Jenny R. Labendz investigates rabbinic self-perception and
self-fashioning within the non-Jewish social and intellectual world
of antique Palestine, showing how the rabbis drew on Hellenistic
and Roman concepts for Torah study and answering a fundamental
question: was rabbinic participation in Greco-Roman society a
begrudging concession or a principled choice? As Labendz
demonstrates, Torah study was an intellectual arena in which rabbis
were extremely unlikely to look beyond their private domain. Yet
despite the highly internal and self-referential nature of rabbinic
Torah study, some rabbis believed that the involvement of non-Jews
in rabbinic intellectual culture enriched the rabbis' own learning
and teaching. Labendz identifies a sub-genre of rabbinic texts that
she terms "Socratic Torah, " which portrays rabbis engaging in
productive dialogue with non-Jews about biblical and rabbinic law
and narrative. In these texts, rabbinic epistemology expands to
include reliance not only upon Scripture and rabbinic tradition,
but upon intuitions and life experiences common to Jews and
non-Jews. While most scholarly readings of rabbinic dialogues with
non-Jews have focused on the polemical, hostile, or anxiety-ridden
nature of the interactions, Socratic Torah reveals that the
presence of non-Jews was at times a welcome opportunity for the
rabbis to think and speak differently about Torah. Labendz
contextualizes her explication of Socratic Torah within rabbinic
literature at large, including other passages and statements about
non-Jews as well as general intellectual trends in rabbinic
literature, and also within cognate literatures, including Plato's
dialogues, Jewish texts of the Second Temple period, and the New
Testament. While she focuses on non-Jews in the Palestinian Talmud
and midrashim, the book includes chapters on the Babylonian Talmud
and on the liminal figures of minim and Matrona. The passages that
make up the sub-genre of Socratic Torah serve as the entryway for a
much broader understanding of rabbinic literature and rabbinic
intellectual culture.
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