Page 87 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

authenticity and tradition to haredi elites, Jewish constituencies make them-
selves available for articulation with distinct political claims within the sphere
of haredi polemics, and with a cultural politics of authenticity that extends far
beyond the haredi community.
In the following pages I elaborate this thesis by offering some general re®ec-
tions on the constitution of modern Jewish public culture, and by considering
one local context in which ArtScroll has made its presence felt: in the Jewish
community of London, England.

The People of the Book: The Modern Jewish
Reading Public
It is common to describe Jewish society and culture as text-centric, and
to suggest that Judaism is a “religion of the book,” de¤ned by a shared commit-
ment to a canon of sacred texts and a privileging of study, textual mastery, and
interpretive expertise (see, e.g., Halbertal 1997). This text centrism has for cen-
turies been key to the production of knowledge, the consolidation of authority,
5
and the social organization of local Jewish communities. Long before the ad-
vent of modern mass communications, mediaeval Jewish society relied heavily
on the written word and on the technology of the book for regulating everyday
practices, codifying communal norms, and communicating across great dis-
tances in the Jewish diaspora. Nevertheless, we must not assume simple conti-
nuities between “traditional” society and contemporary renditions of Jewish
public culture, which owe their existence to radical transformations in the ar-
rangement of markets and modes of participation in communicative practice.
One can, of course, distinguish modern Jewish reading publics in terms of
the development of new markets and the willingness and ability of expanding
sectors of the nonelite Jewish population to make their demand felt for print
commodities. In the aftermath of nineteenth-century revolutions in paper-
making and production techniques, the printed word was brought within reach
of even those with very modest incomes, and a growing number of Jews were
thereby inculcated into new consumption habits of daily newspapers, pulp ¤c-
tion, and other works. This one might surmise from the rapid proliferation of
Jewish presses and publishing houses across Europe and in North America in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But what makes this a distinc-
tively “Jewish” imagined community cannot be explained simply by the expan-
sion of the book market; nor is it fruitful to interpret the history of these inter-
actions through the lens of nation-state-centric narratives of the rise of modern
public spheres. Rather, we must attend to its distinct ordering and distribution
of the categories of language, literacy, territory, communicational media, ideo-
logical formation, and sentiments of collective belonging.
“Traditional” European Jewish society, as it existed for several centuries, was
de¤ned by obligatory membership in geographically and legally constricted cor-
porate communities, kehilot, which sustained a complex web of local traditions

76 Jeremy Stolow