Goy

The distinction between Jew and his other, the gentile, has been so central to Jewish history that the vast scholarship dedicated to Jewish-gentile relations has treated the category of the gentile as self-evident and has never questioned its history. This book shows that this category was in fact born at a particular moment, that it replaced older categories of otherness, and that it was both informed by and embedded in new modes of separation of Jews from non-Jews. The book traces the development of the term and category of the goy from the Bible—where it simply means “people,” through the plurality of others in Second Temple literature, to rabbinic literature—where it signifies any individual who is not a Jew, erasing all ethnic and social differences among different others. The book argues that the abstract concept of the gentile first appeared in Paul’s Letters, but only in rabbinic literature did this category become the center of a stable and long-standing discursive structure. It then reconstructs the specific type of other the goy came to be, and compares it to the famous other of Greek and Hellenistic antiquity—the Barbarian.