ON MULTIPLE MODERNITIES,
CIVILIZATIONS AND ANCIENT
JUDAISM
An interview with Prof. S. N. Eisenstadt1
Shalva Weil
Research Institute for Innovation in Education, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
ABSTRACT: In this interview with Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, the author
discusses with the great sociologist of civilizations the intellectual
influences on his writings, and his progress since his early works on Israeli
society. Eisenstadt analyzes multiple ‘modernities’ in the context of
European society and the salience of solidarity and trust. One of the Axial
Age civilizations that continues to fascinate Eisenstadt is India, the largest
democracy in the world. Eisenstadt points out that Christianity, Islam,
Confucianism, and other civilizations and empires are both universalistic, and
particularistic and exclusive. Following his relatively recent analysis of
Weber’s Ancient Judaism, he prefers to relate to Judaism as a civilization
rather than an ethnic group, nation, religion or people, and finds it useful to
understand the development of modern Israeli society. He foresees both a
constructive and destructive global future, and reiterates his belief in
sociology as a powerful tool to present an analysis which can enrich public
discussion.
Key words: multiple modernities; Axial Age civilizations; democracy;
universalism; particularism
1. The interview frame
This exclusive interview took place in Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s
Jerusalem home on 23 June 2010. I have known S. N. Eisenstadt and
his wife Shulamith for many years, but had not been in touch for at
least a decade. The interview focus was on Europe, formations of
1. This interview took place before Prof. S. N. Eisenstadt passed away on 2 September
2010.
DOI: 10.1080/14616696.2010.515824 451
European Societies
12(4) 2010: 451Á/465
– 2010
Taylor & Francis
ISSN
1461-6696 print
1469-8307 online
modernity, and the role of sociology today.2
Possibly for the first time,
Eisenstadt admitted some of the limitations of his earlier works on
Israeli society, while confessing to his continued fascination with the
study of India.
2. S.N. Eisenstadt: the man and his theories
S. N. Eisenstadt, the ‘father of Israeli sociology’, the ‘sociologist of youth’,
the ‘sociologist of empires and civilizations’ is a pioneer of the comparative
method, and a sociologist of civilizations and modernity. He was born in
Warsaw in 1923, and received his PhD in sociology at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem under Martin Buber in 1947. The following year,
Eisenstadt carried out post-doctoral studies at the London School of
Economics. Today, he is Professor Emeritus of the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem and a Senior Research Fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem
Institute, as well as being a member of many academies. He has held guest
professorships at the Universities of Chicago, Harvard, Zurich, Vienna,
Bern, Stanford, Heidelberg, and many other distinguished universities,
and has been the recipient of honorary doctoral degrees from the
Universities of Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Helsinki, Harvard and Duke, to name
but a few. He is the recipient of the International Balzan Prize, McIver
Award of the American Sociological Association, Israel Prize, Rothschild
Prize in Social Sciences, Max Planck Research Award, Amalfi Prize for
Sociology and Social Sciences, EMET Prize for Sociology, Holberg
International Memorial Prize for scholarly work in social sciences, and
more.
Besides the outstanding list of books that he has authored, some in
collaboration with the Weberian scholar Wolfgang Schluchter, 10 books
have been written in the past decade and three books have been written in
his honor (Cohen et al. 1985; Plake and Schultz 1993; Ben-Rafael and
Sternberg 2005). On the occasion of his 80th birthday, the conference
‘Comparing Modern Civilizations’ was organized by the Academy of
Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem and the International Institute of
Sociology, and the conference ‘Empires, Globalization, Hegemony’ took
place in Budapest. Recently, the proceedings of the symposium organized
in Jerusalem in honor of the Holberg Prize have been published (Gazit and
Yair 2010). In addition, a special volume on Eisenstadt’s work written by
2. A version of the first part of this interview was published in Weil (2010). The second
part of the interview is due to appear in European Sociologist 30, 2011.
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Prof. Gerhard Preyer of Frankfurt is due to be published in Germany later
this year (Preyer forthcoming). Prof. Eisenstadt himself has published
countless scientific articles in sociology journals the world over, and edited
volumes with colleagues and pupils.
3. Early influences: Max Weber and Martin Buber
Shalva Weil (SW): Prof. Eisenstadt, you’ve been influenced by many
scholars: Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Robert Merton, Morris
Ginsberg and T.H. Marshall, to name but a few, yet it appears that
there are two dominant intellectual giants who influenced you the most:
Max Weber (1864Á/1920), on the one hand, and Martin Buber (1878Á/
1965), your mentor, on the other. Would you agree with this, and if so,
do you think that these two scholars represent two parts of your
psyche: Shmuel Noah, the universalist parallel to Weber (Eisenstadt
1968, 1969), and Shmuel Noah, the particularist parallel to Buber (e.g.
Buber 1960, 1973)?
S. N. Eisenstadt (SNE): Yes, it would be fair to say that these two
personalities have been the major influences on my work (Eisenstadt
1969). However, I can’t agree with the premise about the differences
between them. I certainly would not say that Buber was a particularist. It
was from Buber that I got the great encouragement for a universalist
comparative view. For instance, literally the first class I had with him in
Jerusalem in 1940, we read a Chinese text from Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching,
and it was with him that we studied classical Greek texts like Antigone.
Buber was a very broad universalist, with a very strong emphasis on
comparative things, and it was in this sense that he was very close, though
different, from Max Weber.
Although I knew, of course, about Weber before I met Buber, it was
through Buber’s influence that I really understood and studied Weber
much better. I collected some of Buber’s papers bearing on social and
cultural creativity in a special volume published in the ‘Heritage of
Sociology’ series (Eisenstadt 1992a). Also, it is important to know that it
was through Buber that I was introduced to most modern anthropological
theorists of the time like Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and
others, and also to the great classicists of German sociology Á/ not only
Max Weber but also Georg Simmel and others. So I would agree that
Buber and Weber were the two most influential intellectuals in my life,
but they did not represent different viewpoints, but were mutually
complementary.
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On multiple modernities, civilizations and ancient Judaism WEIL
4. Absorption and multiple modernities
SW: Let us turn to one of your earliest books, The Absorption of
Immigrants (Eisenstein 1954), which was published quite soon after the
establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. This book dealt with the
integration of immigrants, which you called ‘absorption’. Two decades
later, you were criticized, often by Israeli scholars (e.g. Smooha 1978;
Bernstein 1980; and others) for dictating a paternalistic attitude towards
immigrants. Many years later, you coined the phrase ‘multiple modernities’
(Eisenstadt et al. 2002; Eisenstadt 2003), a marvelous heuristic tool
to overcome the problems of post-modernity. Do you think today that
‘multiple modernities’ would have been useful then to explain the
integration of different people from different backgrounds into the host
society?
SNE: Let me put it this way: there is in Israel, as there is in many other
modern societies, a great pluralism of experience of life and in the
interpretation of the premises of the society. Not all of them are fullyfledged
patterns of multiple modernities, but rather continuously
changing patterns. So there is no doubt that on the one hand Israel
represents one, or maybe a few, illustrations of multiple modernities; but
at the same time it is different from the multiple modernities of, say, India,
or of Europe, and so on.
SW: You’re saying that on the one hand Israel represents a model, or an
illustration, of a society with multiple modernities Á/ pluralistic frameworks
to work out different, continuously changing patterns; on the other
hand . . .
SNE: On the other hand, it develops its own distinctive patterns, which
are different from the multiple modernities of India, of Europe... One has
to be very careful about how one uses this term. It’s a very nice expression,
a very useful term, but it has to be used very carefully, not to become just a
residual category.
SW: If you had invented this expression earlier, and developed the idea
earlier, would this have overcome the criticism that people had of your
original book?
SNE: I agree that in my original book I did pay attention to, but
certainly did not take into account sufficiently, the traditions of different
groups. I emphasized it, but certainly not enough. Also, I did not study
enough Á/ some of my younger colleagues did later on how these
traditions were continuously being reconstructed in Israel, just as they
are being reconstructed the world over. If you look at Europe today and
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the situation of the Muslims within these societies, you see that they do
not constitute traditional societies, but rather modern frameworks in the
various traditional components continuously being reconstructed.
SW: This model of multiple modernities rings true for many immigrants,
for example those integrated into Europe. But when we have immigrants
in Israel who hail from a rural setting in Ethiopia, and do not come from a
civilization which was exactly an Axial Age civilization, to use your phrase
(Eisenstadt et al. 2005) and that of Karl Jaspers (1949), and didn’t show
manifestations of moderna in the sense that we know it; does the multiple
modernity model fit those realities?
SNE: It does. The Ethiopian Jews, and others, are now working in a
modern society in a modern framework and they accept some of the basic
premises thereof, such as legitimate, open political activism, the possibility
of political participation,3
political criticism, and challenging official
authority in a legitimate way. So, in many ways they already accept many
of the premises of modernity, but interpret them in different ways. But
they are modern.
SW: Aren’t these patterns, like political activism and challenging
authorities, continuations of previous traditional patterns?
SNE: Well, such patterns are partially a continuation of old ones, but
it is also a continual reconstruction thereof. Let us take the Moroccan
Jews’ Mimouna festival as an example (cf. Goldberg 1978). In North
Africa, Mimouna entailed the cooperation of local Muslims who sold
the Jews wheat, and invited them to picnic on their land. From the
mid-1960s, Moroccan Jews in Israel began celebrating the Mimouna as
family picnics in mass gatherings, with as many as 150,000 attending.
Mimouna is now an official holiday in the Israeli calendar. This festival
is one they knew from Morocco, but it’s also obviously something new,
since it did not exist in this way in the past, and it’s not just a
continuation.
SW: Therefore, from your perspective, it’s not an ‘invention of tradition’,
as Hobsbawm and Ranger (1992) call it, but a reconstruction of a new
modernity.
SNE: It isn’t a continuation of a traditional pattern. It’s a reconstitution of
new modern patterns which reconstructs many traditional components.
This is one of the most fascinating facets of modern society, indeed in
principle of any society.
3. The Ethiopian Jews have one Member of Parliament in Israel.
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On multiple modernities, civilizations and ancient Judaism WEIL
5. On fundamentalism in Europe
SW: In contrast to other people, you’ve written that fundamentalism is
essentially a modern phenomenon. This strikes me as a very contemporary
thing to write. In a situation in which you write, elsewhere, that solidarity
and trust are the ingredients for those prone to adjust to social change
(Eisenstadt 1999), can you comment on the integration of Muslims,
particularly in Europe?
SNE: The problem with solidarity and trust is that you cannot have
continuous social relations without them, but at the same time they can be
very limiting. They can limit the extent, and the scope, of your relations.
There is tension between the particularist elements of trust and solidarity,
and the possibility of its extension. This is one of the great challenges
today of Muslims in Europe and in many other places, indeed all over the
world. Sometimes it’s successful, sometimes it fails. But it’s always full of
tension. Any extension, any attempt at extending solidarity and trust,
starting with the family and fanning outwards, is full of tension. I am
thinking of the theories developed by the great psycho-analyst John
Bowlby (1907Á/1990) who wrote a book about the crucial role of material
attachment (1999[1969]), and another book on the psychological effects of
separation, anxiety and loss of the original attachment (1973). The tension
between concrete attachments is a given pattern of life and relations and
the necessity of going beyond the continual components of social life.
SW: I am concerned about in-group solidarity, and trust of the out-group,
or relations with its members; in other words, what about the tension
between the immigrants and the host society?
SNE: The problematique is, can you build new patterns of solidarity
(cf. Eisenstadt 1995)? For instance, the very interesting controversy in the
United States championed by an important scholar, Wilson (1987), shows
through a structural and cultural analysis how mixed neighborhoods
destroy trust. However, there is a response to him, saying: ‘Yes, for some
time they may destroy trust, but they may also slowly extend the range of
trust, so as to continuously build it up’. One of the interesting examples
from Israel in the 1950s was the problem of settlement of different ethnic
groups in the newly established State in the Lachish area. Here we said: ‘If
you make mixed agricultural settlements, if every moshav is mixed, it will
destroy itself. If you make each moshav relatively homogenous, but make
the moshav’s district heterogeneous, you will create trust’.
SW: This relates, on a higher level, to the fact that modernization doesn’t
necessarily lead to homogeneity. So, aren’t we therefore witnessing the
fragmentation of Europe today?
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SNE: We are witnessing a transformation of Europe, which includes a
fragmentation of the old, and attempts at establishing new institutional
and communal patterns and networks. These are new modes. Some of
these are successful; others are failures.
SW: What do you think of the concept of ‘hybridity’ in this context? Is it
useful?
SNE: Yes and no. On the one hand, it’s a useful concept. But it’s not a new
concept. Hybridity means multiplicity of contents, but it does not tell you
about the constitutional borders, or boundaries. Hybridity does not in
itself create firm boundaries. It may, it may not. In Israel, the ultraOrthodox
are very hybrid. Some use the Internet and watch television,
others don’t. Some are dressed quite ‘modern’. But this doesn’t tell you if
they are open in their constitutional boundaries.
SW: You yourself have a wider view: of empires, of civilization (cf.
Eisenstadt 1996, 2003).
SNE: Boundaries are constantly changing and being reconstituted. There
can be no social formations without borders and the concept of hybridity
doesn’t account for this. Boundaries are very important. They change,
they are continually reconstituted. I have not yet seen any social formation
without boundaries. Maybe it will appear one day.
SW: Will a new modernity emerge?
SNE: Yes, a new modernity will be reconstituted, which reconstructs
many traditional components. One of the most fascinating societies, which
I’m studying now from this point of view, is India.
6. India as an Axial Age civilization
SW: As you know, I’ve studied a tiny microcosm of India (Weil 2006) so
I would be delighted to hear more. When you write about Axial Age
civilizations, India is included, but you didn’t include Japan in your
scheme. In fact, you wrote a whole book explaining why Japan is not an
Axial Age civilization and why its development is more similar to Western
Europe than China (Eisenstadt 1996). Why is that?
SNE: Axial Age civilizations was a term used by Karl Jaspers to describe
all those civilizations that developed during the first millennium before
Christianity, in China, in Hinduism and Buddhism and, later, in Islam.
Using a Weberian-style analysis, I showed how Japan has been a non-Axial
society with an absence of clear concepts of state and law with only very
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On multiple modernities, civilizations and ancient Judaism WEIL
weak tendencies to heterodoxy, and few utopian intellectuals. It took me
seven years to write that book (Eisenstadt 1996). But when we come to
India, it is definitely an Axial Age civilization.
SW: How is it that the ancient caste system actually produced the largest
democracy in the world?
SNE: The classical pre-modern Indian caste system is seemingly the
extreme counter-example of public spheres and civil society that crystallized
in Europe, above all in its emphasis on the group and hierarchical
premises as against the individualistic, potentially egalitarian ones that
crystallized in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. However, in a
recent article (Eisenstadt 2009a), I discuss the problem of the applicability
of the term ‘civil society’ to non-Western communities. I demonstrate how
the traditional Indian caste system produced a society that had many of the
characteristics of a civil society.
SW: I still remain confused . . .
SNE: You see, the major aspects of civil societies Á/ autonomy of the
group, autonomy of access to the state, or to the authorities, and
publicity, open public discussion thereof Á/ developed in Europe on the
basis of the conception of individual rights. In India these characteristics
developed on the basis of conceptions of collective duties. So, we have
similar structural effects but different cultural premises, which means
that the dynamics are different. Indian democracy is a different
democracy from France, but it is a very vibrant democratic system,
maybe one of the most vibrant contemporary democratic systems (cf.
Eisenstadt 1999). There are changes of government, criticism of a
dominant power structure and important attempts to maintain the rule
of law. That’s why I’m so fascinated with India. Before this, I was very
fascinated with Japan.
SW: I think you’ve really laid your case with Japan, but India . . .
I understand you are still grappling with it. Do I intuitively understand
correctly?
SNE: I agree with you. Indeed, I am still more puzzled by India.
SW: I’m not sure that we’ve come to the end of the line, the understanding
of the social dynamics.
SNE: Probably not yet, probably not enough. But it’s very important.
SW: For example, in India the individual is often negated. This is true
both of the caste system and even of transnational loan associations based
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on the joint family which operate today in a globalized world. So, if human
agency is denied, how can progress and, indeed, democracy be achieved?
SNE: We have to remember that the caste system was one of the most
mobile systems in the world, such that mobility was indeed effected by
human agents, and we also have to remember that moksha, which is a sort of
equivalent of salvation, is carried by individuals. When we talk about caste,
we think that there are four castes in the varna system, but in practice there
are thousands of little caste-groups or jatis. Now let’s say that you are
a member of a third-rate legal caste in some province, and you want to
become a member of a second-rate one. Today, paradoxically, it’s difficult
to do it directly in such a way because everything is computerized and every
piece of information is available. But a few hundred years ago, I could
migrate to a new place, and make a pact with a new ruler, who would
recognize me. So, it was one of the most mobile of systems. The usual view
of the old caste system was that it was a fossilized system, but in practice it
was one of the most dynamic, mobile systems in the world, and much more
dynamic and mobile than Japan or Imperial China. But, as indicated above,
today, with access to the Internet, people are less free to migrate and start
over again without others knowing a person’s past history, such that the
caste system may be becoming less, not more, dynamic. The result of the
accommodative tendencies in Indian society, which certainly in the past
were also reinforced by the fact that the boundaries of different political
formations were somewhat flexible, gave rise to strong inclusivist
tendencies with respect to different territorial groups and transnational
networks. But they created a type of civil society with numerous relatively
autonomous social sectors, associations, organizations and movements that
develop in modern societies. And of course, civil society constitutes an
arena of contestation about different conceptions of social order and
different interests with a strong emphasis on affirmative group action.
SW: You write more about other Axial Age civilizations, and about
different types of universalism: in Christianity, in Islam, in Confucianism,
and in other civilizations and empires (e.g. Eisenstadt 1996). However, all
of these civilizations are also particularistic and exclusive.
SNE: They’re exclusive . . . They’re universalistic and exclusive. Islam is
not particularistic. Even Judaism is not definitely so.
7. Judaism: ancient and modern
SW: How does the concept of the ‘Chosen People’ in Judaism fit into this
framework?
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On multiple modernities, civilizations and ancient Judaism WEIL
SNE: Each of these groups or civilizations looks on itself as the ‘Chosen
People’, but in universalistic terms. So, there’s always this tension between
emphasizing the universalistic element, but also the special place of the
group in this universalistic view. What is important is that the concept of
‘Chosen People’ is a very open, but also a very exclusivist concept.
Everyone can become a Muslim, if he or she accepts Islam. If he or she
doesn’t accept Islam, then they can’t. So universalism can also be very
illiberal. Universalism and liberalism are not the same. That’s one of our
illusions: that universalism and liberalism are identical, but they are not.
On the contrary, the great Italian classical scholar Arnaldo Momigliano
argued that polytheism is good for empires because it’s not so exclusive; it
allows greater variability (Momigliano 1987).
SW: For many years, in all your writings on Max Weber, you avoided Á/
flirted with, but avoided Á/ Ancient Judaism (1952 [1920]). Only in more
recent years have you analyzed the text in a book entitled Explorations in
Jewish Historical Experience: The Civilizational Dimension (Eisenstadt
2004). I was very glad that you brought my attention to it because
I knew an earlier version of the book on Jewish civilization, which does not
contain an analysis of Ancient Judaism (Eisenstadt 1992b), and I was very
happy to read this now. Here, in your analysis of Ancient Judaism, you
point to the limitations of Weber and clearly mention his more successful
treatises in relation to other civilizations. So, while it took you many years
to delve into Ancient Judaism, why do you think it was worthwhile?
SNE: It got to me; that’s it. It finally got to me. I saw it as a very important
component to understand Israeli society and contemporary Jewish society.
SW: But it’s limited theoretically Á/ it doesn’t ring true theoretically like
other things that Weber wrote, all that we know, with which we are
familiar, like The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1930
[1905]). Ancient Judaism is like ‘the best of Weber’?
SNE: It’s still very important. Except that, as Momigliano (1980)
showed, he is wrong on one basic problem, and that is the conception of
the Jews as a ‘pariah people’, which indicated Weber’s oscillation
between a recognition of the distinct type of creativity of the Jewish
people and the feeling that this creativity was stifled mostly by the
experience both of exile and by a choice; Max Weber indeed was
ambivalent to these trends of Jewish history. This understanding I also
inherited from the great philosopher Martin Buber, who taught me at
the Hebrew University. Recently, I worked out some of the problematique
of Jewish civilization in an article entitled ‘Tensions as resources in
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Jewish historical civilizational experience’ (Eisenstadt 2009b). There
I maintain that the term civilization Á/ and not other terms often used in
the literature, such as people, nation, ethnic group or religion Á/ is best
suited to define the nature of Jewish collectivity and historical experience
and that it provides at least a clue to Jewish survival. This is based on
the fact that while all these terms touch on some very important aspects
of this experience, not only do they not exhaust it Á/ they do not address
its most distinctive characteristics.
SW: You are known as the ‘father of Israeli sociology’ ever since the
publication of your scholarly work Israeli Society (Eisenstadt 1967). Israel
has come under heavy criticism lately. Could you tell us what your view of
Israel is today? Is this a society that will survive or continue to replicate
itself with tensions?
SNE: I think that Israel is facing very difficult times. The hostile relations
between Israel and her neighbors are seemingly of a new nature, as not
only between nation-states and movements, but still bearing many of the
seeds of the historical ambivalence to the Jewish people and civilization.
Another problem of Israeli society is, of course, that of the potential
contestations between different social groups. However, Israel is in a
difficult position, not so much because of the tensions between different
groups, but because it has, in a sense, weakened very much because its
basic institutional formats have become weakened. But at the same time
there is a lot of continual creativity in the cultural arenas, in literature, in
the arts, in technology and in economic entrepreneurship, and then there
is a continual tension or discrepancy between such creativity and the
erosion of many central institutional frameworks.
SW: What do you mean by ‘the end of its institutional formations’?
Societal institutions like the labor union, the Histadrut?
SNE: Not only the Histadrut. Just pick up the paper in the morning.
There is greater distrust in the government Á/ in many institutions thereof.
SW: Á/ which leads us back to solidarity and trust.
SNE: Exactly. One cannot have continuous social relations without
solidarity and trust. There has always been a tension between the
particularist elements of trust and solidarity, and the possibility of
extension. Any extension, any attempt at extending solidarity and trust,
starting with the family and moving to broader settings is full of tension.
In Israel, solidarity and trust in the institutional formations are declining,
and this is worrying.
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On multiple modernities, civilizations and ancient Judaism WEIL
8. The past and the future
SW: At the age of 86, I want you to look back, and let me know how you
view the trends over the past decades, both in sociology and in the world;
I want to ask if the world has acted rationally, according to you, since the
Second World War?
SNE: Sociology has become very diversified and certainly very strong to
the world, but it lacks the strong intellectual impact which it seems to have
had under the influence of its founding fathers. With respect to different
modern rational activities, there developed different modes of rationalities,
not just one mode of rationality. These rationalities are very often
competing; not everything that I don’t like is irrational.
SW: And when it comes to morality, are there still competing moralities, or
is there one absolute morality?
SNE: Let me put it this way: there is a tension between putting emphasis
on seemingly one over-arching universal morality, on the one hand, and
different interpretations of such a universal morality. So Muslims will tell
you, they have a universal morality; but it is different from Christian
morality, be it secular morality, or whatever. There is more and more
dialogue between moralities, but there is no one over-arching morality.
SW: And what is the role of the sociologist in all this?
SNE: To make sense of it all, to analyze, to understand, to present an
analysis so that it can enrich the public discussion. Sociology will not solve
the problem, but it can enrich the discussion.
SW: I also want to look forwards; I know that sociologists aren’t prophets,
but I want to know if you foresee whether one particular empire, one
particular civilization, like China, say, is likely to overtake other Axial Age
civilizations rooted in the Protestant ethic?
SNE: No, I think there will be more common frameworks, and greater
global competition within these frameworks. Some constructive competition,
some very destructive.
SW: When you say constructive, you’re talking about global cooperation,
on the one hand, and when you say destructive, can we talk about a clash
of civilizations?
SNE: Not only civilizations. I don’t think we face here clashes of
civilizations. We could talk about clashes of different states, movements,
and above all of different interpretations of modernity.
SW: Where is Iran in this scheme?
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SNE: It’s a fascinating case of a modern, Jacobean fundamentalist society.
SW: But not a member of the great Axial civilizations?
SNE: Oh, yes. It’s a member of the Islamic world, one interpretation of it.
SW: As a final question, you foresee both a constructive and destructive
future, as was in the past, but do you remain, at your age, optimistic?
SNE: This is probably connected with my own biological clock. In the
morning I am mostly a pessimist. In the afternoon and evening, I’m an
optimist!
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the cooperation of Prof. S.N.
Eisenstadt, who went over the content of this interview. Thanks are due
to Noam Sienna, a student at Brandeis University, who helped with the
transcript.
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Shalva Weil is Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for Innovation in
Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where she
conducts research into qualitative methodology, ethnicity, migration,
diaspora, religion and violence. She has edited several books on Indian
Jews. She is the president of SOSTEJE (Society for the Study of Ethiopian
Jews), and was a member of the Executive Committee of the European
Sociological Association; she edits the association’s newsletter,
European Sociologist.
Address for correspondence: Dr. Shalva Weil, Research Institute for
Innovation in Education, Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem
91905, Israel.
E-mail: msshalva@mscc.huji.ac.il
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