Papers by Barry Wimpfheimer
Studies in Rabbinic Narrative Volume 1, 2021
A Toseftan story tells of Baba ben Buta, a disciple of the house of Shammai, intervening in the l... more A Toseftan story tells of Baba ben Buta, a disciple of the house of Shammai, intervening in the logistical execution of sacrificial rituals to achieve a practical legal outcome according to the position of Beit Hillel. This article lends texture to this narrative by reading into both the doubling of the story in the text and a series of editorial interruptions in the narration. These features combine with similar editorial interruptions in the famous adjacent passage about the temple era legal system to tell a story of editorial resistance to the original story and its assumptions about law and jurisprudence. This example demonstrates that Jewish law as a unified consistent entity was already being contested in the tannaitic period.
A Cultural History of Law Volume I, 2019
This paper compares the genre of legal code across four different ancient cultures with an eye to... more This paper compares the genre of legal code across four different ancient cultures with an eye towards identifying both the inherent poetics of a code and the processes through which readers narrativize codes in order to give them context and meaning.
Preface/Eulogy for Dr. Beth Samuels
An autobiographical essay about becoming a critical reader of Talmud and the pleasure of studying... more An autobiographical essay about becoming a critical reader of Talmud and the pleasure of studying this corpus.
Wisdom of Bat Sheva: The Dr. Beth Samuels Memorial Volume, 2009
This article revisits a famous rabbinic text that advocates birth control in specific scenarios a... more This article revisits a famous rabbinic text that advocates birth control in specific scenarios and attempts to situate it within its contemporaneous historical context. Along the way the piece discovers a pattern to R. Meir's approach to wet nursing and comments upon the nature of rabbinic statutory debate.
This paper critiques a field-wide habit of thinking of Jewish law in objective terms by identifyi... more This paper critiques a field-wide habit of thinking of Jewish law in objective terms by identifying a multiplicity of ways in which the production, adjudication and implementation of Talmudic law are predicated on the experiences of a specific subject. Drawing on the case study of an infertile couple, the paper highlights the way in which rabbinic texts through their discursive presentation can be seen to struggle with subject-based realities. The paper closes with an intervention in the realism/nominalism debate that critiques the difference between rabbinic self-understanding and an historical description of the rabbinic project.
Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature, 2017
This article models a literary methodology that employs culturally relevant stories to produce a ... more This article models a literary methodology that employs culturally relevant stories to produce a "narrative precedent" framework for reading a talmudic legal story. The primary story under consideration is a story found at Bavli Makkot 5b in which a woman appears to have produced witnesses who lie on her behalf.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2010
... Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine. By Richard Kalmin. JewishBabylonia betwe... more ... Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine. By Richard Kalmin. JewishBabylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine. By Richard Kalmin. . Oxford University Press, 2006. 285 pages. $60.00. The hardiest ...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 2004
Jewish Quarterly Review, 2011
Festschrift by Barry Wimpfheimer
Book Reviews by Barry Wimpfheimer
While Jacob Neusner deserves a biography, An American Jewish Iconoclast is too close to its subje... more While Jacob Neusner deserves a biography, An American Jewish Iconoclast is too close to its subject and lets Neusner dictate the terms of the story even when those terms strain credulity. There are also better ways to describe Neusner's contributions to Rabbinics and his relationship with people in that subfield.
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Papers by Barry Wimpfheimer
Festschrift by Barry Wimpfheimer
Book Reviews by Barry Wimpfheimer