"Trans Talmud places eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn from them about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these figures as anomalies to be justified or explained away, Max K. Strassfeld argues…
True disagreements are very hard to achieve. They are even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from the ghost of agreement. 'What is Talmud?' redefines the place of the Talmud and its study in the i…
Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud offers a new perspective on perhaps the most important religious text of the Jewish tradition. It is widely recognized that the creators of the Talmud innovatively interpreted and changed the older traditions on which they drew. Neverthe…
"The first new dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic in a century, this towering scholarly achievement provides a complete lexicon of the entire vocabulary used in both literary and epigraphic sources from the Jewish community in Babylon from the third century C.E. to the twel…
This is the first book to trace the Jewish interpretative enterprise from a historical perspective.
"Talmuda de-Eretz Israel: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine brings together an international community of historians, literature scholars and archaeologists to explore how the integrated study of rabbinic texts and archaeology increases our understanding of bo…
"The Babylonian Talmud, the great compilation of Jewish law edited in the seventh century CE, also contains a great deal of aggada, that is, non-legal material, including interpretations of the Bible, stories, folk sayings and prayers. The Talmud's aggadic traditions contain ech…
"In 1239 the Christian convert Nicholas Donin submitted thirty-five articles to Pope Gregory IX that decried the indecency, blasphemy, and heresy in the Talmud. As a result, the pope triggered a campaign across Europe that gave rise to a trial of the Talmud in Paris in 1240. The…
"The articles included in this book deal with a diverse period of one thousand years, from the Judean exile to Babylon until the fall of the Sasanian Empire. However, one thing is common throughout. All of the studies deal with encounters, especially intellectual encounters, tha…
Jewish philosophy in an analytic age
"Since the classical period, Jewish scholars have drawn on developments in philosophy to enrich our understanding of Judaism. This methodology reached its pinnacle in the medieval period with figures like Maimonides and continued into the modern period with the likes of Rosenzwe…