This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the Beit Midrash) and the academy: Can these two institutions overcome their vast differences? Should they attempt to do so? If not, what could two methods of study seen as diametrically opposed possibly learn from one another? How might they help each other reconceive their interrelationship, themselves, and the broader study of Jews and Judaism? This book begins with three distinct approaches to these challenges.
The chapters then follow the approaches through an interdisciplinary series of pioneering case studies that reassess a range of topics including religion and pluralism in Jewish education; pain, sexual consent, and ethics in the Talmud; the place of reason and devotion among Jewish thinkers as diverse as Moses Mendelssohn, Jacob Taubes, Sarah Schenirer, Ibn Chiquitilla, Yair ?ayim Bacharach, and the Rav Shagar; and Jewish law as a response to the post-Holocaust landscape. The authors are scholars of rabbinics, history, linguistics, philosophy, law, and education, many of whom also have traditional religious training or ordination.
The result is a book designed for learned scholars, non-specialists, and students of varying backgrounds, and one that is sure to spark debate in the university, the Beit Midrash, and far beyond.
This book re-thinks the relationship between the world of the traditional Jewish study hall (the beit midrash) and the academy.
Introduction: Engagement: Religious Devotion, Academic Relativism, and
Beyond.
1. Terms: Is Jewish Studies Devotionist, Relativist, or
Transcendentalist?
2. Philosophy: Moses Mendelssohn, Leo Strauss, and the
Relativist/Devotionist Divide.
3. History: Devotionist Textual Scholarship
and Historical Consciousness in Early Modern Responsa.
4. Law: The Mothers,
the Mamzerim, and the Rabbis: A Post-Holocaust Halakhic Debate as Legal and
Historical Source.
5. Language: Did the Medieval Grammarians Scientific
Approach to Hebrew Reject or Embrace Tradition?
6. Ethics: Debating the
Proper Orientation of the Ethical Self in Rabbinic and Monastic Sources from
Antiquity.
7. Pain: Milk and Blood, or the Critical Place of Suffering for
Sages and Readers of the Talmud.
8. Consent: Coercion, Consent, and Self in
the Redaction of a Bavli Sugya.
9. Feminism: Relativism and Devotion, the
Yarmulke, and the Ex-Bais Yaakov Girl.
10. Postmodernism: The Soft Radicalism
of Rav ShaGaR.
11. Education: A Case Study in Devotional and Relativist
Learning in Early Childhood Religious Education. Afterword: Limits: Thesis,
Antithesis, Synthesis.
Ethan B. Katz teaches History and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous books include The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (2015) and Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (2015, co-edited with Ari Joskowicz).
Sergey Dolgopolski is Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Thought in the University at Buffalo SUNY. He has written Other Others: The Political After the Talmud (2018); The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (2012); and What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (2009).
Elisha Ancselovits teaches at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and Yeshivat Maale Gilboa and is a fellow at Emory Universitys Center for the Study of Law and Religion. He has published widely in English and Hebrew and is completing a multi-volume history of Judaism through the lens of Jewish Law.
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