Moral Obligation and Everyday Advice

Abstract

Alfred Schütz’s investigation of the temporal structure of consciousness in The Phenomenology of the Social World leads him to conceive action as antecedently projected behaviour. Schütz presents his conception of action as resolving a problem in Weber’s discussion of meaningful behaviour in the opening pages of Economy and Society. It serves that aim well, but also has independent value. The antecedently projected form of action necessitates a biographical conception of human agency. Schütz’s conception of action thus reinstates the biographical nature of agency ignored in contemporary analytical philosophy of action. Furthermore, Marx is committed to exactly this conception of action. It founds his further claim that action and history mutually presuppose one another.     

Early Glimmers of the Now Familiar Ethnomethodological Themes in Garfinkel’s “The Perception of the Other”

Garfinkel??s dissertation, ??The Perception of the Other,?? was completed and defended 15?years prior to the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology. This essay seeks hints of the familiar ethnomethodological themes (indexicality, reflexivity, accountability) within his thesis. It begins by examining the contributions of earlier social theorists, particularly Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schütz, to Garfinkel??s thought. It then examines the dissertation itself seeking evidence to support the claim that Garfinkel was already moving in the direction of an ??incommensurable, asymmetric, and alternate?? program of sociological inquiry well before the term ??ethnomethodology?? had even been coined.     

Georg Simmel and social psyhology

Georg Simmel (1858–1918), now best known as a sociologist, made a number of significant contributions to social psychology (especially in the field of small-group interaction) which have been recognized in recent decades. The study of hitherto often neglected material suggests that Simmel's early interest in psychology was maintained in much of his sociological work. The present study seeks to outline Simmel's interest in psychology within this wider context.     

On Jews and property in provincial Central Europe: Leopold Kompert’s 1848 publications

ABSTRACT

Bohemian-born Jewish author Leopold Kompert (1822–1886) is best known for Aus dem Ghetto (1848), his popular tales of provincial Jewish life featuring pious men and women who eke out a living and try to maintain religious traditions amid the temptations of modernity. However, at the same time he also wrote a number of newspaper articles, among them a biography of Jewish tobacco and wax merchant and financier Israel Hönig von Hönigsberg (1724–1808). Considered together, Kompert’s fiction and non-fiction suggest that owning property played a significant – if at times conflicted – role for Jews in the decades preceding emancipation. Analyzing these texts helps show how property, both literal and symbolic, could be used to clarify and critique Jews’ experiences of acculturation, migration, and secularization in the middle of the nineteenth century.     

Counting on Whiteness: Religion,race, ethnicity,and the politics of Jewish demography

American Jews have long been an anomaly for scholars concerned with understanding how they fit into extant social scientific or historical categories. Sometimes they seem best described as an ethnic group, other times as a religious one. This ambiguity has also vexed Jewish communal leaders whose desire to comprehend their communities has largely been underwritten by their intention to protect it. This intersection of sociological methods and schema and Jewish communal concerns has resulted in decisive omissions regarding how best to account for the racial and ethnic diversity of American Jews. An analysis of survey instruments used in 175 American Jewish population studies and community portraits conducted since 1970 reveals a focus on questions of religious practice and an avoidance of those about race and ethnicity, resulting in a “religio-racial formation” of American Jews as White. This approach to studying American Jewish life has marginalized or excluded non-White Jews while ensuring ongoing Jewish communal access to Whiteness without having to claim it explicitly.     

On Simmel’s conception of philosophy

Over the past few decades, the work of Georg Simmel (1858–1918) has again become of interest. Its reception, however, has been fairly one-sided and selective, mostly because Simmel’s philosophy has been bypassed in favor of his sociological contributions. This article examines Simmel’s explicit reflections on the nature of philosophy. Simmel defines philosophy through three aspects which, according to him, are common to all philosophical schools. First, philosophical reasoning implies the effort to think without preconditions. Second, Simmel maintains that in contrast to other sciences, only philosophy is oriented toward constructing a general view of the world. Third, Simmel claims that philosophical work worthy of the name creates a sphere of a typical way of being in relation to world, a third sphere that is between the personal and the objective. According to Simmel, what has made philosophy’s eminent figures great is that they have advanced a type of thinking and developed it into a particularly interesting form, and this type can still correspond with the way we experience the world. It is significant that these three aspects through which Simmel defines philosophical activity emphasize the forms of questioning, not the contents or objects of thought. Still, he thinks that an interaction with concrete examples is always required in order to make philosophy a meaningful activity. This stance is reflected in the wide variety of topics studied by Simmel himself. In his last works Simmel began to emphasize another aspect of philosophy, its nature as a living movement of thought related to fundamental human limitedness: just as life itself ceaselessly reaches beyond its present form, so philosophy constantly strives to overcome the preconditions of thinking.

Wild tribes and ancient Semites: Israelite-Indian identification and the American West

Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston, Texas, carefully preserved a 1916 pamphlet that claimed a common history for ‘Wild Tribes’ of Indians and Jews of antiquity. Why would a Jewish author tie the customs of ‘uncivilised’ tribes to his own religion, and why might it capture Cohen's attention? This article suggests that the ‘Indian-Israelite’ identification appealed to acculturated Jews like Cohen as part of a wider embrace of a vision of manhood that at once held ties to Jewishness and American identity. That is, identification with the American West and frontier emphasised the harmony between Jewishness, a particular type of enlightened Judaism, and Americanisation. A brief survey of three movements – the relatively small-scale Galveston Movement, Jewish agricultural communities and the larger, more diverse Zionist movement – then demonstrates how the gendered and nationalist ideologies of Henry Cohen and other acculturated Jews like him aligned with their imagined constructions of Indians.     

Identity Change Among Ethno-Religious Border Crossers: The Case of the Former Amish

The present study explores identity among the former Amish. While sociologists of religion have long been interested in religious identity, there has been less attention to religious identities among those who cross religious borders. Much of the literature suggests that individuals abandon former religious identities, including ethno-religious ones, when they join a new religious denomination (e.g., Sandomirsky and Wilson in Soc Forces 68:1211–1229, 1990; Sherkat and Wilson in Soc Forces 73:993–1026, 1995). While scholarship on the Jewish case challenges this assumption (e.g., Phillips and Kelner in Soc Relig 67:507–524, 2006; Sharot in Contemp Jew 18:25–43, 1997), research on other religious groups has largely overlooked these insights. This study extend insights from the Jewish case by examining holdover identities among the former Amish and comparing them with the former Ultra-Orthodox Jewish case, making use of Davidman’s (Becoming un-orthodox: stories of ex-Hasidic Jews, Oxford University Press, New York, 2014) research. Analysis of in-depth interviews with 59 former Amish adults reveals that, while those who have left the Amish no longer define themselves as religiously Amish, they do not abandon their Amish identities entirely. Instead, they reconstruct the meanings of their Amishness in varied ways in their non-Amish contexts. Comparison of these patterns with former Ultra-Orthodox Jews illuminates contextual factors, including the Amish practice of adult baptism and differing normative conceptions of Amish and Jewish identities, that contribute to variation in holdover identities across these cases. Altogether, these results suggest that ethno-religious identities are not mutually exclusive of other denominational identities and support the conceptualization of religious identities as complex, multilayered, and constructed in particular contexts in interaction with existing notions about religious groups.     

Incorporating Jewish Texts with REBT in the Treatment of Clinical Anger

Although there are some major philosophical differences between the underpinnings of REBT and religion, REBT has still been used effectively with religious clients (DiGiuseppe et al. in A practitioner’s guide to rational-emotive behavior therapy, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014). To date, most of the literature on using REBT with religious clients has focused on Christians and Christianity (e.g. Johnson in Cognit Behav Pract 8(1):39–47, 2002; Nielsen in Cognit Behav Pract 8(1):34–39, 2002; Ellis in Prof Psychol Res Pract 31(1):29–33, 2000; amongst others), with less attention given to other religions. This paper provides examples for the therapeutic use of Jewish texts from Biblical and Rabbinic literature to help religious Jewish clients who present with clinical anger. The texts are used to highlight and accompany disputations and other REBT therapeutic techniques. Before offering the disputes and the techniques, a brief history of REBT and religion is presented, followed by general ethical guidelines for treating religious clients. A review of different Jewish denominations and a background to Biblical and Rabbinic sources are described as well.     

Jewish Identity and the Secular Achievements of American Jewish Men and Women

Three questions are addressed concerning the relationship of Jewish identity to secular achievements. Are the secular achievements of American Jews related at all to the strength of their Jewish identity? Which has a stronger relationship to secular achievement, a religious or an ethnic Jewish identity? Do communal aspects or private, personal aspects of Jewish identity have the stronger relationship to secular achievements? Using the 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Survey, we find that educational attainment, labor force participation, and occupational achievements are related to several expressions of Jewish identity, even after controlling for the traditional sources of variation (age, gender, education, family status). Jewish identity, as expressed in terms of religion, ethnicity, communal commitment, and private attitudes and practices, is related to contemporary Jewish secular achievement, albeit differently for men and women.     

Law,Charity and Taboo or Kant's Reversal of St. Paul's Spirit‐Letter Opposition and its Theological Implications

This article gives the first account of Kant's reversal of St. Paul's Spirit‐Letter opposition. By means of such reversal Kant defines both charity and law as obtaining a complete autonomy from ‘profane’ life. In Kant's interpretative framework Judaism and Jews represent the ‘profane’, whereas Christ symbolizes the complete transcendence of the empirical. I shall discuss how different Jewish writer – Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel and Franz Baermann Steiner – respond to such a body‐spirit dichotomy in which ‘the Jew’ functions as the representation of that which is devalued as the material, the bodily.     

Invention and convention: Jewish and Christian critique of the Jewish fixed calendar

The institution of the Jewish fixed calendar has provoked muchcontroversial discussion not only among Jewish, but also Christian scholars. The significant contributions to the subject by two of the great sixteenth-century polymaths, the Jew Azariah de' Rossi and the Christian Sebastian Münster, pinpoint the delicate nature of calendrical investigation. Münster's frequent use of one particular piyyut (a religious poem) to undermine the basis of the Jewish fixed calendar is intended to defend the contradictory calendrical data in the Gospels. De' Rossi implicitly attacks Muenster for his recourse to this unhistorical text. Yet de' Rossi himself is intent on proving that the Jewish fixed calendar is a late post-talmudic convention, an iconoclastic approach which was not welcome in certain rabbinic circles. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Friend in Creed: Does the Religious Composition of Geographic Areas Affect the Religious Composition of a Person's Close Friends?

Numerous theories of religion rest on the assumption that the religious composition of local populations influences the religious identities of a person's close friends, but there have been few empirical tests of this assumption. Using a combination of data on the religious identity of close friends (from the 1988 and 1998 General Social Survey) and information on the religious composition of counties (from the U.S. Religious Congregations and Membership Study) we find that despite tendencies toward religious homogeneity, the religious composition of the surrounding population has an effect on the proportion of a respondent’s same‐religion friends and on the proportion of friends belonging to specific other religious groups. Local population characteristics are unrelated to the proportion of respondents’ friends known in congregational settings. Results have implications for a broad range of sociological theories of religion as well as research examining the impact of same‐congregation and same‐religion friends (e.g., health and well‐being).     

The beginning of modern Jewish historiography: Prague – A center on the periphery

This paper questions the well-established view that modern Jewish historical writing began in Germany about 1820, with the Wissenschaft des Judentums. Following a summary of various scholarly discussions of this issue, attention shifts to Prague. Prague was a center of Jewish historical writing before the birth of Wissenschaft, and the historical narratives of three distinct Bohemian maskilim, Peter Beer (1758–1838), Salomo Löwisohn (1789–1821), and Marcus Fischer (1788–1858) are shown to illustrate the options available to Jewish historians before institutionalized German historicism came to dominate the field. No less important, it becomes clear that scholars should treat Prague as a center of Jewish historical production, which they have not done in the past.     

“We have answered their prayer”: American Jewish old age homes as guardians of religious tradition

ABSTRACT

The old age home was the major American Jewish communal response to aged poverty during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first homes offered a self-conscious projection of their sponsors as socially progressive and compassionate in a new landscape. For a religious community increasingly distanced from formal hierarchies of traditional religious practice, the highly visible performance of good deeds under explicitly Jewish auspices became central to its communal identity. Acting on a combination of compassion and the perceived moral imperative of providing a Jewish environment, the founders and supporters of these homes recast Judaism and Jewish identity through an idealized image of aged piety.     

Psychiatry,Cultural Competency,and the Care of Ultra-Orthodox Jews: Achieving Secular and Theocentric Convergence Through Introspection

Several socio-cultural factors complicate mental health care in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. These include societal stigma, fear of the influence of secular ideas, the need for rabbinic approval of the method and provider, and the notion that excessive concern with the self is counter-productive to religious growth. Little is known about how the religious beliefs of this population might be employed in therapeutic contexts. One potential point of convergence is the Jewish philosophical tradition of introspection as a means toward personal, interpersonal, and spiritual growth. We reviewed Jewish religious-philosophical writings on introspection from antiquity (the Babylonian Talmud) to the Middle Ages (Duties of the Heart), the eighteenth century (Path of the Just), the early Hasidic movement (the Tanya), and modernity (Alei Shur, Halakhic Man). Analysis of these texts indicates that: (1) introspection can be a religiously acceptable reaction to existential distress; (2) introspection might promote alignment of religious beliefs with emotions, intellect and behavior; (3) some religious philosophers were concerned about the demotivating effects of excessive introspection and self-critique on religious devotion and emotional well-being; (4) certain religious forms of introspection are remarkably analogous to modern methods of psychiatry and psychology, particularly psychodynamic psychotherapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy. We conclude that homology between religious philosophy of emotion and secular methods of psychiatry and psychotherapy may inform the choice and method of mental health care, foster the therapist-patient relationship, and thereby enable therapeutic convergence.     

Religion and Happiness Among Israeli Jews: Findings from the ISSP Religion III Survey

This study investigates religious predictors of happiness in a population-based sample of Israeli Jewish adults (N = 991). Using data collected in 2009–2010 as a part of the International Social Survey Programme’s Religion III Survey, analyses were conducted on a fully recursive structural model of the effects of synagogue attendance and several religious mediators on a single-item measure of happiness. Bivariately, every religious measure (synagogue attendance, prayer frequency, certainty of God beliefs, a four-item Supernatural Beliefs Scale, and subjective religiosity) is positively and significantly associated with happiness. In the structural model, 11 of 15 hypothesized paths are significant. Of these, only subjective religiosity exhibits a significant direct effect on happiness (β = 0.15, p < .01). The other four religious indicators, however, all exert indirect effects on happiness through subjective religiosity and combinations of each other. Total effects on happiness of both synagogue attendance (β = 0.10, p < .01) and the Supernatural Beliefs Scale (β = 0.12, p < .05) are statistically significant. Analyses adjust for effects of age and other sociodemographic covariates. Results build on a growing body of population-based findings supporting a salutary impact of Jewish religious observance on subjective well-being in Israel and the diaspora.     

The celebration of civil Israeli religion in Italy

In this article, the attitudes of the Italian Jewish diaspora towards Israel, seen as a symbolic homeland, are analyzed. This analysis is based on the theoretical discourse on diaspora. Attitudes are explored through the participation of Italian Jews in the celebration of Yom ha'atzma'ut. Given the significance of Israel's Independence Day in the sequence of the three‐day civil religious commemoration in Israel – which constitutes a sort of national narrative – the entire sequence is also considered in the analysis of the Italian diaspora.     

The institutional evolution of religion: innovation and entrepreneurship in ancient Israel

In light of contemporary advances and in an effort to supplement and add to the vibrant discourse surrounding the evolution of religion, a distinctly sociological theory that returns to and pushes forward the insights of Durkheim and Weber is offered. The unit of evolution is the institutional sphere, or the macro-level structural and cultural sphere of religious action, exchange, and communication; and evolution is the process by which religious entrepreneurs are able to secure material and symbolic independence vis-à-vis other strata and, thereby, carve out an autonomous religious institution to reproduce their symbolic, normative, and organizational innovations. To illustrate the way this sociological theory of institutional evolution works, and how it accounts for multi-linear evolutionary paths, while considering contingencies, the evolution of the Ancient Israelite religion from the late 8th century BCE to the end of the Exile in the late 6th century BCE is examined.