This volume guides beginning students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical-interpretive and culture-critical issues that contemporary scholars use when studying the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors, themselves well-known interpreters of rabbinic literature, have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus. Unlike other introductions to rabbinic writings, the present volume includes approaches shaped by anthropology, gender studies, oral-traditional studies, classics, and folklore studies.
Contents
Introduction; Part I: 1. Rabbinic authorship as a collective enterprise Martin S. Jaffee; 2. The orality of Rabbinic writing Elizabeth Shanks Alexander; 3. Social and institutional settings of Rabbinic literature Jeffrey L. Rubenstein; 4. The political geography of Rabbinic texts Seth Schwartz; Part II: 5. Rabbinic Midrash and ancient Jewish biblical interpretation Steven D. Fraade; 6. The Judaean legal tradition and the Halakhah of the Mishnah Shaye J. D. Cohen; 7. Roman law and Rabbinic legal composition Catherine Hezser; 8. Middle Persian culture and Babylonian sages: accommodation and resistance in the shaping of Rabbinic legal tradition Yaakov Elman; 9. Jewish visionary tradition in Rabbinic literature Michael D. Swartz; 10. The almost invisible presence of the other: multi-lingual puns in Rabbinic literature Galit Hasan-Rokem; Park III: 11. The 'other' in Rabbinic literature Christine Hayes; 12. Regulating the human body: Rabbinic legal discourse and the making of Jewish gender Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert; 13. Rabbinic historiography and representations of the past Isaiah Gafni; 14. Rabbinic ethical formational and the formation of Rabbinic ethical compilations Jonathan Wyn Schofer; 15. Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia Daniel Boyarin.
Review
"The book is possibly the finest survey in English of Critical cultural issues for non-yeshiva beginning students of rabbinic literature."
Aaron Howard, Jewish Herald-Voice
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