Religion, Reductionism, and the Godly Soul: Lubavitch Hasidic Jewishness and the Limits of Classificatory Thought

摘要

This essay explores the limits of the classificatory category of religionnthrough an analysis of Lubavitch Hasidic discourses of Jewishness. ThenLubavitch Hasidim articulate a distinctive vision of Jewish identitynbased on what they describe as a uniquely Jewish “godly soul,” inher-nited by all Jews from the biblical patriarchs. The godly soul sits,nuncomfortably, on the conceptual boundaries of “race” and “religion,”nas these reductive categories of social analysis are typically understood.nThough it may be classified in such terms, it is better described as anconceptual singularity that resists the mechanisms of classificatorynthought. To understand such singular phenomena, I argue, we need tondevelop a social antireductionism—a mode of analysis that interrogatesnthe categories of the modern social sciences without appealing to antranscendent space beyond the social world.