This book is a very important intervention in a vital field: the literary formation of the Babylonian Talmud, arguably the key text in the history of Jewry from the early Middle Ages to the present day. Traditionally read as a diachronically accumulative project, in which each generation added the discussions of their predecessors and edited the pericopae, it has more recently been widely considered a ‘double’ historical project. This involves the gathering and preservation of many ancient utterances on the one hand and their composition into the ordered set of logical arguments on the other. Indeed a third level has been proposed by some scholars, including myself, namely a level of composition in which these individual arguments [sugyot] were placed together with narrative pericopae, producing the Talmud as we have it today. As Vidas describes, ‘[the Babylonian Talmud] is a composite document that proceeds by reproducing earlier literary traditions and placing them within anonymous discursive frameworks. This book concerns the relationship between the creators of the Talmud and these traditions.’ Suggesting that even the most recent scholars, who emphasize the creativity of the anonymous voices behind the ‘discursive frameworks’, consider these anonymous figures as regarding themselves as contiguous with the earlier traditions in style and project, Vidas argues ‘that a discontinuity with tradition and the past is central to the Talmud’s literary style and to the self-conception of its creators’. The crucial and quite amazing insight that generates the argumentation of the first part of the book is that the very distinction between the traditional materials and the anonymous authors of the talmudic text is, itself, an artefact of that very authoring practice and of the design of the Talmud itself. Moreoever, it speaks volumes on the relation of the authors of the Talmud to the notion of tradition ‘as the product of personal motives of past authorities’, indicating in fact that ‘while they remain authoritative and binding, these traditions’ claim to enduring validity is significantly undermined; they are fossilized and contained in the past, estranged from the Talmud’s audience’. It can be easily imagined, I reckon, even by those entirely innocent of talmudic expertise, that a claim of this sort, if it holds up, offers enormous implications for the understanding of the cultural history of Jewry.