The Dialogical Talmud: Daniel Boyarin and Rabbinics

Abstract

The Dialogical Talmud: Daniel Boyarin and Rabbinics Daniel Boyarin. Socrates and the Fat Rabbi). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 388.Since 1990, Daniel Boyarin has published seven monographs Intertextuaiity and the Reading of Mid ras h [1990], A Radical Jew [1994], Carnal Israel [1993], Unheroic Conduct [1997], Dying for God [1999], Borderlines [2004], and the volume under review).1 The sheer number of monographs is remarkable; even more noteworthy are the ways in which this body of work has shaped the field of rabbinic literature. In his seven monographs, Boyarin does not follow the normal paradigm of his academic field. Though his was the most profound philological and linguistic training, Boyarin has not spent his academic life producing the critical editions and narrowly constructed monographs his training encouraged. This is particularly surprising because Boyarin's initial publications operated comfortably and successfully within this milieu. Though Boyarin's first book Ha-'iyun ha-Sef aradi (1989; English title Sephardi Speculation) is a philosophically oriented treatment of medieval talmudic hermeneutics, this work still fits comfortably within the field of rabbinics. This is the sort of book expected of a scholar trained by Saul Lieberman and Haim Z. Dimitrovsky at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the 1960s and 1970s. The subsequent books have shifted the paradigm of rabbinics as a field. As a corpus, these volumes puncture the comfortable definition of the field of rabbinic literature, staking a place for rabbinic literature within the fields of Late Antiquity, Early Christianity, and Greco-Roman rhetoric. These expansions of rabbinics into neighboring contemporaneous corpora continue Lieberman's own project though they do so not only by alerting rabbinics to relevant parallel data (as Lieberman generally did) but by integrating rabbinic literature into these parallel fields. Boyarin's work invites outsiders to the field of rabbinics to see the relevance of this material for their own projects.The impact of Boyarin's work is not limited to the connections it makes between rabbinic and other ancient textual traditions. What distinguishes his work is its triangulation of rabbinic texts, external textual corpora, and contemporary theory. In these seven monographs, several distinct contemporary theories of reading have been invoked and put in dialogue with theories of gender, sexuality, and power. This triangulation has challenged the integrity of rabbinics as a field not only by shattering its hermetic isolation but also by undermining confidence in the old methodology. Since Intertextuality and the Reading of Midraeh (1990), Boyarin has resisted the centripetal pull of the field of rabbinics and turned rabbinic literature outward toward the broader humanities. Though interdisciplinary work has become a campus commonplace, much of the work that transpires under this rubric consists in poaching a neighboring idea or method and crudely applying it within disciplinary boundaries. These seven monographs, in contrast, so engage other fields that they manage both to make important claims about rabbinic literature and culture and genuinely to contribute to the fields with which the rabbinic corpus is put in conversation. Put differently, Boyarin's work tears down disciplinary bounds, including rabbinic texts within a larger library of ancient literature that has hitherto ignored them, and insists that the field of rabbinics update its own hermeneu tics from the model of nmeteenth-century philology to that of literary poststructuralism. The success of this paradigm shift is evident in the work of a new generation of scholars (even in the Wissenschaft stronghold of Israel) who strive to model their own work on Boyarin's triangulation.For some time now, Boyarin has been obsessed with fat rabbis- not with a contemporary problem of rabbinic obesity or with real life fat rabbis, but with a set of literary fat rabbis who appear in a talmudic story at bBM 84a. …