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Alon Goshen-Gottstein. The Sinner and the Amnesiac: The Rabbinic Invention of Elisha Ben Abuya and Eleazar Ben Arach. Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xii, 416 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 December 2004

Jeffrey Rubenstein
Jeffrey Rubenstein
Affiliation:
New York University, New York, NewYork
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Extract

In The Sinner and the Amnesiac, Alan Goshen-Gottstein returns to the question of rabbinic biography with a comprehensive study of all traditions about Elisha ben Abuya, also known as Aher, “the Other.” (One chapter is devoted to the few traditions of R. Eleazar b. Arakh, a sage who reportedly forgot all his knowledge of Torah.) Goshen-Gottstein also provides a thorough summary of the secondary literature on Elisha, whom scholars variously have portrayed as a mystic, gnostic, apostate, philosophical atheist, and heretic. He appends a complete Hebrew version of the main Bavli story of Elisha including all manuscript variants.

Type
Book Review
Information
AJS Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , April 2003 , pp. 117 - 120
Copyright
© 2003 by the Association for Jewish Studies

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