Book description
In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines
ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural
meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud's preeminence in
Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally
taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not
solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The
inscription of Talmud-which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred
quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later-precipitated these
developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was
transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that
Talmud came to play in Jewish life.
What were the historical circumstances that led to the
inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of
ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and
nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and
prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica,
medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies,
Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of
cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered
the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the
ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by
changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom
practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and
social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware
of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others
protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic
virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of
spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of
Rhineland Pietism's emergence in this context and suggests that two
contemporaneous phenomena-the prominence of custom in medieval
Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud-were
indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.
"A vital addition to any Jewish studies library in
America."-Jewish Book World
Talya Fishman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shaking the Pillars of
Exile: "Voice of a Fool," an Early Modern Jewish Critique of
Rabbinic Culture.
