2012-2013 Academic Catalog

Dec 07, 2025

2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HIST 241 - Jewish Popular Culture

Type of Course: Seminar

Most people associate Jewish tradition with rabbinic creativity. Until the age of print, rabbis had a near monopoly on Jewish writing; but the books they wrote, most Jewish men and women could not read. Although what masses of ordinary Jewish people considered Judaism developed in dialogue with rabbinic creativity, historians face enormous difficulties reconstructing Jewish people’s culture. In this seminar, we will explore interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of popular religion and social practice and read primary sources with a view toward uncovering the traces of Jewish experience and expression that lay beyond the pale of rabbinic texts that inform the history of Judaism. We will consider questions related to the role of gender and class, the place of deviance and unbelief, interaction with non-Jews, tensions between orality and literacy and the critical impact of technology, most significantly that of print and other forms of mass media such as film in the domestication of Jewish law and custom and the vernacularization of Judaism between antiquity and the modern age.

Prerequisites: Writing History or at least one upper level course in the humanities.