Attack of the Yeshiva University Faculty

Recently, political commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at my alma mater, Yeshiva University. He mocked transgenders as "mentally ill." Shapiro came under attack by many faculty members in a signed letter to the YU Commentator. Among the signers were some people I respect such as Steven Fine and Elizabeth Stewart. In addition, R. Shalom Carmy, the man my younger brother predicted I would be in a few decades, wrote his own letter.

I have criticized Shapiro in the past over his treatment of Islam. In this case, I do not support treating transgenders as mentally ill for the simple reason that I find the entire notion of mental illness to be meaningless. There is no empirical basis for calling anyone mentally ill. The only difference between saying that transgenders are mentally ill and saying that they are just born that way or that they are pursuing an "alternative lifestyle" is a value judgment. If you think there is something inherently bad about a transgender lifestyle then transgenders must, by definition, be mentally ill to desire to pursue such destructive ends. If, as most westerners today, you find nothing problematic about transgenderism than transgenders are not mentally ill. There is no empirical fact that could change your mind in the absence of a value judgment. What remains of mental illness is the political category of people that cannot be trusted within the framework of the social contract. For example, I could not care less if the people who believe that I am the High Comrade of the Young Elders of Zion should be deemed "mentally ill."  They need to be locked up or, preferably, sent to gas chambers. Their belief presents an implicit threat to my safety and the only true solution is to eliminate such people. 

The fact that the very concept of mental illness is absurd makes the faculty letter, in turn, very problematic. The signers point out: "Shapiro is not an expert on transgender experience or mental health, and his opinion does not reflect the current understanding of these very serious issues, in which people’s lives are literally at stake." 

I agree that Shapiro is not an expert on transgenderism, but then again no one is. We are dealing with a non-empirical non-rationalist concept so no one can claim any kind of objective knowledge about it. Even transgenders themselves can only describe their own personal experiences, not the wider experience of "transgenderism." It is important to keep in mind that psychiatry is not a science. It does not make any empirically predictive claims nor is it united by any kind of consistent methodology. Take any side you wish on the question of the sanity of transgenders and try to construct a test that might even hypothetically be valid. Therefore, an expert psychiatrist is in the same category as an expert theologian. Anyone can claim to be an expert theologian. Therefore, there can be no expert theologians.   

Because we are not dealing with objective physical reality, but only with subjective personal feelings, lives, by definition, cannot "literally" be at stake. If a transgender person immediately walked out of Shapiro's speech went home and blew their brains out, Shapiro would not be responsible in the least. He did not physically cause the death nor is there any reason to assume he conspired to bring it about. If anything, the faculty is endangering Shapiro's life. It is plausible that the government will use this kind of argument to pursue ideological opponents. It should not be too difficult to find a case of someone committing suicide less than twenty-four hours after reading a Shapiro column, giving the government a pretext to arrest Shapiro for murder. (Of course, by this logic, professors can go to jail if a student commits suicide after failing a class.) It would not be unreasonable to charge the signers of this letter with state collaboration and conspiracy to initiate violence. Such charges are not physical acts of violence but are violations of the social contract.  

I would like to conclude with a challenge to those who condemn Shapiro. If Shapiro had questioned the sanity of someone, who wanted their doctor to slice off their left pinky because they felt that they were really a "nine-fingered person," would you have denounced Shapiro with equal vehemence? From a purely logical point of view, there is no difference between someone whose happiness depends on surgically altering their hands or their privates to suit their subjective conceptions of themselves. Both cases would be irrational (as would any kind of plastic surgery). That being said, as a libertarian, I accept that humans are not beings of pure logic (more Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments than his Wealth of Nations) and it is their right to pursue their subjective desires as long as they do not initiate violence against anyone. By that same logic, I accept that people will have irrational distastes for certain behaviors and will express them through mockery.         

Correction in Regards to Dr. Steven Fine and His Views Concerning Morton Smith

In the previous post I mentioned that Dr. Steven Fine believed that the late Dr. Morton Smith forged the Clement letter concerning the alternative version of Mark. He has since clarified his position, both to me and to the Biblical Archeology Review. As I often state when quoting people, "any mistakes are mine." In this case it is certainly my mistake and I take full responsibility for it; my apologies to Dr. Fine.



To the Editor

Thank you for your comprehensive and even-handed presentation of the questions surrounding Morton Smith and Pseudo-Clement.  I, for one, do not believe that that Smith forged this fascinating document.  



I understand why some suspect him, however.  Smith was uniquely brilliant, but at the same time biting, sardonic, and had very complex relationships with the religions that he studied.  The disdain of this former priest toward traditional religions was palpable, sometimes to the detriment of his scholarly writings. As one of his most loyal students wrote in a volume dedicated to Smith's memory, "Smith never tired of discomforting the faithful."  



Within my own field, the study of Judaism in the Greco-Roman period, Smith's influence has been immense.  Scholarship is only now coming out from under his spell.  



None of this makes Morton Smith a forger.  It does, however, contextualize our continuing fascination with him, as well as the lingering controversies that have followed Morton Smith to the grave.

Steven Fine
Professor of Jewish History, Yeshiva University

Director, YU Center for Israel Studies

      

AJS Conference Day Three Session One (Explorations in the Society and Culture of Italian Jewry and Death and Acculturation)

(I session hopped this one in order to listen to Steven Fine so I got parts of two different sessions.)

Explorations in the Society and Culture of Italian Jewry in the Early Modern Era
Stefanie Siegmund (Jewish Theological Seminary)
"Gendered Paradigms and Gendered Prospects: Italian Jewish Converts in the Early Modern Context"

Judith Bennett talks about the need to look at historical continuity when dealing with women. Women are continuously in a subjugated position. To apply this model to the situation of Jewish women and conversion, throughout the early modern period Jewish women were less likely than men to convert to Christianity. With the exception of forced conversions converts are overwhelmingly male. Judging from cases in early seventeenth century Rome, twice as many men converted as women. What we are looking for here is a model of non conversion. Both Christian and rabbinic sources are filled with cases in which wives did not convert along with their husbands.

Jews were more likely to convert when there were economic incentives. One would therefore expect women to convert when there was something for them to gain. Now in most cases women did not have the economic incentive that men had. On the contrary by not converting women were maintaining their status. The wife of a man who converted could still hope to get a divorce and her dowry. This would make her a free woman, outside of the control of her father or husband. Women are more likely to convert along with their husbands if they were younger and had small children. Such a women might value her personal freedom less and feel the need to keep her children.

(It may very well be true that in the situation of Rome women did get divorces. In the literature on the issue of apostate husbands leaving their wives that I am familiar with, mainly from fifteenth century Spain, husbands are not giving their wives halachic divorces, leaving them as agunot. This becomes a major incentive for women to convert. An example that comes to my mind is that Isaac Arama, who frames his discussion of who is a Jew within the contexts of apostate husbands. Saying that such people were no longer Jewish would solve a major problem; their wives would be free to remarry. The consequence of accepting these men as still being Jewish is that they are free to blackmail their wives and their wives are trapped.)


Death and Acculturation in Jewish Late Antiquity
Steven Fine (Yeshiva University)
"The Jewish Community of Byzantine Zoora: Inculturation and Jewish Identity in Late Antique Palestine"

The discovery of tombstones in Zoora gives us lots of written texts, but no context. Ten percent of the tombstones are Jewish the rest are Christian. That being said these Jewish tombstones are sources for Jewish life from the fourth to the sixth century, a period in Jewish history that we know little about. Jews here use their own calendar calculations. They were cut off from the main Jewish communities. We see lots of names starting with Yud or Chet. Inscriptions are in Greek and Aramiac. Engraved tombstones cost more and make you less sloppy. Christians have lots of crosses at the bottom. Jews have menorahs, arks, shofars, and lulavs. Both Jews and Christians have birds.

We cannot say what a symbol means. We can only talk about a range of meanings. Scholarship has been dominated by the Protestant question and has focused on Jews as a collection of sects; rabbis are seen as one among many Judaisms. We need to consider the broader common culture. The Jews in Zoora may not have been "rabbinic" Jews, but they were part of an easily recognizable Jewish culture.

AJS Conference

Here I am at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference (AJS) in Washington DC; a three day gathering devoted to Jewish Studies. It has been wonderful on many different levels for someone with my interests. I cannot think of many of places where I can accidentally run into people whom I know based on having read and admired their books. For example I was sitting in a lecture and I turned to the person sitting next to me and I see on his name tag Marc Saperstein. I also got to talk to Lawrence Fine and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. I have posted on both of these people in the past. (See here and here.) I even got to trade barbs over the History Channel with Lawrence Schiffman. Apparently he was just interviewed for a program on the Garden of Eden by a person who was trying to ask him for a geographic location. I also got to touch base with some old professors of mine from Yeshiva University such as Louis Feldman, Elisheva Carlebach, Steven Fine and Ephraim Kanarfogel. Finally there was the pleasure of running into old friends from various places. I even ran into an ex girlfriend. She did not cheat on me, lie to me, steal from me or do anything calculated to put me in a dangerous depression state so this was actually a good meeting. We left on good terms. She is now happily married and I wish her the best. I got to meet a blogging friend, Baruch Pelta, in the flesh.

While this was a vast conference and I was not able to be everywhere at once, I will be posting one the various lectures I attended. Obviously this reflects those things that interest me, mainly medieval and early modern Jewish history as it relates to philosophy, Kabbalah or messianism.
More to come so stay tuned.