The "Talmud": A Biography

314 Pages·2018·2.43 MB·English

by  Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

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 Calvin’s 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 Sūtra, Donald S. Lopez Jr.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez Jr.
C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, George M. Marsden
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty
Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Bernard McGinn
The I Ching, Richard J. Smith
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, David Gordon White
Augustine’s Confessions, Garry Wills
The Talmud, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
Forthcoming
The Book of Exodus, Joel Baden
The Book of Revelation, Timothy Beal
Confucius’s Analects, Annping Chin and Jonathan D. Spence
The Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, Carlos Eire
Josephus’s The Jewish War, Martin Goodman
Dante’s 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
Rumi’s 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,
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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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Jacket art: © Andi Arnovitz
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 16184- 6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963018
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For Shana, Adin, and Amalia

Contents
acknowledgments ix
Prologue: The Talmud—
Essential, Enhanced, and
Emblematic 1
Chapter 1: Gestation and Birth
(Essential Talmud Part One) 9
Chapter 2: Anatomy
(Essential Talmud Part Two) 41
Chapter 3: Election: How the Talmud’s
Discourse Developed
(Enhanced Talmud) 100
Chapter 4: Rivals, Naysayers, Imitators,
and Critics (Emblematic Talmud) 161
Chapter 5: Golden Old Age: Talmud in
Modernity— Three Stories 209
Notes 249
Index 287
vii

Acknowledgments
An announcement in a conference schedule about a de-
cade ago alerted me to a new series from Princeton Uni-
versity Press called “Lives of Great Religious Books.” My
instant desire to write a volume for this series on the Bab-
ylonian Talmud would take several years to come to frui-
tion. 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 Studies—which I directed while
writing this book—is 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 scholar-
ship in general. I particularly want to thank three col-
leagues—Mira Balberg, Sarah Jacoby, and Michelle