Translating Jewish Ritual

Abstract

Chapter Two explores how toleration and regulation of Judaism required the Russian Empire to identify just what Judaism was and what constituted its laws and practices. Starting in the 1840s, the Russian state worked to produce a correct understanding of Judaism and classify rituals as either required for or indifferent to faith—or as superstition. A Western understanding of faith in addition to Christian antisemitism rendered much of Jewish practice as beyond the pale of “religion.” This chapter analyzes the imperial intervention into Jewish rituals of head covering and clothing, sacred space, and outdoor rites of kiddush levanah, eruv, sukkah, and marriage. Jewish reformers also critiqued embodied or superstitious ritual as not authentically religious. In the inter-revolutionary period, some Orthodox Jews worked against this delimitation of religion to expand the sphere of religion to include even commerce and print culture.