Thread by @Doc_RPS

On the things we think we know, the stories we tell ourselves, and the serendipitous acquisition of new knowledge: a thread.

1. My beloved institutional home is the high school whose sports scores I like and whose Color War I livetweet. But I also am a research fellow at @Hartman_Inst, and was preparing a class for their Muslim Leadership Initiative about the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish world.

2. I grew up in that world, and retain an insider's knowledge and deep appreciation of it (my siblings and their families are all in that world), even as the haredi world and I have been amicably separated for a long time.

3. To help the MLI fellows understand how the haredi world constructs its own identify, understands/defines itself, I wanted to share some of the oft-cited texts, sources, dicta of my education and upbringing.

4. One that if I heard once I heard a thousand times was the Midrash that the Jews merited redemption from Egypt for three reasons: that they did not change their names, their language, and their dress. They held onto these cultural markers of distinctiveness even in slavery.

5. Understand: I don't just mean that I heard this concept. I can quote it to you in rabbinic Hebrew.

So I went looking for the source to include in my source sheet, and couldn't find it.

6. Looked here, looked there. Searched databases of Jewish texts. Tried variant spellings; advanced searches. I got various accountings of what Jews did to merit the Exodus, but never that canonical list of three.

7. Assuming I was being stupid and missing something obvious, I turned to Google. Where I found this blog post:

kotzkblog.blogspot.com/2017/02/113-fa…

"The Famous Midrash Which Doesn't Exist."

8. Even better: the paper he cites which runs this nonexistent Midrash to ground is this one by @Adderabbi, a Twitter-and-real-life-friend.

academia.edu/28574595/_They…

Jewish geography--you can never escape it!

9. Turns out, there were various different Midrashic sources listing different reasons (and different numbers of reasons) the Jews merited redemption. No Midrash lists these three and only these three together.

10. A 16th century source refers to all three together, probably (as per @Adderabbi) because the author was working from memory, didn't have the texts in front of him, and made an inadvertent mashup.

11. And there things lay until the 19th century when rabbis responding to Emancipation and the Reform movement found this articulation of the praiseworthiness of retaining these measures of cultural distinctiveness useful, and ran with it.

12. There's a direct line from that Hungarian ultra-Orthodoxy emerging in response to Emancipation, Enlightenment, Reform to my teachers endlessly citing a source that doesn't exist. (At least not in the works it was cited from.)

13. a. that was a really neat thing to learn.
b. it was neater to find out that I went looking here there and everywhere to circle back to someone I knew.
c. Norton Wise was right.

14. Norton, my thesis advisor, never let his graduate students use the word "influence" (as in: Darwin's influence on Christian thought, or whatever.) That made it sound as though the work or idea went out in the world, and made people do stuff. Put agency in the wrong direction.

15. Instead, he said, let's talk about resources. When someone wants to make an argument or advance a position, what resources are available to them? What can they draw on? What do they choose to draw on?

16. In this case, that "resources rather than influence" is clear. A mistaken concatenation of different midrashim appeared and sat in a 16th century Italian text, until it was very useful in 19th century Hungary, and was elevated to the point of a universal truism.

17. So I was taught it--drilled it--in 20th century Brooklyn, NY (find me anyone who grew up in the haredi world who doesn't know that triad. You can't), and I will be teaching it to North American Muslim leaders in a couple of weeks.

18. Takeaways:
a. historiography is awesome
b. all roads lead to @Adderabbi
c. Identity-fashioning is a conscious, complex, contingent business. And "tradition" is not just "tradition."
d. history of science is the best intellectual training for everything.

/fin