The gift of the land of Israel by God is an essential element in Jewish identity, religiously and politically. That the gift came at the expense of the local Canaanites has stimulated deep reflections and heated debate in Jewish literature, from the creation of the Bible to the twenty-first century. The essays in this book examine the theological, ethical, and political issues connected with the gift and with the fate of the Canaanites, focusing on classical Jewish texts and major Jewish commentators, legal thinkers, and philosophers from ancient times to the present.

Drawing on the great progress in Talmudic scholarship over the last century, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is both an introduction to a close reading of rabbinic literature and a demonstration of the development of rabbinic thought on education in the first centuries of the Common Era. In Roman Palestine and Sasanid Persia, a small group of approximately two thousand Jewish scholars and rabbis sustained a thriving national and educational culture. They procured loyalty to the national language and oversaw the retention of a national identity. This accomplishment was unique in the Roman Near East, and few physical artifacts remain. The scope of oral teaching, however, was vast and was committed to writing only in the high Middle Ages. The content of this oral tradition remains the staple of Jewish learning through modern times.
Though oral learning was common in many ancient cultures, the Jewish approach has a different theoretical basis and different aims. Marc Hirshman explores the evolution and institutionalization of Jewish culture in both Babylonian and Palestinian sources. At its core, he argues, the Jewish cultural thrust in the first centuries of the Common Era was a sustained effort to preserve the language of its culture in its most pristine form. Hirshman traces and outlines the ideals and practices of rabbinic learning as presented in the relatively few extensive discussions of the subject in late antique rabbinic sources. The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is a pioneering attempt to characterize the unique approach to learning developed by the rabbinic leadership in late antiquity.

The gift of the land of Israel by God is an essential element in Jewish identity, religiously and politically. That the gift came at the expense of the local Canaanites has stimulated deep reflections and heated debate in Jewish literature, from the creation of the Bible to the twenty-first century. The essays in this book examine the theological, ethical, and political issues connected with the gift and with the fate of the Canaanites, focusing on classical Jewish texts and major Jewish commentators, legal thinkers, and philosophers from ancient times to the present.

Drawing on the great progress in Talmudic scholarship over the last century, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is both an introduction to a close reading of rabbinic literature and a demonstration of the development of rabbinic thought on education in the first centuries of the Common Era. In Roman Palestine and Sasanid Persia, a small group of approximately two thousand Jewish scholars and rabbis sustained a thriving national and educational culture. They procured loyalty to the national language and oversaw the retention of a national identity. This accomplishment was unique in the Roman Near East, and few physical artifacts remain. The scope of oral teaching, however, was vast and was committed to writing only in the high Middle Ages. The content of this oral tradition remains the staple of Jewish learning through modern times. Though oral learning was common in many ancient cultures, the Jewish approach has a different theoretical basis and different aims. Marc Hirshman explores the evolution and institutionalization of Jewish culture in both Babylonian and Palestinian sources. At its core, he argues, the Jewish cultural thrust in the first centuries of the Common Era was a sustained effort to preserve the language of its culture in its most pristine form. Hirshman traces and outlines the ideals and practices of rabbinic learning as presented in the relatively few extensive discussions of the subject in late antique rabbinic sources. The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is a pioneering attempt to characterize the unique approach to learning developed by the rabbinic leadership in late antiquity.

Taking account of a wide range of literary evidence and the most recent scholarship on the nature of education in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, these studies examine new and varied aspects of the scriptural and intellectual infrastructure of the educational ethos, the tension between oral tradition and literary practice, and the central role of the rabbinic sage as pedagogical innovator and model. They also study the underlying influence of social and economic factors, the evolution of teaching techniques and frameworks, and the formative role of both midrashic mentality and mythopoetic currents. With an eye on the broader contexts of Greco-Roman culture and emergent Christianity, these essays follow the development of rabbinic ideas and institutions from the first centuries of the Common Era in Palestine through the flowering of centers of learning centuries later in Babylonia.