Melvin Konner

I have shared with this community my ongoing and very personal search for my Jewish heritage and identity more than once, most recently, lovingly and visually in a diary based on a talk I gave at a Jewish Genealogical conference.

What I have not shared as much is the academic backdrop to this personal search. I am inspired to share this academic backdrop with you as I reread one of the books that is key to this backdrop: Melvin Konner’s 2003 book Unsettled. This book is billed as an “anthropology of the Jews” and covers the entire panorama of Jewish existence at least to some degree. It is primarily this book I want to share with you.

But first I want to also mention a few other books that complement Unsettled as what I would consider “must read” books for an understanding of Jews as a people. Most particularly I consider Israel Finkelstein’s iconoclastic book The Bible Unearthed a must read. It is considered one of the more radical interpretations of the archaeological evidence, but it by and large rings true to me particularly in light of the far less radical work The Canaanites, by Jonathan N. Tubb, which I read at about the same time as The Bible Unearthed. I found the evidence presented in each work to dovetail very nicely and reading The Canaanites gave me a better appreciation for The Bible Unearthed. Two supposedly counter-views to Finkelstein’s work were written by William G. Dever, Who Were and What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? Oddly, to me Dever comes off far more in agreement with Finkelstein than at odds with him and it seems to me that Dever obsesses over differences with Finkelstein in details…so much so that he felt the need to write TWO books more or less directly addressing Finkelstein’s work. But reading Dever’s view as a partial counterpoint to Finkelstein’s book is well worthwhile. Together, these four books, perhaps with the additional Finkelstein book David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, are to me key books for understanding the origins of Israel and the Jews and I cannot stress enough how important this is to an understanding of being Jewish. Jews are nothing if not obsessed with the thousands of years of tradition that they are a part of and reading these archaeological works gives you a very good sense of what that tradition really is. Judaism was NOT at its start a monotheistic religion, for example. But it WAS a religion that shunned the eating of pork.