RABBIS AND OTHER JEWS: Rabbinic Literature and Late Antique Judaism, Yale University, May 11 2014.
This conference brings together colleagues and former students of Professor Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University, to workshop papers in anticipation of a festschrift in his honor. Prof. Fraade has made important contributions to the study of, among other things, law and rhetoric in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in tannaitic literature (for which see most recently the collected articles in Legal Fictions: Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages), and the ways in which rabbinic literature can be situated within late antique Judaism more broadly (in such articles as “Rabbinic Views on the Practice of Targum, and Multilingualism in the Jewish Galilee of the Third-Sixth Centuries,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity). The conference papers, taking their cue from these contributions, will focus on the relationship between rabbinic (chiefly tannaitic) literature and the rabbis’ contemporaries and Second Temple predecessors.
— Prof. Tzvi Novick (co-organizer)
Schedule:
Greetings
(9:00 a.m.–9:10 a.m.)
Panel 1
(9:10 a.m.–11 a.m.)
ALAN APPELBAUM, “R. Matthia ben Heresh and Todos of Rome: On the Trail of the First European Rabbis.”
JOSHUA BURNS, “Roman Law in the Jewish House of Study: Constructing Rabbinic Authority After the Constitutio Antoniniana.”
ELIZABETH SHANKS ALEXANDER, “Rabbinic Readings of Biblical Gender in the Context of Evidence from Qumran and Alexandria.”
CHAYA HALBERSTAM, “Partial Justice: Law and Narrative in Sifre Deuteronomy.”
Panel 2
(11:30 a.m.–1 p.m.)
LEE LEVINE, “Jews and Judaism in Palestine (70–640 CE): A New Historical Paradigm.”
MARTHA HIMMELFARB, “‘Greater is the Covenant with Aaron’ (Sifre Numbers 119): Rabbis, Priests, and Kings Revisited.”
STUART MILLER, “The Study of Talmudic Rabbis, Other Sages, and Commoners in Late Antique Eretz Israel: Where Things Stand.”
Panel 3
(2:15 p.m.–3:45 p.m.)
ISHAY ROSEN-ZVI, “The Mishnah as a Roman Composition?”
MARC HIRSHMAN, “The Rabbis, Trade Guilds, and Midrash.”
ROBERT BRODY, “‘Rabbinic and ‘non-Rabbinic’ Jews in Mishnah and Tosefta.”
Panel 4
(4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.)
ESTHER CHAZON, “The Road Not Taken: Prayer in Rabbinic Circles and in the New Testament.”
VERED NOAM, “Why Did the Heavenly Voice Speak Aramaic? Ancient Layers in Rabbinic Literature.”
ALBERT BAUMGARTEN, “Sages Increase Peace in the World.”
Keynote
(7:00 p.m.)
MOSHE BAR-ASHER, “The Presence of Rabbinic Hebrew in Blessing Formulae.”
Concluding Remarks
STEVEN FRAADE
Venue
Greenberg Conference Center, 391 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut
Sponsors
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund
The Judaic Studies Program at Yale
Conference Organizers
The Talmud Blog 