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Faculty News & Notes
Scholarship in Progress: Rachel Trocchio Redefning the Parameters of her Field
Imagine yourself at a banquet, and at each banquet table there is an ongoing conversation about some aspect of the human experience—history, culture, politics, religion, art, music, and more. And imagine an endlessly fascinating fgure at this banquet, one who could join the conversation at the vast majority of tables and have something relevant and endlessly fascinating to contribute. That banquet is the world of scholarship, and the endlessly fascinating fgure represents Jewish studies, a feld that spans almost 4,000 years of human experience and within that period touches most parts of the globe. And yet, the connections between Jewish studies and other felds can still surprise. Take, for example, New England Puritanism. The Puritans’ fascination with Judaism is
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Rachel Trocchio well known, but who would think to connect them to Jewish communities in Lithuania? And yet Rachel Trocchio (Assistant Professor, English), one of the most recent scholars to join the faculty in the Center for Jewish Studies, has done exactly that in her forthcoming article on the Puritans and Karaites, “Lost Tribes East and West,” appearing in New England Quarterly 93, no.3 (Sep 2020). With regard to what she characterizes as the Puritans’ “obsession” with the Israelites, Trocchio explains:
Believing they had assumed the Jews’ place as God’s chosen people, the Puritans who traveled to the New World made meticulous study both of Jewish history and the Hebrew language. From Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where a majority of frst-generation theologians were trained, to their private studies in New England (and their new college, Harvard), early American divines traced the correlations between Puritan and Jewish experience that would promise them singular access to God’s grace.
This much has been well documented. But Trocchio has established an explicit connection not just with the broad Jewish narrative, but with the specifcally Karaite narrative, and thus with Jewish communities and thinkers not mythic but real, and far from the North Atlantic and New England environs usually associated with Puritan thought. As an important branch of Judaism, Karaism developed in the Muslim world in the ninth and tenth centuries. Karaite practice is characterized by its rejection of the authority of the Oral Law—and hence of the authority of the rabbis—insisting instead on the necessity of direct, critical study of the biblical text. Protestant scholars in the seventeenth century saw affnities between the Karaite rejection of rabbinic institutions and the concomitant emphasis on individual reading of the Bible and their own rejection of the Catholic Church and their subscription to the primacy of the Word. Based on an account of a Lithuanian Karaite community published in Thomas Thorowgood’s Jewes in America (1650), however, Trocchio has established a Puritan claim of affliation with Karaites that goes well beyond mere affnity. According to Trocchio, Thorowgood’s tome, which otherwise attempts to demonstrate that Massachusett natives were one of the ten lost tribes, includes a letter by Scottish Calvinist John Dury concerning the Lithuanian Karaite community with whom, Dury believes, the Puritans will march as an army in anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ. “By virtue of the distinctly theological registers that structure his imagining of that community,” Trocchio argues, “Dury effectively calls the Karaites Puritans.” In her essay, Trocchio proposes not only that Dury thus draws an affliation between Puritans and Karaites that several bodies of scholarship have not given its proper due, but that “as an idea and in the context of the print and manuscript networks that gave rise to it, that affliation rearranges the parameters of a resolutely Atlanticist Puritan studies that has fxated on New England.” Trocchio’s essay lays the groundwork for a much larger project in which she plans to explore the questions to which a Puritan-Karaite association gives rise: “How is exile experienced in colonial America, before demarcations of state and the rise of the ‘new republic,’ and how does one religious community’s imagination of exile—its own and another’s—serve to cohere its doctrinal commitments and its social bonds?” Trocchio reports that she is excited to see her essay in print, just as we are excited to see the future contributions of her scholarship.
Patricia Ahearne-Kroll’s New Book to Frame Upcoming SBL Section Meeting
At the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Pseudepigrapha Section will feature a forum with invited panelists on the limitations of reconstructed texts, fabula, and Judaism in Hellenistic Egypt. Aseneth of Egypt: The Composition of a Jewish Narrative (SBL Press, 2020), the new book by CJS faculty member Patricia Ahearne-Kroll (Assistant Professor, Classical and Near Eastern Studies), will serve as the springboard for discussing these broad issues in the feld. “Pseudepigrapha” refers to a broad collection of extrabiblical literature, technically those works with a false attribution of authorship, usually to a fgure from the Hebrew Bible, although the collection has come to include several unattributed, anonymous texts as well. The goals of the Pseudepigrapha Section of the SBL, according to the SBL program unit listing,
Patricia AhearneKroll include providing “a forum for scholarly discussion of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha, to encourage the broader study of pseudepigrapha for its relevance in understanding early Judaism and Christianity, and to facilitate both cross-disciplinary interaction and further integration of the study of pseudepigrapha within biblical studies.” Ahearne-Kroll has herself recently helped defne the feld, contributing the chapter, “A History of the Study of Pseudepigrapha” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Fifty Years of the Pseudepigrapha Section at the SBL, edited by Matthias Henze and Liv Ingeborg Lied (SBL Press, 2019). According to Ahearne-Kroll, the discussion at the SBL session will focus on several key issues in the feld: (1) the limitations of reconstructed texts; (2) the implications of her argument that a core narrative of “Joseph and Aseneth” can be traced back to Hellenistic times; and (3) the contextualization of Jewish literature in Hellenistic Egypt. Ahearne Kroll will be closing the discussion by proposing a future direction for Aseneth studies. Patricia Ahearne-Kroll’s developing manuscript was featured in the “Scholarship in Progress” section of the 2018 edition of this magazine. We are delighted that publication of her research is having such an immediate effect on the feld and solidifying her status as a prominent fgure in pseudepigraphic studies.
Bernard Bachrach Retires after 53 Years of Service
Bernard Bachrach (Professor Emeritus, History), one of the frst faculty members in Jewish studies at the University of Minnesota, began his career at the U of M in 1967. During his long and distinguished career, he published 23 books and more than 250 articles, reviews, and reference work entries. Longtime colleague in both Jewish Studies and History, Gary Cohen (Professor Emeritus, History), characterizes him as “a stalwart of the Minnesota history department for decades and an indefatigable scholar of the early Middle Ages who has won national and international renown for his many important publications on Merovingian and Carolingian military affairs, early stateBernie Bachrach, before he realized exactly how many more papers he’d be grading until retirement. building, and the treatment of Jews in early medieval Western Europe.” Bachrach’s scholarship and teaching have always been characterized by an absolute commitment to interdisciplinarity; medieval military history matters in part because it is a window into every other aspect of medieval history. His course, “The History of the Jews in Medieval Europe” was long a mainstay of the Jewish Studies curriculum, and he is the author of Jews in Barbarian Europe (1977) and Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (1977). Bachrach is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and served as a Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelburg. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Medieval Military History and co-founding editor of Medieval Prosopography. He received the CEE Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Minnesota in 1993 and was named a College of Liberal Arts Scholar of the College in 2000. He has also been the recipient of a McKnight Research Award. Bachrach was honored with a Festschrift in 2015, The Medieval Way of War: Studies in Medieval Military History in Honor of Bernard S. Bachrach, edited by Gregory I. Halfond (Ashgate, 2015).
Although Bachrach reportedly has a fear of heights, he has unquestionably scaled to the highest rampart of scholarship, and in doing so he has left an indelible mark on his feld and on those who had the privilege of learning from him. As Fred Astren, his former undergraduate student (BES 1979) and now Professor of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, writes:
Bernie Bachrach, my undergraduate advisor, changed my life by helping me transform a love of history and all things medieval into something serious and substantive. For me, studying under him was like earning an advanced degree even before being admitted to graduate school. After more than four decades, his work continues to impel my research and inform my teaching. It is with deep gratitude that I offer congratulations on retirement to my teacher, mentor, and friend!
To these sentiments we add our own thanks and good wishes to Bernie, who devoted his entire career to the University of Minnesota, and add our hope for much joy in his retirement.
Jonathan Paradise (Professor Emeritus, Classical and Near Eastern Studies) received the 2020 Vivian Mann Jewish Educator of the Year Award at the Minneapolis Jewish Federation Annual Meeting in August. Paradise was the founding faculty member in what eventually became Jewish Studies at the University of Minnesota; he taught at the U of M from 1965 until 2004 and continued to teach at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, until 2015. He is, however, completely unable to stop teaching; he has become the lifelong educator for lifelong learners. In addition to developing (with Ruth Paradise) The Key to Modern Hebrew and a suite of other educational Hebrew software publications (essentialhebrew.com), in his “retirement” he taught a course in modern Hebrew organized by his former student and U of M alum and life-long supporter of close Christian-Jewish relations, Jonathan Paradise JoAnn Magnuson, at Living Word Christian Center, he lectures at area churches and synagogues, teaches 16 week courses in modern Hebrew to over 25 adult learners at Beth El Synagogue, teaches a Zoom course hosted by Beth El on Israeli poetry (enrolling 29 students from the Twin Cities and as far away as Florida and Israel), and conducts a number of private, online tutorials. In addition, he has volunteered his teaching expertise at Agamim Classical Academy and the Heilicher Minneapolis Jewish Day School. He has over the years also provided to an international following a “Hebrew Poem of the Week” with commentary—now in hiatus, but with a constant demand that it be resurrected. The “Jewish Educator of the Year Award” is named after Vivian Mann, herself a beloved and respected Jewish educator in the Twin Cities for over 25 years. In honoring Jonathan Paradise’s ongoing educational contributions, the award also recognizes the deep commitment the local community has to education, and to Jewish Studies.
If you would like to help honor Jonathan Paradise, we invite you to contribute to the Professor Jonathan Paradise Fund for Modern Hebrew Language: https://makingagift.umn.edu/give/fund.html?id=4476
Riv-Ellen Prell Receives Lee Max Friedman Medal from the American Jewish Historical Society
Riv-Ellen Prell (Professor Emerita, American Studies) has been awarded the American Jewish Historical Society’s 2020 Lee Max Friedman Award Medal for Distinguished Service. The Lee Max Friedman Award Medal was established in memory of a past Society president and is awarded by the American Jewish Historical Society “to any individual, group or association deemed to have rendered distinguished service in the feld of American Jewish history.” In selecting Prell for the award, the Society wrote that she “exemplifes a model of humanities scholarship devoted to sustaining community. Her interdisciplinary work has bridged social science and history, bringing together diverse felds and academic communities.” Riv-Ellen Prell In its award announcement, the American Jewish Historical Society singles out what it identifed as “two path-breaking books,” Prell’s Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism, which won the 1990 National Jewish Book Award in Contemporary Jewish Life, and Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation, which was a fnalist for the Tuttleman Award for the best book in Jewish women’s studies in 1999. Of the frst book, the Society writes that it “set a standard for social scientifc inquiry in Jewish Studies,” and of the second the Society concludes that it radically reconceptualized American Jewish history by placing gender at its heart. This book seamlessly weaves together historical methodologies and deep archival work with cultural analyses. Prell deftly charts the conficting shifts in gender norms that placed acculturating Jewish women and Jewish men at odds with each other. She excavates the socioeconomic roots of representations of Jewish women and presented a compelling trajectory of twentieth-century American Jewish history.
In addition, the award points to Prell’s “pioneering articles in the feld,” her edited volume, Women Remaking American Judaism (2007), and the co-edited Interpreting Women’s Lives: Personal Narratives and Feminist Theory (1989), identifying her edited works as “two volumes that advanced the academic study of gender in Jewish and American culture.” Finally, the award recognizes Prell’s work on A Campus Divided:
Most recently, she curated the powerful physical and web exhibit “A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anticommunists, Racism and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota 1930-1942.” It is to date the most widely viewed exhibit in the history of the University of Minnesota and sparked a student movement to address injustice at the University. The website has been viewed by 19,000 people worldwide. The University awarded her its Outstanding Service Award in recognition of the impact of this work.
This exhibit continues to educate and motivate students at the University of Minnesota and in the Center for Jewish Studies, where both undergraduate and graduate students have turned to the exhibit and its associated documents in their research. See, for example, the feature article in this issue for how that exhibit motivated current graduate student, Jana Gierden. The mission of the Center for Jewish Studies is “to foster a new understanding of Jewish culture and history.” As the American Jewish Historical Society’s 2020 Lee Max Friedman Award Medal attests, Riv-Ellen Prell has done and continues to do exactly that.
For the full text of the award announcement, see https://ajhs.org/lee-max-friedman-award-medal
