Talya Fishman’s book Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures has been published. From the publisher’s web site:

What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietism’s emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena—the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud—were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.

Zev Farber, “Extra-Legal Punishments in Medieval Jewish Courts,” in Mishpetei Shalom – A Jubilee Volume in Honor of Rabbi Saul (Shalom) Berman, edited by Yamin Levy (Ktav Pub, 2010). Available here.

Jews and Healing in the Middle Ages: The Harmonisation of Jewish Beliefs with Theories and Practices of Different Western Medical Traditions. Available here.

By Carmen Caballero-Navas

Paper given at the Conference on Religion and Healing and The Second Meeting of the Asian Society for the History of Medicine (2004)

Abstract: In this paper I shall discuss how western medieval Jews integrated medical knowledge and healing practices alien to their own beliefs, trying to conciliate them with their own values and customs, and providing them with their religious ideas and identity. I will discuss these processes at two levels: intellectual ideas regarding natural philosophy and healthcare expressed and transmitted through written medical texts; actual practice and the interaction with people of other religious communities, as witnessed in written sources.

Indeed, practical texts often show the interaction between members of Jewish and Christian communities in actual practice. For example, Christian and Jewish women appear to have shared similar knowledge and have used the same techniques regarding childbirth. It has been shown by historians that despite the differences with regard the use of plants (used according local availability), the techniques found in Western Hebrew texts were not different to those included in Latin texts (and Arabic). The similitude in remedies and techniques might be explained if we consider that, while the theory and notions in physiology are in general textually transmitted, techniques and recipes are more likely part of actual experience and belong largely to the province of orallity. In fact, there is evidence – for example – that Jewish midwives attended Christian women in labour, and vice versa, despite the prohibitions of the Church. This kind of interaction was a sure source of exchange of healing knowledge, and it is in the origin of the common substratum that we often discover in magic formulae and other healing methods and procedures included in sources of different provenance. Jews integrated these common practices, but it seems that they maintained their religious and cultural identity through the resource to Hebrew and to their own cultural background, as show the continuous allusions to practical Kabbalah in magic healing.

During the Middle Ages, natural philosophy and medicine developed in close contact, since the former explained nature and elaborated theories on the body and its functioning that were the theoretical basis for learned medical practice, and had a considerable influence upon healing practices in general. Some of the notions and concepts developed by natural philosophers were easily assumed by Judaism, while other collided with basic Jewish beliefs. I am especially interested in understanding how Jewish authors adopted and adapted ideas and theories regarding questions that were deeply embedded in Jewish culture and were regulated by religious laws, such as, for example, sexuality, menstruation and abortion.

In short, this paper will discuss the “judaization” of medieval western medicine, as a process through which medical ideas and concepts, as well as healing practices, were received, and integrated or refused, by Jews. I shall pay especial attention to the role that their religious beliefs had in the shaping of their medical knowledge and practice.

“Karaites Against Rabbinites? The Developing Methods of Biblical Interpretation”

Is it possible what a poem or other literary work does — that is to say, not what does it mean so much as how does it construct this meaning? Could we productively raise a question of methodology here, and might the methodology literary scholars seek to employ also determine (or pre-determine) what types of evidence is admissable, and does this have ramifications for our enterprise?

and

I’ve been mulling over this since Tuesday: what does it mean, if we are to be empirical in the pursuit of literary studies? On some levels, I suppose, it means what I always tell my students: use textual evidence. But at the same time, aren’t close readings also a form of methodology, and doesn’t empiricism hold its own theoretical rather than interpretive troubles? To wit, can’t empiricism itself proceed from a single (and allegorizing) premise? That everything is both explainable and reproducible, and moreover, that steps taken in an orderly proceeding will inevitably point us to an explanation for – well – everything?

Philosophy and Rabbinic Culture is a study of the great, and curiously underappreciated, engagement of a Medieval European Jewish community with the philosophic tradition. This lucid description of the Languedocian Jewish community’s multigenerational cultivation of – and acculturation to – scientific and philosophic teachings into Judaism fulfils a major desideratum in Jewish cultural history.

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In the first detailed account of this long-forgotten Jewish community and its cultural ideal, the author gives an expansive reappraisal of the role of the philosophic interpretation in rabbinic culture and medieval Judaism. Looking at how the cultural ideal of Languedocian Jewry continued to develop and flourish throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with particular reference to the literary style and religious teaching of the great Talmudist, Menahem ha-Meiri, Stern explores issues such as Meiri’s theory of “civilized religions”, including Christianity and Islam, controversy over philosophy and philosophic allegory in Languedoc and Catalonia, and the cultural significance of the medical use of astrological images.