The Rabbis of History and Historiography

Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities--Encounters--Perspectives: , 2007

The figure known as "Rabbi" (or "Rebbe"), also known as "Rabbeinu ha-Kadosh" ("Our Holy Rabbi"), was central to the rabbinic movement at the end of the tannaitic era. However, this investigation shows that most of the elements of Rabbi's mythos and biography as understood from the time of the Geonim are not original to the earliest sources about him but in large part derive from the late layers of the Talmud Bavli. This includes (1) his name, R. Yehudah ha-Nasi;

Each semester I introduce my undergraduate survey of Jewish history under Greece and Rome, traditionally called at Yeshiva University "Classical Jewish History," with a very simple aphorism that serves as the "mantra" of my course. "Jews were the same as everyone else in the Greco-Roman world," I tell my students, adding with a smile, "until they weren't-and that's when things get interesting." While for most of my students this is a kind of obvious point, for a minority my assertion is mildly jolting-on the order of "Jesus was a Jew" for some Christian students at other institutions. These Yeshiva students are so used to thinking of their culture heroes-Hillel and Shammai, Rabban Gamaliel and Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Laqish, Abbaye and Rava-in the splendid isolation of the talmudic page and by extension, the study hall, that to imagine any of them in togas is a shock. With time, this reimagining takes hold-they did, after all, choose my course-and a richer understanding of the ancient rabbis begins to develop.

Finding, Inheriting or Borrowing?, 2019

The study of ancient Jewish knowledge culture(s), while still in its incipient stage, has developed into an emerging subfield, which seems to offer multiple opportunities of entering into a dialogue with different neighboring disciplines, as it has happened during the scholarly gathering from which this paper emerges. 1 In the wake of the cultural turn in the humanities and following the 1 I would like to express my gratitude to the organizers for inviting me to a truly inspiring conference that brought me in September 2016 to Mainz. I also would like to thank the editors of this volume for their hard work and their many efforts required for publishing this volume. Furthermore, I am indebted to Markham J. Geller and Philip van der Eijk for their constant support, as well as to my colleagues with whom I work comparatively on late ancient medical episteme (project A03) within the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center SFB 980 "Episteme in Motion" at the Freie Universität Berlin. Parts of this paper were (re)written in 2017, the year I spent as a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University and as a Rothfeld Fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, within the program on "Nature between Science and Religion: Jewish Culture and the Natural World". During both fellowships, this paper benefitted equally from the rich holdings of the libraries at both universities, and from inspiring conversations with colleagues from different fields. Several parts of the current chapter were presented and discussed in the Starr-seminar at Harvard, in the Ruth Meltzer-seminar at the Katz Center and at the Katz-symposium "Jews and

Jewish Quarterly Review 111 (2), 2021

LAY LEADERSHIP HAS PLAYED a role in nearly every Jewish community across time; medieval Ashkenaz was no exception. By “leadership,” we mean people—usually a group but sometimes individuals—who were entitled to make decisions that influenced the lives of others and who performed communal functions such as intercommunal arbitration, validation of legal transactions, representation of the community to outside authorities, division of taxes and financial burdens, and more. The term “lay,” in this context, refers to people who, although informed about religious norms, were not primarily known for their scholarly erudition and did not compose normative or legal texts. In medieval times, leadership positions were mostly entrusted to the financially successful and the learned male elite. While the role of rabbinic scholars in the organization and leadership of medieval Ashkenazic communities has been thoroughly researched in the past, information regarding the lay leadership is limited and usually appears in passing in rabbinic writing. Unlike the rabbinic scholars who gradually moved from an oral to a written culture, explaining the norms of individual and communal life, lay leadership tended not to leave much of a paper trail, to the best of our knowledge. Even though written forms were accepted for many legal procedures in the Jewish tradition, everyday leadership activities were usually not recorded in writing and were not systematically archived until a much later period. Yet even in communities with strong rabbinic academies and a strong rabbinic presence, a lay leadership existed, organized into a body of elect leaders, or parnasim, similar to the Christian city council. From the information available to us, this body comprised scholars and laymen alike. In this essay, we collected and analyzed evidence from Cologne, where there was no strong rabbinic academy during the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, in order to show some features that we associate with lay leadership and the differences between lay leadership and rabbinic scholars who led communities. This will be achieved by contrasting the lay leadership with the more prominent form of decision making in medieval Ashkenaz—namely, the scholarly leadership documented in halakhic literature, which is our main, and often only, source of information. Texts composed by the rabbinic elite have been scrutinized for information on those “beyond the elite,” such as women, the poor, and the sick; thus we seek to extract from rabbinic texts traces of a lay leadership, a presence that, since it did not actively contribute texts, has remain silenced behind the literate culture associated with the rabbinic academies of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz (collectively referred to by the acronym ShUM).

Jewish Historiography Between Past and Future: 200 Years of Wissenschaft des Judentums, 2019

Even for those of us trained in rabbinics in religion departments (like myself), the fit in the field of Religion feels uneasy at times. For three decades now, scholars of religious studies have been coming to terms with the Protestant-Christian orientation of the field and the constructed nature of the category of religion. Meanwhile, academics in the social sciences have for the most part neglected consideration of religious factors in their study of human populations, operating as if the secularization theory were true and religious commitments as a social factor were decreasing in importance. The timing of these two trends was unfortunate, making it difficult to argue for the relevance of the study of religion, especially in the age of increasing distrust of religious institutions. My own affiliation with comparative religion, a practical necessity of my employment and an avenue for attracting enrollment to my courses on the rabbis, has aroused the bewilderment-if not suspicion-of some of my Jewish Studies colleagues (not to mention my colleagues in the social sciences). When I saw this volume's title Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation, I was intrigued and hoped this volume could help me find my bearings both in terms of the methodological repertoire I use and to better explain myself to

2020

The main corpus of rabbinical literature evolved following the failure of the Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire in The land of Israel and its vicinity in the first and second centuries AD: The Great Revolt (66-73), The Kitos war (115-117) and The Bar Kochba Revolt (132-135). Following the bloody events, which were a direct result of the Jewish-offensive ethos, the Sages clearly reached a strategic decision to change the Jewish identity and ethos from offensive to defensive. In order to achieve their goal, to transform the Jewish ethos from offensive to defensive, the Sages operated on two spheres: aggadic interpretations, often based on interpretation of verses, personal stories, and legends, and the halakhic discourse. In the article, I shall demonstrate each of these categories, which led to the shape of new Jewish identity.