What is Talmud? : the art of disagreement

348 Pages·2009·2.291 MB·English

by  Dolgopolʹskiĭ, Sergeĭ Borisovich

What Is Talmud?

The Art of Disagreement
Sergey Dolgopolski
What Is Talmud?
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What Is Talmud?
THE ART OF DISAGREEMENT
Sergey Dolgopolski
fordham university press
new york 2009
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Copyright © 2009 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any
other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the
prior permission of the publisher.
Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence
or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites
referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that
any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or
appropriate.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dolgopol’skii, S. B. (Sergei Borisovich)
What is Talmud? : the art of disagreement / Sergey Dolgopolski.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8232-2934-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Talmud—Methodology. 2. Talmud—Criticism, interpretation,
etc. 3. Talmud—Philosophy. 4. Reasoning. 5. Rhetoric. I. Title.
BM503.6.D65 2008
296.1'2506—dc22
2008043310
Printed in the United States of America
11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
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To the blessed memory of my mother z”l, my most
important teacher
lòòz ytrwm ymal
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contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction i
part one: what is talmud?
1. What Is Talmud? 7
2. The Talmud in Heidegger’s Aftermath 14
3. The Art of (the) Talmud 69
4. Talmud as Event 117
part two: THE WAYS OF THE TALMUD in its rhetorical dimension
5. The Ways of the Talmud in Its Rhetorical Dimension:
A Performative Analytical Description 179
part three: the art of disagreement
6. The Art of Disagreement 233
Notes 275
Works Cited 319
Index 327
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preface
It is no secret that prefaces are written after the work is already done.
Although the preface is placed at the beginning of the book, I am writing it
to highlight my current position in my larger intellectual journey and the
role this book plays within it.
This book grew out of my interest in the rhetoric of religious discourse,
in particular the rhetoric of the Talmud, the main normative text of Jewish
tradition originating in late antiquity. Because the Talmudic tradition devel-
oped in the same intellectual times and places as did Western philosophical
and rhetorical traditions, I began to wonder how their approaches came to
differ so much, and why one of them became dominant while the other
remained largely unknown. In particular, why does the Talmudic approach
to disagreement as a goal in itself seem exotic and esoteric while Western
philosophy’s goal of reaching agreement in any discussion, intellectual or
political, shapes common parlance? These questions intrigued me, and this
book is my way of addressing that unfamiliar side of Western civilization,
the side of disagreement as an end rather than as a means.
Entering the area of the unfamiliar realm of Talmudic disagreement as a
goal of discourse required me to reconsider the familiar boundaries—only
recently established in the twentieth century—between studies in phi-
losophy and studies in the Talmud. Doing this required my undertaking
a complicated and complex intellectual journey into two hitherto separate
ix
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