ABSTRACT
How shall I begin to tell the story of what went into my study of life among ultra-Orthodox Jews in and around Jerusalem? Perhaps the place to begin is with the curiosity that propelled me on what would turn out to be a quest for a world that looked quite different at first from what it turned out to be in the end. Curiosity was what compelled me to go into this world that in many ways saw itself in opposition to the one from which I, social anthropologist, academic and modern Orthodox Jew, came. But why begin with curiosity? One of the first pieces of advice that I always give those who come to me
for counsel before embarking upon some field research with the goal of completing an ethnography is that what they are about to do is not going to be easy. The tasks of carrying out observations and interviews in the real world are enormously demanding and onerous, filled with frustrations and difficulties. I warn them that the process is time-consuming in the extreme, with long periods of waiting for just the right detail to emerge that will help one figure out what is actually going on. And the chances are that after all the waiting one might not even recognize or appreciate the detail when it does emerge. I tell them that good informants, those who know what insiders need to know, are hard to find and that many, if not most, people one encounters in the places one wants to learn about are exasperatingly inarticulate and frequently do not know the answers to the questions researchers ask or the full significance of what they do-Durkheim was absolutely correct when he wrote, “Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?” (1912: 486). Finally, I remind them that taking field notes and packing them with the experiences and knowledge in some kind of syntactic way, transforming these notes into an account or narrative that allows others to share one’s understanding (when and if it does come) as well as to appreciate its significance is astonishingly
difficult, particularly when part of what one wants to share are sentiments, atmosphere, or the sheer physical experience of being somewhere. In fact, as Mitchell Duneier has correctly noted, “in real life, even the most straightforward ‘facts’ like age or family status can be difficult to record in a straightforward way” (Duneier 2006: 684). Add to that the often infuriating demands of IRB committees and those demanding safeguards on all research dealing with human subjects, and the prospect of doing ethnography is overwhelming. Accordingly, because of all this difficulty and based on my own experi-
ence, I suggest to all who come for advice that it is essential that they begin with a powerful, compelling curiosity about the particular field setting, group, or subject they want to research. Without that compulsion, that insatiable desire to discover and uncover, followed by an equally strong need to share the discoveries with others, they ought not to embark on the project. The compulsion and curiosity, of course, are not by themselves sufficient, but in their absence much that remains is daunting in the extreme. And I have found few who have succeeded without it. The curiosity need not be purely academic or scientific. Indeed, something personal and subjective might even be better. The drive and passion that a personal quest contains can often times be more potent and sustaining than any other desire to know-and in the face of having to spend hours writing and coding notes, days waiting for something revealing to happen, endless encounters during which one is forced to show interest in dull or inane conversations and trying to make sense out of obfuscating comments or contradictory insights from interviewees who seem to have nothing of value to impart, the personal curiosity can be the extra impetus that keeps one at it long after the simple academic motive has been sapped. It was just this sort of curiosity with which I began the research that cul-
minated in the publication of my book, Defenders of the Faith: Inside UltraOrthodox Jewry (1992). As I wrote in the prologue of that book, the world of Jews whose Orthodoxy kept them living in enclaves in which they sought to create a life apart, insulated from what they considered to be the defiling influences of contemporary civilization and modern society, seemed to me at first to be the incarnation of a Jewish past that I felt a compulsion to visit and in which I then believed I might discover something about my own religious roots and heritage. My maternal grandparents, whom I had never met, had come, my mother assured me, from just such a world, which she too had once inhabited. In this respect, I was not, I suspect, too different from those who imagine that in the faces of the bearded men in black and the bewigged women in long skirts, the dozens of earlocked little boys and pigtailed little girls, often arrayed in schools around long rows of desks and loudly reviewing ancient texts or hearing timeless tales, they are looking at the reincarnation of those ghettoes of a pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, a world somehow caught in time and for some bathed in nostalgia. I too
thought at the outset, these were people and places that time forgot and that learning about them would enable me to turn back the clock and see a world that had seemed to be part of my Holocaust-survivors-family’s past. To be sure this is a nostalgia that does not necessarily signify a desire to live like that but simply to glimpse what is sometimes viewed (falsely, I should add, in light of what I learned) as a more primitive and hence authentic version of Judaism that has somehow insulated itself against the ravages of time and change-and given the Holocaust-even death and destruction. Without a doubt, there are those partisan boosters of this way of life who
argue just that: that these sorts of Jews, haredim, as the fervently religious call themselves, are the real thing, the true defenders of the faith and keepers of the immutable tradition against all of modernity that tries to erode it. They feed this nostalgia and often feed off it, drawing financial and political support for their institutions and ways of life from those who do not live like them but have become convinced that without them Judaism would ultimately wither. But all that I would learn later. At the outset, my curiosity, powerfully subjective and not all that well informed-in spite of my previous research on Orthodox Jews and my own personal background in a corner of the modernist, acculturated wing of that Judaism-was enough to get me going and past many of the early obstacles.
