The halakha developed around this division and enabled the sages to use the distinction to serve a detailed, systematic discourse of separation and dissociation. The goy also advanced the concept of history as a mythical narrative and not a natural sequence of events.
Babylonians, Greeks and Romans are not separate political adversaries, they are different manifestations of a uniform alien presence that is pitted against the Jewish people. History assumes a metahistorical meaning. Jews by need. The two uncover a dramatic historical development and for the first time elucidate the history of one of the oldest and most important Jewish institutions.
At the end of their book, Ophir and Rosen-Zvi ask whether it is possible to imagine a Jewish existence that does not arise from the negation of the goy, that is not dependent on the goy to define himself. I think it is, and it seems to me that the answer to their question is simpler and more accessible than is usually thought. A Jewish life of that kind already exists in both the United States and Israel, and it is based on the supplanting of God and of the halakha, as the fulcrum of Jewish identity, by the nation-state.
The nation-state, and the ethos and mythos it stands for, transforms different people, and sometimes also different ethnic groups, into a single community. In America, Jews typically treat their neighbors — non-Jewish American citizens — not as strangers separate from them, but as colleagues and partners in the great American liberal project.
The rates of exogamous marriage are both proof of this, and the expression and realization of that project. In Israel, too, identification with the nation-state overcomes the traditional taboo against exogamy. This is done not in concurrence with the liberal ethos, but by basing Jewish identity on nationalism and on the national struggle. Here we can see that when non-Jews, according to halakha immigrants under the Law of Return , participate in the struggle against non-Jews according to halakha and to nationality Muslim Arabs , they are accepted into the community of the Israeli nation, and hence are considered Jews for the purposes of friendship, communal life and marriage.
Indeed, when the fact that halakha prohibits their burial next to people who are considered Jews by the Rabbinate is re discovered by the media, public outrage ensues. Partnership in the Israeli national project is enough to turn them into non-goyim. In Israel we are witnessing, as it were, the return to the biblical model pre-Ezra and Nehemiah : Members of different ethnic groups receive different treatment, according to their attitude toward the Jewish people. As an early encounter between the Talmud and a broader, Western audience, the intervention of Christian censors into the printing of the Talmud offers an instructive precedent for the kind of inquiry I pursue in this book.
Christian Hebraists looked to the Talmud with the expectation that the wisdom of Jewish sages could address them as readers, and the rabbis of the time—whether for reasons of self-preservation, principle, or some combination—cooperated in reformulating talmudic language to match this expectation. The interest of such figures as Johannes Reuchlin in the Talmud would seem to offer a compelling model for how talmudic literature might engage an audience beyond the circle of traditional Jews for whom the Talmud has religious authority.
But despite the joint efforts of sixteenth-century Christians and Jews to make the Talmud palatable, the discourse of the Talmud remained fundamentally indigestible in early modern Europe. The price for keeping the Talmud in print was steep—not only was the name "Talmud" erased, but fundamental concepts were changed. Opening up the Talmud to a broader audience required closing down the distinctive structures of thought and discourse that made the Talmud meaningful. Christian Hebraists' embrace of the Talmud was only partial, because Christian Europe could not accommodate Jewish difference as represented by the Talmud.
Today, we find ourselves in a cultural moment that allows for a reengagement with the Talmud on its own terms. Postmodern sensibilities promote expressions of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism in which impulses toward particularism and universalism are not seen as mutually exclusive, but rather can be embraced as complementary aspects of complex identities.
The moment is ripe for engaging the Talmud's pitched debates about the nature and extent of Jewish superiority. In contrast with the early modern readers who revised the talmudic text to make it match their own sensibilities, this book seeks to squarely contend with difference, both as a central theme in AZ and as a feature of reading across languages and cultures.
AZ has long been on the front lines of confrontations between cultures, and this book extends that history by using the tractate to provoke a new encounter between talmudic scholarship and the humanities. A critical examination of what AZ meant in its late antique context is the prerequisite for bringing its distinctive vision and discourse into conversation with contemporary theory.
The particular set of critical tools that I bring to my analysis of AZ emerges out of recent developments in the academic study of the Talmud, where a new configuration of research advances, theoretical orientations, and reading strategies have coalesced into what some call the "literary approach" to the study of the Talmud. The advent of this critical approach to the Talmud is but the most recent chapter in a much longer story of interaction between the Talmud and humanistic studies in the West.
In general, the critical study of the Talmud has developed in tandem with broader trends in the study of religion and of literature. While the first century of critical talmudic research had a philologic and historiographic orientation, more recent scholarship employs theoretical approaches influenced by the New Criticism, post-Structuralism, and the New Historicism.
The academic study of the Talmud began with the rise of Wissenschaft des Judentums, a nineteenth-century movement initiated by German Jewish intellectuals who sought to apply the scientific methods of the modern university to the study of the texts, culture, and history of the Jews. Many of these pioneering scholars had studied in traditional rabbinic academies before entering university, and their academic pursuits intertwined with their efforts to reform Jewish practice and to integrate Jewish life into German culture.
They studied Semitic languages, engaged in philological study, and sought to reconstruct the original versions and meanings of rabbinic texts in their historic contexts. Even as these scholars distanced themselves from traditional modes of Jewish study, however, some habits of traditional Talmud study persisted.
Like their counterparts in traditional rabbinical academies, Wissenschaft scholars for the most part accepted the Talmud's presentation of legal debates among the Tannaim and Amoraim as reliable reports about the named authorities' differences of opinion. And like jurists in the traditional world, Wissenschaft scholars had a tendency to give short shrift to the Talmud's extensive narrative material, giving priority to legal dialectics as the central expression of rabbinic tradition.
When nineteenth-century scholarship engaged talmudic narrative, it was largely in the service of historiography, as researchers read stories about the lives of the Sages as testimony about historic events and about the conditions of Jewish life in antiquity. In the twentieth century, when historical positivism gave way to growing skepticism about the reliability of the Talmud's testimony and attributions, the academic study of the Talmud took a literary turn. During the past forty years, talmudic scholarship has coalesced around two literary projects, one focusing on diachronic analysis and the other on synchronic analysis.
While one set of researchers has made huge advances in describing the process of the Talmud's formation, the others have engaged in close readings of talmudic passages, focusing especially on talmudic narratives. On the diachronic front, scholars David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman share the credit for a paradigm shift in how the field understands the formation of the Babylonian Talmud.
Redactional criticism of the Talmud begins with the observation that there are two distinct layers of talmudic discourse: apodictic statements that are attributed to named sages the Amoraim , and dialectical discussions of these statements that are anonymous. In parallel projects over the course of decades, Friedman and Halivni have investigated the relationship between these two layers, developing complementary theories about the Talmud's development.
Both agree that the anonymous material is consistently later than the attributed material. Friedman's work has focused primarily on developing methodologies for distinguishing among historical layers of the Talmud, an advance that allows for the relative dating of components of any passage. Halivni has sought to anchor the stages of the Talmud's development in history, and proposes that the redaction of the Talmud is largely the work of anonymous editors who lived in Babylonia between and ce.
Today, there is widespread agreement among rabbinicists that it is these anonymous editors, whom Halivni designates with the neologism Stammaim , or "anonymous ones," who are the true creators of the Babylonian Talmud.
These advances in redactional criticism have transformed how scholars read the Talmud and how we use it as evidence. In the realm of synchronic analysis, the late Yonah Fraenkel was a pioneer.
In a series of articles and books published throughout his long career, Fraenkel offered close readings of hundreds of stories from the Talmud and other rabbinic sources.
In these readings, he highlighted such literary devices as structural parallelism, unifying motifs, and paranomasia, effectively developing a poetics of rabbinic narrative. Fraenkel's readings emphasize the patterned structure of rabbinic stories and what he called their "closure"—a quality wherein every detail of a story contributes to its overall structure and theme, and no data external to a story is necessary for its interpretation.
Subsequent scholars credit Fraenkel with securing a place for rabbinic text in the study of belletristic literature, but critique this notion of "closure," which they identify with the New Criticism. Today, when scholars pursue literary analyses of talmudic passages, they do so with a much expanded notion of what constitutes a literary unit, and with a strong emphasis on context. Jeffrey Rubenstein revisits many of the talmudic narratives Fraenkel interpreted, and he demonstrates that themes, motifs, and other literary features from within the narrative extend into the surrounding dialectical deliberations.
Others join him in showing how the kind of close reading and literary analysis that Fraenkel modeled in examining rabbinic narrative can be effectively applied to other forms of rabbinic discourse, including the sugya, the Babylonian Talmud's basic unit of talmudic deliberation. And beginning with the work of Daniel Boyarin, the so-called "literary turn" made yet another rotation, as rabbinicists of a literary bent turned back toward history to examine how rabbinic texts interact with the cultural contexts of late antiquity.
Today, talmudic scholarship has exploded in a flurry of diverse projects that are methodologically sophisticated, breaking down the disciplinary walls separating historical investigation, literary studies, and redactional criticism. One central insight to emerge from this scholarly ferment is a principle that has been hard-won in talmudic studies: that how the Talmud speaks is critical to interpreting what it says.
While this proposition is no doubt true of any literary text, and so painfully apparent that it hardly need be mentioned, the Talmud's relatively recent entry into the realm of literary analysis means that it bears articulating. Even as critical scholarship has made great advances in describing how the Talmud works as literature, there is an ongoing tendency in popular, religious, and academic works to extract and abstract statements, stories, and concepts from the Talmud and to present them as timeless bits of wisdom or opinion, unmoored from any historic or textual context and from any interpretive tradition.
Perhaps it is only to be expected that popular writers will treat the Talmud as a grab bag of edifying insights or a Jewish treasury of quotations, but scholarly works of Jewish studies sometimes fall into similar habits.
The Babylonian Talmud is a vast and complicated work, as dense and it is sprawling, and any investigation of a topic or theme must inevitably be selective in how it cites and interprets talmudic material.
New scholarship on the formation of the Talmud and on the distinctive features of talmudic discourse demonstrates just how tricky a business this can be. Since the Talmud is built of dialectic exchanges that juxtapose disparate opinions, splice stories with law, and draw on diverse traditions, making sense of isolated statements is a particular challenge.
At what stage of an extended argument can a story or question carry interpretive weight? How does one determine where the relevant text gives way to context? Literary studies of the Talmud demonstrate the thoroughgoing interpenetration of the Talmud's form and content, and the consequent need for caution and sophistication when using talmudic sources in investigations of Jewish thought, culture, history, and law.
The distinctive discursive forms of the Talmud condition its meaning—this is the core insight that generates the structure of this book. Unlike other topical studies of talmudic thought, Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals does not venture into the vast library of rabbinic works, or even scour the whole of the Babylonian Talmud for relevant material; instead, it cleaves to a single textual formation, AZ, and offers a reading of this tractate and only this tractate. Working within the bounds of a discrete redacted unit, I can attend to confluences between form and content in a holistic way.
I mitigate the problem of deciding how much of any given passage to consider by looking at broad swaths of material, and by following the anonymous editors' cues about how any given passage's parts add up to a larger whole.
The boundaries I adopt for my analysis are the very boundaries imposed by the anonymous editors when they set the tractate's frame. The overall trajectory in talmudic scholarship over the course of the last few decades has been to continually expand the frame for literary analyses, from readings of discrete narratives to readings of extended sugyot to considerations of the literary qualities of the Babylonian Talmud as a whole.
In adopting the talmudic tractate as a unit of analysis, this book participates in this general trend, and also stakes out a strong position in an ongoing debate within the field. While there is now broad agreement that the final redaction of the Babylonian Talmud was far more belated than previously believed, scholars disagree on precisely how to characterize the editors' activity and the extent of their interventions: Is the primary work of the talmudic editors to compose stories and sugyot, or simply to arrange existing materials?
That is, are the editors like weavers, creating passages whole cloth, or are they more like quilters, stitching discrete units of material into larger compositions? At what level of composition is the editors' vision expressed? Debates about these issues are closely related to the question of how to categorize the Babylonian Talmud as a literary work. Scholars who assign the Talmud's editors a more robust authorial role tend to emphasize the coherence of talmudic discourse, while those who minimize the editors' interventions describe talmudic texts as anthologies or miscellanies.
I take a strong position in this debate when I argue that AZ is unified by an overarching structure and animated by a set of recurring themes, reading the tractate as a coherent work of literature. I suspect that any heat generated by the scholarly debate about the Talmud's redaction has less to do with assessments of the Talmud's anonymous editors and more to do with how scholars understand the contributions of the Amoraim whom tradition reveres as the authors of the Talmud.
Jacob Neusner famously challenged the notion that we can reliably trust the attributions of any rabbinic source, proposing that each rabbinic text be approached at the level of the document as a reflection of the views and values of its latest editors, rather than as a reliable report about rabbis who lived in earlier times.
To a certain degree, the methodology Shamma Friedman has developed for separating out the layers of the talmudic text answers Neusner's skepticism with a procedure for identifying the contributions of earlier periods. Richard Kalmin's recent work on rabbinic narrative offers a model for assessing the historical value of any given tradition through consideration of language and other geographic and historical markers. Such scholarship suggests that different parts of the Talmud are constituted differently and reflect varying levels of editorial intervention.
I offer a cohesive reading of AZ because in the case of this tractate, there is a compelling case to be made for sustained editorial activity at the level of the tractate.
In aligning myself with those who emphasize the coherence of talmudic discourse, however, I do not mean to discount the reliability or authenticity of discrete rabbinic traditions—to my mind, coherence at the macro-level of a document does not speak to the question of editorial intervention into individual traditions one way or another.
In demonstrating the extent of editorial design at the macro-level of the tractate, I effectively promote the anonymous editors of AZ to the status of authors rather than mere redactors. This book joins other recent scholarship that focuses on the creative interventions of the Bavli's editors, such as Rubenstein's investigations of Stammaitic storytelling, Boyarin's description of the Stam's activities in juxtaposing the discordant voices of the Talmud's dialogism, and Moulie Vidas's discovery of a self-conscious authorial voice.
These scholars all emphasize the inventiveness of the belated, anonymous editors and credit them with the creation of the Bavli as a whole, but the evidence they marshal comes from readings of discrete stories and sugyot. By offering a sustained reading of an entire tractate, I am able to identify evidence of authorial activity on a broader scale, bringing to light the artistry with which AZ's anonymous creators weave diverse materials into a complex, coherent work. My emphasis on the final redacted form of AZ distinguishes my project from important research that has taken a diachronic approach.
Both Christine Hayes and Alyssa Gray have focused on AZ in their investigations of the relationship between the two Talmuds and of how the Bavli took shape. Though the questions I bring to this tractate are different, my work builds on theirs and complements it.
Hayes's work on AZ focuses on the legal materials within the tractate. She presents her findings as a corrective to the tendency of earlier scholars to attribute differences between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds to differences in the cultural and political circumstances of Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia, demonstrating that alongside these external factors are factors that inhere within the distinctive normative worlds of the two rabbinic communities.
While I am only secondarily interested in the Palestinian Talmud, I look to it from time to time either as a counter-text or as a source that the redactors of the Bavli rework. Gray argues that the editors of the Bavli were familiar with the Palestinian version of the tractate and engaged it as source material in a variety of ways.
The methodology she develops entails a macro-analysis of the tractate as a whole and the identification of those passages where the Talmuds exceed their commentarial function, presenting material that is not "called for by the mishnah. Because my own focus is on aspects of AZ that are unique to the Bavli, I adopt the broad outlines of Gray's approach for very different ends. I examine narratives, dialectics, and framing devices that are neither "called for by the Mishna" nor anticipated by the Palestinian Talmud, because these are sites where the distinctive artistry and sensibility of the Bavli's editors are easiest to discern.
This book is an invitation to robust interpretation of the Talmud as literature. In my readings, I seek to illuminate the subtle turns of art and fine filaments of connection that can only come into view when examined in the right light, with the instruments of literary analysis.
Skeptics might counter that having set out to find evidence of design and coherence, it is no surprise that I discover these in abundance. I presume that the Bavli's editors are artists, and then I find evidence of their art everywhere. It might be that the artful coherence and ironic reversals that I discern in AZ emerge from my own imagination and not from the creative genius of the talmudic editors, but I think that is giving me too much credit.
While ultimately there is no way to verify my proposal that AZ is unified by an overarching plan or an undergirding logic, I submit that it is only by entertaining this possibility—by adopting a reading practice that presumes design and seeks after cohesion—that aspects of the Talmud's art can come into view. I offer my reading of the tractate as an illustration of how fruitful literary examinations of large units of the Bavli might be.
While I require the space of this entire book to effectively make my case for the editorial craft and literary artistry that unifies AZ as a whole, at this early juncture the story of Dama ben Netina helps to illustrate important aspects of a literary approach. As it happens, Dama steps into the action on page 23b of AZ in a very peculiar way.
Unlike the version of his story presented above, in the context of AZ the Dama tradition is presented in a form that cannot properly be considered a narrative at all. Here, the components of Dama's story are broken apart and reconstituted as steps in a dialectical exchange about the fine points of rabbinic law. The absorption of this colorful tale into the back-and-forth of a complicated sugya does not preclude literary analysis, but rather serves to focus attention on the multiform and polyphonous qualities of talmudic discourse.
In this passage, the voice of the anonymous editors—the voice that controls the dialectical argumentation—dominates the tradition about Dama without entirely drowning out the moral critique that is expressed through his story.
The immediate context in which Dama appears within AZ is a passage that engages one of the most stridently xenophobic statements in all of rabbinic literature. According to the Mishna, "We do not stable livestock in the stalls of non-Jews because they are suspected of bestiality. The specific question under debate in the sugya is whether animals that have been owned, herded, or quartered by non-Jews are admissible as sacrifices in Jewish Temple rites.
The implication of the Mishna is clear: no animal that has been used sexually by humans can subsequently be dedicated to sacred purposes, so a presumption of bestiality among non-Jews excludes the possibility of using these animals for sacrifice.
Tradition preserves a second, conflicting ruling on this matter, however. The Talmud cites a baraita, a tannaitic tradition that does not appear in the Mishna, that permits animals that had been owned by non-Jews to be used for sacrifice; this baraita explicitly states that there should be no presumption that the animals of non-Jews have been used in bestial sex.
How can the opposing rulings of the Mishna and the baraita be reconciled? Resolution of the apparent conflict between these two ancient traditions drives the back-and-forth of the sugya as a whole.
One proposal that the editors entertain is that the suspicions expressed in the Mishna reflect the views of Rabbi? It is here that Dama's story becomes most relevant. The story dramatizes an instance of a Temple sacrifice being procured from a non-Jew—the very issue under discussion—and, according to tradition, it is Rabbi? In the passage below, the anonymous editorial voice introduces the story and then interrupts it, using details from the narrative to test the plausibility of propositions that were made earlier regarding Rabbi?
To highlight these editorial interventions, I present the voice of the anonymous editors—traditionally called "the Stam"—in boldface below. My own glosses of their words are also in bold, and indicated with brackets, and I have numbered the sections of sugya in order to refer to them afterward. As the discussion opens, the Stam returns to a statement that appears earlier in the deliberations, a proposal by a sage named Shela that Rabbi?
Such an understanding of Scripture could serve as a rationale for a prohibition on non-Jews' animals that does not impute bestial tendencies to non-Jews. Back to the body of the matter: Shela taught: What is the reason that Rabbi?
Because it is written in Scripture, "Instruct the Israelite people to bring you [a red cow. But, according to this reasoning, the verse "Tell the Israelite people to bring me gifts" Exod. But if you should say that this is indeed so [i. But look [the conjunction that follows in the verse's enumeration of items—] "and other stones for setting" once again links up [with the passage under discussion, and so such contributions from non-Jews would have to be prohibited if Rabbi?
And furthermore, it was taught in the end [of the story] that the next year, a red cow was born into his herd. The Sages of Israel came to him. He said to them, "I know of you that if I were to demand all the money in the world, you would give it to me, but I will only request the amount of money that I lost on account of Father. As the discussion begins section 1 , the editor returns to a proposal that was made earlier in the deliberations.
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In addition, the nature of Jewish learning is such that classical and medieval Jewish texts are constantly studied. The many instances of less-than-sympathetic attitudes toward non-Jews in these sources inevitably have their effect on Jewish communal discourse and consciousness.
At times, Jews have embraced large numbers of converts, but hostile relations with Gentile neighbors often led to suspicion of proselytes as well.
While Jewish parlance often seems to divide the world into two groups--Jews and non-Jews--in Jewish tradition, not all gentiles are viewed in the same light.
Early Jewish texts affirmed the universal fraternity of humankind, while asserting the importance of Jewish distinctiveness. We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and bring you ads that might interest you. Join Our Newsletter Empower your Jewish discovery, daily. Sign Up.
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