Rabbinic Law and Literature: Beyond Halakhah and Aggadah

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Rabbinic Law and Literature: Beyond Halakhah and Aggadah
The distinction between Halakhah and Aggadah weighs so heavily on the study of rabbinic literature that it dominates the field and prevents scholars from taking note of the interdisciplinary “law and literature” work that has been executed both in legal and literary academia. This panel, Rabbinic Law and Literature: Beyond Halakhah and Aggadah, seeks to revisit the fundamental question of the relationship between law and literature in rabbinic literature and more specifically in the Babylonian Talmud.
Robert Cover’s “Nomos and Narrative” was influenced by rabbinic literature and the halakhah/aggadah dichotomy. As a foundational text of the “law and literature” subfield, Cover’s essay has stood at the center of attempts to rethink the relationship between legal and literary in the rabbinic context. The panel opens with Raphael Magarik’s paper, “Law and What Exactly? Un-disciplining the Talmud,” which questions whether law and literature are best characterized as fields (James Boyd White) or genres (Robert Cover) and thinks through the ramifications of the answer for understanding irony in the reading of two specific passages.
The remaining three papers strive to treat talmudic legal material as literature in the fullest sense of the term. Noah Bickart’s “Logic and Language in the development of a Talmudic Sugya” attends to historical matters of composition to demonstrate the intentional construction of a legal discussion as a literary text and the ways that a literary lens argues for an intra-talmudic connection to narrative material that has already been canonized as literary by the field. Sarah Wolf’s “The Construction of a Rabbinic Rebel: Rabbi Yirmiyah and Characterization in the Bavli” focuses on character and characterization in her argument that a set of texts about Rav Yirmiyah’s problematic study hall behavior testify to rabbinic denial about some of the true nature of rabbinic legal study and pedagogy. Barry Wimpfheimer’s “Infertility and the Legal Subject” examines the legal example of the infertile couple in rabbinic literature to implicate an understanding of the role of subjectivity in the construction and reconstruction of law.

Sub Unit

• Rabbinic Literature and Culture

Chair

• Tzvi Michael Novick, University of Notre Dame

Individual Presentations

• Law and What Exactly? Un-disciplining the Talmud - Raphael Magarik, University of California Berkeley

• Logic and Language in the Development of a Talmudic Sugya - Noah Benjamin Bickart, Yale University

• The Construction of a Rabbinic Rebel: Rabbi Yirmiyah and Characterization in the Bavli - Sarah Wolf, Northwestern University

• Infertility and the Legal Subject - Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Northwestern University