Author: David C. Kraemer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108661769
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the Talmud in Judaism and beyond. Yet its difficult language and its assumptions, so distant from modern sensibilities, render it inaccessible to most readers. In this volume, David C. Kraemer offers students of Judaism a sophisticated and accessible introduction to one of the religion's most important texts. Here, he brings together his expertise as a scholar of the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism with the lessons of his experience as director of one of the largest collections of rare Judaica in the world. Tracing the Talmud's origins and its often controversial status through history, he bases his work on the most recent historical and literary scholarship while making no assumptions concerning the reader's prior knowledge. Kraemer also examines the continuities and shifts of the Talmud over time and space. His work will provide scholars and students with an unprecedented understanding of one of the world's great classics and the spirit that animates it.
Author: Adin Steinsaltz
Publisher: Random House Incorporated
ISBN: 9780679773672
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
Since it was first published in 1989, the "Talmud Reference Guide" has introduced thousands of people to the study of the books of Jewish law. The guide is an historical treatise on the Talmud and its role in Jewish life, as well as an essential road map to the twenty projected volumes of the Steinsaltz translation. Brilliantly written and lavishly designed and illustrated, this full-length guide will raise interest in the Talmud.
Author: Geoffrey Herman
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 1946527106
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 431
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Book Description
Essays that explore the rich engagement of the Talmud with its cultural world The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), the great compilation of Jewish law edited in the late Sasanian era (sixth–seventh century CE), also incorporates a great deal of aggada, that is, nonlegal material, including interpretations of the Bible, stories, folk sayings, and prayers. The Talmud’s aggadic traditions often echo conversations with the surrounding cultures of the Persians, Eastern Christians, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, and the ancient Babylonians, and others. The essays in this volume analyze Bavli aggada to reveal this rich engagement of the Talmud with its cultural world. Features: A detailed analysis of the different conceptions of martyrdom in the Talmud as opposed to the Eastern Christian martyr accounts Illustration of the complex ways rabbinic Judaism absorbed Christian and Zoroastrian theological ideas Demonstration of the presence of Persian-Zoroastrian royal and mythological motifs in talmudic sources
Author: David Charles Kraemer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195062906
Category : Jewish law
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
This critical study traces the development of the literary forms and conventions of the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, analyzing those forms as expressions of emergent rabbinic ideology. The Bavli, which evolved between the third and sixth centuries in Sasanian Iran (Babylonia), is the most comprehensive of all documents produced by rabbinic Jews in late antiquity. It became the authoritative legal source for medieval Judaism, and for some its opinions remain definitive today. Kraemer here examines the characteristic preference for argumentation and process over settled conclusions of the Bavli. By tracing the evolution of the argumentational style, he describes the distinct eras in the development of rabbinic Judaism in Babylonia. He then analyzes the meaning of the disputational form and concludes that the talmudic form implies the inaccessibility of perfect truth and that on account of this opinion, the pursuit of truth, in the characteristic talmudic concern for rabbinic process, becomes the ultimate act of rabbinic piety.
Author: Talya Fishman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204980
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud's preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud—which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later—precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life. What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietism's emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena—the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud—were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.
Author: Yehuda Septimus
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161534218
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
The English term "prayer" is usually understood as communication with God or the gods. Scholars of Jewish ritual until now have accepted this characterization and applied it to Jewish tefillah. Does rabbinic prayer indeed necessarily entail second-person address to God, as many scholars of rabbinic prayer to this point have presumed? In this work, Yehuda Septimus investigates a boundary phenomenon of talmudic prayer - ritual speech with addressees other than God. The book represents a fresh look at the possible range of performances undertaken by talmudic ritual prayer. Moreover, it places that range of performances into the historical context of the rapid emergence of prayer as the centerpiece of Jewish worship in the first half of the first millennium CE.
Author: Ishay Rosen-Zvi
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204204
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
In Demonic Desires, Ishay Rosen-Zvi examines the concept of yetzer hara, or evil inclination, and its evolution in biblical and rabbinic literature. Contrary to existing scholarship, which reads the term under the rubric of destructive sexual desire, Rosen-Zvi contends that in late antiquity the yetzer represents a general tendency toward evil. Rather than the lower bodily part of a human, the rabbinic yetzer is a wicked, sophisticated inciter, attempting to snare humans to sin. The rabbinic yetzer should therefore not be read in the tradition of the Hellenistic quest for control over the lower parts of the psyche, writes Rosen-Zvi, but rather in the tradition of ancient Jewish and Christian demonology. Rosen-Zvi conducts a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the some one hundred and fifty appearances of the evil yetzer in classical rabbinic literature to explore the biblical and postbiblical search for the sources of human sinfulness. By examining the yetzer within a specific demonological tradition, Demonic Desires places the yetzer discourse in the larger context of a move toward psychologization in late antiquity, in which evil—and even demons—became internalized within the human psyche. The book discusses various manifestations of this move in patristic and monastic material, from Clement and Origin to Antony, Athanasius, and Evagrius. It concludes with a consideration of the broader implications of the yetzer discourse in rabbinic anthropology.
Author: Richard Hidary
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316828697
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
Training in rhetoric - the art of persuasion - formed the basis of education in the Roman Empire. The classical intellectual world centered around the debate between philosophers, who boasted knowledge of objective reality, and sophists, who could debate both sides of any issue and who attracted large audiences and paying students. The roles of the Talmudic rabbis as public orators, teachers, and jurists, parallel that of Roman orators. Rabbinic literature adopted and adapted various aspects of the classical rhetorical tradition, as is demonstrated in the Talmudic penchant for arguing both sides of hypothetical cases, the midrashic hermeneutical methods, and the structure of synagogue sermons. At the same time, the rabbis also resisted the extreme epistemological relativism of rhetoric as is evident in their restraint on theoretical argumentation, their depiction of rabbinic and divine court procedure, and their commitment to the biblical prophetic tradition. Richard Hidary demonstrates how rabbis succeeded in navigating a novel path between platonic truth and rhetorical relativism.
Author: Devora Steinmetz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812240685
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
Punishment and Freedom offers a fresh look at classical rabbinic texts about criminal law from the perspective of legal and moral philosophy, arguing that the Rabbis constructed an extreme positivist view of law that is based in divine command and that is related to the rabinnic notion notion of human freedom and responsibility.
Author: Moulie Vidas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400850479
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud offers a new perspective on perhaps the most important religious text of the Jewish tradition. It is widely recognized that the creators of the Talmud innovatively interpreted and changed the older traditions on which they drew. Nevertheless, it has been assumed that the ancient rabbis were committed to maintaining continuity with the past. Moulie Vidas argues on the contrary that structural features of the Talmud were designed to produce a discontinuity with tradition, and that this discontinuity was part and parcel of the rabbis' self-conception. Both this self-conception and these structural features were part of a debate within and beyond the Jewish community about the transmission of tradition. Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud, produced in the rabbinic academies of late ancient Mesopotamia, Vidas analyzes key passages to show how the Talmud's creators contrasted their own voice with that of their predecessors. He also examines Zoroastrian, Christian, and mystical Jewish sources to reconstruct the debates and wide-ranging conversations that shaped the Talmud's literary and intellectual character.
