This book examines the talmudic writings, politics, and ideology of Y.I. Halevy (1847-1914), one of the most influential representatives of the pre-war Eastern European Orthodox Jewish community. It ...analyzes Halevy’s historical model of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud, which, he argued, was edited by an academy of rabbis. That model also served as a blueprint for the rabbinic council of Agudath Israel, the political movement he founded.
In this pioneering effort, noted Jewish philosopher Eugene B. Borowitz opens up the rules by which the language-game of aggadic discourse is carried on in the Talmud, the foundational document of ...rabbinic and all later Judaism. These findings are compared with the aggadah (the realm in which almost all explicit statements about classic Jewish religious belief occur) of some other early rabbinic writings. Two issues drive Borowitz's inquiry: What, if anything, constrains the unprecedented freedom of this realm? and How might one positively characterize the aggadah? Borowitz introduces us to the rabbis not only in their amazing profundity, but also in their unguarded humanity. He concludes with a reflection on how this old Jewish language-game should influence contemporary Jewish thought, and, perhaps, other religious thought as well.
U ovome se članku analiziraju stavovi i rasprave u judaizmu o bolnom problemu samoubojstva, osobito se usredotočujući na samoubojstva zbog vjerskih razloga. Prvi dio donosi općenit pregled stavova o ...samoubojstvu iz židovskih pravnih izvora te rasprava o konceptualnom temelju zabrane suicida. Središnji dio članka analizira neke slučajeve samoubojstva iz židovske povijesti od biblijskih vremena do talmudskog razdoblja, služeći se vjerskim izvorima kao što su Talmud i rabinska literatura. Među tim slučajevima je i biblijski slučaj samoubojstva kralja Šaula, kao i neki slučajevi iz Talmuda i rabinske literature. U ovom istraživanju ispituje se koji je stav ispravan u navedenim slučajevima prema izvorima židovskoga zakona. Jesu li takvi slučajevi izvor nadahnuća ili nedoličan čin? Autor se služi velikim brojem izvora od talmudskih vremena, preko srednjega vijeka sve do modernog doba, a dio te literature je autor prvi put preveo s hebrejskog i aramejskog na hrvatski jezik.
Kiperwasser highlights the famous story of Solomon and Ashmedai from the Babylonian Talmud, Gitin 68b. While the redaction criticism of talmudic narratives is a well-established trend in the field, ...this text has not yet received the treatment it merits. The numerous scholarly studies of this Babylonian tale tend to the comparative, folkloristic, and literary and have heretofore avoided close redaction criticism. A study of the cultural background of the story and its possible sources of influences is overdue.
U ovome članku autor analizira stav judaizma prema samoubojstvima počinjenima iz vjerskih razloga, ponekad potaknutima junaštvom, i raspravlja o tome stavu. Članak počinje uvodom, za kojim slijedi ...općeniti pregled stavova izvora židovskoga zakona spram samoubojstva počinjenoga radi posvećenja Božjega imena. Središnji dio ovoga članka sastoji se od analize kolektivnoga samoubojstva zelota u Masadi te stava judaizma prema raznovrsnim pokušajima samoubojstva tijekom holokausta. U ovome istraživanju autor se koristi izvorima iz židovskoga zakona (halahe) kako bi preispitao koji su ispravni stavovi prema tim slučajevima te razmotrio praktične implikacije koje takvi slučajevi mogu imati na život današnjega čovjeka. Mnoge izvore rabinske literature, od talmudskih vremena do modernoga doba, kojima se koristi u ovome članku, autor je prvi put preveo s hebrejskoga i aramejskoga na hrvatski jezik.
In this article, the author analyzes and discusses the attitude of Judaism towards suicides committed for religious reasons, sometimes motivated by heroism. The article starts with an introduction, followed by a general overview of attitudes from Jewish laws towards suicides committed for the sanctification of God’s Name. The central part of the article consists of an analysis of the collective suicide committed by zealots at Masada and the attitude of Judaism towards various suicide attempts during the Holocaust. In his research, the author uses sources from Jewish laws (halacha) to examine the appropriate attitudes towards these cases and to consider the practical implications of such cases on people today. Many sources of rabbinic literature used in this article, from Talmudic times to modern times, have been translated by the author from Hebrew and Aramaic into Croatian for the first time.
True disagreements are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement, and ...provokes unsettling questions: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine relationship between minds? Are disagreements always only temporary steps toward final agreement? Must a community of disagreement always imply agreement, as in an agreement to disagree? What is Talmud? rethinks the task of philological, literary, historical, and cultural analysis of the Talmud. It introduces an aspect of this task that has best been approximated by the philosophical, anthropological, and ontological interrogation of human being in relationship to the Other-whether animal, divine, or human. In both engagement and disengagement with post-Heideggerian traditions of thought, Sergey Dogopolski complements philological-historical and cultural approaches to the Talmud with a rigorous anthropological, ontological, and Talmudic inquiry. He redefines the place of the Talmud and its study, both traditional and academic, in the intellectual map of the West, arguing that Talmud is a scholarly art of its own and represents a fundamental intellectual discipline, not a mere application of logical, grammatical, or even rhetorical arts for the purpose of textual hermeneutics. In Talmudic intellectual art, disagreement is a fundamental category. What Is Talmud? rediscovers disagreement as the ultimate condition of finite human existence or co-existence.
While focusing on the concept of liberty, this article produces a dialogue between the Talmud and western political theory, and thus expands the canon of political thought. Equipped with three ...concepts of liberty—negative, positive, and republican—this article offers an original reading to Babylonian Talmud Giṭ 12a–13a. The talmudic passage's pivotal question—whether liberty is necessarily beneficial to a slave—enables us to reconstruct its fundamental, albeit implicit, understandings of both slavery and liberty. The talmudic approach to slavery and liberty emerges as concrete, and hence yields a thick and multi-faceted notion of liberty. Considering that a person might prefer the benefits of slavery reveals a paradox in Isaiah Berlin's negative concept of liberty. Therefore, as this article concludes, his conceptual distinction between two concepts of liberty is unsustainable and needs to be replaced by a concrete and thick notion of liberty.
As if by design, crisis reveals basic structural fault lines. In the middle of the COVID-19 crisis, non-Haredi Jews expressed surprise and even outrage about the ultra-orthodox Haredi response to the ...pandemic. It was not understood how large-scale violations of public health protocols comported with the legal-halakhic principle of Pikuaḥ Nefesh (saving human life). In this essay, I explore Hasidic response to COVID-19 as reported in the secular and Haredi press and in emergent social science literature about this crisis. I place Haredi response to crisis in relation to the clash between two sets of values: the value of saving human life and the value of intensive Talmud study (talmud Torah) and ritual-communal practice. In what Robert Cover called a paideic nomos, there are more important things than human life. What we see already in the Babylonian Talmud is the profound ambiguity of paideic norms vis-à-vis the larger public good.
PDF
