15, 68, 180–83 on criticism 65, 82 on denouncers 181 on deuteronomism 181 on “seeing” 92–3 on syllogistic reasoning 180–81 on theory 93, 180 belief 4, 6, 7, 47, 55, 59n, 59–60, 86, 159–60 Bible Code 79, 84, 103 Bickhard, M. on age-4 transition 159, 167 “knowing levels” 168 binary 75, 114, 140 binding see Tefillin biology and DST 40–41, 44–5 and Judaism 7–9 relation to culture 12–14, 145–52, 158 relation to the study of religion 5, 176, 178 birds and divination 87, 93 and language 157n naming 107 birth 94, 163 Bloch, M. 18, 42 blood 19, 22, 61, 140, 141, 164–6 Bloom, P. 40 body 1, 8, 13, 72, 97, 103, 140, 154, 164–5 flesh 122

211

Index

heart as centre 21 see also mind Boyarin, D. 31, 34, 35, 130, 131, 138 Boyer, P. on academic guilds 32–5, 49 on ritual 81 on writing 169 bottom-up versus top-down 42, 173 brain 1–5 and cognition 19–22 and names 108 cortex 168, 185 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex 147n fusiform gyrus 108 and hormones 152, 170 hypothalamus 165 information 140–42 neurological tipping point 15, 29 plasticity 150, 154 and technology 10, 16, 69, 147, 151 waves 140–42 breast cancer 7–8 feeding 155, 164 breeding see artificial selection brit milah see circumcision Bruner, J. 33–5, 47, 91 on “lifelikeness” 34–5 Buddhism 18, 103 Bulbulia, J. 44n, 173 Buller, B. 39 critiques of evolutionary psychology 13, 145n bureaucracy 50, 52, 169 by-products 3, 6, 149, 157 cake 106, 162–3 Carr, N. 140n, 146, 147n causation 43, 119 Davidson on 41, 57, 71, 91 downward forms of 41, 98, 150, 163, 173 folk versus science 40, 91, 94, 95 relation to religion 30 literacy 169 in open systems 89, 146 charisma 51, 63 cheating 34, 170, 183 childhood 23, 72–3, 98, 123–4, 141, 152–71 chimpanzees 107, 112, 113, 160 China 68, 147n, 176n

212

Chomsky, N. 10, 30, 30n, 157n, 157–8, 160 chunking 125, 140, 142 circumcision 163 cities 14, 52, 169 Clark, A. 145, 154 on material symbols 85, 111–15 extended mind 21 Coen, Joel and Ethan 26 see also A Serious Man cognitive artefacts 44, 78, 96, 98, 157 texts as 2, 45, 87 Cognitive Science of Religion 3–4, 23–4, 28–32, 37–9, 43, 102–3 Cohen, “Israel is real” 183 commandments see Mitzvot communication 3–6, 16, 32–3, 158, 165 theories of 46–76 competition 52, 65, 81 complexity 1, 9, 15, 41, 44–5, 133, 160, 176 computers see technology consilience 29, 30, 31, 36 constructivism 9, 35 content 11, 22, 96, 102, 115, 128 as intersubjective 54, 56–61 of religion 36, 39, 42, 47 conversation 29–30, 55, 62, 129, 143 coordination 57, 137n, 141 copying 109, 114, 142 copyright 117–18, 120, 123 CP (ceteris parebus) 89–90, 90n, 132 Craver, C. 41, 45, 89, 140n creativity 5, 12, 48, 64, 88, 120, 158 criticism 52, 110, 135, 180 cycles 43, 63, 155, 156 dairying 171 Damasio, A. 40n, 108 dāraš 83, 134, 140, 175 Darwin 13, 43, 133, 146, 147 Davidson, D. 34, 53–73, 57n as against “magic-language” theory 126, 132 on anomalous monism 45, 132 on causation 91 on quotation 124 on the principle of charity 55, 61 on radical interpretation 53 and religion 38 on scheme-content dualisms 135–6 and Spinoza 39–40, 133 Davies, P. 109–11

Index

Day, M. 1, 6, 90n, 109n De Waal, F. on the naturalistic fallacy 178 Deacon, T. 15–16, 30, 36, 154, 170 death 17–18, 19, 40, 67, 73, 78 in A Serious Man 25, 26 decoupling 17, 73, 81, 157–60 deconstruction 48, 126, 132 definition of divination 82, 85 of Judaism 7, 11, 177 of religion 5, 11n Dehaene, S. 69n, 113 democracy 120, 121n Derrida, J. 126–7, 132, 137n desire 11, 41, 42, 58–60, 59n, 63, 81, 178, 188 determinism 1, 13, 23, 38, 126–7 indeterminacy 59n, 126, 137, 137n technological 50, 66 under- 135, 137 development 23, 58, 69, 72, 98, 152, 155, 156–76 Developmental Systems Theory (DST) 43–5 diabetes 171 Diamond, J. 13, 47, 169, 171 diaspora 8, 12, 117, 125, 148, 172 digital see analogue/digital Diodorus Siculus 93 discrete infinity 157, 157n displacement 61, 75, 81, 124 distributed cognition 85, 87, 108–11, 115 divination 75, 128, 146, 177 domestication of 48, 51–3 and goal demotion 81 mechanistic versus interpretive 60 polemics against 23 as research 83, 122, 134 and science 49, 80–98 textual 78 and theories of communication 60–66 dolphins 107 domestication 14–15, 47–8, 147, 155, 166–7, 170–71 Donald, M. 15–16, 140n, 150, 180 dopamine 165 double-subject construction 97, 99–100 dualism natural born 40 scheme-content 38, 135–7 Dubreuil, B. 159–60 Dummett, M. 72–3, 78

Dunbar, R. 86, 168, 170 Durkehim, E. 17 dybbuk 25 echopraxia 79 education 27, 52, 68, 70, 74, 92, 123 related to Judaism 45, 129, 162, 172, 179 see also schooling effects of literacy 25, 48, 51–2, 58n, 64–9, 70, 74, 78–9, 147n, 167, 175, 187 Einstein, A. 133n El 7, 99, 115 electricity 2, 76, 140, 141, 165 emancipation 133n, 147n, 148, 179–80 embedding/disembedding 35, 38, 54–5, 63, 70, 81, 124–6, 152, 157–60, 167–8, 176 see also recursion emergence 15–16, 25, 58, 100, 167–9 emotion 7, 87, 130 and food 155, 164, 172 and heart 20 empiricisim dogmas of 135–6 endocrine system 164–5 social regulation of 166 entrainment (synchronization) 140–41 epigenetics 1, 119n, 162 epistemology 13, 35, 71, 87, 176, 188 eugenics 149n evil 19, 20, 25, 26, 93 evo-devo 152 evolution 8, 11, 15, 147–9, 152, 169–71 of biblical books 109 and causation 40, 44, 95 of childhood 155 of religion 9, 160, 168 evolutionary psychology 13, 145, 145n explanation 12, 31–5, 41, 45, 89–95 externalism 41, 70 eye direction 58–9 faces 51, 69, 76, 108, 129 faculty of language narrow 30n, 158 see also MERGE falsity 42–3, 59, 63, 70, 80, 82, 90, 160 feedback 2, 13, 39, 44, 66, 147, 150, 154, 166, 170, 171 feeding crisis 155 fertility 95, 166 fire 170 focus 12, 57, 60, 62, 87, 88, 108, 177

213

Index

folk psychology 3, 31, 36–7, 41, 45, 48, 52–3, 62, 91, 94 food see emotion format 69, 110, 112, 122, 141–2 Foucalt, M. 10, 10n founder effect 8, 148 Frankenberry, N. 7, 11n, 38, 42 freedom 120–21, 133, 176 friendship 32, 117, 129, 130 Frith, C. 41 Frith, U. 58 functionalism 90, 92, 171n Geertz, A. 1, 29, 38 Geertz, C. 7, 12 Geller, S. 20n, 181 Gematria 84, 96, 139 genetics and ethnicity 7 gene-centric views 43 and Jews 8–13, 44, 147–9 relation to phenotype 1–2 ghetto 148, 178, 179 of mind 178 Giddens, A. 78, 87 authoritative versus allocative technologies 64 space-time control 23, 65–7 Gladwell, M. tipping point 15n, 160 Goldfarb, M. 141, 178–9 Goody, J. 47–52, 64, 78–9, 105, 169 Google 87n, 103, 120 as verb 87 Gould, S. J. 9 grammar 17, 34, 56, 102, 115, 157 graven images 11 gravity 40, 78, 91 “Greek” versus “Hebrew” thinking 34–5, 96, 125–7, 134, 137–9, 176, 180–81 Grice, P. 57–8 guilds 32, 35, 49, 149, 169, 187 Gunn, G. 74, 78 Guthrie, S. 17, 37, 138 haircut 163 Halivni, D. 134 HaShem 3, 7, 26, 60, 98, 100, 122, 175, 182 Hashkes, H. 135–7 heart

214

in Judaism 18–21, 20n, 36, 83, 106, 128, 163–4, 183 physical 2, 141 see also levav Hebrew Bible Deut. 6:4ff. 20, 103 Deut. 7:9ff. 103 Deut. 18:10ff. 51 Deut. 26:16 19 Deut. 30:11ff. 127–8 Deut. 33:4 106 Gen. 11 137n Gen. 30:35ff. 147 Gen. 33:41ff. 147 Gen. 52 59 Exod. 6:3ff. 97, 99–100, 102 Exod. 20:4 11 Exod. 35:1 84 Lev. 1:1 106 Lev. 20:6ff. 51 Lev. 24:11 97 Num. 6:24ff. 103 1Kings 22 83 Heisenberg, W. 2, 39 see also uncertainty principle of the mind Hendrix, Jimi 182 higher-order labeling 112–14, 167 history and evolution 98, 145, 159 individual 37, 91; see also development and Judaism 2, 10–14, 44, 99, 122, 179 of religions 176 and writing 65, 78 holism 41, 45 “Homemade boat” 27 see also Neurath’s ship hominid adaptation, the 155, 164 honey 106, 162–3, 166–7 hormones 164–5 humanities, the 1–9, 45, 146, 177 hunting 166, 170 Hurricane Katrina 97 iconoclasm 17–18, 121, 179 idols 78 indeterminism see determinism index 108, 115, 153 India 68, 147n individualism 180 methodological 3, 27, 30, 44

Index

industrialization 179 infinity 139, 157 information 4, 44, 47–9, 53–8, 62–5, 80, 84, 88, 107, 139, 170–72 inhibition 15n, 160 institutions 33, 38, 45, 50, 62–8, 78, 126, 129, 150, 156–60, 169, 171 intellectuals 35, 48–52, 62, 181 intelligence, debates over 148–51, 172 Internet 22, 115, 117, 121, 139–49 intersubjectivity 16–17, 33, 54, 58, 65–78, 129, 177–8 intertextuality 75 irreducibility 33, 36–8, 70, 132–3, 140 see also reduction Jaffee, M. 68, 73, 76 Jaspers, K. 52 Jefferson Airplane 103, 182 Jensen, J. S. 22, 25, 31, 31n, 33, 37, 38 jest 31, 35 Job 26, 138, 181–3 Kaballah (Jewish mysticism) 3, 26, 79, 83, 98, 137–8, 182 Kanzi 16, 17, 76 Kauffman, S. 90n Ketef Hinnom amulets 103, 104 knowledge 19, 45, 70, 71, 76, 78, 80, 88–9, 126 labeling see higher-order labeling language as complex 2–3 learning 36, 67, 70, 154–9 origins 15–16, 30, 36, 154–9, 170–72 rabbinic 123–8 and religion 37, 47 and thought 58, 85, 111–15 Language Acquisition Device (LAD) 30 Lawson, T. 30, 37, 81 laws in science 21–2, 26, 40, 89–92, 95 in theology 8, 51, 127, 137 layers 5, 54, 69, 76, 110, 113, 117, 129–31, 140, 153 Lessig, L. 117–23, 139, 142 levav 18–20, 36, 37, 159, 164, 168, 183 see also heart levels 5–7, 15, 27–9, 41, 44–5, 54–5, 85, 100, 106–18, 133, 156–9, 167–9

Levi-Strauss, C. 169 Levite and Cohen Haplotypes 148 light 2, 20, 94–5, 101 life-cycle 154–5, 161–2 limit 3, 30, 64, 112, 133 Lisdorf, A. 80–81, 86, 92, 94 literacy see effects of logic 18, 180 logos 127, 137, 181 love 20, 103, 171, 182–3 lying 83, 170, 182 magic 51–2, 80–81, 99–102, 105, 126–7, 162, 175 majority rule versus minority opinion 127–9, 131, 134 manna 166 Marcus, I. 105–6, 161–4 marking 8, 102, 107, 112, 119, 152, 162–3 Marshak 26, 103, 182 mashal 130–31 materialism 31, 38, 41, 44, 68 McCauley, R. 1, 30, 37, 81 media 16, 23, 75, 114, 118–21, 134, 139–40, 180 see also technology memory and authority 64 computer 76, 114, 140 human 21, 108, 141 storage 49, 73, 78, 125, 140, 162, 163 working 15, 23, 60, 112–14, 160 Mentaculus, the 79–80 mental states 5, 11, 15–18, 40, 58–9, 122, 159, 170 mentalizing 16, 62, 65, 82, 159, 176 MERGE 157, 176 metabolism 164–5, 166 metaphor 130, 145 metarepresentation 17, 54, 81, 92, 112, 123, 125, 139, 159–60 method 3–5, 22, 30, 32, 39, 93, 132, 139, 175–7 mind to body relation 17, 40, 40n, 58, 103, 132 mirror neurons 69 Mitzvot (commandments) 19, 20, 32, 128, 161, 182 monism 133, 137 see also anomalous monism

215

Index

morals 25–6, 122, 127, 139, 158 Moses 19, 99, 162, 163 motion 19, 22, 58, 63, 94, 132 music 22, 49, 120, 125, 142, 179 mystery 2, 3, 26, 36, 49 narrative 31, 34–7, 57, 88, 91, 94, 146, 180–81 “nature” 7, 9, 15, 44, 63, 80 “human-” 13, 45 Neoplatonism 126, 137 neurons 1, 21, 22, 40, 69, 112, 141, 165, 170 neurohistorical model see Smail, D. neurotheology 3–5 natural selection 13, 15, 43–4, 133, 147, 155–6, 170 necessary and sufficient conditions 6, 89–91 Neurath’s ship 27, 40 see also “Homemade boat” Neusner, J. 6–7, 10, 110, 122, 131 nervous system 4, 15, 22, 165 niche construction 15, 44, 143, 146, 150, 167–73, 178 noise 4, 75n, 140–43 normative cognition 2, 7, 31, 33–7, 45, 102, 160 number line 113 numerosity 15–16, 18, 20, 36, 79, 84–5, 92, 108, 112–13, 157, 168 see also shapes Olson, D. on effects of literacy 123–5, 139, 167–8, 176 on quotation 124–5, 142 oneness 20, 20n ontology 20, 127, 132 orality 16, 69 organisms 39, 43–5, 149, 165, 170 organization 48, 52, 65, 95, 97, 101, 108–11, 115, 147, 154, 168 oven of Akhnai 117, 121, 127–38 Passover 106 patterns 9, 12, 40, 59–60, 63, 79, 111, 141, 142 Penner, H. 7, 37–8, 89–90, 158 perceptions 2, 75, 112, 119 personhood 50, 60, 70–71, 108, 180 Pharisaism 67

216

phenotype 13 relation to genotype 1, 133 phonograph see technology physics and causation 94 laws in 40, 91 contrasted with the mental 25–8, 132 physiology 10, 103, 106–8 Picard, Captain 57 Pinker, S. 167 plastic representation of deity 18, 121–2 see also iconoclasm and shapes Plato 9, 15, 92–3, 123–6, 134, 137–8, 175 play 34–5, 160, 167, 181 Pleistocene 13, 38, 145, 146 polemics 23–5, 45, 48, 51–3, 65–6, 82, 162 possession see dybbuk power 12, 52, 65, 76, 78, 117, 156, 164, 167, 180 pragmatism 32, 45, 47–8, 135–6 prayer 19, 21, 90, 141 prediction 49, 63, 82, 84, 88–96 priests 23, 51–2, 65, 93, 99, 102–3, 117 prime numbers 15, 16, 18, 36 Preus, J. S. 83, 121, 134 prophecy 50–52, 67, 82–3, 96, 107–10, 123, 134, 138 propositional attitudes 5–6, 9–11, 42, 55–6 propositions 41, 54 see also shapes Psalms Scroll from Qumran 101–2 pseudo-science charges of 24, 91, 94, 176 psychotropy see Smail, D. Pust, J. 41 Pyysiäinen, I. 49, 78 Quine, W. 2, 17, 70, 126, 135, 136 Qumran 20, 73, 101–2, 105–6 quotation 80–82, 107, 123–5, 130–31, 142 rabbinism 67, 73, 135 race 12, 44 and racism 8–9, 147–9 ratcheting 151 Rava 35 reading 16, 34, 58, 62, 64, 78, 121, 181 fever (or fury) 10 see also literacy reasons as causes see causation

Index

record keeping (recording) 50, 72, 75–6, 119, 142, 152, 169, 176 recursion 55, 157–60, 176 reduction 113 charges of reductionism 1–2, 28 ontological 5–6, 41 in science 13, 27 see also irreducibility reflection 2, 4, 35, 63, 64, 76, 121, 180 Reformation, the 68, 121 relations 3, 58, 70, 73, 76, 98, 113 Relevance Theory 32–3, 53–64 renounciation 18, 181 representation 12, 22, 59, 111–12, 121–2 representationalism (and anti-) 3–4, 36, 47 reproduction see sex research see dāraš resonance, theory of 69, 75, 78 resources, cognitive 16, 62–5, 111–12 Ricoueur, P. 75, 76, 76n rites of passage 106, 154–62 ritual 4–6, 14, 45, 50, 64, 81, 85, 105–6, 158 see also rites of passage Rorty, R. 6 Rosen, J. 117, 122, 128n, 139–40 Rubenstein, J. 128n, 129–30, 134 rules 20, 64, 110, 122, 134, 156–8 Sabbath 43, 84 sacred 64–5, 101–2, 106, 137n, 141 “Sacred Emily” 101 Salmon, N. 42, 102 sampling 117, 123 Schniedewind, W. 73, 78, 83, 103, 105 school rituals 105–6, 160–64 schooling 45, 68, 92, 123–4, 129, 155, 161–3, 179 see also education Schmandt-Besserat, D. on origin of writing 72, 84, 151, 169 science 1–6, 27–9, 34, 40, 51, 176, 180–81 and divination 80–82, 88–95 and literacy 49–50, 79 see also “Greek” versus “Hebrew” thinking scribes 52, 69, 76, 84, 110 scrolls 7, 11, 98, 101–2, 106–10, 167 searching 16, 26, 34, 36, 81, 103, 117, 140 search engines 140 Bing 87n Google see Google

Searle, J. on status functions 156–7 on institutions 158–9 Sellars, W. 127, 135–6 second-order reflection 15, 35, 65, 119, 121, 124, 158, 180–81 Sefer Yetzirah 84, 138 sefirot 84 self 18, 35, 42, 58, 176, 180–81 semantics 28–9, 36, 40, 42, 45, 59n, 123, 128, 139, 157 Serious Man, A 2, 25, 60, 79–80, 175, 177, 181 the three rabbis 26, 60, 103, 175, 181–3 SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) 16, 36 sex 12, 147, 155, 165–6, 170–71 Shaimos Box 106 sharing 54, 56–9, 61, 68–9, 70–71, 120 shape(s) 15, 36, 112, 121–2, 142, 151 see also propositions and numerosity Shavuot 105, 160–62, 166 Sheba the chimpanzee 112, 114, 158, 160 Shema, the 19–21, 20n, 103 sight 56–8 signals 36, 107, 119, 140, 165 signs 20, 23, 60–63, 84, 124–5, 142, 152–3 Smail, D. 12–14, 164 neurohistorical model 10, 12, 177 on psychotropy 10 Socrates 29, 34, 92, 181 Song of Songs, the 171 soul 17–18, 21, 186 see also mind to body relation and self speech 39, 55 contrasted with writing 48, 73–5, 80–82, 112, 123–7, 168 Sperber, D. 49, 81n see also Relevance Theory Spinoza, B. 3, 11n, 39, 44, 132, 133, 139, 176, 182 Stamma’im 129, 131, 137 “standard model” of CSR 27, 30, 37–47, 135, 155 statistics 3, 13, 92 status 154–60, 164, 183 Steiner, R. 155 Sterelny, K. 43, 44 structuralism 23, 30, 38, 158 superhuman agents 11, 16–18, 42, 47–8, 62, 65, 81–3, 92, 97, 121

217

Index

sweetness 106, 162, 164, 166, 167 symbols 36, 85, 95–6, 98, 111–15, 121, 140, 158, 162 Sørensen, J. 81 tablets 50, 106, 121, 152, 162–3 Talmud 19–20, 34–5, 122, 171–2 argumentation 129–30 Avodah Zarah 94 b. Baba Metzia 59b 118, 131–2 b. Baba Batra 21a 161 b. Berakhot 9a 129 b. Berakhot 63b 130 comparison with Internet 139–43 layout 109–10 b. Megilla 7b 31 Pirke Avot 3:18 84 Pirke Avot 5:21 161 b. Pesaþim 49a 171 b. Sanhedrin 93b 129 Tambiah, S. 80, 88, 91 Tarski, A. 56 Tay Sachs Disease 148 teachers 43, 67–8, 70, 73, 106, 117, 162–3, 167, 181, 183 see also schooling technology 23, 47, 52, 98, 155, 166, 175, 182 computer 3, 28, 76, 87, 89, 114, 117, 120, 139–40 language as 112 literacy as 10, 15, 64, 146–7 phonograph 75–6, 119–20 storage 64–5 symbolic 16 telegraph 169 television 120, 147 time-keeping 72, 85 Tedlock, B. 87–8 Tefillin 20, 103, 105, 164 temple 11, 19, 50, 67, 109, 117, 121, 122, 129 temporality 43, 65, 72, 74, 75, 78, 94, 140, 158, 162 tetragrammaton 7, 11, 80, 99, 102, 122 theology 3–5, 36, 96, 102, 133, 180 theory 29, 37, 88–9, 92 ad hoc 56–8 game 172–3 “magic-language” 127 passing versus prior 56–61

218

theoretical culture 150 theory of mind 16, 58–9, 66, 86, 92, 94, 124, 159–60, 164, 167–8, 176 see also mentalizing token versus type 36, 100–102, 113, 122, 140–43, 151–4, 167–9, 176–7 see also analogue/digital Tomasello, M. 98, 98n, 151n tools 16, 20, 51, 97–9, 108, 155 Torah scroll 11 translation 28, 30, 111 triangulation 56, 60, 63–4, 70–74, 132 truth 29, 34, 35, 54, 92–3, 176, 182 and Davidson 55–7, 70–73 see also falsity uncertainty principle of the mind 2–3, 39, 176, 182–3 universals 36, 146 urbanism 14–15, 146, 149–50, 152, 162, 171–2 see also cities Vedas 49n, 64, 112 virtuality 117, 122, 148, 158, 179 voice 62, 107, 127, 131, 140, 141 war 20, 57, 83, 129, 145, 146, 148 water 60, 63, 106, 121, 131, 163 weather 63, 93, 98 tornado (whirlwind) 13, 26 weening 155 see also feeding crisis Wheeler, S. 126–8, 132, 134–5, 137, 139 Whitehouse, H. 37, 169 Wiebe, D. 38, 94 Williamson, T. 86 Wilson, E. O. 13 wisdom 3, 93, 103 Wittgenstein, L. 126 Wolfson, E. 137n women 8, 10, 148, 162, 166, 170, 178, 183 “word of God” 178 words 20, 43, 85, 101, 113, 122–5, 127, 137, 154, 163, 168, 182 yad 11 Yahweh 19–20, 52, 83, 99–100, 103, 105, 115, 167 YouTube 120