Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1,000 CE

Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1,000 CE

Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld et Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (dir.)

 

Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures Series

This volume is dedicated to the cultural and religious diversity in Jewish communities from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Age and the growing influence of the rabbis within these communities during the same period. Drawing on available textual and material evidence, the fourteen essays presented here, written by leading experts in their fields, span a significant chronological and geographical range and cover material that has not yet received sufficient attention in scholarship.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first focuses on the vantage point of the synagogue; the second and third on non-rabbinic Judaism in, respectively, the Near East and Europe; the final part turns from diversity within Judaism to the process of ”rabbinization” as represented in some unusual rabbinic texts.

Diversity and Rabbinization is a welcome contribution to the historical study of Judaism in all its complexity. It presents fresh perspectives on critical questions and allows us to rethink the tension between multiplicity and unity in Judaism during the first millennium CE.

© Open Book Publishers, 2021

Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 International - CC BY 4.0

• Éditeur : Open Book Publishers, University of Cambridge
• Collection : Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures Series | 8
• Lieu d’édition : Cambridge
• Année d’édition : 2021
• Publication sur OpenEdition Books : 16 septembre 2021
• Nombre de pages : xxiv-474 p.

Gavin McDowell, Ron Naiweld et Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

Introduction

Part 1. The Synagogue

Lee I. Levine

1. Diversity in the Ancient Synagogue of Roman-Byzantine Palestine: Historical Implications

Michael D. Swartz

2. Society and the Self in Early Piyyut

José Costa

3. Some Remarks about Non-Rabbinic Judaism, Rabbinization, and Synagogal Judaism

Part 2. Evidence For Non-Rabbinic Judaism: The Near East

Geoffrey Herman

4. In Search of Non-Rabbinic Judaism in Sasanian Babylonia

Robert Brody

5. Varieties of Non-Rabbinic Judaism in Geonic and Contemporaneous Sources

Yoram Erder

6. Karaites and Sadducees

Christian Julien Robin

7. The Judaism of the Ancient Kingdom of Ḥimyar in Arabia: A Discreet Conversion

Part 3. Evidence for Non-Rabbinic Judaism: Europe

Capucine Nemo-Pekelman

8. The Didascalus Annas: A Jewish Political and Intellectual Figure from the West

Giancarlo Lacerenza

9. Rabbis in Southern Italian Jewish Inscriptions from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages

Michael Toch

10. Jewish Demographics and Economics at the Onset of the European Middle Ages

Part 4. Rabbinization

Ron Naiweld

11. The Rabbinization Tractates and the Propagation of Rabbinic Ideology in the Late Talmudic Period

Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra

12. Who is the Target of Toledot Yeshu?

Gavin McDowell

13. Rabbinization of Non-Rabbinic Material in Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer

Günter Stemberger

14. Seder Eliyahu Rabbah: Rabbinic. Tradition for a Non-Rabbinic Society

Ra‘anan Boustan

Afterword: Rabbinization and the Persistence of Diversity in Jewish Culture in Late Antiquity

List of illustrations

Index