Political Scholarship
My wife and I just got back from a trip to Costa Rica, and I was finally able to go through the dozens of emails and blog posts which were waiting for me upon our return. There have been some very interesting posts by a number of people in the last week or so. First, Manuscriptboy has written a compelling post which included some personal ruminations about his career-path and academia. Besides the practical question about “whether I will survive in the cut-throat world of academia”, he asks,
[W]hether as even a successful academic I would be contributing something worthwhile to the world. A lot of the research out there is just fodder for people’s anger at the communities they come from, belong to or wish they belonged to. I don’t feel comfortable with all that negativity. Maybe that’s one reason why I focus on the Middle Ages…
There are so many people out there helping others in a real way – including plenty of people in liberal arts. But how much practical good can come of manuscript studies and the history of medieval Halakhah?
To begin with, any type of scholarship which adds to our understanding of the human experience throughout history is “contributing something worthwhile to the world.” Knowing more about where we have come from, what were our communities and cultures like, including how and with what they expressed themselves through written and/or oral culture, is very important. Whether one studies their own civilization, literature, etc., or a foreign one, one of the driving forces, although not the only one, is often a “lust for knowledge,” the desire to know more about humanity, the world, etc. I would also claim that much scholarship, often very good scholarship, is driven by a personal political agenda. “Political” all too often has negative overtones, but it is my opinion that almost all scholars are drawn to a certain subject area for similar reasons to those that MB notes, whether it be anger, alientation, a personal quest for meaning, a desire to uncover that which we wish had existed, or some similar mutation of such a desire, and there is nothing wrong with it. When it does become problematic is when we consciously alter the evidence in order to present a certain picture of a person, people, idea, etc., letting our biases, which we all have, get the best of us.
Since MB mentions librarians and manuscript cataloging, there is a very timely example which he himself has already noted (see also these posts at Seforim). To mark one-hundred years since his death, there already has been, and will be another, conference about the great bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider. In addition the JNUL has digitized a number of his works. From the little that I know about him, and as this post makes clear, much of his objective scholarship was far from objective and value-free. Is it any surprise that he wrote about and catalogued the cross-cultural and linguistic exchange of ideas, literature, etc.? Do these ulterior motives make political scholarship useless? Not at all, it just behooves later scholars to use it with caution. We must also realize that if nobody had any agenda, there would be very little scholarship to begin with.
Update: One can find Steinschneider’s book Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century here.