The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature

by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Martin S. Jaffee

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521843904
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/04/2007
Series:	Cambridge Companions to Religion
Pages:	438
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.18(d)

About the Author

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (2000) which won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year, and was a finalist (one of three) for the National Jewish Book Award.

Martin S. Jaffee is the author of Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE-400 CE (2001), Early Judaism: Religious Worlds of the First Judaic Milennium, 2nd edition (2006), and several volumes of rabbinic translation and commentary. He is currently co-editor of the AJS Review.

Table of 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.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher