Neusner was a rabbinic historian. He can be credited with reinventing rabbinic historiography in the modern period. Prior rabbinic historians were either completely naïve in accepting traditional histories or, if they were critically-oriented, prioritized the[…]
The field of rabbinics is peopled by two types of scholars—literary scholars and historians. Literary scholars produce scholarship on small quantities of text read very closely and squeezed with various methodologies to maximize the potential[…]
The turn to the Talmud as a book of Western wisdom in Japan, Korea, and China is reminiscent of a similar interest in and fetishizing of Eastern wisdom in the West. On a visit to[…]
By far, the most important source for mapping Jewish settlement and, in a sense, urban reality as a whole in Sasanian Babylonia is the Babylonian Talmud. The dearth of any substantial late antique Jewish archaeology[…]
The archaeological remains in Babylonia reveal few clear markers of Jewish identity. In the Greek and Roman world, with their so-called epigraphic habit, plenty of inscriptions have been unearthed that attest to a Jewish presence.[…]
This term, first used by medieval commentators (see Zimmerman, p. 27, note 6), is, itself, an inaccuracy: Rabbi Zera merely describes a stringent practice which Babylonian Jewish women had taken upon themselves. Thus, the correct[…]
Unparallel parallels which feed a partisan ego scarcely represent good scholarship, whether the dabblers are Christians or Jews. How should a serious student assess the statement of a modern writer that “in many ways the[…]
For the rabbis, breastfeeding offers a fascinating set of variables for academic investigation. First, breast milk is produced by women and for infants, both of which are non-normative rabbinic categories of people. Second, it is[…]
Being the principal alcoholic beverage of Mesopotamia, it is discussed at length in the Babylonian Talmud and, naturally, the vocabulary is Mesopotamian. Its preparation is short, less than a week: They may put in [ingredients][…]
Leviticus 15 is concerned with normal and abnormal, male and female genital discharges. As scholars have noted, the chapter is structured chiastically: (A) Verses 2-15 describe males with abnormal (gonorrhea) discharges (zav), (B) verses 16-18[…]