Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval J

Description: Becoming the People of the Talmud by Talya Fishman Talya Fishman explores the impact of the textualization process in medieval Europe on the Babylonian Talmuds roles within Jewish culture. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmuds preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud-which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later-precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life.What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietisms emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena-the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud-were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life. Author Biography Talya Fishman is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shaking the Pillars of Exile: "Voice of a Fool," an Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture. Table of Contents IntroductionChapter 1. The Place of Oral Matters in Geonic CultureChapter 2. Oral Matters among Jews of Qayrawan and al-Andalus: Framing SefaradChapter 3. Framing Ashkenaz: Cultural Landmarks of Medieval Northern European SocietiesChapter 4. Textualization of North European Rabbinic Culture: The Changing Role of TalmudChapter 5. Medieval Responses to the Textualization of Rabbinic CultureChapter 6. Rhineland Pietism and the Textualization of Rabbinic Culture in Medieval Northern EuropeEpilogueGlossaryAbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments Review "A vital addition to any Jewish studies library in America." * Jewish Book World *"Talya Fishmans ambitious new study . . . indicates the sweep of the issues that are a significant part of Jewish cultural history from late antiquity through the High Middle Ages." * American Historical Review *"For every historian of intellectual history of the (Christian) High Middle Ages the book is a must." * Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies *"An indispensable study, whose exemplary exposition of Jewish attitudes toward oral, written, and legal matters may well spark comparisons with other cultures, for Fishman has brilliantly shown that words can produce meaning through their epistemological categorization as oral or written, a categorization that itself remains undetermined by their actual mediatic support." * Law and History Review *"Becoming the People of the Talmud offers a unique and highly original contribution to our understanding of Jewish culture in the Middle Ages. The book indubitably places Talya Fishman in the vanguard of scholarly research." * Israel J. Yuval, Hebrew University of Jerusalem * Promotional Talya Fishman explores the impact of the textualization process in medieval Europe on the Babylonian Talmuds roles within Jewish culture. Prizes Winner of Winner of the 2011 Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award of the Jewish Book Council. Winner of Winner of the 2011 National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship. Long Description In Becoming the People of the Talmud , Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmuds preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud--which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later--precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life. What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietisms emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena--the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud--were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life. Review Quote "Talya Fishmans ambitious new study . . . indicates the sweep of the issues that are a significant part of Jewish cultural history from late antiquity through the High Middle Ages."-- American Historical Review Promotional "Headline" Talya Fishman explores the impact of the textualization process in medieval Europe on the Babylonian Talmuds roles within Jewish culture. Excerpt from Book Introduction Transmission will never replace creation in the historians romantic heart . . . but it does provide us with a set of hard, unromantic and revealing questions to ask about many received truths and tenets. --Anthony Grafton The importance of the Babylonian Talmud in the lives of observant Jews is taken for granted. Yet when considered from certain vantage points, the Talmuds role as a guide to Jewish life is bewildering. Though construed as a legal reference work, a significant proportion of the Talmuds content does not pertain to law, and the legal traditions themselves are presented in the form of pending disputes. (Critical scholars have determined that the resolved disputes are actually late interpolations into the talmudic text.) In other words, there is no evidence that the sages whose teachings are preserved in the Talmud, Babylonian amoraim of the third through sixth centuries CE, intended to produce a prescriptive guide to applied Jewish law. In the case of the Talmud, the ever-thorny problem of discerning authorial intent applies even at the level of genre. Does this voluminous repository of conflicting legal perspectives, legends, tall tales, and accounts of the sages behavior (some quite unflattering) correspond to any known cultural or literary form that flourished in the Hellenistic or Persian societies with which rabbinic Jews had contact? The cultural roles that the Babylonian Talmud came to play in the lives of medieval Jews are far better understood, but it would be anachronistic to retroject these onto rabbinic Jews of earlier generations, whether amoraim, saboraim, i.e., anonymous redactors, or geonim, the leaders of the post-talmudic rabbinic academies around Baghdad in the seventh through eleventh centuries. The disconnect between the contents of the Talmud and the roles that it came to play in medieval Jewish culture (and beyond) is puzzling. It is also difficult to understand why the Babylonian Talmud (unmediated by the commentaries and codes that transposed it into a reference work) has, for many centuries, enjoyed such prominence in Jewish education. As will be seen below, a range of medieval Jewish scholars plaintively argued that other textual products of Jewish culture were far better suited than the Talmud to assist students in their religious training and spiritual growth. Another question about the Talmuds role in Jewish culture is best framed from the sociologists perspective: As a rule, individuals learn proper comportment from living models--parents, teachers, and community members. It is unnatural to regard a (non-revealed) written text as the definitive guide to all socially and culturally desirable behaviors, for mimesis, rather than reading, is the primary guide to life. If anything, living life "by the book" is anomalous. The strangeness of regarding the Talmud as a guide to Jewish life comes into sharper focus when the scope of its teachings is compared with that of other legal systems. In most societies, huge swaths of life are left ungoverned by legal prescription; for example neither the spatial orientation of ones bed, nor the order in which shoes are to be donned is considered a matter to be monitored. Yet because the Babylonian Talmud--which came to be regarded as a prescriptive work--preserves advice about these matters, some rabbinic Jews have construed these arenas of life as ones that are subject to regulation. Each of these observations underscores the fact that students of Jewish history have little sense of what the Talmud was within its amoraic Sitz-im-Leben , before medieval Jews assigned it particular cultural meanings. Robert Brody, a scholar of rabbinics, affirmed this point: "We have no way of knowing to what extent, if at all, the editors of the Talmud--as distinct from the authors of the legal dicta embedded within it--intended to create a normative legal work, rather than an academic or literary corpus." Why has scholarly ignorance about the Talmuds raison d Details ISBN0812222873 Author Talya Fishman Short Title BECOMING THE PEOPLE OF THE TAL Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press Series Jewish Culture and Contexts Language English ISBN-10 0812222873 ISBN-13 9780812222876 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 296.12 Birth 1955 Year 2013 Publication Date 2013-12-12 Pages 424 Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press Subtitle Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures Place of Publication Pennsylvania Country of Publication United States Illustrations 2 illus. UK Release Date 2013-12-12 AU Release Date 2013-12-12 NZ Release Date 2013-12-12 US Release Date 2013-12-12 Alternative 9780812243130 Audience Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:119008951;

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