{Melvin Konner. The Jewish Body. Schocken 2009. 304 pp. $22.00}

Reviewed By Sherwin B. Nuland

Melvin Konner of Emory University is one of America’s most distinguished anthropologists, whose talents include the ability to make himself easily and enjoyably understood by readers with no background in his area of expertise. He also teaches in the university’s human biology and Jewish studies programs. When a scholar with such qualifications focuses his attention on a theme as potentially amorphous as The Jewish Body, we can anticipate a perspective that allows him to roam over a wide and rich territory of sociological, biological, and historic turf. At the same time, we can also expect that he will give form to his large subject.

Konner lays out his plan at the outset: “It is my goal in this book not only to trace the Jewish body through its radical, almost magical transformations, but to try to understand how Jewish bodies and Jewish thoughts about them have shaped the Jewish mind and Jewish contributions to civilization.” This is precisely what he does and more, enlightening his readers on the matter of that body as seen by non-Jews and the effect on the Jewish self-image.

The Jews, Konner points out, introduced to the ancient world the notion of a God without a body, so different from the conceptions of deities held by the various peoples among whom they lived. With that idea came the belief that their own bodies must be treated in highly specific ways, so as to maintain their purity. How ironic then that so many of their later antagonists, particularly Christians, should see them as ugly contaminants on their own pristine civilizations. Since the dawn of recorded time, the Jewish body has been a target of contempt on which the animosities of other groups have been focused. [Read more...]