Talmud and Philosophy

Abstract

“Talmud” means in Tannaitic Hebrew “learning,” “study,” or more precisely “expounding.” From the Middle Ages and on, the term came to refer to two corpora of rabbinic literature from Late Antiquity, called, respectively, Palestinian Talmud, or “Yerushalmi,” and Babylonian Talmud, or “Bavli.” Even broader, the term can mean rabbinic literature in Late Antiquity in general to include corpora of the Mishnah, Midrash, and other genres of late ancient rabbinic literature as well. There traditionally has been an incongruity in thinking about “Talmud and philosophy.” Philosophy was always understood as a discipline of thinking that has developed historically from Antiquity on. However, “Talmud” has been predominantly understood as an object, a book, “the Talmud” as opposed to “Talmud” as an intellectual discipline. That understanding leads to the first rubric in this article: the Talmud as an Object of Philosophical or Theoretical Inquiry: Comparative Study. The rubric embraces synchronic and diachronic comparative studies of the Talmud (as an object) in its relationship to philosophy as a discipline at various stages of its development. Yet beginning from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, the Talmud acquired a new understanding. Now, like philosophy, it has come to be understood as a discipline of thinking (which renders in English as Talmud, without the “the”). Not totally unlike how the discipline of rhetoric has been classified by different authors as either a part of philosophy or the philosophy’s most significant other, Talmud also has been placed differently in relation to philosophy. Different authors understand it either as one among other philosophical disciplines or, alternatively, as a discipline of its own, distinct from philosophy. That translates into the second rubric of this article, Talmud as a Discipline of Thinking at different periods of its evolution from Late Antiquity to modern times. The third major rubric is thematic; it includes works in which Talmud and philosophy is a theme (“(The) Talmud and Philosophy” as a Theme). As is true for all schematic divisions, a specific work, author, or line of thinking can defy this partition. Focused as it is on relationships between Talmud and philosophy, this article does not address a related but radically different field of philosophy, that of halakhah (Jewish Law), for the latter treats the Talmud as neither an object nor a discipline, but rather as a source of law; this is a radically different pursuit belonging to a bibliography on law and philosophy, which is not treated in this article. This selected bibliography focuses primarily on individual monographs published in the last ten years, with an even more selective mention of what has proved to be influential works in this category published earlier. The compilers of this bibliography envision it as a node and invite additional entries accompanied by original bibliographic descriptions, which will be credited to the name of their authors. Rather than providing general bibliographic descriptions available elsewhere, the annotations of entries focus on the relation of each monograph to the theme of this particular article.