Challenging Stereotypes of Scholarship: Intention in the Talmud Between America and Israel

Abstract

Challenging Stereotypes of Scholarship:Intention in the Talmud Between America and Israel Sara Ronis A review of: Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed by Shana Strauch Schick. Pp. xii 178+. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Hardback: $135.00 In 2018, I participated in a roundtable at the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies titled "Different Approaches to Rabbinics Research: Between America and Israel." The participants were junior and senior scholars in academic positions in the United States and Israel, all reflecting on the complicated relationships between scholarship in these two regions. My own presentation was meant to represent the perspective of American early-career scholars. Being early career myself at the time and recognizing that people without tenure have distinct risks in offering critiques, I surveyed a number of junior scholars and shared their aggregated views without attaching names to the quotes. In talking to my peers, two important themes that came up were the perception that there is a shared academic interest in "law" – both actual laws and the concept of law more generally – across the community of scholars in North America and Israel, and a sense that rabbinists in Israel and America are engaged in fundamentally different kinds of work. The general picture that emerged was one in which Israeli scholars have better skills of textual criticism, manuscript traditions, and better knowledge of some of the Hebrew reference works, and as one colleague put it, American scholars are asking about what texts mean more expansively, "in conversation with wider theoretical trends and interdisciplinary approaches in the academy more broadly."1 This distinction points to a pervasive stereotype which contributes to how different communities of scholars see each other and engage with each other's works. But it is also clearly too broad; it does a disservice to the textual skills of rabbinists [End Page 275] trained in America, and to Israeli scholars' ability to engage with broader questions and conversations in the academy. Shana Strauch Schick's 2021 book Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed both affirms this shared interest in the law and convincingly challenges a reductive binary between scholars in these two regional centers. Strauch Schick earned a PhD from Yeshiva University, and teaches in both the United States and Israel. Where many scholars who have been trained in the United States read the Talmud with an eye toward discourse and rhetorical analyses, and identity-construction, Strauch Schick demonstrates profound expertise in textual criticism and manuscript traditions, and using these skills, offers a positivist reconstruction of the development of rabbinic concepts of intention. Strauch Schick's work is characterized by her extremely careful readings of complicated legal texts. It is worth repeating this last point – these rabbinic texts are complicated; understanding them requires profound experience with rabbinic thinking as well as deep familiarity with modern legal categories. In this short but dense book, Strauch Schick expertly analyzes these rabbinic texts and brings legal theory to bear in understanding what the rabbis are doing. Using source critical methodologies together with an eye toward the rabbis' cultural contexts, she Constructs a legal-intellectual history that highlights the distinct positions of the Amoraim expressed in their statements and rulings (identifying each according to generation, cultural environment, and school of thought) as well as the approaches favored by the redactors. This careful process of reconstruction reveals a decided shift in rabbinic thinking that ramifies across many aspects of Talmudic law" (p. 2). She offers this detailed reconstruction over the course of an introduction and five subsequent chapters. In her introduction, Strauch Schick situates her work within three scholarly contexts: the field of Jewish thought on rabbinic intention (including works by Shaul Kalcheim, David Brodsky, Yaacov Habba, Irwin Haut, Jacob Bazak, Avraham Goldenberg, Shalom Albeck, Ephraim Urbach, and Leib Moscovitz), scholarship applying source critical methodologies to the Talmud (the approach pioneered by David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman, and nuanced by Robert Brody), and scholarship on the historical context of the Bavli (with an extensive list of relevant scholars, from Alexander Kohut and Jacob Levy in the nineteenth century to the more recent work of her dissertation advisor Yaakov Elman, [End Page 276] Isaiah Gafni, Shaul Shaked...