Cultural Enology: What Wine Can Teach Us about Religion (And About Jewish Kabbalah and Hasidism in Particular)

Abstract

Wine has played a relevant role as a cultural object in many civilizations, from ancient Israel and Greece to modern Italy and France. Acknowledging wine’s distinctive significance in multiple religious and cultural traditions, I propose to delineate a specific area of scholarly research named “cultural enology”-an interdisciplinary pursuit at the crossroads of food and alcohol studies with its own theoretical assumptions and methods. Using premodern Judaism as an example, I note that wine’s peculiar status within it stems not only from this liquid’s ubiquitous presence and important role in many different realms of Jewish life, but also from certain general features of the beverage itself. This combination of general characters and specifically Jewish factors pertaining to wine has resulted in a prominent usage of this beverage as a symbol throughout Jewish history and has made wine a product of unique cultural significance for Jews overall. Recognizing this, I argue that attitudes toward wine provide a smaller-scale reflection of ideological and existential postures maintained by a Jewish individual or social group, and thus investigating said attitudes may contribute to elucidating more fundamental elements in the mentalities of the authors under scrutiny. As a case study, I demonstrate how studying early Hasidic pronouncements concerning wine allows us to tackle a variety of questions germane to the field of Religious Studies-views on asceticism, the value of human action, spiritual stature, the nature and extent of holiness, and the relations surrounding normative religion, mysticism, magic, and medicine.

Department(s)

Language, Cultures and Religions

Document Type

Article

DOI

10.4324/9781032683584-4

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Journal Title

Holy Waters an Interdisciplinary Examination of Religion and Alcohol

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