ANCIENT JEW REVIEW

In Earthquakes and Gardens, Burrus pulls a few short lines from the very end of Jerome’s Life of Hilarion and applies immense analytical pressure to them. It is a mode of historiography as spoliation.

Historians often try to reconstruct places; they map areas to give readers a sense of a whole. I am grateful for that work. But Burrus reminds us that humans do not really experience places as whole.

We may, in fact, be approaching a moment when historical literacy—much like philology—ought to be regarded as a basic expectation of rigorous scholarship on the Talmud. If so, the question before us is not only what the Talmud is, but also what forms of training, institutional support, and scholarly habits are required to render that question newly intelligible.

The book historical question that I will focus on here is the question of the Talmud’s initial reception, of what we may call its canonization. And I mean this not in the sense of its coalescing as a work, though that is still profoundly unclear, but in the sense of how the Talmud became the most central work for defining what Judaism is and should be—well before, even a millennium before, it became a popular book and a part of popular piety.

[O]ne major and simple contribution that Bavli Studies can make as a recognized (sub)field is to bring together scholars studying the Bavli’s formation and those studying its reception history.