Historians of Judaism often call the first Islamic centuries the “gaonic period.” The term alludes to the gaonic yeshivot – scholastic academies in Abbasid and Buyid Baghdad, as well as in Palestine, whose leaders helped to canonize the Babylonian Talmud. However, this essay argues that these yeshivot were not commensurate across regions. I revisit the early history of the Palestinian yeshiva and conclude that it developed long after its Iraqi counterparts, likely sometime in the tenth century. The essay closes by considering briefly how this thesis might help us begin to better understand the Palestinian rabbinic culture that preceded the yeshiva–a distinct form of rabbinic Judaism that thrived in Byzantine and Umayyad Palestine during the fifth to eighth centuries, before giving way to a new brand of gaonic rabbinism imported from the Abbasid heartlands.

This chapter considers the impact of theological doctrine on papal policy toward the Jews in medieval Europe. Specifically, it focuses on the ambivalence toward Jews and Judaism inherent in the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness and its expression in the decrees of Gregory the Great, Innocent III, and those popes who first condemned the Talmud in the 13th century.

This chapter surveys the main treatments of Alexander in Jewish literature (in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic), from the Hellenistic period to the Hebrew Alexander Romances and the medieval biblical and Talmudic commentators. Themes discussed include the prophecy of Daniel regarding Alexander and Makedonian rule, the king’s visit to Jerusalem, the analogies drawn between his character and role and those of Cyrus and Antiochos IV, and the value attached to his name and personality by the Jewish community in Alexandria. The Romances tell of Alexander’s adventures with gymnosophists, Amazons, and his wise judgement given to the king of Katzia. Though a hero and sage in Jewish tradition, his aspirations to divinity make him an imperfect role model for the rabbinic scholars.

This chapter argues that the relationship between tradition and change can be illuminated through a better understanding of how tradition is (re)produced. How do traditions emerge, how do appeals to tradition serve to justify decisions, and, in what ways does justifying a choice in terms of tradition exercises a constraint over the kind of decision that can be made? The first part of the chapter discusses Patrick Glenn's approach to these questions, as seen, for example, in his claim that tradition is 'massaged', always entails change, and cannot control its own boundaries. It then goes on to put his ideas to the test by examining a controversial Rabbinical innovation recorded in the Talmud; Hillel's introduction of the 'Prozbul' so as to secure loans that would otherwise have been cancelled each sabbatical year. A meta-analysis of how this institution has since been categorized by those within and outside the Talmudic tradition suggests that successful innovation depends on the ability of interpreters to convince the relevant audience(s) that it embodies the best efforts to continue the tradition. It concludes that anachronism may be the price we need to pay if fidelity to tradition is to be more than antiquarianism.

Shortly before his death in 2007, in an interview for Nextbook Reader, Mailer was asked what role Judaism had played in his body of work. His response was “An enormous role.” Raised in a Jewish family, Mailer himself never accepted the traditional Judaism practiced by his parents, and (with the possible exception of The Naked and the Dead), his work does not address the lives of Jewish Americans as explicitly as some contemporary Jewish writers like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. Yet Mailer himself insisted that the religious and spiritual aspects of Judaism as well as the experience of Jewish identity were central to his work, and this chapter provides an overview of those influences, also acknowledging how they factor into his decision to pen novels about both Jesus Christ (The Gospel According to the Son) and Adolf Hitler (The Castle in the Forest).

In the previous chapter, we looked at a greatly under-appreciated piece of Greek prose that was articulated between the Septuagint and its critical readers, between Greco-Egyptian culture and Jewish anxiety about assimilation, between authoritative Jewish scriptural texts and later Christian readers and writers. It is a text that, whatever its origins, makes evident an arena where Jews and Christians were struggling to form and assert a coherent social self-understanding in and against dominant Greco-Roman culture. The recognition that the Roman Empire included citizens who were Roman and spoke Greek as well as Latin, and citizens who called themselves Greek and who felt conflicted about speaking Latin,1 and citizens of many different ethnic groupings, who spoke not only their own languages but also one or more of the privileged languages of the centre – Greek or Latin – and whose social standing and cultural positioning were articulated through these multi-lingual and culturally diverse interactions, has become a standard understanding of the transformations, translations and cultural interactions of late antiquity, although what the implications are for the study of the literature of the period still needs a good deal of work.

After exploring Eliano’s participation in the burning of the Talmud in Rome in 1553, the introduction outlines the book’s central argument regarding the entanglement of Eliano’s Jewish past and Catholic identity. By exploring Eliano’s Jewishness, which I define as the burden that his Jewish past continued to bear on the formulation of his Catholic identity, I argue that Eliano’s missionary efforts allow us to unpack how sincere converts approached their new religious identities in an age of heightened anxiety regarding religious conversion. By thinking of Eliano as a palimpsest of religious identity formation – someone whose Jewish past continued to play a foundational role in the way he became and existed as a Catholic – the book contributes to our historiographical understanding of the role of the individual in constructing collective identities in the early modern Mediterranean and how individuals were agents of collective change. His story likewise illuminates how Catholic missionary activity was also a field in which missionaries used their efforts to promote the apostolic mission of the Catholic Church to construct fuller senses of themselves and secure their place as Catholics.

This short epilogue revisits the major themes of the book. Rather than delving back into Eliano’s life, this epilogue uses the plaque that was placed in the cobblestones of Campo de’ Fiori in Rome in 2011 to commemorate the burning of the Talmud – in which Eliano participated – in 1553. Inscribed on the plaque are “the pages burn, but the letters fly” and “invoke peace for whoever laments your burning.” These quotes capture the essence of the futility of erasure and desires to ignore the burden that the past bears on the present. But these quotes also point to the very real ways in which the human experience transcends Eliano and the religio-cultural landscape of the early modern Mediterranean. This epilogue invites the reader to think more broadly about identity construction and individuals’ role in it through their interactions with one another. Just as Eliano constructed his sense of self by performing his Catholicness in light of his Jewishness in the theater of the everyday, so too do we confront difference, reconcile pasts and presents, attempt to construct better senses of ourselves, and come to terms with where we fit in the world.

In this chapter, we examine the Talmud in its final form, the document that came to shape in the century or so before the Muslim conquest. This is a document with unique and surprising qualities, which we can understand only if we interpret it in its original, late antique setting. In this chapter, we study representative Talmudic texts, carefully laying out the qualities of the Talmud that make it Talmudic. We ask how this composition of the Babylonian rabbis compares to that of the Yerushalmi, allowing the comparison to help us appreciate the uniqueness of the latter. Then focusing on the Bavli, we ask several key questions: to what audience was it addressed? What purpose did it serve for the masters who conceived it and their students? Why is it so devoted to argumentation? Based upon the picture that emerges, we weigh various claims for what the Talmud really is: is it a commentary on the Torah, or on the Mishnah, or something else entirely? Is it a legal code? What is its theology? Its vision of society? And how did the authors of this elite document hope to make a difference in the shape of Judaism for coming generations?

This chapter considers the first Talmud, that of the Land of Israel (the Yerushalmi), and the setting in which it was produced. The first part of the chapter is devoted to reviewing the major events that defined Jewish life in Palestine from the third to the fifth centuries, including the spread of Christianity, a failed project to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, the rise and abolition of the patriarchate, the alienation of common Jews from core Jewish beliefs, and the consolidation of the rabbinic movement. It then examines samples of the Yerushalmi, delineating the contours and major qualities of this Talmud. How did the shape and substance of this Talmud represent a response to the world its creators knew? Central to our examination will be a consideration of how this Talmud, though bearing that name, has very different qualities than its sister Talmud, the one then taking shape in Babylonia. In this chapter, it will immediately become clear that there was no single rabbinic tradition, nor even a single Talmudic tradition. Though the Yerushalmi was a first step in the journey, it was not the Talmud that would influence the future of all Judaisms.