LAUSR

For Carlin Barton on her retirement from teaching—wishing her many more years of py scholarly life. This programmatic essay is propadeutic for and ultimately introductory to my book in prog, The History of Judaism: A Philological Study. These reflections come between, as it were, philological and theoretical work involved in the coproduction with Barton of Imagine No igion (2016) and the new project, between thinking about genealogies of religion and genealoof Judaism. Versions of this long-gestating text have been presented at seminars at the Ant Judaism Workshop at Yale University, the departmental seminar of the rhetoric departnt at University of California, Berkeley, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, and the rld Philologies Seminar of Zukunftsphilologie of the Forum Transregionale Studien of the ie Universität Berlin on which occasions it benefited greatly from the interventions of particits. It was first delivered publicly as the Sigmund H. Danziger, Jr. Distinguished Lecture in the manities at the University of Chicago in April 2016, where, once again, it benefited greatly from interventions of listeners of the likes of Tom Mitchell, Jamie Redfield, and David Nirenberg. I grateful to Shadi Bartsch for the invitation to present it there and for decades of scholarly colality. I owe particular debts of gratitude to Carlin A. Barton, Jonathan Boyarin, Andrew Bush, r Cohen, Chana Kronfeld, Maya Kronfeld, Lorraine Daston, Ramona Naddaf, and James I. ter for their readings and astute commentary, helping me avoid some of the most obvious pits in thinking this through. The graduate students in my seminar on the rhetoric of history are to be mentioned. The paper was completed while I was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute the History of Knowledge in Berlin under the aegis of Professor Daston whom I am happy to nk for that opportunity. Finally, the editorial board of Critical Inquiry sent me very helpful critinquiries and suggestions towards this final revision, and I am grateful to them as well. 1. Benson Saler, “Religio and the Definition of Religion,” Cultural Anthropology 2 (Aug. 1987): .