Making Up People in Rabbinic Literature: Identity and Categories of Disability in Rabbinic Law

• In Event: Negotiating Disability within Jewish Tradition: Interpretations, Rabbinic Discourses, and the Modern Religious Self

Abstract

Famously, the philosopher Ian Hacking coined the phrase “making up people” to refer to the process by which the classification of people affects the people classified. Focusing on the forms of scientific classification that emerged in the nineteenth century, Hacking argues that the process of classification and the scientific study of individuals is an interactive process and thus changes the people who are classified. This dynamic process of identity formation that results from classification is what he refers to as “looping,” as once classified, a person is not the same as they were before. Discussing examples such as the so-called “invention of homosexuality” in the nineteenth century and “multiple personality disorder” in the twentieth century that brought new “kinds of people” into being, Hacking argues that, especially in the case of scientific classification, resistance to the medicalization and control of a particular classification continues to transform the classified person’s identity. This paper draws on the philosophic framework of “making up people” and the “looping” model of identity formation to examine the categorization of people— in particular, the category of blindness—in rabbinic literature and how it relates to identity.
Within rabbinic literature, people are designated into specific categories: man, woman, child, sick, blind, deaf, etc., are all categories used to designate a person’s obligation in relation to rabbinic law. Judith Hauptman in her study of women in rabbinic literature and Julia Watts Belser in her study of disability in rabbinic literature argue that the degree of obligation, the category one is assigned to, correlates to a person’s social status within the imagined rabbinic community. In this paper, I will examine the representation of the category of blindness in rabbinic literature. Focusing on stories about rabbinic figures who themselves were blind, such as R. Sheshet and R. Joseph, I will consider how these texts portray the dynamic process by which these rabbis negotiate this categorization. Indeed, I argue that the texts themselves seem invested in exploring the relationship between how the category of blindness and the identity of a person who is blind relate to one another, as these texts depict R. Sheshet and R. Joseph resisting and pushing back against strands within rabbinic law that exclude or discriminate against persons who are blind.

Author

• Shulamit Shinnar, Florida State University