Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and Their Historical Context by Richard Kalmin

Abstract

Kalmin offers a series of case studies that support his contention that non-rabbinic and non-Jewish literary traditions moved from west to east, either directly or mediated by other communities, notably Syriac-speaking Christians. In the course of his analysis of his primary textual source, Kalmin adduces a range of comparative materials from external sources, Jewish and non-Jewish, and offers hypotheses for possible points of contact, routes and agents of transmission, and implications for various cultural models of Jewish/non-Jewish relations more broadly speaking. [...]Kalmin’s ambitions—for example, his desire to “make the leap from the printed page to social reality, with the help of the rich archaeological record of the Babylonian magic bowls from approximately the same time and place as the Talmudic rabbis” (96)—fall short in the execution.