When considering issues of rabbinic legal authority, hierarchy and other subjects related to rabbinic interactions, the difficulty arises of how to explain the hundreds of instances in which the Babylonian Talmud uses the words of one amoraic sage to challenge another. This study reevaluates the explanations of this phenomenon suggested in modern scholarship and offers my own findings. I analyze three types of difficulties raised from amoraic sources found in the Bavli, including: (1) »But did R. X not say …?«; (2) »Does the master not agree with what R. X said …?« and (3) »Was it not stated about this …?!/Behold it was stated about this ….« The results of this analysis lead to a new way of understanding the development of talmudic dialectics (from amoraic to stammaitic) and the dating of the stam in the Bavli. In light of these findings, it will also be possible to understand how certain trends in legal rulings were formed and developed in talmudic Babylonia.

The purpose of this essay is to open up a fundamental conversation about the concept of rabbinization, together with the adjective rabbinic, principally as a qualifier of Judaism. I shall follow these terms and concepts through the first millennium CE, from rabbis of the Roman period to early medieval Rabbanites. The title I have chosen refers to the Rabbanites, but the essay covers equally the earlier period, and it could equally have been entitled: What made the rabbis rabbinic? My purpose is not to answer these questions, but rather, to discuss and explain why they need to be asked.

Developing religious institutions are ultimately products of local environments despite their every effort to appear trans-regional and eternal. As I showed in Christianizing Egypt (2017), the production of Christian religion on the ground always involved a negotiation between local traditions, habitus and immediate landscapes (on the one hand), and new idioms of authority and charisma, including textuality (on the other hand) - a negotiation played out across multiple social sites that I have called syncretism. This paper investigates ways rabbinization might also be said to have involved syncretism, here in the context of scribal authority (as expressed in Babylonian incantation bowls) and in the context of iconic or magical writing (as expressed in late antique Palestinian synagogue floors).

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Bilingual writer Hanan Klenbort (1910–1992), known by his penname Ayalti, authored his first Yiddish novel »Bum« un keytn (»Boom« and Chains) in 1936. The novel sketched a blueprint for understanding the violence that erupted in Palestine just months after he finished writing. It framed the Labor Zionist settlements as anti-utopias, including in the sexual realm. Through examination of Ayaltis debut novels in Hebrew and Yiddish, this article shows the authors unusual linguistic transformation relative to his contemporaries. I will demonstrate how this linguistic shift was caused by the authors disillusionment by Zionism, causing him to turn away from its official language. Instead, he chose to create in Yiddish, a language spoken and simultaneously rejected by most Zionist settlers, but officially embraced by various circles of Jewish diaspora leftists. That shift freed him to represent the situation in Palestine through a uniquely critical and yet highly authentic lens.

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This essay examines how targumic literature sheds light on the process of rabbinization. It organizes our extant targums, Jewish Aramaic Bible translations, into three contiguous periods and argues that each successive chronological layer of targum depicts a translational literature more aware of rabbinic titles, institutions and practices than the one that preceded it. This essay also begins the process of developing a historically oriented methodological paradigm for the study of targumic literature. It encourages scholarship on targum to resist the seemingly natural tendency to conflate the aims, agendas and authorizing agents of rabbinic and targumic literatures. Instead, scholarship should view these translations as historical and cultural artifacts of the late ancient and early medieval Jewish societies in which they were produced and during which they circulated - societies that included, but were not necessarily dominated or controlled by, the Judaism of the mishnaic and talmudic rabbis.