Law and What Exactly? Un-disciplining the Talmud

• In Event: Rabbinic Law and Literature: Beyond Halakhah and Aggadah

Abstract

Critical study of the Talmud, which juxtaposes legal material with narrative, homiletic, folk remedies, and demonology (to name just a few of its genres), naturally raises questions about the relationship between legal and non-legal writing. But it matters how we name law’s other, not least because in so doing we are implicitly defining law itself. I contrast two models of “law and…” conjunction: James Boyd White’s humanist “law and literature” program and Robert Cover’s 1982 “Nomos and Narrative”. The humanist “law and literature” movement understands its twin objects as distinct disciplines, which offer separate, complementary spheres of knowledge. This model thus perversely insulates law from literature, since the latter’s significance is non-doctrinal and instead mediated through the aesthetic sensibilities of the humanist reader. By contrast, Cover reads nomos (halakhah) and narrative (aggadah) not as disciplines but as genres: differing literary forms and conventions that nonetheless embed essentially entangled normative questions. In the paper’s second half, I discuss two examples from the Talmud, discussions of praying for non-Jewish political authorities that variously mix legal and narrative material. While both moments use narrative to ironize otherwise uncontested norms, I argue that Cover’s and White’s respective conjunctions produce radically different accounts of that irony’s significance.

Author

• Raphael Magarik, University of California Berkeley