The Talmud is one of the richest and most complicated works of literature the world has ever known. Since being composed around 1500 years ago it has inspired not only religious reverence but significant intellectual engagement. In this course learners will be introduced to the unique characteristics of this text and the challenges that inhere in studying it while studying a chapter of the Talmud. Students of the course can expect to develop an appreciation for how the Talmud works and why it continues to inspire religious and intellectual devotion. They will be challenged to employ critical reading skills and to analyze legal and historical concepts.
Video 4 The Talmud's Interpreters
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From the course by Northwestern University
The Talmud: A Methodological Introduction
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From the lesson
Introducing the Talmud
The Talmud is a canonical work of Jewish literature that collects the ideas and arguments of rabbis who lived between the first and eighth centuries CE. This module explains the basics of how the Talmud was composed, why the Talmud matters and how it is accessed today.
Meet the Instructors
Barry Scott WimpfheimerAssociate Professor
Religious Studies
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Of the many works of ancient literature that were considered valuable in their own
age, some survived to the present, but many survive only in reputation.
Great works by famous Greek authors who wrote plays and poems have not survived.
The Talmud could have suffer his fate.
So it is important to recognize the fact that beyond its importance work of
literature, the Talmud is significant.
Because it encouraged many people over a millennium to continue to preserve it,
study it, interpret it and apply it.
It is these people,
the Talmud's interpreters who are the subject of this video.
When the rabbinic movement began,
the rabbis of the Talmud were a small and marginal group.
When they determined legal matters, they did so in disciple circles.
Groups of students attached to a single charismatic teacher.
Their legal decisions had little impact outside their small community.
But by the close of the Rabbinic Period around the time of the Muslim conquest in
the eighth century, the rabbinic movement had spread in popularity and influence.
And it would continue to spread its newly developed ways of doing Judaism and
thinking about Judaism throughout the Jewish diaspora.
Babylonia, which came to outstrip Roman Palestine as a center of rabbinic activity
was home to two large institutional yeshivot, academies of Talmud study.
These were massive schools.
Think of a college or university, which were attended both by locals and
by students from elsewhere in the diaspora.
Most yeshiva's study was structured around a curriculum focused on the full time
students.
But twice a year, the yeshivot would open their doors to the larger Jewish
community and offer public instruction for several weeks at a time.
The heads of yeshivot were known as the geonim.
Literally, eminences and the period of time in
which they flourished is sometimes called the Geonic Period.
The Geonic Period lasted from about the 8th through the 11th centuries.
During this time, the Babylonian academies focused on deriving practical
law from the multivocal and open-ended text of the Talmud.
One of the most important ways they did this Was by using legal ideas contain in
the Talmud to answer real questions,
post to them by actually people living in the surrounding areas.
This genre of legal literature is known as responsa literature.
Responsa is the plural form of the singular responsom.
In eesponsa literature, questionnaires post their present legal queries to
an authoritative respondent who writes back with a decision.
Responsa are like legal advice columns in that the authority of the respondent
is produced in part by the very act of asking him or her to weigh in.
Just as an ethics expert in the newspaper is an authority,
mostly because the person asked them to opine on this issue.
Much of the authority of the response and
writer stems from the decision of the layperson to consult with that writer.
The responsa literature was an important way in which the geonim and
their yeshivot became universal Jewish authorities.
During the Geonic Period,
there were no full blown commentaries produced on the Talmud.
Difficult terms, ideas or passages Were sometimes explained by our sponsor,
but the first true line by line commentary from the Talmud were produced by
rabbis who lived in Kirawan in modern day Tunisia in the 11th century.
These commentaries written by Rabbenu Hananel and Rabbeinu Nissim are written in
a paraphrasing style in which the commentator incorporates
much of the Talmud language, but changes difficult terms.
The commentary of Rabbenu Hananel was first added to the printed page of
the Talmud only with the production of the classic Vilna edition of the 1880s.
The editors of that edition recovered the text of this commentary
from a handwritten codex housed in a Vatican library.
By the 11th century, Jewish communities had spread beyond Babylonia and
North Africa to Europe.
There were there major European centers of Talmud study in the medieval period.
Ashkenaz, Provence and Sefarad.
The Jews of Ashkenaz lived in what is now northern France and Germany.
Medieval Ashkenaz was home to some of the most important developments
in the entire reception history of the Talmud.
In the late 11th century, a prolific scholar named Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki,
known as Rashi produced a commentary on the Talmud
that helped its readers encounter the Talmud as a unified and coherent text.
Instead of simply paraphrasing as the Carolini rabbis did in their commentaries,
Rashi presented a coherent conceptual framework for each chapter and
made sure that an explanation in one part of a chapter
did not undermine a statement later on in that chapter following on Rashi's heels.
A school of commentators known as the Tosafists continued the project of
producing the Talmud, as a unified and coherent document.
Whereas Rashi's commentary made each chapter function as a unified whole,
the Tosafists went a step further and
attempted to do this with the entire Talmud.
The Tosafists's main mode of commentary was to identify possible
contradictions between sections of the Talmud and completely different tractates
of the Talmud or different sections of the same tractate, an attempt to resolve them.
These commentaries by Rashi and Tosafot were incredibly significant for
the Talmud's canonization.
Although the Talmud had already been viewed as an important and
authoritative text, the interpretive work of Rashi and
the Tosafists presented the Talmud as an integrated and univocal work.
One that could much more easily be relied upon for clear answers.
Provence was home to another center of Jewish activity in medieval Europe.
Today, Provence refers to an area of southern France.
But in the medieval period, the region included Southern France.
But also importantly, Northern Spanish cities, such as Girona and Barcelona.
Although the most significant Jewish texts to come out of Provence were the first
stirrings of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.
Provence also produced significant legal commentaries in the 13th and
14th centuries.
From scholars, such as Nachmanides known in Hebrew as Ramban and
Solomon ibn Aderet known as the Rashba.
The third major center of Talmud study was Farad.
A region that included Southern Spain and North Africa.
If Rashi and the Tosafists were the most important textual scholars of Ashkenaz,
the major thinker of Spain.
And arguably, the most important Jewish thinker of the medieval period,
was Moses Maimonides, also known as Rambam.
A native of Cordoba, Spain, Maimonides migrated first to Fez, Morocco and
then to Cairo, Egypt.
Maimonides is world famous for his philosophical works.
Most notably, the Guide to the Perplexed, but
he also wrote a comprehensive code of Jewish law.
That simultaneously established and threatened the authority of the Talmud.
Maimonides Law Code called Mishneh Torah.
Literally, second Torah, was built almost solely on the legal content of the Talmud,
yet was explicitly designed to render study of the Talmud superfluous.
Understandably, this work met with a great deal of controversy.
Over the course of time though, the work became universally accepted and
is now regularly used as a commentary to the Talmud by students in traditional
settings.
Maimonides code may have been controversial,
but it was only the first of many influential law codes to come.
In the 16th century, Rabbi Joseph Karo produced Shulhan Arukh.
A code whose title literally means the set table.
In the 16th and 17th centuries,
this comprehensive work displays the Talmud as a focus of academic study.
In part, because of a reaction against a newly popular style of Talmud study
that was seen as overly abstract and detail oriented.
In 19th century Eastern Europe,
the Talmud was returned to its central place in the study curriculum.
This is largely due to the influence of Rabbi Elijah of
Vilna known as the Vilna Gao or his Hebrew acrostic, GRA.
Soon after GRA's death,
the first large institutional yeshiva in modernity was founded in Valozhyn.
This study center and the other Lithuanian yeshivot that were founded on its model,
put the analytic study of Talmud back at the center of the curriculum.
The study of the Talmud today takes place primarily in Israel and the United States.
The demographics and ideologies of contemporary Talmud
students are now more varied than they have ever been.
There are now different Jewish denominations.
Beginning with the reform movement in the 19th century and followed by the Orthodox,
Conservative, Reconstructionist and Renewal movements.
The emergence of these different movements means that
there are now multiple rabbinic bodies that engage with the Talmudic corpus and
issue decisions that are authoritative for their own communities.
These denominations disagree not only about specific matters of Jewish law, but
about the authoritative and canonical status of the Talmud and
the later codes themselves.
The existence of communities that study the Talmud seriously in
a religious context, but do not view it or other sources of Jewish law as completely
binding is a distinctively modern phenomenon.
There are also modern centers of Talmud study that do not operate in a religious
context at all, namely universities.
In the 19th century, Jewish Studies emerged as a serious scholarly
discipline known as Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Science of Judaism.
The study of academic Talmud has meant opening new areas of inquiry about
the Talmud, but besides clarification of difficult passages or
settling matters of practical law.
Talmud academics might pursue questions about the history of the Rabbinic Period,
cross-cultural influences on the rabbis.
The formation of the text.
The literary structure of the Talmud or gender theory.
The birth of academic Talmud study has broadened the readership of the Talmud
beyond the world of traditional Judaism.
Or indeed, any kind of Judaism.
Some of the leading academic Tamulds today are non-Jews.
Some contemporary Talmud study still takes place in communities that consciously
imagine themselves, as the inheritors of 19th century Lithuanian tradition.
The students in these yeshivot, both in Israel and
in American cities, such as Lakewood, New Jersey are generally men who
study full-time usually supported by working wives.
However, the 20th century saw the birth of non traditional yeshivot in both
America and Israel.
Many of these yeshivot are open to all genders and
welcome students from many different backgrounds.
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