Rabbinic Exegesis (Midrash) and Literary Theory

Abstract

In the early 1980s, the academic study of rabbinic exegetical literature—chiefly midrash and some talmudic texts—underwent a drastic shift as a direct result of the field’s exposure to structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory. A generation of rabbinicists challenged the hegemony of philological methods in their field, producing a number of publications that treated rabbinic literature qua literature by applying new methods drawn from literary studies. Around the same time, a small group of mostly American literary theorists became interested in the same rabbinic corpora, which they regarded either as analogous to or historically related to their own literary theories. The result was an exemplary instance of interdisciplinary encounter at a moment in American academic history when interdisciplinarity, enabled by the phenomenal ascendancy of “theory,” was at the vanguard of humanities research. This “midrash-theory connection,” as it was retrospectively named by David Stern, was temporarily solidified by a major two-year research symposium convening scholars from American, Israeli, and French institutions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, despite the initial burst of excitement from both Jewish studies and literary studies about the midrash-theory connection, it was marked early on by persistent and serious methodological and thematic differences between rabbinics and literary theory. Namely, rabbinicists tended to regard literary theory as instrumental, a means to the end of better understanding rabbinic texts and hermeneutics using the most up-to-date methods, whereas literary theorists were more invested in articulating similarities and continuities between midrash and “theory.” Consequently, by the mid-1990s, publication at the intersection of rabbinics and literary theory declined significantly, with literarily-inclined rabbinicists turning toward the methods of “the New Historicism,” cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies, while literary critics moved on from the poststructuralist “theory” popularized in the 1970s–80s and, with it, the rabbinic texts to which “theory” had been linked. To review the midrash-theory connection bibliographically is thus not only to consider the major publications resulting from this interdisciplinary encounter as scholarly accounts of their respective objects (rabbinic literature and literary theory), but also to consider these publications as illustrating the historical rise and decline of the encounter itself. Note that, because of the peculiarly American milieu in which the midrash-theory connection took place—see the section Historical Overviews—the majority of sources in this bibliography are in English; a bibliography tracking related interdisciplinary intersections in, e.g., Modern Hebrew- or French-language scholarship would look rather different.