Abstract
In his current work, Carlo Ginzburg raises questions about “the emergence, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, of a comparative approach to religions—an approach far older than the late nineteenth-century codification of the history of religion as an academic discipline. Older, yes, but how much older?” Here Ginzburg pushes back a comparative intellectual practice before the discovery of the New World and the Enlightenment, which have been highlighted by such scholars as Jonathan Z. Smith and Guy Stroumsa as the incipient phases of what ultimately became the academic study of “religion.” Daniel Boyarin’s conceptually rich and sharply argued Judaism comes as a disruptor to any such project in that it interrogates the pre-modern existence of the very category that these scholars present as their object of study.