1

Emma M. Brodeur
PhD Comprehensive Examination Proposals
Syracuse University
April 11, 2013
The overarching aim of these four examinations is to gain a competence in studying
religion through the lens of aesthetics. All four examinations touch upon the relationship
between religion and aesthetics but according to different historical, cultural contexts and from
different philosophical perspectives. For example, my exam on the Shabaka Stone/Memphite
Theology utilizes aesthetics, or the notion of creation through invisible speaking and visible
writing, to analyze and compare a late 8th century BCE Egyptian metaphysical text with similar
cosmogonies in broader Egyptian culture and Western thought. My exam on American Jewish
Feminism in the 1970s-today takes up aesthetics from an epistemological perspective,
questioning whether or not and to what extent symbolic or imagined bodies, especially
representations of gender and sexuality in the Jewish textual tradition, underpin so-called real
bodies and constitute Jewish women as marginal subjects. My exam on the French Jewish
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas also takes up aesthetics, and indeed, the limits of aesthetics,
especially vision, across Levinas attempts to stage ethics as first philosophy in a post-World
War II context. And finally, my exam on the early 20th century Realism/Modernism debates in
German Marxist thought is a serious interrogation into the relationship between aesthetics and
politics, or the possibility of a Marxist aesthetic, as a platform for thinking about religion in our
increasingly de-materialized contemporary world. If aesthetics traditionally holds a relatively
debased status in comparison to other branches of Western philosophy, in large part because it is
a field of inquiry directed at the bodily aspects of human existence, including the investigation
into works of art, culture and nature as well as sensory perception, these exams attempt to
challenge the notion that serious philosophy can ever be divested of our sensual interactions with
others and to bring aesthetic questions to bear upon the major branches of Western philosophy.
Similar to aesthetics, religion, too, is an uneasily demarcated field of study that exhibits a
concern for the ways in which we experience, create and destroy the worlds in which we live,
often through the material and bodily facets of human interaction. These exams thus attempt to
use aesthetics as a mode for analyzing religion across philosophical positions and historical,
cultural contexts and to find resources for investigating the relationships between aesthetics,
politics and religion today.
Each exam also fulfills a need in my professional, academic profile. Because I am
predominantly trained in Continental philosophy and modern Jewish thought in a French and
German context, my exam on American Jewish Feminism is aimed at developing not only a
better understanding of American Judaism but also the facility to teach American
undergraduates, many of whom are Jewish. I chose to do my person exam on Levinas because
I have not yet read his works and he is one of the most important theorists in the Continental
philosophy of religion and Jewish studies. My problem exam on the German Marxist debates
over realism and modernism is aimed primarily at developing a serious methodological study of
aesthetics that is firmly rooted in a historical, cultural context as a template for better
approaching modern Jewish thought and contemporary religion in our hyper-mediated
contemporary world. My exam on the Memphite Theology builds on an interest of mine on the
political relationship of Greek (Western) thought as it develops in response to ancient Egyptian
religious culture and strives to develop a hermeneutics that takes seriously the ways in which

politics shape our history of reception of Egyptian texts. This text exam is thus a task in
reading, and reading responsibly. Finally, as a graduate student trained primarily in the modern
West, my text exam on the Memphite Theology helps increase my aptitude to work in ancient
Near East religions, a skill that is important for a future in teaching Judaism more generally.

Person: This examination will deal with either the completed literary corpus of a religious thinker or with the
biography (including hagiography) and religious legacy of a key religious figure. Students must (a) show familiarity
with the person's life, (b) grapple with his/her body of works, and (c) demonstrate its influence on subsequent
conceptions and/or religious practice or thought in the wider culture.

Emmanuel Levinas: Aesthetics and Transcendence

I propose to study the Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (19061995). Levinas, whose life and work spanned a large portion of the 20th century, is an important
figure in Continental philosophy of religion and Jewish studies. Following a traditional Jewish
education in Lithuania, Levinas began his study of philosophy in Strasbourg, France in 1924.
Often credited with exposing France to German phenomenology after studying with Edmund
Husserl at Freiberg University in 1928 and translating Husserls Cartesian Meditations into
French, Levinas, too, became a pivotal figure in the phenomenological tradition, both responding
to and critiquing the works of Husserl and Martin Heidegger. World War II had a profound
impact on Levinas life and philosophy. As an officer in the French army, Levinas was captured
and sent to a prison camp. While Levinas wife and daughter managed to escape to a French
monastery, the rest of Levinas family was murdered in the Holocaust. Deeply critical of
Heideggers association with National Socialism, Levinas dissertation, Totality and Infinity
(1961) explicitly moves away from Heideggers preoccupation with the question of Being and
towards ethics as first philosophy. Although Levinas does not write about the Holocaust at
length, his shift from ontology to ethics has remained an important resource not simply for postHolocaust thought but for a whole range of disciplines, including philosophy, religious studies,
aesthetics, and social and political theory.
Levinas Jewish upbringing as well as his Jewish writings, including his Talmudic
commentaries, mark and shape him as an important twentieth-century religious figure worth
examining in the academic study of religion. However, for the purposes of this exam, I propose
to focus primarily on Levinas philosophical writings, which have had the greatest influence on
what Dominique Janicaud has indicted as the theological turn in second-generation, French
phenomenology. Because Levinas ethics include an unconditional commitment to the radical
alterity of the Other as well as a philosophical dedication to the notion of transcendence,
Janicaud argues that Levinas slips the God of the Biblical tradition1 through the backdoor of a
project that claims to be phenomenological but is actually taken hostage by a theology that does
not want to say its name.2 At stake in Janicauds critique is not whether or not phenomenology
is useful in the study of religious phenomenon but rather whether or not theology in Levinas
work has covertly usurped the phenomenological method as descriptive in nature. The Other,
in Levinas thought, always stands outside of my desire to see him or her, that is, before the
givenness of all sense. Janicaud thus claims that Levinas project makes phenomenological
description impossible in exchange for a metaphysics that stands prior to philosophy. Although it
is not the goal of this exam to assess the status of the relationship between phenomenology and
theology, the debate over whether or not Levinas philosophical writings are theological in
nature, for better or for worse, nonetheless points to the extent to which Levinas has influenced
subsequent conceptions of philosophy and theology. Similarly, Levinas philosophical
commitment to transcendence and his concomitant suspicion of the sphere of the visible have

1

Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000),
27.
2
Janicaud, 43.

consistently exposed the question of whether or not Levinas should be read as a religious
thinker. Important to the goals of this exam, then, is to gain a comprehensive understanding of
Levinas life and philosophy through the lens of the intersection(s) between transcendence and
aesthetics, especially vision, throughout his corpus.
Central to Levinas mature philosophical works, including Totality and Infinity and
Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1981), is a phenomenological description of the faceto-face encounter with a radically distant and transcendent other that precedes cognition and
institutes language. The ethical stakes of the relationship between transcendence and aesthetics
are most clear in these two major works. According to Levinas, the philosophical tradition,
especially ontology, which privileges Being over existents, systematically suppresses alterity,
reduces the other to the primacy of the same, and subordinates justice to freedom. The face of
the other, for Levinas, disrupts the self-sufficiency of the I and the murderous tendency to
comprehend, exploit, and totalize others. It is according to his understanding of the face, or the
way in which the other relates to me and exceeds my idea of him or her, that Levinas provides
his most trenchant reproach of aesthetics. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas systematically
attempts to protect the face of the other from representation, from a synoptic gaze that renders
the face a plastic image and turns expression into a death mask, a work of art for aesthetic
contemplation. Vision, for Levinas, is a violent way of relating to the other because vision is the
adequation of an idea with a thing,3 denies what is infinitely other, and attempts to assimilate
alterity into an economy of the same in order to protect the freedom of the ego. To maintain the
heterogeneity of the other, Levinas thus locates the ethical relation in language, and more
specifically, oral discoursean interpellation that occurs in time, is never complete, and allows
for the unexpected and inassimilable incursion of the living presence of the other.
Levinas recrimination of light, vision and comprehension has had a profound impact on
the reception of his work across disciplines. Many interpreters have likewise noted the religious
motivations underlying the tension between aesthetics and transcendence in Levinas thought.
Martin Jay, for example, cites Levinas religious training, and more specifically, the Hebraic
taboo on visual representation, as fundamental to Levinas distrust of vision as a means of
relating ethically to the other.4 And yet, it is strange that Levinas refers to ethics as the spiritual
optics,5 suggesting not only that ethics is first philosophy because it is a way of perceiving
and begins with the face-to-face encounter but also that ethics cannot avoid, and is essentially,
tied up with the problem of the visible. Is Levinas, for example, not simply an iconoclast? But
rather, does Levinas philosophy open up new ways of theorizing vision? And is there a more
complicated picture of the relationship between transcendence and aesthetics at work in Levinas
philosophy? To focus my treatment of the reception of Levinas philosophy, I will therefore
explore the contours of the debate about the relationship between aesthetics and transcendence in
three main areas, including Continental thought, Jewish studies and literary theory, all three
disciplines of which have stakes in this debate. And while I focus primarily on Levinas
philosophical writings in large part because they have had the greatest influence on his reception,
I will also demonstrate familiarity with his Talmudic commentaries but only insofar as they play
a part in the history of interpretation of Levinas philosophy.

3

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 34.

Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 552-555.
5
Levinas, 61.
4

Bibliography
Primary Sources
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998.
---. Alterity and Transcendence, translated by Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999.
---. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sen Hand. London: Athlone, 1991.
---. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon
Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2008.
---. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, translated by Barbara Harshav and Michael B. Smith.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
---. Existence and Existents, translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague and Boston: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1978.
---. Nine Talmudic Readings, translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990.
---. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1978.
---. Time and the Other, translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1987.
---. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Biographical Sources
Lescourret, Marie-Anne. Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Flammarion, 1994.
Malka, Salomon. Emmanuel Lvinas: His Life and Legacy. Duquesne University Press, 2006.
Poirie, Francois. Emmanuel Levinas. Qui etes-vous? Lyon: La Manifacture, 1987.
Secondary Sources
Crignon, Philippe. Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the Image. Yale French Studies 104
(2004): 100-125.
Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford University Press, 1999.
---. Violence and Metaphysics in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, in Writing and
Difference, translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2005.
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Katz, Claire Elise. Levinas, Judaism and the Feminine: In the Silent Footsteps of Rebecca.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Kenaan, Hagi. The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze. I. B. Tauris, 2013.
Moyn, Samuel. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005.
Peperzak, Adriaan T., ed. Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for
Philosophy, Literature and Religion. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate (Perspectives in Continental
Philosophy). New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.

Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999.
---. Visage, Figure: Reading Levinass Totality and Infinity. Yale French Studies 79 (1991):
135-149.
Wyschogrod, Edith. The Art in Ethics: Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the Philosophy of
Emmanuel Levinas in Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel
Levinas For Philosophy, Literature and Religion, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, 137148. New York: Routledge, 1995.
---. Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others (Perspectives
in Continental Philosophy). New York: Fordham University Press, 2006.

Text: This examination will focus on a particular text or textual tradition that is regarded as sacred to a religious
community or exemplifies the religious orientations of a society. Students must demonstrate knowledge of (a) the
history of interpretation of their text(s), (b) textual-critical issues such as authorship, context, transmission, etc., and
(c) arguments about their meanings and uses.

The Shabaka Stone and the Memphite Theology:

the Oral and Grammatological Dimensions of Creation
Scholars frequently cite the ancient Egyptian Memphite Theology, an account of the
creation of the world by divine word preserved on a monument called the Shabaka Stone, as
evidence that serious philosophy did not begin with the Greeks.6 This exam will test and
challenge this assumption by reading this text in the context of Egyptian religion and politics, as
well as in comparison to ancient Jewish, Greek and Christian texts that provide ostensibly similar
creation myths. With a focus on the oral and grammatological elements of creation stories across
Egyptian literature, this exam will also attempt to carve out a space for a more nuanced
appreciation of the relationship between Egyptian culture and religion and Western thought.
The Shabaka Stone was originally erected as a monument in the Temple of Ptah in Memphis,
Egypt in the late eighth century BCE under the reign of King Shabaka. A Nubian King from
Kush (present-day Sudan), King Shabaka is credited with conquering and re-uniting Lower and
Upper Egypt as well as Kush around 710 BCE and officially establishing the 25th Dynasty, the
Nubian Dynasty or Kushite Empire. According to the dedication on the Shabaka Stone itself,
King Shabaka found a worm eaten work of the ancestors, probably on papyrus or leather,
and commissioned a stone copy better than its former state to be placed in the Temple of Ptah,
the local deity of Memphis.7 Currently housed in the British Museums Department of Ancient
Egypt and Sudan, not much is known about the Stones provenance between its ancient origins
and its donation to the Museum in 1805 by George John, 2nd Earl of Spencer. In addition, it was
not until almost 100 years later in 1901 that James Henry Breasted first deciphered the contents
of the Shabaka Stone and provided an English translation. Although badly damaged due to
secondary use either as a millstone or foundation stone, possibly for a pillar or column,8
Egyptologists have managed to decipher a relatively coherent inscription, including the now
famous creation myth, referred to as the Memphite Theology, according to which the
Memphite God Ptah gave life to both the gods and all things through his heart and tongue.
Also included in the translated text is an introduction and dedication to the King, a story of the
gods and the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the God Horus, and finally a summary
of the text as a whole.
For the purposes of the text exam, I propose to study and analyze both the textual and
material aspects of the Shabaka Stone. First, I seek to assess the social, political and religious

6

Joshua J. Bodine, The Shabaka Stone: An Introduction in Studia Antiqua 7.1 (2009), 20.
See James P. Allen, From the Memphite Theology (1.15) in The Context of Scripture, Ed. W. Hallo (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 21-23 (partial).
8
In his article, New Findings about the Memphite Theology in Proceedings of the ninth International Congress of
Egyptologists (ed. Jean-Cleaude Goyon and Christine Cardin; Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 1:574, Amr El Hawary
challenges the long-held notion that the damage to the Shabaka Stone was due to its secondary usage as a millstone.
Hawary claims the hole in the center of the stone is neither deep enough nor round enough to be used as a millstone
and instead makes the movement of an axle impossible. Hawary speculates the Stone was more likely used as a
foundation on the ground or in a wall for a pillar or column, and that the radiating lines of damage, which are on the
unwritten surface, were likely made to help avoid any slippage of the smooth stone.
7

context and importance of the Shabaka Stone in the Nubian Dynasty. Because the Shabaka Stone
claims to be a copy of an incomplete original never recovered by archaeologists, dating the
text is hotly debated among scholars. Whether the text is a direct copy of an original, is loosely
based on earlier sources, contains embellishments alongside an authentic copy, or is a
complete fabrication designed to look archaic by Shabaka and his scribes, are all important
textual-critical questions that shape our understanding of the authorship and context of the
Shabaka Stone. While many scholars have attempted to ascertain a possible date for the
original, or at the very least, the Stones literary antecedents, based on the reading direction of
the hieroglyphs, the grammar, the orthography and the guiding ideas of the Shabaka Stone, I am
less interested in solving this problem than investigating the possible rhetorical goals of this
work as a material monument and product of Kushite Kingship. The problem of dating this text,
however, is not completely irrelevant to the question of its rhetorical function. An important
question I want to ask is, what is the relationship between the Kushite Kings who were not of
Egyptian origin and invaded Egypt around 750 BCE and the long-standing Egyptian customs and
traditions? How does the Shabaka Stone both reflect and shape Egyptian religious culture
according to the rhetorical goals of the Kushite Kings, including their understanding and reimagination of the greatness of Egypts past, especially the Old Kingdom? Or to what extent
does the Shabaka Stone represent the Kings attempts to buy legitimacy from the Memphite
priests through the publication of their theological and political interests? How does such a
comparison highlight the particularity of the religious culture of the Kushite Empire, especially
according to the interests of the Memphite Priests, as an achievement of both conservative
renewal and progressive innovation?
Finally, by better understanding the role of the Shabaka Stone in the Kushite Empire as well
as its relation to broader, historical currents in Egyptian thought, I would like to re-approach the
main theme of the Memphite Theology that has captured the attention of modern Western
scholars: the creation of the world through the word. Because the Memphite Theology has only
recently been translated and was, before this translation, unknown since its ancient origins, it is
not possible to construct a nuanced history of interpretation of this text. However, many
Egyptologists have casually noted conceptual linkages between the Memphite Theology and
Genesis 1-6 of the Hebrew Bible, Platos Timaeus and John 1 of the New Testament. Whether or
not these Jewish, Greek and Christian cosmogonies represent a direct history of interpretation of
the Memphite Theology or simply suggest cultural derivations is impossible to determine and
beyond the scope of this exam. Nonetheless, the thematic similarities between these texts,
creation through the word, continue to shape the modern Wests reception and interpretation of
the Memphite Theology, which suggests an adequate, responsible comparison is important.
Because the origins of Greek philosophy and the rise of Christianity are the backbones of
modern Western culture, a consistent worry of mine is that modern scholars regale the Shabaka
Stone as a reliable witness that serious philosophy did not begin with the Greeks9 from an
anachronistic, Eurocentric perspective. That is, I worry that the Memphite Theology is labeled
philosophy precisely due to a thematic link with an already privileged philosophical tradition
that underlies the goals of Western colonialism and archaeology and obscures the particularities
of the Stones historical, political context. Notably lacking from Genesis 1 and the Greek
conception of the logos, for example, is the equally prominent role that the Memphite Theology
provides to the creation of the world through hieroglyphs as ideograms. In order to better

9

Joshua J. Bodine, The Shabaka Stone: An Introduction in Studia Antiqua 7.1 (2009), 20.

understand the history of interpretation of the Memphite Theology in modern Western thought, I
would therefore like to locate my analysis of the text in the relationship between the oral and
grammatological or the immaterial and material dimensions of the act of creation in terms of
both the Memphite Theologys larger Egyptian cultural currents as well as later Jewish, Greek
and Christian accounts.
First, how does the Memphite Theology compare to and contrast from previous Egyptian
cosmogonies, most notably in the Heliopolitan doctrines of the Coffin Texts, which likewise
explore the notion of creation through the heart but focus on the physical-creation act of the
god Atum? Atum also has a role in creation in the Memphite Theology but is secondary to Ptah
who gives life to Atums image in a speech act. Many scholars have argued that the prominence
given to Ptah in the Memphite Theology represents an attempt on the part of the Memphite
priests to discredit the traditional solar theology. James P. Allen claims, however, that the
Memphite Theology is less polemical than it is an example of a persistent syncretism in
ancient Egyptian culture. To what extent, then, does the fact that intellectual creation precedes
physical creation in the Memphite Theology reflect a privileging of the voice over writing? Or,
to what extent does Ptah represent a combination or syncretism of two equally important
aesthetic, creative dimensions? It is my hope that a comparison of both the oral and
grammatological aspects of the Memphite Theology with both Heliopolitan doctrines and the
Jewish, Greek and Christian creation accounts according to which modern Western scholars
claim ownership will lead to a better appreciation and understanding of the particularity of the
historical, religious and cultural context of the Kushite/Egyptian origins of the Shabaka Stone,
and a more nuanced account of the relationship of ancient Egyptian thought to Western culture.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Allen, James P. From the Memphite Theology. 1.15 in The Context of Scripture, edited by W.
Hallo. Leiden: Brill, 1997. 21-23 (partial).
Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature. Berkeley: U. of California, 1975. Volume 1,
pp. 51-57 (complete).
Background on Religion and Literature in Ancient Egypt
Baines, John. Egyptian Syncretism: Hans Bonnets Contribution. Orientalia 68 (1999): 199
214.
---. Egyptian deities in context: multiplicity, unity, and the problem of change. In Barbara
Nevling Porter (ed.), One god or many: concepts of divinity in the ancient world, 978.
Transactions of the Casco Bay Assyriological Institute 1. n.p.: Casco Bay Assyriological
Institute, 2000.
Bonnet, Hans. On Understanding Syncretism, translated by John Baines. Orientalia 68 (1999):
181-198.
Hollis, Susan Tower. Egyptian Literature, in From an Antique Land: An Introduction to
Ancient Near Eastern Literature, edited by Carl S. Ehrlich. New York: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2009.
Horning, Erik. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: the One and the Many, trans. John Baines.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1982
Teeter, Emily. Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011.

10

Morkot, R. G. The Black Pharaohs. Egypts Nubian Rulers. London: Rubicon Press, 2000.
Possible Conceptual Antecedents
(Heliopolitan Cosmogony: Attestations in Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts (Spell 75-81, 335) and
Book of the Dead (Ch. 17))
Faulkner, Raymond Oliver, trans. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1969.
Secondary Sources
Allen, J. P. Genesis in Egypt: the Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts. New
Haven: Yale Egyptological Seminar, 1988.
---. Cosmologies, in The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical
World, ed. William W. Hallo, vol. 1. 3 vols. (New York: Brill, 1997).
Assman, Jan. Creation through Hieroglyphics: The Cosmic Grammatology of Ancient Egypt,
in The Poetics of Grammar and the Metaphysics of Sound and Sign, edited by S. La Porta
and David Dean Shulman. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Bodine, Joshua J. The Shabaka Stone: An Introduction. Studia Antiqua 7.1 (2009), 1-21.
(online at https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/StudiaAntiqua/article/view/11991/11931).
Breasted, James H. The Philosophy of a Memphite Priest. Zeitschrift fr gyptische Sprache
und Altertumskunde 39 (1901): 3954. (First American translation and interpretation).
El Hawary, Amr. New Findings about the Memphite Theology, in Proceedings of the Ninth
International Congress of Egyptologists, edited by Jean-Claude Goyon and Christine
Cardin. Leuven: Peeters, 2007.
Hare, Tom. Remembering Osiris: Number, Gender and the Word in Ancient Egyptian
Representational Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Iverson, Erik. The Cosmogony of the Shabaka Text, in Studies in Egyptology: Presentations to
Miriam Lichtheim, edited by Sarah Israelit-Groll. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew
University, 1990.
Kkosy, L. A Memphite Triad. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 66, (1980), 48-53.
Possible Conceptual Derivations
Genesis 1-6
Luckert, Karl W. Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of
Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective (Suny Series in Religious Studies). Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1991.
James K. Hoffmeier, Some Thoughts on Genesis 1 & 2 and Egyptian Cosmology, Journal of
the Ancient Near Eastern Society 15 (1983): 39-49.
Plato. Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles (Loeb Classical Library No. 234) (v.
9), translated by R. G. Bury. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929.
Philo, On Creation
Gospel of John
Runia, David T. Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato. Leiden: Brill, 1986.
Boyarin, Daniel. The Intertextual Birth of the Logos: The Prologue to John as a Jewish
Midrash, in Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

11

Period or Movement: This examination will deal with a clearly demarcated time-period or a specified religious
movement or an identifiable set of influential religious ideas within or across culture(s). Students must demonstrate
a strong grasp of (a) the history of, (b) the cultural, intellectual, or religious context of, and (c) the secondary
scholarship on the period or movement, and show the ability to think constructively and critically about its
significance.

American Jewish Feminism: Real and Imagined bodies in

Halakha, Philosophy and Theology
This comprehensive exam will explore the history and cultural context of American
Jewish Feminism between the 1970s and today with attention to three primary avenues according
to which the movement has sought to uncover, understand and improve the status of women in
Judaism: halakhic-legal, philosophical and theological. American Jewish Feminism traces its
origins to broader counter-cultural feminist currents of the 1960s. Although many of the
feminists of the 1960s were Jewish, such as Betty Friedan whose Feminine Mystique is credited
with sparking second-wave feminism, it was not until the 1970s that a feminism with a particular
Jewish focus became prominent. Sylvia Fishman notes, for example, that the development of
Jewish Feminism in the 1970s is due in large part to the development of feminism more
generally and the recognition that women of African American, Hispanic, and Third World
heritages were seldom trapped in the gilded cage of domesticity10 that shaped the worldview of
the movements white, middle-class suburban founders. The tendency to collapse the diverse
experiences of women worldwide into a single category of womanhood inevitably gave way to
the interrogation into the ways in which class, race and religion operate as different but
connected systems of oppression that shape womens lives in unique ways. The Israeli victory in
the 1967 Arab-Israeli War also contributed to an increased pride among American Jewish
intellectuals and artists who began to emphasize their cultural and ethnic Jewishness. Upon
recognition of a growing anti-Semitism in the larger womens movement, many Jewish
feminists, too, including secular or cultural Jewish feminists, turned with renewed energy to
the religious culture that set them apart as both women and Jews in order to bring the issue of
gender equality to the American Jewish community, fighting not only for the inclusion of
womens experiences in the construction of liturgy or women in traditionally male-defined roles
but also the re-interrogation of the textual, theological and philosophical traditions of Judaism
from a Jewish womans perspective.
In order to gain a better understanding of the diverse contours of American Jewish
Feminism, this exam will first approach the history of the movement with attention to key figures
as well as the goals and accomplishments of Jewish feminism in American Jewish communities
at large, including Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. Although this exam will not focus on the
problem of whether or not contemporary (largely Christian) feminism and normative Judaism are
at odds, it is important to recognize the differences between Christian feminism, which draws on
a more systematic theological enterprise, and Jewish feminism, which must wrestle with a
diversity of theological and practice-based questions across communities largely defined by the
level of observance of halakha or Jewish ritual law. To pay attention to the history of American
Jewish Feminism across the differences of American Judaism(s), then, is to recognize that there
is no identifiable, monolithic movement called American Jewish Feminism and to better

10

Sylvia Fishman, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (Hanover: University Press of
New England, 1993), 5.

12

appreciate the varying analyses of how to open up Judaism(s) to womens experiences and
participation, whether through law, history, practice, communal institutions, or textual traditions.
In the late 1970s, Jewish feminist theorists across the Orthodox, Conservative and
Reform movements contested the ways in which to best overcome the subordination of women
in Judaism. In a famous essay, entitled, Notes toward finding the right question, Cynthia Ozick
argues that Jews traditionally have no theology11 and that the status of women in Judaism is a
sociological question that cannot be approached through the re-interpretation of the nature of
God, for example, but rather through halakha, a legal system that historically calls itself into
question for the sake of justice. In response to Ozicks essay, Judith Plaskow argues that the
Right question is theological and that how we imagine God structures society and a male God
grants men power over women. To better understand the methods and goals of American Jewish
Feminism at large, and to think constructively and critically about its significance, this exam will
therefore pay close attention to both the halakhic and theological/philosophical dimensions of
Jewish feminist arguments and assess the differences and overlaps between these two
methodological interventions. What is at stake in the debate between Ozick and Plaskow is the
difference between reforming the objective, sociological status of women in Judaism and
challenging the images, metaphors or representations of gender and sexuality in Jewish textual
and cultural traditions that exclude women, for example, from God-language and reinforce male,
symbolic power. But a connecting thread is a concern for the ways in which womens bodies are
imagined and constituted as sexually other in both halakhic and theological/philosophical
systems, whether in purity laws, prayer books or philosophical treatises. This exam will therefore
pay close attention to corporeality, especially the relationship between real and imagined
bodies, as a lens for assessing the debates on the relative importance between halakha and
theology/philosophy in Jewish feminism. To what extent does the political status of real bodies
reside within imagined constructs of gender and sexuality? To assess this question, this exam
will grapple with the various ways in which American Jewish feminists have engaged real and
imagined bodies with attention to gender and sexuality in three major aspects or traditions of
Judaism: Rabbinic Judaism, Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah, and contemporary Jewish
theology.
Bibliography
History of American Jewish Feminism
Fishman, Sylvia. A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. UPNE, 1995.
Hyman, Paula. Jewish Feminism Faces the American Womens Movement: Convergence and
Divergence. Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, The University of
Michigan, 1997.
Women in Rabbinic Literature
Adler, Rachel. Tumah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings. In The Jewish Woman: New
Perspectives, edited by Koltun, Elizabeth. New York: Schocken, 1987: 63-71.
. The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies. Tikkun (Nov/Dec. 1998).
. In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theology of Purity. In Tikkun 8/1 (1993).

11

Cynthia Ozick, Notes toward finding the right question in On Being a Jewish Feminist, ed. Susannah Heschel
(New York: Schoken Books, 1983), 122.

13

Biale, Rachel. Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History, and Their Relevance
for Today. Schocken, 1995.
Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
. Feminization and Their Discontents. In Judaism Since Gender, edited by Miriam
Peskowitz and Laura Levitt. New York: Routledge, 1997.
. Justify My Love. In Judaism Since Gender, edited by Miriam Peskowitz and Laura
Levitt. New York: Routledge, 1997.
. Rabbis & Their Pals. In Judaism Since Gender, edited by Miriam Peskowitz and
Laura Levitt. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Dubin, Lois. A Ceremony of Remembering. In Kerem 4 (Winter, 1995-1996).
Hauptman, Judith. Rereading The Rabbis: A Womans Voice. Westview Press, n.d.
. Images of Women in the Talmud. In Religion and Sexism, edited by Rosemarie
Radford Ruther. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974: 184-212.
Ilan, Tal. Beruriah Has Spoken Well: The Historical Beruriah and Her Transformation in the
Rabbinic Corpora. In Integrating Women into Second Temple History. Tubingen, GR:
JCB Mohr Paul Sibeck, 1999: Ch. 6.
Levitt, Laura and Wasserman, Sue Ann. Mikvah Ceremony for Laura. In Four Centuries of
Jewish Womens Spirituality: A Sourcebook, edited by Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne
Ashton. Brandeis, 2008.
Wasserfall, Rahel, ed. Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law. 1st ed.
Brandeis, 1999.
Wegner, Judith Romney. The Anomaly of Woman in Mishnah. In Chattel or Person?: The
Status of Women in the Mishnah. Oxford University Press, USA, 1992.
Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah
Fine, Lawrence. Purifying the Body in the Name of the Soul: The Problem of the Body in
Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah. In People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an
Embodied Perspective, edited by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1992.
Graetz, Naomi. Silence Is Deadly: Judaism Confronts Wifebeating. 1ST ed. Jason Aronson, Inc.,
1998.
Halbertal, Moshe, and Avishai Margalit. Idolatry and Representation. In Idolatry, translated by
Naomi Goldblum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Idel, Moshe. Sexual Metaphors and Praxis in the Kabbalah. In The Jewish Family: Metaphor
and Memory, edited by Kraemer, David C. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Katz, Claire Elise. Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent Footsteps of Rebecca. Indiana
University Press, 2003.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Desacralization and Disenchantment. In Nine Talmudic Readings,
translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
. And God Created Woman. In Nine Talmudic Readings, translated by Annette
Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Maimonides, Moses. The Code of Maimonides: The Book of Women. Yale University Press,
1972.
. The Guide of the Perplexed, Vol. 1. University Of Chicago Press, 1974.
Melammed, Rene Levine. Castillian Conversas at Work. In Heretics or Daughters of Israel?
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

14

Scholem, Gershom. The Feminine Element in Divinity. In On the Mystical Shape of the
Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. Schocken, 1997.
Shapiro, Susan. A Matter of Discipline. Judaism Since Gender, edited by Peskowitz, Miriam,
and Laura Levitt. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Incorporated, 1997.
Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy. Indiana University Press,
2004.
Wasserfall. Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law. UPNE, 1999.
Wolfson, Elliot R. Crossing Gender Boundaries. In Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of
Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism. SUNY Press, 1995.
Women, Feminism and Theology
Adler, Rachel. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Beacon Press, 1999.
Alpert, Rebecca T., and Rebecca Alpert. Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the
Transformation of Tradition. Columbia University Press, 1998.
Greenberg, Blu. On Women & Judaism: A View from Tradition. Jewish Publication Society,
1981.
Heschel, Susannah. On Being a Jewish Feminist. Schocken Books, 1995.
Levitt, Laura. Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home. Psychology Press, 1997.
Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. HarperCollins,
1991.
Umansky, Ellen M. "Spiritual Expressions: Jewish Women's Religious Lives in the
Twentieth-Century United States." In Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, edited by
Judith Baskin. Wayne State University Press, 1998.
. Reclaiming the Covenant. In Four Centuries of Jewish Womens Spirituality: a
Sourcebook, edited by Umansky, Ellen M., and Dianne Ashton. Boston: Beacon Press,
2009.
. Re-Visioning Sarah. In Four Centuries of Jewish Womens Spirituality: a
Sourcebook, edited by Umansky, Ellen M., and Dianne Ashton. Boston: Beacon Press,
2009.

15

Problem: This examination must articulate an issue or problem within an area that will ideally provide a transition to
the topic of the Ph.D. dissertation and/or the FPP 320 course. An issue or a problem may be an event, idea,
movement or scholarly position that has provoked debate. Students must demonstrate the ability a) to formulate a
problem, b) to grasp and evaluate relevant theories and methodologies, c) to address cogently and argue
systematically an issue, problem or thesis.

Aesthetics, Politics and Religion in early 20th Century German Marxist Thought
This comprehensive exam will explore a variety of theoretical debates that have taken
place at the open intersections of politics and aesthetics in early 20th century German thought as a
platform for reconsidering the role of religion in our increasingly non-representational, dematerialized global society. Central to these debates, and thus to this exam, is the interrogation
into the meanings and effects of modernity and modernism alike. The rise of aesthetics as an
autonomous field of inquiry runs parallel to the so-called secularization of the modern
Christian west and the inflection of religious phenomena into humanist forms, especially the
experience of beauty or the sublime in novels, paintings and music. The Romantic reverence for
nature, however, or the cult of physical fitness also occurs within the context of and as a
response to rapid industrialization, capitalism and nationalism and calls attention to the problems
endemic to modern society. Nietzsches claim that life was only justified as a work of art, for
example, expresses not only an enthusiasm for the liberation of the human subject at the heart of
the decline of theology as a guarantor of order but also a suspicion that the world was inherently
meaningless and thus livable only in images.12 To assert a relationship between art and life,
or to assert the privilege of art over morality as Nietzsche does, thus only becomes possible once
art is freed of its mimetic function and separated from the strictures of religious and courtly
institutions. By the 20th century, the rise of non-representational modernist art forms further
called attention to the relationship between art and life in ways that became a hotly contested
political question.
In order to evaluate the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the modern west,
this exam will focus on the German Left realism/modernism controversies precipitated by Georg
Lukcs trenchant denunciation of Modernism as a subjectivist war on reality incapable of
critiquing the true social conditions of modern life.13 Expressionism, one of the first German
modernist art forms, developed during World War I as response to the dehumanizing and
isolating effects of rapid industrialization, capitalism and colonialism in Wilhelminian Germany.
With an emphasis on the subjective, emotional, and indeed, spiritual, aspects of human
experience, Expressionist artists consciously tried to break free from the conventional, realist
forms of signification of 19th century art as both a political protest against imperial power and a
response to the problems of modernity. But by the Nazi seizure of power in the 1930s, the
alliance of art and politics, and especially the critical capacity of Expressionisms nonrepresentational form, fell under deep scrutiny of the German Left. Indeed, Lukcs essay set the
stage for a variety of exchanges in the 1930s between himself, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht,
Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno that continued to reverberate in post-World War II critical
theory. Adorno, for example, the leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory who
referred to his style of thinking as atonal philosophy, dedicated his posthumously published

12

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 33.
13
Georg Lukcs, Realism in Balance in Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classical Debate within
German Marxism (London: Verso, 2002), 40.

16

Aesthetic Theory (1970) to a defense of the social function of modernism insofar as the most
politically engaged art is inherently contradictory and thus exposes the contradictions of modern
societal conditions.
Important questions to these debates and thus to this exam are: Do images, as well as
aesthetics as the theoretical topos of human perception and sensation, have the critical capacity
to effect change in modern society? Can art serve as a vector to the social and political reality
of modernity? What is the status of this reality? And finally, what can the contested territory
between art and politics tell us about the shape of religion in the modern period? The
Expressionists explicitly drew on religious themes and frequently saw their works as acts of the
spiritual. To question in its German context the critical capacity of art, therefore, is to similarly
question the relationship between religion and politics. One of the guiding assumptions of this
exam is that aesthetics became a fertile ground within which religion took refuge under the
pressures of secularism and materialism in the modern period. And in todays increasingly
dematerialized global economy and hyper-mediated environment, the tie between religion and
images in both the production and management of social, political conflict and change is once
again a highly contested question, especially in debates about the nature and possibility of a socalled post-secular society. The separation of religion from the public sphere, the very
separation that paved the way for the autonomy of art, has led to renewed questions, for example,
in both religious studies and political philosophy about the ways in which societies are organized
according to a distribution of the sensible, to use Jacques Rancires term, that conditions what
is possible to see, hear and feel, and not just intellectual networks of power relations.
Aesthetics, that which Alexander Baumgarten coined the science of the perception,14 is thus
once again an important landscape for re-thinking politics and religion today.
This exam therefore proposes to return to the most explicit engagement of the
relationship between aesthetics and politics in early 20th century thought among the German Left
in order to ground an investigation into the role of religion in the contemporary global circulation
of images. This exam will focus primarily on Expressionism, however, as it is taken up by the
German Marxists in order to understand and appreciate the historical importance and meanings
of the debates on modernism more generally. While religion is only sometimes an overt
topic of concern in the modernism/realism debates, Rancire notes that the theoretical
foundations of the critique of the spectacle, the beginnings of which we see in Lukcs critique
of Expressionism, are borrowed, via Marx, from Feuerbachs critique of religion.15 What is at
stake is the potential power of false, human projections. The representational status of images,
especially Expressionism, and their relationship to material, social reality in these early debates
is thus always and already informed by a critique of religion in relation to politics. While
Lukcs defense of realism, especially in the works of Gustave Flaubert, over and against
Expressionism and Adornos defense of the avant-garde in the plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom
he dedicates his Aesthetic Theory, clearly signal two poles between which the question of
modernism circulated among the radical Left, many other thinkers contributed to the texture of
these debates. This exam will therefore also draw support from early 20th century German
thought more broadly, including theorizations of the political in the work of Carl Schmitt and
religion in the works of Martin Buber, Karl Barth and Rudolf Otto in order to better understand
the terms of the debates about the relationship between aesthetics, politics and religion and the

14

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Meditationes

Philosophicae De Nonnullis Ad Poema Pertinentibus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 78.
15
Jacques Rancire, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2011), 6.

17

German historical, cultural context to and within which they were directed and took hold.
Finally, in order to theoretically frame these early 20th century debates, this exam will also draw
on the work of Rancire who is the leading, most widely known thinker to continue to theorize
the politics of aesthetics and critical theory today.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Adorno, Theodor, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukcs. Aesthetics
and Politics. Verso, 2007.
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor. 1st ed. Univ Of
Minnesota Press, 1998.
Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Oxford University Press, 1968.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.
. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, 2010.
Bloch, Ernst. The Spirit of Utopia. Translated by Anthony Nassar. 1st ed. Stanford University
Press, 2000.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated by John Willett.
13th ed. Hill and Wang, 1977.
Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2002.
. I and Thou. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
. Kingship of God. Humanity Books, 1990.
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Empire Books, 2011.
Lukcs, Georg. Essays on Realism. Mit Press, 1983.
. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney
Livingstone. The MIT Press, 1972.
. The Theory of the Novel. MIT Press, 1971.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea Of The Holy: An Inquiry Into The Non Rational Factor In The Idea Of
The Divine 1926. Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition. Translated by George Schwab.
Expanded. University Of Chicago Press, 2007.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by
George Schwab. 1st ed. University Of Chicago Press, 2006.
Secondary Sources
Braiterman, Zachary. The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought. 1st ed.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.
Reprint. The MIT Press, 1991.
. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered. MIT
Press 62 (1992): 3-41.
Brger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Manchester University Press, 1984.
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. 1st ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 1991.
Gordon, Donald E. Expressionism: Art and Idea. Yale Univ Pr, 1987.

18

Huhn, Tom, and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds. The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adornos
Aesthetic Theory. The MIT Press, 1997.
Jay, Martin. Adorno. Harvard University Press, 1984.
Plate, S. Brent. Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion Through the Arts.
1st ed. Routledge, 2004.
Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. University of California Press,
1994.
Willett, John. Art And Politics In The Weimar Period: The New Sobriety 1917-1933. Da Capo
Press, 1996.
Rancire, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Reprint. Verso, 2011.
. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. Reprint. Verso, 2009.
. The Politics of Aesthetics. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.