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Journal of the American Academy of Religion Advance Access originally published online on September 2, 2009
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2009 77(3):547-572; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfp045
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Religion, Reductionism, and the Godly Soul: Lubavitch Hasidic Jewishness and the Limits of Classificatory Thought

Henry Goldschmidt

Henry Goldschmidt, Department of Religion, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 06549, USA

E-mail: hgoldschmidt{at}wesleyan.edu


  Abstract

This essay explores the limits of the classificatory category of religion through an analysis of Lubavitch Hasidic discourses of Jewishness. The Lubavitch Hasidim articulate a distinctive vision of Jewish identity based on what they describe as a uniquely Jewish "godly soul," inherited by all Jews from the biblical patriarchs. The godly soul sits, uncomfortably, on the conceptual boundaries of "race" and "religion," as these reductive categories of social analysis are typically understood. Though it may be classified in such terms, it is better described as a conceptual singularity that resists the mechanisms of classificatory thought. To understand such singular phenomena, I argue, we need to develop a social antireductionism—a mode of analysis that interrogates the categories of the modern social sciences without appealing to a transcendent space beyond the social world.

Thanks to my friends and colleagues at Wesleyan and elsewhere for their incisive critiques of previous drafts and invaluable help with comparative sources. I am particularly grateful to Ron Cameron, Nathaniel Deutsch, Ayala Fader, Peter Gottschalk, Samuel Heilman, Elizabeth McAlister, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Jillian Shagan, Jeremy Zwelling, and the JAAR's reviewers.


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