In recent years, there has been no issue that has convulsed academia and
its role in society more stridently than the personal politics of its
institutions: who has access to education? How does who you are change
what you study and how you engage with it? How does scholarship
reflect the politics of society - how should it? These new essays from
one of the best-known scholars of ancient Greece offer a refreshing and
provocative contribution to these discussions.
What is a Jewish Classicist? analyses how the personal voice of a
scholar plays a role in scholarship, how religion and cultural identity
are acted out within an academic discipline, and how translation, the
heart of any engagement with the literature of antiquity, is a
transformational practice. Topical, engaging, revelatory, this book
opens a sharp and personal perspective on how and why the study of
antiquity has become such a battlefield in contemporary culture.
The first essay looks at how academics can and should talk about
themselves, and how such positionality affects a scholar's work - can
anyone can tell his or her own story with enough self-consciousness,
sophistication and care? The second essay, which gives the book its
title, takes a more socio-anthropological approach to the discipline,
and asks how its patterns of inclusion and exclusion, its strategies of
identification and recognition, have contributed to the shape of the
discipline of classics. This initial enquiry opens into a fascinating
history of change - how Jews were excluded from the discipline for many
years but gradually after the Second World war became more easily
assimilated into it. This in turn raises difficult questions for the
current focus on race and colour as the defining aspects of personal
identification, and about how academia reflects or contributes to the
broader politics of society. The third essay takes a different
historical approach and looks at the infrastructure or technology of the
discipline through one of its integral and time-honoured practices,
namely, translation. It discusses how translation, far from being a mere
technique, is a transformational activity that helps make each
classicist what they are. Indeed, each generation needs its own
translations as each era redefines its relation to antiquity.
