Abstracts

Scholars often distinguish between two different modalities of interpretation, rewriting and commentary, frequently associating the former with the Second Temple period and the latter with the rabbis. However, as I argue in this paper, both modalities coexist in each era and, more importantly, we find evidence of a blurring of the line between these interpretative approaches at Qumran, in tannaitic sources, and in the Talmudim. I begin by examining how 4Q252 employs both modalities – coupling rewriting with distinct comments. I then move to tannaitic sources, drawing upon Steven Fraade’s gesture towards deconstructing the rewriting/commentary binary and introducing insights from the work of Azzan Yadin-Israel and Assaf Rosen-Zvi. Turning to the Talmudim, I argue that the Bavli frequently rewrites earlier rabbinic material and blurs the lines between rewriting and reinterpretation through several mechanisms. Juxtaposing the different ways through which these various works blur the line between rewriting and commentary will hopefully allow us to eventually identify shifts in the self-understanding of what it means to transmit and interpret traditions from the Dead Sea Scrolls through the Bavli.

B. Sotah 34b-35a and B. Arakhin 15a-16b contain extended sugyot on the topic of lashon ha-ra. While both B. Sotah and B. Arakhin depict the sin of the desert spies (Numbers 13-14) as lashon ha-ra, in B. Sotah lashon ha-ra results in national catastrophe. In contrast, B. Arakhin turns to exhortations cautioning the individual, rather than the nation, against the sin of lashon ha-ra. This paper makes two connected arguments: First, attention to the redactional context of these sugyot at the level of their respective tractates helps to explain the similarities and differences between these two passages. Second, similarities and differences between the two sugyot cannot be explained by simplistic chronological criteria of one sugya as earlier than and influencing the other. Rather, attention to the context of the tractate reveals a more complex and non-linear compositional process.

This paper analyzes “The Amazing Adventures of Rabbi Pinḥas ben Yair” (b. Ḥul. 7a-b), in which the stammaitic storytellers inherited a palestinian, amoraic collection of unconnected stories about Rabbi Pinḥas ben Yair—now appearing in y. Demai 1:3, 21d-22c— and strung together three of those episodes to create a coherent narrative. While the babylonian reworking of the collection has been previously analyzed by Ofra Meir, Leib Moscovitz, and Yonatan Feintuch, this paper adds to their studies by exploring how and why the stammaitic storytellers replaced the original palestinian, agricultural Halakhot with different halakhic material. Against the assumption that this replacement can be reduced to recontextualizing the story from y. Demai to b. Ḥullin and Babylonian desuetude, I argue that these changes were also a result of the stammaitic storytellers’ narrative artistry, as well as their desire to finish what they saw as an incomplete narrative.

Over a century ago, Louis Ginzberg noted a shared theological concept between Second Baruch and rabbinic literature describing a treasury of souls that must be depleted prior to the coming of messiah, a discourse that exists significantly in Fourth Ezra, as well (see, e.g., bYev 63b; 2Bar 23:1-7; 4Ez 4:34-43). This paper explores and expands on that common soul-related theology, considering other related conceptions from “apocalyptic” Jewish writings that appear in rabbinic literature, including a concept of God delineating all future souls at the time of creation. Moreover, it traces the deployment and expansion of the teaching around future souls within rabbinic literature, comparing it to parallel conceptions in earlier apocalyptic and contemporaneous Christian literature (e.g., Eunomius of Cyzicus, Clementine literature).

It is frequently asserted by scholars that both Josephus and the rabbis know of the conversion to Judaism of the royal house of Adiabene. This paper argues that this is far from clear in Tannaitic sources. These sources do hint at Helena and Monobaz’s provenance from outside the Land of Israel, but they never mention that they were not born Jewish. If they know of the conversion, it is not a factor they choose to highlight in their assessment of these figures. Queen Helena and her son Monobaz appear several times in rabbinic literature, starting in the Mishnah and Tosefta. Only one later source (Genesis Rabbah 46:10) directly mentions the conversion of either party. This story, however, has no clear relationship to the earlier sources which mention Helena and Monobaz. This narrative was likely incorporated separately from an external source (some scholars have suggested Josephus himself, an intermediary, or a shared source) and therefore cannot be taken as evidence that the earlier, inner-rabbinic sources have any knowledge of the conversion nor that they mean their depiction of Helena and Monobaz as a reflection on their status as converts.

This paper will trace the development of Hanukah fire rituals demonstrating that while the Books of Maccabees emphasize the Hasmonean inauguration of the sacrificial altar, the rabbis shifted the focus of the commemoration from the altar to the menorah after the Temple’s destruction as part of an effort to transfer the holiness of the Temple to the Jewish home. A contextual and literary analysis of the locus classical of the Hanukah laws at Bavli Shabbat 21a-24b reveals themes connecting Hanukah lamps both to the Temple menorah and to household Shabbat lamps. The Talmud communicates this new centrality of home holiness through details of ritual law as well as by recontextualizing and retelling the miracle of the oil. Methodologically, this paper will also offer a new contribution to Talmudic research by demonstrating a thematic continuity, purpose, and literary structure over an extended section of Talmud.

This paper inquires into the mental disorder called qordiyaqos which is found in one discursive thread that runs through earlier and later layers (Mishnah to Talmud). Traditional commentaries and modern scholars sought to identify the meaning of this term either by using philological and linguistic approaches (Greek etymology) or trans-cultural comparison, mainly with Greek medical literature. However, the outcome remains vague with possible identifications ranging from (chronic) alcoholism or abusive drinking, delirium (tremens) or ecstatic dancing to epileptic seizures and demonic enchantment. In addition, most discussions focused on only one sources, a particular (linguistic or medical) detail or they tend to mix up the different Talmudic texts as well as external points of comparison. This talk will parse the different discursive moves of the Talmudic texts in their different context in order to understand how the communities that created these texts “observed the world and how their members moved in it” and created “culture-specific disease” (Pollock). Shedding some light on the cultural and symbolic work that is performed - with some comparative perspective on Graeco-Roman, Syriac, Mesopotamian and other traditions, this study aims to show how qordiyaqos served the broader rabbinic project to distinguish and differentiate between different manifestations of ‘madness’ ( mental illness or disability) with a keen eye on the religious and socio-economic (but also emotional) costs and consequences of such categories.

In my dissertation research, I harness a basic insight from the philosophy of language: different ideas about how language means spring from differing assumptions about the mutual relationship between thought, spoken, and written word. These become thematic in areas of halakhah such as liturgical practice, vows, oaths, betrothal, divorce, and more, granting us access to conceptions implicitly held. Thorough contextualization leads me to conclude that the rabbis continue an older view once widely held in Mediterranean antiquity: a “material” view of language as corporeal traveler dispatched from the mouth. This view assumes full force in bBB 38a-39b, as Rava and his students advance a bold new vision of how information travels. They leave behind the model of shlihut, to promote a path of transmission through an unlimited chain of intermediaries. The message is now a public message, traveling as text. Starting from there, this paper critically investigates the potential of my findings for the study of rabbinic textuality. I focus on three aspects. 1) The utterance is out, once out, assuming a life of its own. 2) Transmission becomes incumbent on the collectivity, rather than on “I”s and “You”s. 3) Words as material stumbling blocks in a text.

The rabbis are creative Greek authors. In this paper, I home in on one specific strategy the rabbis employ to dislodge standard semantic values of Greek words and reinscribe them with a new meaning that is dependent on the Hebrew and Aramaic context in which these lexemes appear: Interlingual homophony. The phonetic overlap between Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic functions as philological justification for positing novel interpretations of Greek words. In order to articulate the full range of this discursive strategy, I focus on two particular types of interlingual homophony. Part one interrogates the ways the rabbis of Bavli Avodah Zarah reclaim pagan cultural objects. Greek words that had signified a pagan deity or holiday betray a Jewish origin once their true identity is revealed through interlingual homophony. Part two turns to Moses Margolies (Pnei Moshe), the 18th century commentator of the Yerushalmi, a text replete with Greek words. Ignorant of Greek yet determined to thoroughly comment on nearly every word of the Yerushalmi, Margolies turned to interlingual homophony as a heuristic strategy for defining Greek words. Although nearly all of his definitions of Greek words are incorrect, Margolies’ thorough commentary on the Yerushalmi functions as a repository of creative philology.

Recent studies by Bohak, Anthony, Stökl Ben-Ezra and myself have firmly placed much of the raucous Toledot Yeshu tradition into the Late Antique period. This opens the door to a new triangulation between 1) these Jewish polemical texts, 2) the more dialectical approach to Jesus taken in the Babylonian Talmud, and 3) the establishment of Jesus as an Israelite prophet who was not crucified in the Qur’an. In this paper, I will argue that both the Bavli and the Qur'an are best read as diverging responses to the Toledot Yeshu narrative, reestablishing Jesus either as an Israelite sinner that should have been saved in the case of the Talmud or as God's prophet, in the Qur’an. The new perspective will allow for a revaluation of the way in which both the Talmud and the Qur’an relate to the Christian tradition more broadly.

In this talk I would like to offer a fresh take on the famous chain of transmission in Avot 1-2. I will argue, contrary to most previous scholarship that this text does not have any polemical agenda against another group. Furthermore, to the extent to which this text grants authority to any of the individuals mentioned in the list, this is entirely secondary. Rather, the primary purpose of this text is to reassure members, or potential members of the Rabbinic community regarding doubts about the integrity of the received tradition in light of the fact that there is no record or communal memory of the existence of a rabbinic community of scholars prior to the late Second Temple period. Unlike the succession lists in classical and early Christian sources, the list of individuals and pairs in Avot, represent the exception rather than the norm. The norm was a community of scholars a such that of the tannaim and those imagined to have existed in the Biblical period. This has very significant implications for the overall ideology of the text. In order to develop this argument, I will reexamine the terms זקנים and אנשי כנסת הגדולה that appear in the first Mishnah of the tractate.

As religious communities ritualize the act of copying sacred books, they often assign symbolic, theological meanings to the scribe’s tools. Several classical rabbinic sources (e.g., b. Taanit 20a-b) include the proverb that one “should be soft like a reed, not stiff like a cedar”—opining that the reed’s flexible strength merits it to be the preferred tool for copying Torah. The way these sources imagine reed pens sheds light on late antique Jewish scribes in the cultural matrices of Greco-Roman scribal traditions and rabbinic self-understanding. Just as Jewish scribes used the same reeds as Greco-Roman scribes, so this proverb draws from the fable of “The Oak and the Reed” found in Aesop and other fabular traditions. Despite the proverb’s Gentile origins, however, it illuminates rabbinic notions of virtue and communal ethics. Though it echoes biblical mappings of plant traits onto humans—namely, emulating the cedar’s strength (2 Sam 7:2) over the reed’s weakness (1 Kgs 14:15)—the rabbinic proverb flips the preference. It recasts the reed’s supposed weakness as flexibility and humility, paralleling the social value of accommodating to majority powers in diaspora. In this proverb, a mundane, everyday writing implement becomes a pedagogical and mnemonic device for cultural values.

In the course of the discussion of the laws of mourning in the third chapter of BT Moed Katan, the stam repeatedly invokes rabbis' near kin: the text is replete with not only stories of rabbis mourning their own relatives' deaths, but also seeming asides as to the kinship relations between rabbis in the midst of legal discourse. What is the relationship between these stories, rabbinic law on mourning, and the role of the rabbi as both legal authority and private individual? How does the rabbinic conception of kinship shape their understanding of loss? Drawing on both contemporary anthropological theories of kinship and mourning, as well as a literary analysis of these stories and their parallels in the rabbinic canon, this paper will explore the role of relatedness in the rabbinic imagination, and how it shapes the rabbinic approach to death and loss.

Mishnah Shevuot 2:2 describes (or constructs) a processional ritual for expanding the Temple’s temenos. It includes a non-descript “song” (shir). In commenting on this part of the ritual, Bavli Sheuvot 15b presents a baraita that lists the contents of this shir, which includes numerous psalms and a liturgical unit called the shir shel pegaim. The stam (and a late amora in a somewhat parallel passage in Yerushlami Shabbat) identifies this unit as Psalm 91. Based on this identification, modern scholars have typically assumed that Psalm 91 was already understood by this moniker in the Second Temple period. Such is possible. But it reads history backward. I argue that it is more historically plausible that shir shel pegaim referred to an exorcism poem that continued to circulate in the late ancient period. The baraita and its Yerushalmi parallel preserve mention of such a work. Magical texts live long lives. The localization of shir shel pegaim as Psalm 91 (and possibly also Psalm 3), I argue, belongs to a larger rabbinic reading strategy, a canon-bound consciousness that narrowed most pre-rabbinic sources of authority to the Bible alone.

How did the rabbis of Roman and Byzantine times imagine the order of the world, and what registers of reality did they operate with? To answer this question, we won’t turn to cosmogonic narratives, as we might expect, but to legal texts from the Babylonian Talmud. Several passages are likely to provide us with elements of an answer, from which we have chosen two: on the one hand, the folios that regulate the construction of the roof of the ritual hut of Sukkot (beginning of tractate Sukka) and, on the other, the folios that seek to define the notion of soil and ground (Avoda Zara 45b-46a). In both cases, rabbinic discussions deconstruct notions that may seem intuitive but are only so in surface terms: this applies, for example, to objects such as mountains, pebbles, branches and trees, but also to boards and statues. This demonstrates that the rabbis of Late Antiquity were not interested in “sectorial” taxonomies, and did not conceive of general charts of plants, animals or stones. On the other hand, the rabbis of the Talmud were very sensitive to the natural-artificial distinction, since it was this distinction that guided the establishment of ritual practices and, more generally, legal decisions (halacha). In this way, based on an analysis of the above-mentioned passages, we will highlight the tripartite taxonomy of reality that characterizes rabbinic thought: a) the register of minerals and the living, b) the register of entities originating from second but non-human causes, c) the register of artifice.

One of the most widely told stories in all of rabbinic literature focuses on the wickedness of the emperor Titus, his blasphemy and execution through the agency of a lowly gnat. My current research focuses on these tales, the storytellers and their audiences within the frame of Roman culture. Rabbinic sources preserve the voice of a people defeated and forcibly integrated into Roman imperial culture; the tales of Titus and the Gnat a unique window into the experience of one of Rome’s conquered peoples. Material evidence is essential to this project, both as the “props” referenced by the storytellers and the “sets” in which the stories take place. This cultural history breaks down the lines separating “literary” and “material” evidence, presenting a more integrative approach to the primary sources.

The Babylonian Talmud (Ber. 7a) records a remarkable recollection of Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha in which he has a dialogue with G-d in the holy of holies. The dialogue concludes with an enigmatic nod of the head by G-d. The purpose of this paper is to highlight just how rare and strange this divine nod is in rabbinic literature. We then argue that this nod is to be understood in terms of a renowned episode in the Iliad where Zeus nods his head as a vow and a commitment to Thetis. This Homeric episode is associated with Pheidias’ statue of Zeus – One of the seven wonders of the ancient world and is oft mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, thus establishing it as a well-known episode which the rabbis most probably also recognized. We end with tracing this nod all the way into late medieval Ashkenazic Hassidic poetry.

The miraculous sleep (ATU 766) is a well-known, recurring tale-type observed in Abrahamic folktales since the Second Temple period. This paper compares variants of ATU 766 on three levels of analysis: as a popular tale in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writings from late antiquity and early medieval times; as a Jewish rendition; and as a multiple tale-type in rabbinic literature. The analysis will contemplate the validity and use of syntactic methods in folklore studies to analyze midrash. The paper introduces a new theoretical perspective for critical reading of rabbinic fiction, using the notions of tale-type, ecotype, conglomerate, and motif as discourse formations of different scales.

MS Erfurt 12 (now MS Berlin 1220) is one of the two major extant manuscripts of the Tosefta. When describing the manuscript, Leiberman adopted the assessment of M. Lutzki which placed the writing of the manuscript in 12th century Ashkenaz. However, while studying the margin notes of the manuscript, I discovered new evidence that points to an earlier Italian origin of the manuscript. This lecture will present the results of a collaborative project with Prof. Dr. Ira Rabin in which we utilized ink analysis techniques to determine which margin notes were written by the original scribe and which were written by a second, later hand. These results will allow us to track the history of the manuscript from its origins in 11th century Italy to its journey to Erfurt and finally to its current locale in Berlin.

It is well known that the Qur’an draws from the Mishnah in its discussion of value of human life and the severity of killing a person, based on the story of Cain and Abel (Q 5:32; m. Sanhedrin 4:12). Earlier in the same surah (5:18), the Qur’an alludes to a different Mishnah (Avot 3:14), and a third allusion is found in Q 9:30-31 (drawing on Avot 4:12). These three examples, in two of the latest Medinan sections of the Qur’an, provide important evidence for the Jewish traditions encountered in seventh-century Arabia. The Qur’anic data therefore provides a useful reference point for investigation the form and distribution of the Mishnah in this crucial period of “rabbinization” throughout the Middle East.

In law and lore Tavi is Rabban Gamliel’s non-Jewish slave. In Bavli Yoma 87a, more specifically, Tavi is referred to as a Canaanite slave who discredits all of the generations that follow after him. This paper will explore the ethical stakes of using the equation made between Tavi and his status as a Canaanite slave to read other rabbinic sources that mention him. What do we impose on these sources when we read them through the lens of Tavi’s status as a Canaanite? What do such readings reveal and what do they mask? As part of our larger project on rabbinic conceptions of slavery and slaveholding, we will discuss how our reading practices of sources such as those that mention Tavi are fused with apologetics about Jews and slavery. We will discuss how unsettling past understandings of slavery that stem from underreading rabbinic sources call attention to the ways that our readings (whether intentionally or not) are colored by xenophobic attitudes toward non-Jews and desires to see rabbinic slavery in a positive light.