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.
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.
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.