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Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud
This book offers new perspectives on animals and animality from the vantage point of the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud.
Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud
Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud selects key themes in animal studies - animal intelligence, morality, sexuality, suffering, danger, personhood - and explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud. Beth A. Berkowitz demonstrates that distinctive features of the Talmud - the new literary genre, the convergence of Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian cultures, the Talmud's remove from Temple-centered biblical Israel - led to unprecedented possibilities within Jewish culture for conceptualizing animals and animality. She explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud, showing how it is ripe for reading with a critical animal studies perspective. When we do, we find waiting for us a multi-layered, surprisingly self-aware discourse about animals as well as about the anthropocentrism that infuses human relationships with them. For readers of religion, Judaism, and animal studies, her book offers new perspectives on animals from the vantage point of the ancient rabbis.
Defining Jewish Difference
Berkowitz shows that interpretation of Leviticus 18:3 provides an essential backdrop for today's conversations about Jewish assimilation and minority identity.
Religious Studies and Rabbinics
Religious Studies and Rabbinics have overlapping yet distinct interests, subject matter, and methods. Religious Studies is committed to the study of religion writ large. It develops theories and methods intended to apply across religious traditions. Rabbinics, by contrast, is dedicated to a defined set of texts produced by the rabbinic movement of late antiquity. Religious Studies and Rabbinics represents the first sustained effort to create a conversation between these two academic fields. In one trajectory of argument, the book shows what is gained when each field sees how the other engages the same questions: When did the concept of "religion" arise? How should a scholar’s normative com...
Execution and Invention
The death penalty in classical Judaism has been a highly politicized subject in modern scholarship. Enlightenment attacks on the Talmud's legitimacy led scholars to use the Talmud's criminal law as evidence for its elevated morals. But even more pressing was the need to prove Jews' innocence of the charge of killing Christ. The reconstruction of a just Jewish death penalty was a defense against the accusation that a corrupt Jewish court was responsible for the death of Christ. In Execution and Invention, Beth A. Berkowitz tells the story of modern scholarship on the ancient rabbinic death penalty and offers a fresh perspective using the approaches of ritual studies, cultural criticism, and t...
Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals
In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud's most scandalous tractate, to uncover the hidden architecture of this classic work of Jewish religious thought. She proposes a new way of reading the Talmud that brings it into conversation with the humanities, including animal studies, the new materialisms, and other areas of critical theory that have been reshaping the understanding of what it is to be a human being. Even as it comments on the the rabbinic laws that govern relations between Jews and non-Jews, Avoda Zara is also an attempt to reflect on what all people share in common, and on how humans fit into a larger ...
What's Divine about Divine Law?
How ancient thinkers grappled with competing conceptions of divine law In the thousand years before the rise of Islam, two radically diverse conceptions of what it means to say that a law is divine confronted one another with a force that reverberates to the present. What's Divine about Divine Law? untangles the classical and biblical roots of the Western idea of divine law and shows how early adherents to biblical tradition—Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo, the community at Qumran, Paul, and the talmudic rabbis—struggled to make sense of this conflicting legacy. Christine Hayes shows that for the ancient Greeks, divine law was divine by virtue of its inherent qualities of intrin...
Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law
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.
The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law
The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law provides a conceptual and historical account of the Jewish understanding of law.
Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism
How the rabbis of late antiquity used time to define the boundaries of Jewish identity The rabbinic corpus begins with a question–“when?”—and is brimming with discussions about time and the relationship between people, God, and the hour. Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism explores the rhythms of time that animated the rabbinic world of late antiquity, revealing how rabbis conceptualized time as a way of constructing difference between themselves and imperial Rome, Jews and Christians, men and women, and human and divine. In each chapter, Sarit Kattan Gribetz explores a unique aspect of rabbinic discourse on time. She shows how the ancient rabbinic texts artfully subvert Roman im...
