The Lives of Jessie Sampter

Sarah Imhoff’s The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist makes significant contributions not just to religious studies, disabilities studies, queer theory, and political theology, but also builds bridges between all of these fields. Blurring the boundaries of biography and microhistory, a decision she addresses in the introduction (3), Imhoff reviews the complex life of Jessie Sampter, a woman born in New York in 1883 and disabled by polio in 1895; a writer, thinker, and poet who challenged the boundaries of religious identity through her beliefs in aspects of Judaism, Ethical Culture, Christianity, Hinduism, Theosophy, and the occult; a queer person who never married nor bore biological children, yet created new definitions of family with a long-term female partner, an adopted child, and fellow members of the kibbutz in Palestine where she lived for her final years of life; and promoter of  Zionism who challenged the movement’s exhortations of physical labor and childbearing.

Imhoff narrates each of these “lives” while drawing connections between Sampter’s various identities. Chapter 1 considers Sampter’s religious beliefs; chapter 2, the role of disability in her daily life, work, and theories of both God and the world; chapter 3, her views on gender roles and kinship ties; and chapter 4, her political philosophy and how it was shaped and challenged by each of her other identities. The final chapter, “Afterlives,” serves as the book’s conclusion, in which Imhoff describes the impact Sampter had on her friends and community, and places where her work has been revived and reinterpreted in the decades since her death in 1938.

In her examination of Sampter’s life and identities, Imhoff combines several unique approaches that may change the ways we think about historical research and life writing. First, Imhoff presents her subject not chronologically, as is typical in biographical writing, but thematically. She argues that this approach better aligns with the methodology of history, where we know the end from the beginning, and with both queer theory and disability studies. Using her theoretical foundation in queer time and an offshoot she describes as “crip time,” Imhoff explains that “regular time often does not match our life experiences” (23). Time may slow and stretch during periods of pain and illness, and it may look different to people who do not see life as one straight path from birth through marriage, childrearing, and eventually to death. Imhoff argues that linear time is not the most accurate framework for presenting a life, and she narrates Sampter’s life accordingly.

Second, Imhoff builds on her earlier work to argue that Sampter’s life demonstrates how often people with disabilities turn to religion. Religion offers not just explanations of suffering and existential comfort, but also identities and clarifications for how people live their lives and understand the world around them. “Although many—perhaps most—memoirs about disability address religious belief, practice, or communal belonging,” Imhoff asserts, “scholarship about disability studies tends to pay it little attention” (70). By reclaiming a role for religion in the study of disability, Imhoff advocates for more complex pictures of both religion and of the lives of people with disabilities.

Third, because Sampter believed there was no separation between the body and the mind, Imhoff delves into the sensations and perceptions of the body that shape the thoughts and responses of the mind. Imhoff is nearly as present a character in this book as Sampter, describing how she came upon this subject and interjecting herself throughout the text. This reflexivity includes descriptions of the methods Imhoff incorporated to expand upon her archival work: visiting the important places in Sampter’s life, imagining the sights and smells Sampter encountered, growing the same plants that Sampter had in her garden, and relating her own physical pains to the pain and impairments Sampter faced. As Imhoff writes, “Biographies and narrative histories are not just a series of facts; they are stories. And those stories have much of the author in them” (194). Although occasionally distracting from the narrative, this approach makes the reader consider how we as humans embody our beliefs, and how we confront situations in which our beliefs and our bodies are at odds.

Fourth and finally, Imhoff proposes a new term, “religious recombination,” which she defines as “people exchanging ideas and philosophies, inheriting some practices and adopting others, and crafting religious worldviews in dialogue with the friends, family, and social world around them,” a process similar to the genetic recombination that occurs during cell division (67). Imhoff declares that “religious diversity” and “religious pluralism” do not adequately capture the idiosyncrasies of actual religious life for everyday people, and her new term should be adopted more broadly to better define and understand religion. Without mentioning Robert Bellah’s Sheilaism directly, Imhoff is clearly arguing against the way religious studies scholars have criticized people for picking and choosing different elements of religion to create new combinations that represent “truth” for themselves. This argument will seem less original to scholars who work in the realm of lived religion, and Imhoff’s terminology seems closely related to Catherine Albanese’s idea of combinative religion from A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale University Press, 2007). However, the way Imhoff makes religious recombination seem as natural as genetics is insightful, and for people outside the field of lived religion, it may transform conceptions of religious identity and the history of religion.

Scholars of religion, disability, politics, and gender and sexuality will find something of interest in this book, as will anyone fascinated by everyday historical people who resisted the molds of society without fully breaking them. The writing is approachable, the arguments well-articulated, and the moments in which Imhoff inserts herself give the reader pause to consider their positionality and thoughts on the subject. It is clear that, for Imhoff, Sampter is not just a research subject or a historical figure; she is an example of the ways everyone embodies paradoxes and complexities in their daily lives, and for Imhoff, she is even, at times, a friend. Imhoff may be a “historian who loves too much,” as historian Jill Lepore described biographers and microhistorians (3), but her work—and our understanding of embodied theology and politics—is better for it.

Brittany Acors is a doctoral candidate in American religious history at the University of Virginia.

Brittany Acors

Date Of Review:

October 23, 2023