Barry Scott Wimpfheimer - The Talmud

LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

The Talmud: A Biography

LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

The Dead Sea Scrolls, John J. Collins

The Bhagavad Gita, Richard H. Davis

John Calvins Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bruce Gordon

The Book of Mormon, Paul C. Gutjahr

The Book of Genesis, Ronald Hendel

The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs

The Book of Job, Mark Larrimore

The Koran in English, Bruce B. Lawrence

The Lotus Stra, Donald S. Lopez Jr.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez Jr.

C. S. Lewiss Mere Christianity, George M. Marsden

Dietrich Bonhoeffers Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty

Thomas Aquinass Summa theologiae, Bernard McGinn

The I Ching, Richard J. Smith

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, David Gordon White

Augustines Confessions, Garry Wills

The Talmud, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

FORTHCOMING

The Book of Exodus, Joel Baden

The Book of Revelation, Timothy Beal

Confuciuss Analects, Annping Chin and Jonathan D. Spence

The Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, Carlos Eire

Josephuss The Jewish War, Martin Goodman

Dantes Divine Comedy, Joseph Luzzi

The Greatest Translations of All Time: The Septuagint and the Vulgate, Jack Miles

The Passover Haggadah, Vanessa Ochs

The Song of Songs, Ilana Pardes

The Daode Jing, James Robson

Rumis Masnavi, Omid Safi

The Talmud

A BIOGRAPHY

Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2018 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Jacket art: Andi Arnovitz

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-16184-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963018

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Shana, Adin, and Amalia

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An announcement in a conference schedule about a decade ago alerted me to a new series from Princeton University Press called Lives of Great Religious Books. My instant desire to write a volume for this series on the Babylonian Talmud would take several years to come to fruition. Passing mention of my interest to Daniel Boyarin led to an invitation to pitch my idea for this book to Fred Appel. The rest is history.

I am grateful to those who have helped me with this project. Northwestern University has been my scholarly home for eleven years. I feel tremendous support from the Department of Religious Studies and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studieswhich I directed while writing this bookis particularly dear to me; thank you to Nancy Gelman, who administers the Crown Center, for freeing up my time to write this book. My colleagues in both Religious Studies and Jewish Studies have been terrific sounding boards for this project and for scholarship in general. I particularly want to thank three colleaguesMira Balberg, Sarah Jacoby, and Michelle Molinawho have often served as a writers collective for this and other projects.

Several friends were very generous with their time and energy and gave me extensive feedback. Thank you to Mira Balberg, Daniel Boyarin, Jeremy Dauber, Shana Gillers, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, and Tzvi Novick for their manuscript annotations and suggested edits. Jonathan Milgram, Daniel Reifman, and Elli Stern are old friends with unique expertise in the Talmud, and their conversations over the years have produced many of the underlying ideas in this book. Sarah Wolf co-taught with me during the period the book was written. Adina Goldman provided valuable research support. Thanks also to Anne Mintz for copyediting and Angela Erisman for indexing.

Family members have encouraged this process. I want to specially thank Susanne and Michael Wimpfheimer, Mina and Bruce Gillers, Jan/Orit, Ahuva/Gershon, David/Rachel, Ben/Tracy, Sara, Chanani/Seth, Yosef/Sara, and their families.

Adin and Amalia have kept me company on this escapade and tolerated those nights on which I couldnt quite let go of the days work. I thank them for cheering me up and distracting me while serving as concrete reminders to keep things in perspective.

Shana is my confidante and partner who has encouraged and critiqued this project since its inception. I am grateful for her love and her company for so many years. In recognition of my inexpressible gratitude, I dedicate this book in her honor and in honor of our children.

LIVES OF GREAT RELIGIOUS BOOKS

The Talmud: A Biography

The TalmudEssential, Enhanced, and Emblematic

PROLOGUE

The Babylonian Talmud can be accurately defined in three distinct ways:

The Babylonian Talmud is a work of religious literature collectively produced by a group of rabbi scholars who lived in two geographic regions (Palestine and Babylonia) between the first and eighth centuries CE.

The Babylonian Talmud is the central canonical work of the Judaism that emerged after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem; within an idiosyncratically scholastic culture that relied heavily on texts to ground religious meaning, the Talmud has been the text on which scholars have focused their energies.

The Babylonian Talmud is a uniquely Jewish scripture and has often come to function as the ultimate symbolic representation of Judaism, Jewishness, and Jews.

contains a fuller description of the Talmud itself.)

To understand this notion of multiple registers of meaning, the reader who has not yet encountered the Talmud should consider the biblical Ten Commandments or the United States Constitution as comparable foundational texts. These three texts (the two comparators and the Talmud) were produced in historical time and place. The original meaning of the text is the essential meaning of the text. There are fundamental problems that affect ones ability to confidently recover the original meaning of a text. And yet we can easily comprehend historical meaning as an ideal to which one might strive. This is the first register of Talmudic meaning.

The three texts we are considering are fundamental to ongoing cultural (including legal and religious) practices of reading and have engendered interpretations and applications (to say nothing of explicit amendments) that exponentially expand the work as each original word or sentence generates exegesis, and becomes the basis for inferences and new applications. From its completion (ca. 750 CE) until today, the Talmud has been at the center of an active culture of reading that has generated an enormous literature of reception that understands, interprets, and applies it. This enormous literature is often understood as the Talmud by cultural insiders and should be considered the enhanced Talmud.

Part of what makes the Ten Commandments or the Constitution relevant long after their respective historical moments of production is the potency of their symbolic meaning. This symbolic meaning is sometimes employed without awareness of essential or enhanced meanings and even, occasionally, in contradiction to those meanings. People regularly invoke the Ten Commandments as a symbol of divine legislation and moral justice without knowing the specifics of the commandments themselves. The Constitution is invoked as the basis for liberal democracy and all that is noble about the United States without recourse to its specific words. This book argues that the Talmud also possesses a register of meaning that is only loosely connected with the underlying original content (essential) of the work or the vast apparatus of reception (enhanced). When functioning in this