Melvin Konnor's Unsettled in His Text, Entitled

Melvin Konnor's Unsettled In his text, entitled Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, the professor of Jewish studies, biology, and human anthropology of Emory University Melvin Konnor ties the unsettlement or displacement and persecution of the Jewish people to their essential identity and integrity as a people.

He asks the questions -- how did the Jews as a people survive such unsettlement and displacement so well, and keep the Jewish religion and even their ethnicity relatively intact, or at least in recognizable enough form that the Jewish religion still survives today? How did the Jewish people retain their uniqueness as a people in so many distinctive foreign territories? "Other people have suffered greatly; others have survived. But the Jews seem to garner a kind of attention focused on no other people ..

Why? That is the mystery at the heart of this book, and it took me, and will take us, through the grand sweep of Jewish cultures in time and space," writes Konner (xv-xvii) To do answer all of these complex questions, Konner chronicles the history of the Jews over the course of their collective civilization in a chronological fashion in a series of eighteen chapters. He distills his text into a series of cycles, of persecutions and creative religious and cultural responses to such persecution.

For example, the author traces the rise of ecstatic, popular forms of worship of the Eastern European Hasidism to the Polish invasion of the Ukrainian Jewish communities and the ensuing pogroms. Judaism as a culture and a faith was always in a resilient dialogue with an often-hostile gentile world, but this persecution also spawned a unity within the Jewish communities of a variety of nations that prevented Judaism from dying out.

Unsettled begins with the origins of the ancient Israelites Egypt, the first place of persecution where Jews lived in hostile territory. It then takes on the major areas of the Jewish Diaspora such as Western and Eastern Europe, Russia and America. It also includes special chapters on as Jewish communities in places like China, India and the 'hidden Jews' of the Spanish Inquisition in medieval, Catholic Spain.

Although these different environments created different forms of Judaism and different cultural responses, the responses that emerged, Konnor argued, still remained recognizably, often surprisingly Jewish in character. Throughout his text Konnor insists on the 'special' quality or significance of some Jewish rituals and rites, such as circumcision. Other cultures used this ritual as a puberty or initiation rite.

However, if one was born a Jew and practiced as a Jew, one was Jewish -- circumcision was part of the Mosaic ritual purity laws, laws that kept the Jews distinctly removed and cohesive as a people in the face of persecution. Circumcision was a covenant with God rather than a tie to a localized community, an interpretation that facilitated Jewish intellectual survival, argues Konnor, as a distinctive religious and cultural group of practice as well as of beliefs.

The fascination with, and one could even argue the cultural dominance of this minority group, argues.