“Haven't I told you not to take yourself outside of the law?”: Rabbi Yirmiyah and the characterization of a scholastic

The paper looks at several episodes in which R. Yirmiyah is rebuked for questions that are portrayed as epistemologically destabilizing to the rabbinic legal project. I argue that R. Yirmiyah is portrayed as a caricature of late rabbinic scholastic thought, and that his characterization enables the...

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Détails bibliographiques
Autres titres:Research Article
Auteur principal: Wolf, Sarah (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: University of Pennsylvania Press [2020]
Dans: AJS review
Année: 2020, Volume: 44, Numéro: 2, Pages: 384-410
Sujets / Chaînes de mots-clés standardisés:B Talmud / Rabbin (Motif) / Rabbi / Halakha / Loi (Motif) / Fiction
RelBib Classification:BH Judaïsme
Accès en ligne: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Résumé:The paper looks at several episodes in which R. Yirmiyah is rebuked for questions that are portrayed as epistemologically destabilizing to the rabbinic legal project. I argue that R. Yirmiyah is portrayed as a caricature of late rabbinic scholastic thought, and that his characterization enables the writers of the Bavli to hold their own scholastic tendencies up to critique while also drawing protective boundaries around the analytical direction their legal culture has taken. I also read the passages together to demonstrate that the Bavli functions as a unified literary work in previously unacknowledged ways. These episodes form a sort of nonlinear plot, a web of stories that produce a character with his own “history.” There may be no historical rabbinic nuisance named R. Yirmiyah, but there is certainly a constructed literary one, whose reappearance throughout the Talmud plays an important role in working out tensions within the rabbinic legal project.
ISSN:1475-4541
Contient:Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0364009420000112