The Talmud, the central text of Judaism's oral law, has a lengthy history of development, and an even lengthier history of reading and interpretation. As such, it seems particularly fitting to be the subject of a series called "Lives of Great Religious Books," a Princeton University Press collection of "biographies" of essential religious texts. Barry Scott Wimpfheimer's The Talmud:A Biography traces the life story of the Talmud beginning with its creation and production between the first and eighth centuries, and continuing with readers' engagement with the text from the Middle Ages to today.
Wimpfheimer structures his biography around three overlapping and coexistent Talmuds. First is the "essential" Talmud, the Talmud as understood by the individuals who collectively developed it over centuries through conversations both real and imaginary. Although uncovering the original intended meaning of such a text poses numerous challenges, contemporary academic study of the essential Talmud places the text in its historical context and seeks to discover authorial intent. The "enhanced" Talmud, in contrast, incorporates the layers of interpretation built up over centuries. Later readers of the Talmud--or, at least, certain readers, mostly male rabbis--received creative and interpretive authority second only to the Babylonian and Palestinian rabbis who created the essential Talmud. Sometimes, however, the meaning the Talmud holds for Jews and non-Jews does not stem from the text at all, but from what it symbolizes. The third Talmud is the "emblematic" Talmud, the Talmud as a text whose symbolic meaning outweighs its content. At different moments and for different groups of people, the Talmud represented tradition, rabbinic authority, Judaism, or Jewishness, and inspired very different reactions depending on an individual's relationship to that symbolic meaning.
The Talmud:A Biography begins with two chapters on the essential Talmud, which provide historical context and employ a reading strategy that emphasizes the goals and concerns of both named rabbis and anonymous compilers. Beginning in the first of these chapters, "Gestation and Birth," Wimpfheimer draws on an unusual Talmudic passage about fire liability in the case of a fire caused by a dog. This chapter forms a common thread that weaves together a variety of discussions of the Talmud over the first three chapters. This initial chapter provides context about the Talmudic authors themselves, the rabbis of Late Antiquity, who effectively transitioned into a new type of religious leadership in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple. It also explains the process by which these rabbis created new religious literature inspired by yet distinct from the Bible: Midrash, a creative form of biblical interpretation; Mishnah, thematically organized interpretations related primarily to law and ritual; and finally, Talmud, which Wimpfheimer describes as "a freestyle conversation surrounding the Mishnah" (36). The Palestinian Talmud and its longer--and ultimately more authoritative--counterpart, the Babylonian Talmud, structure knowledge as a multi-generational conversation, which presents multiple authoritative opinions. The following chapter, "Anatomy," draws attention to the structure of these textual conversations. Returning to the fire liability case, Wimpfheimer proffers an example of the critical reading strategy practiced by modern academic scholars of the Talmud, which seeks to uncover original meaning through a combination of close analysis of text and an awareness of the nature of the Talmud as a "manufactured work of literature that is made to be read as if it were a record of the conversations of the ancient study hall" (72)--with the key word being "manufactured."
The following two chapters move away from the Talmud as conceived by its creators, and toward the Talmud as a text that continued to house various interpretive meanings over the ensuing centuries. Chapter 3, "Election: How the Talmud's Discourse Developed" considers the enhanced Talmud through the lens of three medieval rabbinic commentators, whose status as male religious elite allowed their commentary to take on an authority almost equivalent to the Talmud itself. The commentators Wimpfheimer selects--Maimonides (1135-1204), Rashi (1040-1105), and Rabad (1125-1198)--allow him to consider the different cultures of Talmudic interpretation that developed in the different regions of Sepharad, Ashkenaz, and Provence, as well as the different interpretive methodologies on display in the distinct literary genres of legal codes, commentaries, and responsa. Wimpfheimer focuses in particular on how each of these three rabbinic authorities, as well as other medieval and early modern rabbis, imbued the Talmud with greater authority by producing a "robust discourse of interpretation that arose around the work--the expanded Talmud" (160). This chapter effectively continues the biography of the Talmud into what might be called the text's afterlife. As Wimpfheimer emphasizes, however, the life story of the Talmud did not come to an end when it received its canonical textual form in the eighth century. Rather, it continued to be re-created and re-produced through constant reading and interpretation.
The Talmud took on a very different type of interpretive meaning for those who primarily experienced it via its symbolic meaning rather than through reading text. In chapter 4, "Rivals, Naysayers, Imitators, and Critics," Wimpfheimer turns from the rabbis who worked to establish the Talmud's authority to those who challenged that authority, including both Jews and non-Jews. Some of the people who entered into what Wimpfheimer calls "hostile relationships" (164) with the Talmud had deep familiarity with the text, while others had never read it. All of these groups, however, developed responses to the Talmud that emphasized its emblematic meaning rather than the text and the layers of discourse surrounding it. This chapter covers a broader historical period than any other in the book, beginning with the Babylonian Talmud's rival contemporary, the Palestinian Talmud, and concluding with modern Jewish and Christian critiques based on Enlightenment, mystical Hasidic, and Zionist ideologies. Wimpfheimer also addresses a number of medieval Jewish and Christian critics of the Talmud: the Karaites, who rejected the Talmud as an authoritative understanding of the biblical text and of Jewish law; the Kabbalists, who embraced mystical texts such as the Zohar as a serious rival to the Talmud; and Christians, primarily those associated with the Dominican order, who varyingly presented the Talmud as anti-Christian text, as symbol of medieval Judaism's abandonment of the Bible, and as proof of Christian faith.
The final chapter, "Golden Old Age: Talmud in Modernity--Three Stories" seeks to emphasize the continued cultural importance of the Talmud today. As the text has become more accessible to a wider audience due to first printing and now apps, the Talmud "has developed a larger quantity and a greater diversity of readers than it has ever had" (210). Thanks to the mass availability of the Talmud, it is studied by a wide range of individuals, including yeshivah students, university academics, and a substantial and diverse lay audience. The Talmud has retained sufficient cultural capital that it not only inspires study among traditional Jews, but also has spawned new discourses centered on such topics as its historical and cultural context, its cultural symbolism for the American Jewish laity, and the possibility of reclaiming the Talmud for modern feminist readers.
Although Wimfpheimer concludes this chapter with a discussion of feminist efforts to protest and remedy their historical exclusion from Talmudic study, his work might have benefited from more careful attention to gender throughout. In chapter 2, he briefly addresses the fact that as a pre-modern text, the Talmud sometimes "assumes morally problematic positions on race and gender" (58). Yet he does not generally draw attention to the fact that while women are subjects of discussion in the Talmud and in later rabbinic commentaries, the production of Talmud and the vast majority of Talmudic discourse remained the sole province of an all-male intellectual elite. The Talmud creates the illusion of conversations, which are almost always conversations between men. One of the few women quoted, Beruriah, received a striking textual punishment for her intellectual endeavors, as she ultimately succumbed to the seduction of her husband's student and committed suicide out of shame. Although some pre-modern women--including Rashi's daughters--received training in Talmud, any contributions they might have made to the enhanced Talmud have been rendered invisible, subsumed under the commentaries of their more famous male relatives. A stronger consideration of this gendered history of the creation and interpretation of the Talmud would have deepened Wimpfheimer's analysis.
Ultimately, however, Wimpfheimer effectively weaves together a biography of the Talmud as a text that continued to take on new and multivalent meanings centuries after it received a canonical written form. By structuring the text around different registers of Talmudic meaning--essential, enhanced, and emblematic--he allows readers unfamiliar with the text to simultaneously understand not only the Talmud's history, but also the wide range of reading strategies used to interpret the Talmud. Even a reader who has not previously studied Talmud will come away from this book with a clearer understanding of how academics read the Talmud relative to its historical context, how medieval commentators read and interpreted the text, and why it took on such importance for both its proponents and its challengers. The Talmud:A Biography will not seem particularly groundbreaking to scholars familiar with the text, nor is it meant to be. Thanks to clear explanations and effective presentation of background material, Wimpfheimer's book provides a valuable introduction to the Talmud for educated lay readers and for students beginning to study the Talmud or Jewish history.