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A Gentle Caveat: The Slippery Slope of Familial Belonging - Reviewed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108606967.

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Reviewed: Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging. By Joseph E. David. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 156. $110.00 (cloth); $88.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108606967.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2022

Paul Mendes-Flohr*
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract

In Kinship, Law and Politics: An Anatomy of Belonging Joseph David offers an erudite and duly nuanced analysis of Judaism as the faith of a people bound by kinship and a faith grounded in religious law, of consanguineous and spiritual belonging. In the premodern period and prior to the onset of secularization, the relation of kinship and spiritual belonging was determined by religious law in dialogue with evolving social realities. With the eclipse of religious authority, as David astutely notes, the traditional codes of Jewish belonging were desacralized, allowing for competing ethical and social values, and visions of the good. To remedy the consequent fracturing of Jewish affiliation, David calls for a revalorization of Jewish kinship, focused on familial affection and mutual regard, which he celebrates as an ethos of care. To cast the ethos of care in purely phenomenological terms, however, courts a blurring of the ethical and axiological boundaries between ideological communities—Left and Right—that offer bonds of mutual care, solidarity, and distinctive visions of the good. Moreover, as regards Judaism, one might find contemporary institutional expressions of Jewish kinship, religious or otherwise, to be incompatible with one’s understanding of the tradition’s teachings and values and choose not to belong.

Type
Book Review Symposium on Kinship, Law, and Politics
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University

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References

1 Asad, Quoting Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 231.Google Scholar

2 Le Bon, Gustave, Psychologie des Foules [Psychology of crowds] (Paris: Ancienne Librairie Germer Baillière et Cie, 1895).Google Scholar