ANCIENT JEW REVIEW

Earthquakes and Gardens is a deeply idiosyncratic book. It is experimental in a number of ways, and experiments do not always succeed—certainly not for every reader.

Burrus urges us to curate earthquakes, but I also wonder if she asks us to consider whether we might be more earthquake than curator. How much of our control is an illusion? How different are we from the rest of the world?

Burrus wildly and intentionally reads Jerome and Hilarion forward alongside contemporary art, histories of cartography, and modern sciences of geology and seismology. She cites artifacts and photographs from affiliated but not scholarly-verified sites in Cyprus.

Using the idea of recursive connection to a locus—a place—that is also a time, a feeling, a sensation—Burrus invites us to see other connections beyond ancient hagiography and into other quasi-historical imaginariums.

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.