Category Archives: English

Around the Web, English, Technology

Digitally Humanizing Jewish Studies

RAMBI has added RSS feeds (=RAMBIRSS)

The past week has seen some updates in the digital humanities side of Jewish Studies.

For those of us who like wasting time constructively online, RAMBI has added some 17 RSS feeds of recently published articles. Each feed is dedicated to different categories of the catalog.

In its newest version, The Friedberg Genizah Project added another 70,000 images or so to its database. Most of the images are of fragments located in the Cambridge University and British Libraries. The FGP also made some significant “website improvements”, such as a redone “browse by collection function”, a unified advanced search, an expanded text search, joins display, and more (I hope in a future post to provide guidelines for getting the most out of FGP).

Standard
Around the Web, English, Talmud in the News

Reading the Talmud in…

The South Korean ambassador to Israel visiting a yeshiva in Bnei Brak, earlier this month (picture from ynet, courtesy of the municipality of Bnei Brak)

The South Korean interest in Talmud has been a real hot-topic over the past few months. This piece outlines the phenomena, but as a simple Google search will show, there are many, many more articles on the subject (see also Menachem Mendel’s coverage).

But what does Talmud Study in South Korea actually look like? Perhaps a recent op-ed by Mario Blejer in the Korean JoongAng Daily, one of South Korea’s three daily English-language newspapers, may help answer that question. Commenting on the current debt crisis in Greece, the former governor of the central bank of Argentina and former director of the Bank of England seeks to find a solution in “the Talmud, the ancient repository of Jewish legal commentary – and one of the oldest sources of human thought on morality and economic activity”.  He then goes on to summarize the sugya of “kofin oto ad she-yomar rotze ani” as it appears in Bavli Kiddushin (50a) in order to “show that there are mechanisms that can – and should – be used to place pressure on the parties in the interest of obtaining superior voluntary outcomes.”

The article’s title, “The Talmud and Greek Debt”, is quite reminiscent, interestingly enough, of studies penned by Saul Lieberman.

Standard
Conferences, English, Recent Publications

Bar Ilan Talmud Conference Proceedings

Back in 2007, I attended a Talmud conference at Bar Ilan University. It was an international meeting, and included a nice variety of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, along with a “continental” Talmudist or two. The proceedings have recently been published by Bar Ilan University Press under the title Malekhet Mahshevet: Studies in the Redaction and Development of Talmudic Literature (eds. Aron Shemesh and Aron Amit).   Although the volume does not include all of the original papers, I’ll quote Uriel Shklunik by saying that the volume is like finely sifted flour.  Some highlights are the ongoing debate about the dating of the Stam between Robert Brody and Shamma Friedman, Yaakov Elman’s continued research of the introduction to talmudic tractates, and Steven Fraade’s preliminary probe: “Anonymity and Redaction in Legal Midrash.” For an English table of contents, see here.

Standard
Announcements, Around the Web, English, Events

Talmud in the New World

The first- all-American- attempt at a critical edition of the Talmud

Since the early decades of the twentieth century, the bond between academic Talmud and America has been a strong one.  To name but a few highlights, Julius Kaplan published his  pioneering work on the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud, Solomon Shechter took up residence in the great city of New York, while Henry Malter published the first ever (semi-) critical edition of part of the Babylonian Talmud in Philadelphia in 1928.

The four current authors of this blog normally live in Israel, but are all visiting the United States for the summer.  We are all in transition.

Just the other day, Alan Brill responded to Tomer Persico and his classification of Brill’s blog as “American,” by wondering what it means to  be American, Israeli, or Maltese (added in honor of Henry) in a globalized, fiber-opticized world.   Brill also wondered how (and whether) the Talmud Blog is American, Israeli, or something else.  Some similar questions were raised back on the old Talmud blog, and they are crucial not just for sociological speculations, but related to this blog’s preoccupation with context.  Shai thought then, and continues to maintain, that regardless of the radical changes in our world, context continues to matter.

A lot of what the new wave of “contextual Talmudists” do, is make connections between textual (that is, non-material) things and probe their significance.  It’s a messy business and often difficult to argue or articulate which parallels are worth pursuing and what is a strangely coincidental set of characteristics. The problem plagues virtually every area of comparative historical research, but particularly of ancient times.  If everything in the room that I am now sitting in will vanish (as it one day will), save for a few, arbitrary objects, will anyone be able to reconstruct the feeling of sitting where I sit and breathing the air I breathe, watching the flashes of lightening across a charred Gotham sky, the pitter-patter of a soaking summer rain on the fast streets below? And yet scholars do it all the time, and occasionally get somewhere with the few things that remain. Of course the real interest is not in the texture of banal living, but in the world of thoughts, ideas, and religion. Against all odds, even this sometimes works.

Since we are traveling we would like to: a. ask for help from our Israeli readers; b. apologize for a relative slack in posting; and c. announce some upcoming Talmud Blog events.  Traveling and fasting (some of us preferred to do this simultaneously) has taken a toll and it will be a few days until we get back to a normal posting schedule. Regardless, we’ll have a tougher time keeping tabs on Talmudic goings-on in Israel, so we would appreciate if readers there could keep us posted via email of upcoming events in the Holy Land. For readers in the greater Teaneck area- Shai will be delivering a few shiurim at Congregation Rinat Yisrael on Shabbat Hazon. Yedidah and Amit can be heard on Tuesday nights on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at Mechon Hadar. Before I host Shai in Teaneck, I’ll be at Princeton for two weeks, where I hope to blog from Tikvah’s Undergraduate Summer Seminar.

For further discussion, see here. Also- don’t miss Manuscript Boy‘s exciting updates (days 1, 2, and 3) from the Books within Books colloquium on the European Genizah.

Standard
English, Reviews

Sifre Bemidbar, Ed. Kahana!

In 1982, when he completed his doctoral dissertation, Menahem Kahana wrote:

In the first stages of preparing this dissertation, over a decade ago, I naïvely thought that I could quickly finish the menial work of collecting the material and collating it.

He ends his preface with a prayer

It is my hope and prayer that as I was able to complete these Prolegomena, I will, with God’s help, be able to publish the edition itself. (M. Kahana, “Akdamot le-hotsaa hadasha shel sifrei bemidbar”, PhD Diss., Jerusalem 1982)

Prof. Kahana recently fulfilled half of his prayer: his impressive edition and exhaustive commentary on the first half of Sifrei Numbers, the midrash on Numbers of the school of Rabbi Ishmael.

This is not the first critical edition of Sifre Numbers. The first attempt at a critical text and commentary was made by Meir “Ish-Shalom” Friedmann, of Vienna in 1864. This was not a critical edition in the sense that we use today: Friedmann just corrected the textus receptus of the Sifre according to Yalkut Shimoni, and added a commentary. The second attempt came shortly afterwards, in 1907, when Haym Saul Horowitz published Sifre Numbers (and Sifre Zutta Numbers) as the first volume in the series Corpus Tannaiticum: Pars Tertia, published by the Gesselschaft för die Wissenschaft Des Judentums in Berlin. (Prima and Secunda of the Corpus were the Mishna and Tosefta, which were never published; J. N. Epstein was commissioned to do the former but “only” managed to produce the Prolegomenon that he then translated into Hebrew). This edition had a real apparatus criticus and a short commentary, a real step up from Friedmann’s. Horowitz also almost completed the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael and started work on Sifre Deuteronomy – both were published posthumously by Haym Rabin and Louis Finkelstein, respectively. The latter work was the last publication of the Gesselschaft, in October 1939.

Horowitz’s editions, however, suffer from three serious drawbacks. Their text is eclectic, based on ed. princ. (better than the textus receptus in Friedmann’s editions, but still not a good text), and it did not make use of all the manuscript material, which was not all known to Horowitz. Ed. Kahana, published a mere 104 years after ed. Horowitz, rectifies these problems: Kahana knows all the mss material – and has better knowledge than anyone of all the medieval citations and quotations of the Sifre as well – and strictly adheres to the best-text method of editing critical editions.

This method is not without its critiques – Peter Schäfer and Chaim Milikowsky both come to mind – but in the case of the Sifre it is probably the best one, because, as Kahana attempts to prove in his dissertation, all of the MSS of the Sifre represent a single text-type, unlike, say, Bavli Karetot or Moed Katan, or Hekhalot literature.

The commentary (for half the Sifre) spans two volumes. Kahana notes that he attempted to follow Saul Lieberman’s model in his exhausitve Tosefta Ki-feshuta, in that he tries to expand the discussion beyond the correct reading of the text, while paying close attention to these readings, believing that they hold the key to a correct understanding of any rabbinic text.

However, Kahana differs from Lieberman in two respects. The first is an outcome of the text Kahana chose, Sifre Numbers. Unlike Lieberman, who had two MSS and one ed. Princ. to work with, plus a smattering of Geniza fragments and citations in Medieval Authorities – and no medieval commentaries on his work at all, Kahana’s text has five whole MSS,  fragments, some from the Geniza (all discovered after the 1982 dissertation, and one, styled ב1 in the edition, discovered two summers ago by Ezra Schwat), two medieval commentators (R. Hillel b. Elyaqim  “from Greece”, the “Raavad”, in fact a Tosafist, and countless citations in later biblical commentaries on Numbers.  On top of that, the Sifre was emended more often and more freely than either Mishnah or Tosefta, often according to a parallel in the Bavli – other times according to other works. The production of a critical edition is thus more complicated, fraught, and methodologically nuanced for the Sifre than for Tosefta.

The second respect in which Kahana differs from Lieberman is his eye for matters of style, patterns, ring compositions and other such rhetorical devices. Kahana has published several papers on these devices in other works, and is happy to employ these tools when he can. This is but an indicator of the great generational shift in Talmudic studies, from a philological-historical approach to a philological-literary one.

Being half a work has some disadvantages. The three-volume set has no index, for example. This is probably going to be appended to volume 6 (or whatever the final volume turns out to be), but in the meantime, readers have no way of finding the amazingly useful surveys of terminology of the Sifre that dot almost every line of the commentary, or discussions of other midrashim and their manuscripts. Kahana did append the text of the entire Sifre to the edition, but without the apparati that are – in his own words – essential for understanding the text. Scholars, beware of citing the second half of ed. Kahana without reading through the manuscripts! Time will of course heal all wounds, and the remaining volumes of the text will have a complete edition and indices to everything. In the meantime, you can buy a searchable PDF edition of the work for a mere 300 NIS (150 if you already spent 200 NIS on the book!). The set also comes with Kahana’s Prolegomena which are actually still quite important and useful, and not found in most libraries outside of Israel.

Reviews will of course be published of this impressive (half a) work, but for the moment we can simply be content with a piece of advice cribbed from Kahana himself (about Lieberman’s TK). From now on, when you’re learning a rabbinic text, try to find a parallel in the first half of Sifre Numbers. Then at least you’ll  know what you don’t know.

Standard
Conferences, English, Guest Posts

SBL Conference Day 2 – Guest Post by Ari Lamm

  continued from day 1

I got a bit of a later start on Tuesday than I had on Monday.  Busy packing up our London apartment for our move back to New York – my wife and daughter had already made their way home a week earlier – I ended up missing the first two lectures of Tuesday’s initial block of sessions.  Fortunately, I managed to attend several fantastic lectures over the course of the day.

As soon as my Northern Line train pulled into Waterloo Station I navigated my way through the complex maze of underpasses leading to the King’s College campus, and dashed upstairs to the “Non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls: Themes and Perspectives” section. This session was convened specifically to address the topic, “Images of the Feminine in the Dead Sea Scrolls.” I arrived just in time to get my laptop ready for Claire Ruth Pfann’ (University of the Holy Land) presentation entitled, “Women at Qumran: Fact or Fiction?” Making use of what she referred to as a revised version of De Vaux’s chronology of the site, Pfann concluded that throughout the history of habitation at Qumran, finds that might indicate the presence of women (e.g. hairnets, feminine fabric patterns, jewelry, spindle whorls, etc.) are absent. During the period Pfann has designated IIb (66-68 CE), however, we begin to find in sealed loci possible indicators of female habitation of the site. These finds continue to appear in layer III (post-73 CE). Pfann thus sees evidence for Revolt-related female habitation at Qumran just prior to the revolt (during a period beginning in 66 CE), but not beforehand.

The discussion period following Pfann’s presentation produced the most heated exchange that I had seen at SBL to that point. Jodi Magness (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) questioned Pfann’s decision to posit a separate stage of habitation commencing in 66 CE, rather than a single period beginning some time early in the reign of Herod Archelaus (i.e. around 4 BCE). Pfann’s view, doggedly defended during the subsequent session break by Stephen Pfann (University of the Holy Land), is that an observable change in material culture before and after 66 CE – as well as the eventual presence at the site of Revolt-era coins (97 from Year 2, and 3 from Year 3) – is sufficient to suggest a separate habitation, which may be dated to 66 CE. Magness countered – as far as I could understand (and hear…things got pretty tense!) – that no “change in material culture” in fact occurred. Instead, the original inhabitants from approximately 4 BCE simply adapted to evolving tastes in dishware and the like. In other words, Magness strenuously insisted, no evidence exists that should force us to suggest a fresh habitation of the site in 66 CE.

Once presentations resumed following the break, I returned to the same section only to encounter my least favorite presentation of the conference: Paul Heger’s (University of Toronto) paper entitled, “The Status of Women in Scripture, Rabbinic and Qumran Literatures.” At the risk of oversimplifying things (although this tendency was precisely my problem with the paper itself), Heger argued that while the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls and rabbinic literature all more or less agree that women possess a subordinate legal status, the Rabbis venture even further in saddling women with a subordinate social status as well.

Paul Gaugin, "Eve - Don't Listen to the Liar.' 1889. Watecolor and paste. Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. courtesy of wikicommons.

Heger introduced his lecture by presenting what he saw as a simple, unbiased reading of the Fall from Eden narrative. In Heger’s view, the text does not fault Eden any more so than Adam for sinning against God; in fact, as Heger implied at several points during his talk, the biblical narrative may even skew against Adam on occasion.

Heger then seemed to assume that the soundness of his reading should be readily apparent to most, perhaps all those who engage the text. Given this, Heger employed his reading as the standard against which both Qumranic and rabbinic  interpretations should be measured. Heger then proceeded to highlight commentary on this narrative from various Dead Sea Scroll sources, which he noted tended to see this episode as a cautionary tale against man’s lustful and generally sinful nature. Eve, he noted, is not implicated as a villain in these readings.

In contrast, Heger pointed to a slew of rabbinic texts, culled from sources as diverse as the Tosefta, Genesis Rabbah, and the Bavli, that cast Eve, especially her feminine sexuality, as the primary culprit in humankind’s Fall. Although noting that exceptions exist, Heger viewed this as the dominant depiction of Eve within rabbinic literature, and as such an indicator that the Rabbis went further than other erstwhile Biblical interpreters in marginalizing women. Heger noted, however, that the Rabbis may not have been directly concerned – at least in this context – with women’s social status per se. Their excessive social demotion of women, therefore, may have been a mere byproduct of an earnest inquiry into the dangers of sexual temptation for males concerned to avoid transgression.

I found Heger’s paper deeply unsatisfying from both a methodological and interpretative perspective. During the discussion period I raised several points with respect to the former. First, I asked that we consider the hazards of attempting to create a coherent programmatic statement out of rabbinic texts drawn from a variety of disparate geographical and chronological contexts. On a related note, I pointed out the problematic nature of referring to “the Rabbis” – as if reducing several hundred years of complex and multivalent development into a single corporate identity somehow makes things simpler instead of vastly more complicated. Finally, I commented that some of the texts to which Heger pointed over the course of his analysis (BT Yoma 18b, in particular) have actually been noted for their reflection of a specifically Sasanian milieu, rather than as merely several points on a broad, rabbinic continuum.

Heger responded rather forcefully that by no means had he suggested that “the Rabbis” only had negative things to say about women. The denigration of Eve, however, is so pervasive throughout rabbinic thought that, in Heger’s view, we may deduce the rabbinic view of women (or some part of it) from the texts in which it appears as a theme. I did not feel at all that this answer addressed my question.

Following Heger’s paper, those who stayed until the end of the morning session were treated to a phenomenal paper by Shani Tzoref (listed as University of Sydney, but announced beforehand as affiliated with the Israel Antiquities Authority). This paper remained my favorite of the conference. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to cover this paper, along with the rest of the lectures I attended throughout the remainder of Day 2, in a subsequent post.

Ari Lamm is concluding a year as a Fulbright scholar based at University College, London and the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Standard
Around the Web, English

From R. Simeon Qayyara to Meir Ariel

Hebrew U trained Roni Shweka‘s dissertation bears the title Studies in Halakhot Gedolot: Text and Recension. For the past year or so he’s been hanging out at Oxford’s Yarnton Manor analyzing genizah fragments alongside some of the field’s most experienced readers of medieval manuscripts. His new book, Shir Chadash, is a collection of “derashot” on various songs of different musicians in the Israeli rock scene. In an interview, Haaretz’s music reviewer Ben Shalev summarizes Shweka’s contribution to Israeli music criticism:

Nobody else has thought or written about Israeli music like that… Nobody else has dove into the depths of the Talmud and Gemara in order to find possible keys for explaining recent rock songs.

Israeli Renaissance, anyone?

Standard
English, Events

Coming Up

To build off of Shai’s list of upcoming Talmud related events in Jerusalem (and also off of his discussion of the place of Talmudic literature in the Israeli-Jewish Renaissance), Rehavia’s Adraba bookstore will host Prof. Avigdor Shinan of Hebrew U’s Hebrew Literature Department this Thursday night, July 14th. According to the announcement on the store’s site, Prof. Shinan will speak about rabbinic stories of the destruction of the Temple:

י”ז בתמוז בפתח ועמו מתחילים, לפי המסורת, שלושת השבועות המובילים בסופם ליום המציין את חורבן ירושלים, בימי בית ראשון ובית שני, הלוא הוא תשעה באב.

פרופ’ שנאן יתמקד בקבוצה של סיפורים מתוך ספרות האגדה העוסקים בחורבן הבית, סיבותיו ותוצאותיו.
במהלך הערב נשאל, בין השאר, האם יש בסיפורים רק הד לאירועי העבר שחלפו, או שמא יש בהם מסר לימינו אנו.

While you’re there, make sure to check out Yonatan and Rachel’s excellent collection of used and new books. Although the store’s specialty is not necessarily Jewish Studies, they regularly pick up quite an array of secondary literature pertaining to the Talmud (they sold me both Boyarin’s Carnal Israel and Epstein’s Introduction to Amoraic Literature). Also- space is limited, so try getting there early if you plan on attending.

Standard
English, Readings

A New Reading of 4Q251 8

Note: Events and reviews are the mainstay of the blog, but some original research and thoughts will of course be posted from time to time. The ideas in these posts are not finished pieces. Rather, they are ideas thrown out with the hope that they will generate comments and debate. This is a fragment I stumbled across while doing research for my MA thesis, supervised by Prof. Menahem Kahana. I thank Prof. Aharon Shemesh for the email conversation that sparked this post.

Several years ago, Aharon Shemesh (whose new book with Cana Werman was just published, and whose old books were recently reviewed by Beth Berkowitz) reread a Qumran fragment of what he termed “Midrash Mishpatim“. Designated simply and prosaically 4QHalachaa by its original editors, Shemesh was able to see through the holes in the fragment (and there were many) and posit an exciting new reconstruction of one pericope, a rewriting and commentary on Exodus 21:23.  His interpretation managed to make sense of the fragment while simultaneously reconstructing not only an interpretation of Exodus 21:23 (ונתן בפללים) heretofore unheard of, but also one that marks and explicates the exegetical element of the rewriting.

Speaking to Prof. Shemesh recently about the same fragment, I came across one other place where it is possible to offer a reconstruction along the same lines. Less exciting and revolutionary, but in this instance somewhat important, I believe, for the history of rabbinic legal history and biblical interpretation.

In the DJD reconstruction of the scroll, we read in fragment 8 (the asterisks mark letters that are not complete in the scroll, like the requisite circles above the letters in critical editions):

[כי יכה איש את עבדו או את שפחתו ]בעין [ או כי יפיל את שן]

[עבדו או אמתו לחפשי ישלחנ]*ו ונתן *ש*ב[תו ורפו]א ירפא

[תחת עינו או שנו כי יגח שור איש או ]*אשה והומת השור וסקלהו

As you can see, the words that remain in the fragment are בעין in l. 1, ונתן שב…א ירפא in l. 2 and אשה והומת השור וסקלהו in l. 3. The DJD editors decided that these words are the connection point between the midrash on Exodus 21:26-27 and idem, 28.

However, in a conversation with Prof. Shemesh, I suggested that בעין does not fit the role of the object of the blow quite well – one would expect את עינו as in MT or perhaps על עינו as in rabbinic Hebrew. בעין however is part of the talionic formula – not in Exodus, but in Deuteronomy 19:21, in the law of conspiring witnesses “עין בעין שן בשן יד ביד רגל ברגל”.

Beyond this “narrow” question of grammatical construct lies the wider question of the reliability of such reconstructions. The editors decided to read the fragment as commenting on the sequence Exodus 21:26-28, but this is but one option. The grammatical question can actually lead to the following reconstruction:

עין] בעין [ שן בשן  יד ביד

רגל ברגל כויה תחת כויה ] ונתן שב[תו ורפו]א ירפא

[כי יגח שור איש או ]*אשה והומת השור וסקלהו

This reconstruction (the DJD editors note that the first four reconstructed words in l. 3 don’t fit the estimated size of the fragment, and can be omitted) would have the fragment be the connection point between two laws that are not contiguous in the Biblical text: the law of the miscarrying woman, and the law of the goring ox. This reconstruction also lets the fragment answer an important question.

The formula “an eye for an eye” never appears as an integral part of a law in the Pentateuch, but rather has a way of being interpolated into an already existing law. As an exercise, try reading Exodus 21:22-25, Leviticus 24:16-22 and Deuteronomy 19:21 without this formula. The verses will stand on their own just fine.

4Q251 knows this, and might be creating a “new” law of assault in order to solve the problem (warning: unsubstantiated reconstruction!):

כי ינצו אנשים ונתתה עין] בעין [ שן בשן  יד ביד

רגל ברגל כויה בכויה ] ונתן שב[תו ורפו]א ירפא

[כי יגח שור איש או ]*אשה והומת השור וסקלהו

A more substantial reconstruction of line 1 might – perhaps read something like “when men fight together, and one hits the other and maims him, then you shall give eye for eye, tooth for tooth etc.”

In this new law, 4Q251 incorporates the talionic formula together with the law that compensation for lost time and medical expenses is given to the victim of a brawl (Exodus 21:19). This reading of Exodus 21:18-19 and 22-25 as parts of the same law is found in the Mekhilta according to Rabbi Ishmael (Nezikin 6 and 8 ) and the Mishnah (Bava Kama 8), and now – perhaps – also in 4Q251.

It should be noted that even if the DJD reconstruction is maintained, the inclusion of the formula from Exodus 21:19, ונתן שב…א ירפא means that Exodus 21:18-19 is read together with the other laws of injury, and not, for example, as part of the laws of murder. But I think the proposed reconstruction solves the grammatical problem and the legal problem in one swoop. It also does so more elegantly.

If so, this would be yet another example of possible connections between the school of R. Ishmael and other (almost contemporary) scripture-reading circles, such as Qumran.

Standard