A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Essays that explore the rich engagement of the Talmud with its cultural world
The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), the great compilation of Jewish law edited in the late Sasanian era (sixth–seventh century CE), also incorporates a great deal of aggada, that is, nonlegal material, including interpretations of the Bible, stories, folk sayings, and prayers. The Talmud’s aggadic traditions often echo conversations with the surrounding cultures of the Persians, Eastern Christians, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, and the ancient Babylonians, and others. The essays in this volume analyze Bavli aggada to reveal this rich engagement of the Talmud with its cultural world.
Features:
- A detailed analysis of the different conceptions of martyrdom in the Talmud as opposed to the Eastern Christian martyr accounts
- Illustration of the complex ways rabbinic Judaism absorbed Christian and Zoroastrian theological ideas
- Demonstration of the presence of Persian-Zoroastrian royal and mythological motifs in talmudic sources
Animal law has become a topic of growing importance internationally, with animal welfare and animal rights often assuming center stage in contemporary debates about the legal status of animals. While nonspecialists routinely decontextualize ancient texts to support or deny rights to animals, experts in fields such as classics, biblical studies, Assyriology, Egyptology, rabbinics, and late antique Christianity have only just begun to engage the topic of animals and the law in their respective areas. This volume consists of original studies by scholars from a range of Mediterranean and West Asian fields on a variety of topics at the intersection of animals and the law in antiquity. Contributors include Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer, Beth Berkowitz, Andrew McGowan, F. S. Naiden, Saul M. Olyan, Seth Richardson, Jordan D. Rosenblum, Andreas Schüle, Miira Tuominen, and Daniel Ullucci. The volume is essential reading for scholars and students of both the ancient world and contemporary law.
A systematic attempt to understand the rabbinic world through its approach to confronting uncertainty
In the history of halakhah, the treatment of uncertainty became one of the most complex fields of intense study. In his latest book, Moshe Halbertal focuses on examining the point of origin of the study of uncertainty in early rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah, Tosefta, and halakhic midrashim. Halbertal explores instructions concerning how to behave in situations of uncertainty ranging from matters of ritual purity, to lineage and marriage, to monetary law, and to the laws of forbidden foods. This examination of the rules of uncertainty introduced in early rabbinic literature reveals that these rules were not aimed at avoiding but rather at dwelling in the midst of uncertainty, thus rejecting the sectarian isolationism that sought to minimize a community’s experience of and friction with uncertainty.
Features:
- A thorough investigation of the principles concerning how to behave in cases of uncertainty
- An examination of two distinct modes for coping with uncertainty
While the use of feminist analysis as a methodological lens is not new to the study of Talmudic literature or to the study of individual tractates, this book demonstrates that such an intervention with the Babylonian Talmud reveals new perspectives on the rabbis’ relationship with the temple and its priesthood. More specifically, through the relationships most commonly associated with home, such as those of husband-wife, father-son, mother-son, and brother-brother, the rabbis destabilize the temple bayit (or temple house). Moving beyond the view that the temple was replaced by the rabbinic home, and that rabbinic rites reappropriate temple practices, a feminist approach highlights the inextricable link between kinship, gender, and the body, calling attention to the ways the rabbis deconstruct the priesthood so as to reconstruct themselves.
Spurred by a curiosity about Daf Yomi—a study program launched in the 1920s in which Jews around the world read one page of the Talmud every day for 2,711 days, or about seven and a half years—Adam Kirsch approached Tablet magazine to write a weekly column about his own Daf Yomi experience. An avowedly secular Jew, Kirsch did not have a religious source for his interest in the Talmud; rather, as a student of Jewish literature and history, he came to realize that he couldn’t fully explore these subjects without some knowledge of the Talmud. This book is perfect for readers who are in a similar position. Most people have little sense of what the Talmud actually is—how the text moves, its preoccupations and insights, and its moments of strangeness and profundity. As a critic and journalist Kirsch has experience in exploring difficult texts, discussing what he finds there, and why it matters. His exploration into the Talmud is best described as a kind of travel writing—a report on what he saw during his seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Talmud. For readers who want to travel that same path, there is no better guide.
Judaism and Story documents a chapter of rabbinic tradition that explored the possibility of historical orientation by means of stories. As Neusner demonstrates, this experiment with narrative went beyond the borders of rabbinic preoccupation with rhetorical argumentation focused on the explication of the Torah. The sage story moved in the direction of biography, but without allowing biography to emerge. This development, in Neusner's account, parallels the movement from epistle to Gospel in early Christianity and thus has broad implications for the history of religions.
In his attempt to answer these questions, Neusner sets forth the character and the form of the Torah as sung theology. Israel, the holy community, meets God in the synagogue, while at prayer, and in the yeshiva, when studying the Torah—at the moment in each setting when the Torah is received. In both circumstances people do not read but sing out its words. With the written part of the Torah sung in the synagogue, and the oral part declaimed in centers of sacred learning, music provides the medium for Judaism's theological voice.
Neusner identifies a reciprocal exchange between the holy community Israel and God: Israel sings to God when the Torah is studied, and God sings to Israel when the Torah is declaimed. Through the metaphor of music, Neusner offers an account of how he believes those faithful to the Torah meet God in the Torah, and how they should listen to the melody of God's self-revelation. The result is an original theological reflection that will interest all students of Judaism.
Jonathan Schofer offers the first theoretically framed examination of rabbinic ethics in several decades. Centering on one large and influential anthology, The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, Jonathan Schofer situates that text within a broader spectrum of rabbinic thought, while at the same time bringing rabbinic thought into dialogue with current scholarship on the self, ethics, theology, and the history of religions.
Notable Selection, Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Philosophy and Jewish Thought, Association for Jewish Studies
Now in Paperback!
In the past thirty years, the Mishnah has taken its place as a principal focus in the academic study of religion and of Judaism. Many university scholars have participated in the contemporary revolution in the description, analysis, and interpretation of the Mishnah. Nearly all the publishing scholars of the academy who are now at work are represented in this project. Both essential volumes present a broad selection of approaches to the study of the Mishnah. What they prove in diverse ways is that the Mishnah defines the critical focus of the study of Judaism. It is a document that rewards study in the academic humanities.
Features:
- The best of contemporary scholarship on the Mishnah
- The most representative selection of contemporary Mishnah-study contributions available in any collection in a Western language
- Paperback format of an essential Brill reference work
Reasserts the centrality of Jewish culture to contemporary discussions of diaspora
Diaspora: the scattering of a people, often described as a condition of helplessness and a pathology to be overcome. It can also be, as Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin assert in this provocative work, a unique source of power and strength. Focusing on Jewish experience, Powers of Diaspora forcefully argues that diasporic communities exercise a distinct form of cultural power in order to maintain themselves.
With reference to rabbinic culture and contemporary Jewish ethnography, the authors evoke the cultural strategies of Jewish diaspora—of regeneration through statelessness—that should prove increasingly relevant to the dilemmas and possibilities of the "new diasporas" born in the midst and in the aftermath of the modern world-system. Their work exposes the various methods by which peoples in diaspora "legislate" distinctive ways of life and establish formal communal structures, thus creating fluid yet effective boundaries between themselves and the others who surround them, and critiques the internal power dynamics that can sometimes result.Powers of Diaspora strongly reasserts the place of Jewish culture in contemporary discussions of diaspora, where the cultural politics of postcolonialism have remarginalized Jewish experience; at the same time, it brings insights from studies of other diasporas to bear on the study of Jews. In challenging the equation of diaspora with powerlessness, the book questions the modern nation-state ideal and suggests that diasporic cultural formations offer important clues toward an alternative means of relating culture to polity.
This volume in the Bible and Women series is devoted to rabbinic literature from late Jewish antiquity to the early Middle Ages. Fifteen contributions feature different approaches to the question of biblical women and gender and encompass a wide variety of rabbinic corpora, including the Mishnah-Tosefta, halakhic and aggadic midrashim, Talmud, and late midrash. Some essays analyze biblical law and gender relations as they are reflected in the rabbinic sages’ argumentation, while others examine either the rabbinic portrayal of a certain woman or a group of women or the role of biblical women in a specific rabbinic context. Contributors include Judith R. Baskin, Yuval Blankovsky, Alexander A. Dubrau, Cecilia Haendler, Tal Ilan, Gail Labovitz, Moshe Lavee, Lorena Miralles-Maciá, Ronit Nikolsky, Susanne Plietzsch, Natalie C. Polzer, Olga I. Ruiz-Morell, Devora Steinmetz, Christiane Hannah Tzuberi, and Dvora Weisberg.
A thief-turned-saint, killed by an insult. A rabbi burning down his world in order to save it. A man who lost his sanity while trying to fathom the origin of the universe. A beautiful woman battling her brother’s and her husband’s egos to preserve their family. Stories such as these enliven the pages of the Talmud, the great repository of ancient wisdom that is one of the sacred texts of the Jewish people. Comprised of the Mishnah, the oral law of the Torah, and the Gemara, a multigenerational metacommentary on the Mishnah dating from between 3950 and 4235 (190 and 475 CE), the Talmud presents a formidable challenge to understand without scholarly training and study. But what if one approaches it as a collection of tales with surprising relevance for contemporary readers?
In Six Memos from the Last Millennium, critically acclaimed novelist Joseph Skibell reads some of the Talmud’s tales with a storyteller’s insight, concentrating on the lives of the legendary rabbis depicted in its pages to uncover the wisdom they can still impart to our modern age. He unifies strands of stories that are scattered throughout the Talmud into coherent narratives or “memos,” which he then analyzes and interprets from his perspective as a novelist. In Skibell’s imaginative and personal readings, this sacred literature frequently defies our conventional notions of piety. Sometimes wild, rude, and even bawdy, these memos from the last millennium pursue a livable transcendence, a way of fusing the mundane hours of earthly life with a cosmic sense of holiness and wonder.
Explore new theoretical tools and lines of analysis of rabbinic stories
Rabbinic literature includes hundreds of stories and brief narrative traditions. These narrative traditions often take the form of biographical anecdotes that recount a deed or event in the life of a rabbi. Modern scholars consider these narratives as didactic fictions—stories used to teach lessons, promote rabbinic values, and grapple with the tensions and conflicts of rabbinic life. Using methods drawn from literary and cultural theory, including feminist, structuralist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic methods, contributors analyze narratives from the Babylonian Talmud, midrash, Mishnah, and other rabbinic compilations to shed light on their meanings, functions, and narrative art. Contributors include Julia Watts Belser, Beth Berkowitz, Dov Kahane, Jane L. Kanarek, Tzvi Novick, James Adam Redfield, Jay Rovner, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Zvi Septimus, Dov Weiss, and Barry Scott Wimpfheimer.
Yerushalmi Pesahim details the specific requirements regarding the preparation for Passover, the Passover sacrifice, and the Seder. Commenting on the many, often contradictory, prescriptions in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, this tractate is an important part of a long tradition of interpretation regarding Passover.
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