In Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer: Structure, Coherence, Intertextuality Katharina E. Keim offers a description of the literary character of Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer, an enigmatic work of the late-eighth-to-early-ninth centuries CE. Katharina E. Keim explores the work’s distinctive literary features through an analysis of its structure and coherence. These literary features, when taken together with the work’s intertextual relationships with antecedent and contemporaneous Christian and Jewish (rabbinic and non-rabbinic) texts, reveal Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer to be an innovative work, and throw light on a new turn in Jewish literature following the rise of Islam.
The art of interpreting Holy Scriptures flourished throughout the culturally heterogeneous pre-modern Orient among Jews, Christians and Muslims. Different ways of interpretation developed within each religion not without considering the others. How were the interactions and how productive were they for the further development of these traditions? Have there been blurred spaces of scholarly activity that transcended sectarian borders? What was the role played by mutual influences in profiling the own tradition against the others? These and other related questions are critically treated in the present volume.
This book conducts a study of contradictions and coherence in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and suggests that the alleged contradictions are ultimately given to resolution, once the greater context of biblical and Jewish tradition is taken into consideration.
Winner of the Jewish Book Council Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award in Scholarship This book explores the reception history of the most important Jewish Bible commentary ever composed, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki; 1040-1105). Though the Commentary has benefited from enormous scholarly attention, analysis of diverse reactions to it has been surprisingly scant. Viewing its path to preeminence through a diverse array of religious, intellectual, literary, and sociocultural lenses, Eric Lawee focuses on processes of the Commentary's canonization and on a hitherto unexamined--and wholly unexpected--feature of its reception: critical, and at times astonishingly harsh, resistance to it. Lawee shows how and why, despite such resistance, Rashi's interpretation of the Torah became an exegetical classic, a staple in the curriculum, a source of shared religious vocabulary for Jews across time and place, and a foundational text that shaped the Jewish nation's collective identity. The book takes as its larger integrating perspective processes of canonicity as they shape how traditions flourish, disintegrate, or evolve. Rashi's scriptural magnum opus, the foremost work of Franco-German (Ashkenazic) biblical scholarship, faced stiff competition for canonical supremacy in the form of rationalist reconfigurations of Judaism as they developed in Mediterranean seats of learning. It nevertheless emerged triumphant in an intense battle for Judaism's future that unfolded in late medieval and early modern times. Investigation of the reception of the Commentary throws light on issues in Jewish scholarship and spirituality that continue to stir reflection, and even passionate debate, in the Jewish world today.
Printed editions of midrashim, rabbinic expositions of the Bible, flooded the market for Hebrew books in the sixteenth century. First published by Iberian immigrants to the Ottoman Empire, they were later reprinted in large numbers at the famous Hebrew presses of Venice. This study seeks to shed light on who read these new books and how they did so by turning to the many commentaries on midrash written during the sixteenth century. These innovative works reveal how their authors studied rabbinic Bible interpretation and how they anticipated their readers would do so. Benjamin WIlliams focuses particularly on the work of Abraham ben Asher of Safed, the Or ha-Sekhel (Venice, 1567), an elucidation of midrash Genesis Rabba which contains both the author's own interpretations and also the commentary he mistakenly attributed to the most celebrated medieval commentator Rashi. Williams examines what is known of Abraham ben Asher's life, his place among the Jewish scholars of Safed, and the publication of his book in Venice. By analysing selected passages of his commentary, this study assesses how he shed light on rabbinic interpretation of Genesis and guided readers to correct interpretations of the words of the sages. A consideration of why Abraham ben Asher published a commentary attributed to Rashi shows that he sought to lend authority to his programme of studying midrash by including interpretations ascribed to the most famous commentator alongside his own. By analysing the production and reception of the Or ha-Sekhel, therefore, this work illuminates the popularity of midrash in the early modern period and the origins of a practice which is now well-established-the study of rabbinic Bible interpretation with the guidance of commentaries.
The book is concerned with a so called ethical midrash, Seder Eliyahu (also known as Tanna debe Eliyahu), a post-talmudic work probably composed in the ninth century. It provides a survey of the research on this late midrash followed by five studies of different aspects related to what is designated as the work’s narratology. These include a discussion of the problem of the apparent pseudo-epigraphy of the work and of the multiple voices of the text; a description of the various narrative types which the work, itself as a whole of non-narrative character, makes use of; a detailed treatment of Seder Eliyahu’s parables and most characteristic first person narratives (an extremely unusual form of narrative discourse in rabbinic literature); as well as a final chapter dedicated to selected women stories in this late midrash. As it emerges from the survey in chapter 1 such a narratologically informed study of Seder Eliyahu represents a new approach in the research on a work that is clearly the product of a time of transition in Jewish literature.
Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the most revered religious leaders of the 20th century, and God in Search of Man and its companion volume, Man Is Not Alone, two of his most important books, are classics of modern Jewish theology. God in Search of Man combines scholarship with lucidity, reverence, and compassion as Dr. Heschel discusses not man's search for God but God's for man--the notion of a Chosen People, an idea which, he writes, "signifies not a quality inherent in the people but a relationship between the people and God." It is an extraordinary description of the nature of Biblical thought, and how that thought becomes faith.
This volume contains Hebrew and Syriac text. Please, check that your e-reader supports texts set in left-to-right direction before purchasing the epub and azw3 editions of the book. This volume is dedicated to the cultural and religious diversity in Jewish communities from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Age and the growing influence of the rabbis within these communities during the same period. Drawing on available textual and material evidence, the fourteen essays presented here, written by leading experts in their fields, span a significant chronological and geographical range and cover material that has not yet received sufficient attention in scholarship. The volume is divided into four parts. The first focuses on the vantage point of the synagogue; the second and third on non-rabbinic Judaism in, respectively, the Near East and Europe; the final part turns from diversity within Judaism to the process of "rabbinization" as represented in some unusual rabbinic texts. Diversity and Rabbinization is a welcome contribution to the historical study of Judaism in all its complexity. It presents fresh perspectives on critical questions and allows us to rethink the tension between multiplicity and unity in Judaism during the first millennium CE. L’École Pratique des Hautes Études has kindly contributed to the publication of this volume.
The contributors to this book analyze how the redactors of the Talmud transformed and reworked earlier aggadic (non-legal) traditions. Critical study of the Babylonian Talmud is founded on the distinction between two literary strata: traditions attributed to named sages (the Amoraim, c. 200-450 CE) and setam hatalmud, the unattributed or anonymous material. The conclusion of modern scholars is that the anonymous stratum postdates the Amoraic stratum and should be attributed to the Talmudic redactors, also known as Stammaim (c. 450-700 CE.) The contribution of the Stammaim to the aggadic (non-legal) portions of the Talmud - to midrash, narratives, ethics and theology - has received minimal scholarly attention. The articles in this book demonstrate that the Stammaim made a profound contribution to the aggadic portions of the Babylonian Talmud and illustrate the processes by which they created and composed many aggadic traditions.
This book presents a new framework for understanding the relationship between biblical narrative and rabbinic law. Drawing on legal theory and models of rabbinic exegesis, Jane L. Kanarek argues for the centrality of biblical narrative in the formation of rabbinic law. Through close readings of selected Talmudic and midrashic texts, Kanarek demonstrates that rabbinic legal readings of narrative scripture are best understood through the framework of a referential exegetical web. She shows that law should be viewed as both prescriptive of normative behavior and as a meaning-making enterprise. By explicating the hermeneutical processes through which biblical narratives become resources for legal norms, this book transforms our understanding of the relationship of law and narrative as well as the ways in which scripture becomes a rabbinic document that conveys legal authority and meaning.
