Description
This collection of Daniel Boyarin's previously uncollected essays on the Talmud represents the different methods and lines of inquiry that have animated his work on that text over the last four decades. Ranging and changing from linguistic work to work on sex and gender to the relations between formative Judaism and Christianity to the literary genres of the Talmud in the Hellenistic context, he gives an account of multiple questions and provocations to which that prodigious book gives stimulation, showing how the Talmud can contribute to all of these fields. The book opens up possibilities for study of the Talmud using historical, classical, philological, anthropological, cultural studies, gender, and literary theory and criticism. As a kind of intellectual autobiography, it is a record of the alarums and excursions of a life in the Talmud.
Chapter
The Loss of Final Consonants in Babylonian Jewish Aramaic (BJA)
On the History of the Babylonian Jewish Aramaic Reading Traditions: The Reflexes of *a and *ā
1. Morag’s View of the Vocalization Tradition of BJA
2. The Rationale for an Alternate View
3. The Present Hypothesis
“Pilpul”: The Logic of Commentary
III. Gender and Sexuality
Literary Fat Rabbis: On the Historical Origins of the Grotesque Body
Classical Saints and Grotesque Rabbis
Appendix: The Tale of Rabbi Elazar the Son of Rabbi Shimon
Reading Androcentrism against the Grain: Women, Sex, and Torah-Study
2. The Legend of Beruriah
Are There Any Jews in “The History of Sexuality”?
Introduction: Homophobia before Sexuality?
The Bible before Sexuality
Female Homoerotic Practice
Anal Intercourse as Cross-Dressing
Penetration as Constituting the Female
Were the Men of Sodom Sodomites?
Epilogue: Gender versus Sexuality
Rabbinic Resistance to Male Domination: A Case Study in Talmudic Cultural Poetics
Historicism as Resistance
Cultural Poetics and Talmudic Culture
Historicism as Resistance
The Speaking of Female Desire
“A Rigorously Unsentimental Nostalgia”
Homotopia: The Feminized Jewish Man and the Lives of Women in Late Antiquity
Torah Study and the Making of Jewish Gender
Male Self-fashioning Has Consequences for Women
The Rabbinic Sexual Contract
Orthodox Feminists: Reina Batya and Bertha Pappenheim
Reina Batya, the Wife of the Natziv, and her Protest
Bertha Pappenheim and “The Jewish Woman”
IV. Judaism and Christianity
Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism
Introduction: The Entwining of the Ways
Rabbi Eliezer Christianus?
“Whose Martyrdom is this?”: The Decian Persecutions and the Midrash
Rabbi Akiva and the Invention of the Jewish Martyrology
A Tale of Two Synods: Nicaea, Yavneh, and Rabbinic Ecclesiology
Women’s Bodies and the Rise of the Rabbis
The Rabbinization of Eliezer
Yavneh and Nicaea Revisited
Two Powers in Heaven; or, the Making of a Heresy
1. “Two Powers in Heaven” as Jewish Theology
2. The Apostasy of Rabbi Akiva
3. Justin’s Jewish Heresiology
Archives in the Fiction: Rabbinic Historiography and Church History
Anecdotal Evidence; or, Thinking outside the Books
V. The Bavli in its Hellenistic World
Why Is Rabbi Yohanan a Woman? or, A Queer Marriage Gone Bad: “Platonic Love” in the Talmud
Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia
Dating the Talmud: the Stammaitic Hypothesis
Rabbi Eliezer at Nicaea: Rufinus at Yavneh
Patron Saint of the Incongruous: Rabbi Meir, the Talmud, and Menippean Satire
2. Saintly Decorum: Rabbi Meir as Halakic Hero
3. Sleeping with Elijah: The Hero and the Hetaera
4. Encountering Decorum: The Saint Profaned
The Adventures of the Torah on Earth
Rabbi Meir and the Second Sophistic
5. Saints Are Good for Thinking With: Notes toward an Interpretation
The Talmud as a Fat Rabbi: A Novel Approach
1. Introduction: The Monologic Dialogue of the Talmud
4. Gut Feelings – or, Epistemology in the Operating Theater
5. Theoretical Coda on Authorial Agencyand Dialogue: The Novel Approach
Second Temple Period Jewish Literature
Other Rabbinic Texts and Related Literature
Greco-Roman and Early Christian Literature
The Talmud - A Personal Take
：Selected Essays
( Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism )
Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.
