Where does the archive of the Rabbinic Rhetorical Schools in Sepphoris, Caesarea and Tiberias belong in the formation of modern subjectivity and humanity? In his archeology of modern subjectivity, ...Alain de Libera answers a similar question about Church Fathers to locate the beginnings of both (1) a modern human as a willing and thinking subject and of (2) Heidegger’s critique thereof in the philosophical horizons of Western and Eastern patristics. In this context, the essay examines a fragment of the archive in juxtaposition with de Libera’s discovery of the patristic horizon of Heidegger’s thought. The essay builds upon and reconsiders the method of philosophical archeology as a self-critical “method” of examining the “beginnings” as retro-projections of repetition in both Heidegger’s (eschatological) and de Libera’s (post-theological) versions of philosophical archeology. The results are a comparative reading of the two parallel, never-intersecting but ever commensurable figures of the relationships between G-d and Israel in the Rabbinic and Patristic horizons of thought and a requalification of the scope and task of archeology of modern subjectivity in de Libera’s and Heidegger’s work.
Migrating tales Kalmin, Richard
2014., 20140905, 2014, 2014-09-05
eBook
Migrating Tales situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian ...literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work, Richard Kalmin argues that non-Jewish literature deriving from the eastern Roman provinces is a crucially important key to interpreting Babylonian rabbinic literature, to a degree unimagined by earlier scholars. Kalmin demonstrates the extent to which rabbinic Babylonia was part of the Mediterranean world of late antiquity and part of the emerging but never fully realized cultural unity forming during this period in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Persia. Kalmin recognizes that the Bavli contains remarkable diversity, incorporating motifs derived from the cultures of contemporaneous religious and social groups. Looking closely at the intimate relationship between narratives of the Bavli and of the Christian Roman Empire, Migrating Tales brings the history of Judaism and Jewish culture into the ambit of the ancient world as a whole.
Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priestsexamines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the ...Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, have on rabbinic identity and authority as expressed in the Talmud? Drawing from the field of comparative religion, Jason Sion Mokhtarian addresses this question by bringing into mutual fruition Talmudic studies and ancient Iranology, two historically distinct disciplines. Whereas most research on the Talmud assumes that the rabbis were an insular group isolated from the cultural horizon outside their academies, this book contextualizes the rabbis and the Talmud within a broader sociocultural orbit by drawing from a wide range of sources from Sasanian Iran, including Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature, archaeological data such as seals and inscriptions, and the Aramaic magical bowl spells. Mokhtarian also includes a detailed examination of the Talmud's dozens of texts that portray three Persian "others": the Persians, the Sasanian kings, and the Zoroastrian priests. This book skillfully engages and demonstrates the rich penetration of Persian imperial society and culture on the Jews of late antique Iran.
The basic history of Talmudic printing has been told in a lifetime of publications by Marvin Heller and in Yeshiva University's important exhibition catalog, Printing the Talmud.2 I will add to this ...conversation by explaining why this mise-en-page and the specific fixed folio numbers had staying power in Rabbinic texts long after similar glossed texts had ceased being popular in Latin or other Western languages. ...the invention of paper decreased the price of the written word and enabled more text to be available to more people, with wide cultural implications.5 Cheap ball point pens encourage things like the jotted down note-to-self. * Economics and the market for knowledge and education: ...book buyers today have greater and cheaper access to printed works, but the format is hardly individualized at all due to constraints of the mass market. * Cultural assumptions about what one does with words: The writing surface-not the labor cost of the scribe-was the most expensive aspect of manuscript production. Since the skin of a sheep or
The Babylonian Talmud has reached us in multiple versions in medieval manuscripts, early printed editions, and in citations in the works of medieval and early modern scholars. The field of Talmud ...criticism has developed criteria for working with these materials and the scholar E. S. Rosenthal famously theorized about the implications of textual variants for the history of the Talmud's redaction. Tractate Temurah of the Babylonian Talmud received special attention due to the frequency and, at times, unique usage of the term, lishana 'aharina, meaning "alternative textual reading," found in it. In Temurah the term lishana 'aharina does not only signal a difference in formulation, as in other tractates of the Talmud, but sometimes also seems to introduce a separately redacted text of the tractate that was integrated into a widespread and known base text.
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.
Disponemos de dos informes sobre el proceso contra el Talmud que tuvo lugar en París durante el año 1240 y que llevó a la quema de varios manuscritos talmúdicos, a saber, un informe en latín y otro ...en hebreo. El primero de ellos, las Depositiones o Confessiones, se presenta como el acta de un interrogatorio de dos rabinos por parte de un grupo de eclesiásticos de alto rango; la Vikkuah, en cambio, describe una disputa pública que protagoniza el converso judío Nicolás Donin con un grupo de rabinos en la corte real. Junto con la edición crítica de las Depositiones, ofrecemos en este artículo una revisión de la relación entre ambos documentos y sus respectivas descripciones de los hechos.
Los manuscritos talmúdicos Magl. coll. II.I.8 y 9 de la Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale de Florencia contienen traducciones latinas marginales del Talmud que corresponden a la traducción del siglo XIII ...conocida como Extractiones de Talmud. En este trabajo se describen los dos manuscritos y su evidencia textual es comparada tanto con la tradición manuscrita de las Extractiones como con el texto talmúdico hebreo/arameo que contienen, tratando de responder la pregunta de si los manuscritos de Florencia constituyen, o no, la Vorlage de la traducción latina del Talmud. La cuestión se presenta compleja: las sorprendentes analogías parecen sugerir una respuesta afirmativa a la pregunta en cuestión; sin embargo, también pueden encontrarse evidencias que apoyan una conclusión contraria. Aun así, los manuscritos florentinos ciertamente pertenecen a una tradición hebreo-aramea que está muy cercana a la Vorlage de las Extractiones. Además, el texto latino que ofrecen en sus márgenes refleja un estadio de trabajo anterior en la producción de las Extractiones, conteniendo variantes y pasajes únicos que se corrigen u omiten en el resto de la tradición latina manuscrita.
Shlomo Sirilio, a resident of sixteenth-century Safed, created a radical adaptation of the Jerusalem Talmud based on its 1523 editio princeps . He sweepingly adapted the talmudic text, expanded it ...with medieval materials, and added novel material, based on his creative scholarly intuition. This essay describes Sirilio's scholarly conception and distinguishes between the medieval motifs and the innovative Renaissance ideas that shaped his work. It argues that such a creative approach could not have been created in the centers of humanistic culture, but only in the peripheral locale of Safed, where humanistic ideas could be developed without polemical undertones.
Abstract
The term "savar" in the Babylonian Talmud indicates an opinion that is ultimately rejected. According to some Rishonim, however, in certain places this term introduces an opinion that is not ...rejected. This article examines these instances and concludes that indeed in these places the term "savar" is references an opinion that is not ultimately rejected. In most of these places, the reading in most of the textual witnesses was emended, and the word "savar" was erased, apparently in accordance with the other approach. In those places where the text was not emended, some of the commentators interpreted the passage not in accordance with its plain meaning, and, according to their interpretation, the opinion that was introduced by the "savar" was indeed rejected.
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