This chapter comprehensively lays out all the possible ways that artificial intelligence (AI) might interact with Jewish sources as their relationship develops over the next many years. It divides the scope of the relationship into three parts. First, it engages with questions of moral agency and their potential interactions with Jewish law, and suggests that this path, while enticing, may not be particularly fruitful. Second, it suggests that Jewish historical sources generally distinguish human value from human uniqueness, and that there is therefore quite a bit of room to think of an AI as a person, if we so choose, without damaging the value of human beings. Finally, it considers how Jewish thought might respond to AI as a new height of human innovation, and how the human–AI relationship shares many characteristics with the God–human relationship as imagined in Jewish sources.

This paper examines the methodological problems presented by the relationship between law and religion, and the tensions between internal and external approaches. It argues for a (neutral) semiotic approach: the basics of sense construction, as understood by the Greimasian model of semiotics, are the same for both law and religion. At the same time, the model allows for the identification of differences. But it also problematizes the value of the concepts themselves: who, we may ask, needs to talk about either “law” or “religion” as such a very different question from that of the characterization of particular acts or norms as “legal” or “religious?”. “Law as Religion: Religion as Law” is thus a secondary (or meta-) question addressing the relationship between institutional concepts rather than human behaviour in either its factual or normative dimensions. It may, however, figure large in the rhetoric of religious politics, whose full understanding requires us to narrativise the pragmatics (speech behaviour) of its various participants.

This essay advocates that “theology” as “God-talk” is endemic to Jewish discourse throughout the ages. Jewish theology is a dialectic between prescriptive halakhah or law on one side, and descriptive aggadah or narration on the other side. While the term “theology” itself is usually taken to mean human talk about God, Jewish “theology” as the explication of God’s revealed word (dvar Adonai) means, as Abraham Joshua Heschel (the foremost 20th century Jewish theologian) put it, “God’s anthropology.” Thus Jewish theology is the explication of what Jews have accepted as revealed truth, namely, what God wants humans to know of God’s concern for them as evidenced in history, and what God wants humans to do in response to God’s concern for them.

In this chapter, we seek to understand the Mishnah and its meanings in its final form. We consider the shape of the Mishnah, the subjects it does and does not include, the qualities of its language and rhetoric, its relationship to canonical scripture and other parts of the pre-rabbinic tradition, and so forth. Crucially, we analyze a variety of key examples of the Mishnah to gain a genuine sense of its approaches. With an eye toward these considerations, we review the range of characterizations that have been offered for the Mishnah. We consider the theories of modern scholars who have made claims for the meaning of the Mishnah in its late antique Palestinian context and suggest some refinements of our own. In the end, we emerge with an appreciation of both the Mishnah’s rhetoric of tradition, on the one hand, and its bona fide radical qualities, on the other. Having characterized the Mishnah, to the best of our abilities, we then consider the question of when the Mishnah came to the precise shape we know, and ask about its realm of authority, whether among the rabbis or beyond.

The rabbis did not emerge as leaders of the Jewish community until at least the seventh century. So how did the Talmud, a product of ancient rabbinic culture, become so influential? The acceptance of the Bavli was due to several factors, including the fact that the academies that sponsored it were located in the center of the new Islamic empire, Bagdhad. But this did not assure the authority of the rabbis or their Talmud, and some Jews opposed rabbinic authority for centuries. In this chapter, we trace the growing authority of the Talmud in different sections of the Jewish world, along with different approaches to studying the document. We come to recognize the medieval Jewish world as the world of halakhah (Jewish law), conceived as an outgrowth of Talmudic deliberations. We consider the reception of the Talmud in Christian Europe, in which the Talmud represented the error of the Jews from the time of Jesus onward. We recount disputations in which prominent rabbis were forced to defend the Talmud against Christian condemnation, and we detail the earliest burnings of Talmuds, so hateful was the text in the eyes of many in the church.

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.