TALMUD, TALMUDISTI, AND ALBERT THE GREAT

Since the onset of modern study of the Jewish past much attention has been focused on the Roman Catholic Church and its role in determining Jewish fate. For the great early synthesizers of Jewish history, Heinrich Graetz and Simon Dubnow, the Church played a role that was decisive and unchanging, a role that was distinctly negative and harmful.' For the major late-twentieth-century synthesizer of Jewish history, Salo Baron, the role of the Church was more modest and less harmful, but still essentially unchanging. For Baron, the Church was bound, all through the Middle Ages, to a complex and somewhat flexible course that was rooted in toleration of Judaism and the Jews, with Jewish behaviors always subject to scrutiny and limitation by majority Christian society.2 Of late a striking new thesis has been proposed by a number of researchers, who suggest that the heretofore assumed continuity Graetz's assessment of the role of the Roman Catholic Church appears throughout his massive study, beginning with volume IV and his depiction of the rise of Christianity to power in the Roman Empire. Graetz was particularly harsh in his indictment of the thirteenth-century papacy. Dubnow, while differing markedly from Graetz in many ways, shared his predecessor's sense of the deleterious role played by the Roman Catholic Church. For a particularly telling summary statement, see the ninth chapter of his broad essay on Jewish history. This is conveniently available in the English translation -Jewish History: An Essay in the Philosophy of History (Philadelphia, 1903), pp. 114-133. 2 See the careful statements in the opening chapters to the fourth and ninth volumes of Baron's magisterial Social and Religious History of the Jews (2nd ed.; 18 vols.; New York, 1952-83). in ecclesiastical doctrine was in fact not the case. They claim rather that the thirteenth century saw the development of a radical new Church stance on Judaism and the Jews, a stance that in effect proscribed rabbinic Judaism.3 Let us note the fullest formulation of this new view, that of Jeremy Cohen in The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism.

The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning (Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum (CRINT) 16), 2022

This chapter explores connections between late antique Christian traditions and rabbinic literature, with special emphasis on the Babylonian Talmud

This study looks anew at the interactions and possible influences between the monastic and cathedral school masters in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries , and the leading contemporary scholars of the Talmud in northern France and Germany known as the Tosafists. By focusing on significant commonalities in inter-pretational methods and institutional structures, as well as on the formulations of various critics, the contours of these interactions can be more precisely charted and assessed. Keywords Tosafists ‒ Rashi ‒ Jewish–Christian contact ‒ dialectic ‒ Cathedral Schools ‒ Sefer Hasidim

In 1944, my teacher Saul Lieberman published a classic essay in which he treated talmudic martyrology in the context of patristic literature. ' The article had been written under the inspiration of his meeting and friendship with Henri Gregoire, the great Belgian church historian, then a refugee from the Nazis in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in New York, where Lieberman, the great Lithuanian talmudist, had also found refuge and where the two met. Nearly a half-century later, this student of Lieberman' s met another church historian, Virginia Burrus, in Morningside Heights under happier circumstances, when both of us were participants at a conference on asceticism at Union Theological Seminary, and a similar intellectual interaction began. This paper represents some of the first fruits of that second encounter and aspires to modestly continue the enterprise begun by the first.

European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion (special issue on Contemporary Jewish Perspectives on Divine Hiddenness, Religious Protest and Doubt), 2020

Robert Brandom's "The Pragmatist Enlightenment" describes the advent of American pragmatism as signaling a sea-change in our understanding of human reason away from the top-down Euclidean models of reasoning, warrant and knowledge inspired by the physical sciences, toward the far more bottom-up, narrative, inherently fallible and dialogical forms of reasoning of the life and human sciences. It is against this backdrop that Talmudic Judaism emerges not only as an early anticipation of the pragmatist enlightenment, but as going a substantial and radical step beyond it, that in the context of religious commitment and reasoning, is unprecedented.

Modern Judaism, 2001

[Excerpt] My project has two parts. The first part demonstrates that Jews were in fact a changing people of the Talmud. Even though I make some references to it, discussion of that large subject awaits further investigation. The second part of the project is to identify and evaluate reputations of Jews as a People of the Talmud. An aspect of that work is the primary concern of this article.