“What does a human look like? What does a raven look like? What happens when you look at them for long enough to see something like yourself? And then you look even longer? –and there is something about being asked to attend to these things that gets at the heart of the matter.”
Read MoreThe Method-Image
“Critical to this argument, and worthy of further reflection, is Rafael’s deployment of their own artistic practice to communicate their book’s ideas and to produce a meta-argument about history and method that develops alongside the text, and does work that words alone could never do.”
Read MoreRabbinic World-Making and Imagining Multiplicity
“In When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, Neis uncovers a world of reproductive uncertainty, making a convincing case for taking the rabbis’ scenarios and debates at face value – as constitutive of ancient world-making.”
Read MoreClassification for Networks of Care
“Rafe’s book invites us to revisit what it meant in the rabbinic world to take care of another being, to rely on and be relied upon, and to be enmeshed with another being physically and psychically.”
Read MoreReview Panel for Rafael Rachel Neis's When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven
This review panel features responses from a range of scholars working in late antiquity, originally shared at the 2024 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting.
Read MoreMy Next Guest Needs an Introduction: Proudly Presenting “Pseudo-Hegesippus”
Cover page of Philadelphia Public Library, LJS 237 (ca. 1460)
Cover page of Philadelphia Public Library, LJS 237 (ca. 1460)
The exceptional influence and popularity enjoyed by DEH from late antiquity through the Middle Ages, and its critical interface with Jewish historiography as a work both based on and source of major Jewish histories, suggest that this work is important for scholars of pre-modern Judaism and/or Christianity to know.
Read MoreAway with Autonomy
“I hope the book further chips away at the deep-seated eurocentrism and Roman-triumphalism that continues to treat Iranian empires as backwards and primitive, employing different strategies of rule based on their lesser governing capabilities.”
Read MoreA Social and Political History of Jews in the Sasanian Empire
“In the end what I think distinguishes Simcha’s account from others is the sense of the informality and improvisatory character of these arrangements, their non-institutionalization and their easy evadability. Thus, minority communities were not bound by any Personalitätsprinzip: they were not required to follow their own laws and did not even necessarily have any formal privilege to follow them, just accreted usage and custom.”
Read MoreManichaean Precedents in Light of Gross, Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity
“Whatever the case, both Kartir and the Homilies converge on this one point, that is, that persecution now has an imperial scope. They agree that matters of religion are now imperial matters of concern, not just local. And it is perhaps this imperial vision of persecution that the early Sasanian experience with the Manichaeans bequeathed to later Sasanian Empire, especially following Constantine’s conversion and the later Christianization of the Roman Empire. “
Read MoreHow Rabbinic Narratives Talk History
“I want to respond to Gross’s call to read Bavli narratives differently – neither as pure literary creations nor as sources for historical fact, but as sites in which the rabbis are actively navigating their relationship with empire by incorporating and responding to imperial ideas and motifs.”
Read MoreBeyond Influence: Simcha Gross’ Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity
Actually, Simcha suggests, maybe all we have reflected in the Bavli is not a historical truth of kind kings versus mean magi but the effects of an imperial ideology which endeavored to get its Jewish subjects to think positively of the sovereigns and warily of the Zoroastrian clergy.
Read MoreBabylonian Rabbinic "Class Consciousness" and Competition for Social and Religious Influence in Sasanian Iran
These two sets of patterns—rabbinic tensions with the non-rabbinic wealthy and their involvements with charity and the working poor—are arguably complementary. Not only should the rabbis prevail in the competition with the non-rabbinic wealthy for social capital because of their Torah study, interpretation, living, and teaching, they should prevail because they are benevolently mindful and even activist on behalf of their social inferiors (the working poor) and are willing and able to compel other Jews to be similarly mindful and also do charity in accordance with rabbinic visions of that cluster of practices.
Read MoreA Radical Revision of Knowledge About Babylonian Jewish Society
Naqsh-e Rustam Photographed by Wojciech Kocot via Wiki Commons
Naqsh-e Rustam Photographed by Wojciech Kocot via Wiki Commons
The result is a radical revision of what we thought we knew about of Babylonian Jewish society, the place of the rabbis, and the nature of their textual tradition, as illuminated by comparison with other similarly-situated minority communities who were also navigating the realities of empire and being formed and transformed in the process. (I’ll return to this methodological point at the end.) But there’s more. The book also offers a radical revision of what we thought we knew about Sasanian rule.
Read MorePanel in Celebration of Simcha Gross's Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity
A review panel from the 2024 Association for Jewish Studies featuring scholars engaging with Simcha Gross’s award winning Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity.
Read MoreRabbinic Civil Law in the Context of Ancient Legal History: A Legal Compendium to the Talmud Yerushalmi
Catherine Hezser and Constantin Willems introduce the AHRC-DFG Collaborative UK-German Research Project in the Humanities (2023-26) on Rabbinic Civil Law in the Context of Ancient Legal History.
Read MorePossibilities in the Past: The Challenges and Payoffs of Public Scholarship
Fragment of a queen’s face. Yellow jasper sculpture from New Kingdom Egypt. Ca. 1390–1336. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926, accession number 26.7.1396. OA public domain.
Fragment of a queen’s face. Yellow jasper sculpture from New Kingdom Egypt. Ca. 1390–1336. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926, accession number 26.7.1396. OA public domain.
In this article, we argue that, despite and precisely because of these real cautions, public scholarship can further three core academic responsibilities: teaching, service, and even research.
Read More2024 AJR Year in Review
Image by Callmetak on Freepik.
Publication Preview | Narsai: Selected Sermons
As I learned more about the literature and history of my tradition, I found myself drawn to another important author, Narsai, and wondered whether someday a similarly accessible and instructive volume might be written about him. This project has been both a dream and an aspiration ever since.
Read MoreBook Review | Animal Rights and the Hebrew Bible
Indeed, these audiences in particular would benefit from Olyan’s treatment since they have adopted, at least in part, the academic tools of biblical scholarship, take the Bible seriously as a text of moral significance, and could theoretically affect social and political change in a way that is not limited to academic circles.
Read MoreGuide to Biblical Citations: Teaching Resource
“I came to a realization similar to the one about composition history, though considerably more mundane: the jumble of words, numbers, and punctuation that make up a biblical reference is objectively confusing if you’re not used to it!”
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