Rabbinic Study Circles

Taking account of a wide range of literary evidence and the most recent scholarship on the nature of education in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, these studies examine new and varied aspects of the scriptural and intellectual infrastructure of the educational ethos, the tension between oral tradition and literary practice, and the central role of the rabbinic sage as pedagogical innovator and model. They also study the underlying influence of social and economic factors, the evolution of teaching techniques and frameworks, and the formative role of both midrashic mentality and mythopoetic currents. With an eye on the broader contexts of Greco-Roman culture and emergent Christianity, these essays follow the development of rabbinic ideas and institutions from the first centuries of the Common Era in Palestine through the flowering of centers of learning centuries later in Babylonia.Marc Hirshman/David Satran: Introduction – Marc Hirshman: A Resurgent Religion: Midrashic Teaching in the First Centuries – Yael Wilfand: Was There Really 'an Arrogance of Wealth'? Re-evaluating a Scholarly Description of Second-Century Rabbis – Shimon Fogel: Sitting or Standing? Teaching Postures in the Early Rabbinic Literature – Adiel Kadari: Elijah as Torah Teacher – Where Should One Pray? – Reuven Kiperwasser: The Art of Forgetting in Rabbinic Narrative – Eliashiv Fraenkel: Pirqa Tales in the Babylonian Talmud – Reality and Literature – Jonathan Cahana-Blum: A Rabbinic Irigaray vs. a Christian Wittig? Boyarin's Parting of the (Gender) Ways Reconsidered – Richie (Shmuel) Lewis: The Myth of the Torah