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University of California Press

Tales of the Neighborhood

Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity
by Galit Hasan-Rokem (Author)
Hardcover eBook
Price: $85.00 / £71.00
Publication Date: Feb 2003
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780520234536
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.25
Series:
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Read an Excerpt

One

Erecting the Fence


Texts, Contexts, Theories, and Strategies

This short book seeks to explore the ways in which we can learn something about the relationship between literature and reality in Late Antique Jewish culture by reading the texts that we call Rabbinic literature, the Talmud and the Midrash. The discussion will evolve specifically in terms of narratives told in Hebrew and Aramaic, mostly in the Galilee, some time between the years 150 and 500 C.E.

These stories are short and concise, and they are embedded in discursive contexts that often emphasize non-narrative concerns such as Bible exegesis and juridical deliberation. The reason they have stimulated generations of traditional interpretation and scholarly research is, I believe, their capacity to present themselves continually as forceful and condensed signs for multiple concerns and areas of experience and expression. The same seductive complexity of these apparently simple texts opens them for study from various vantage points and theoretical outlooks. It also assures us that no one analytical procedure will exhaust all their meanings.

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About the Book

In this lively and intellectually engaging book, Galit Hasan-Rokem shows that religion is shaped not only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study, but also in ordinary events of everyday life. Common aspects of human relations offer a major source for the symbols of religious texts and rituals of late antique Judaism as well as its partner in narrative dialogues, early Christianity, Hasan-Rokem argues. Focusing on the "neighborhood" of the Galilee that is the birthplace of many major religious and cultural developments, this book brings to life the riddles, parables, and folktales passed down in Rabbinic stories from the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era.

About the Author

Galit Hasan-Rokem is Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore and Head of the Institute of Jewish Studies at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is the author of Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (2000) and coeditor of The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present (1999) and Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes (1996).

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Erecting the Fence: Texts, Contexts, Theories, and Strategies
2. Peeping through a Hole: Comparing and Borrowing
3. Building the Gate, or Neighbors Make Good Fences
4. The Evasive Center: Hadrian, the Old Man, the Neighbor, and the Rabbinic Rhetoric of the Empire
5. Between Us: A Conclusion

Notes
Index

Reviews

"Hasan-Rokem brings exciting new life to the rabbinic texts. She skillfully turns tales into windows where we can see the cultural world in which the narrators of the midrashic world lived. This stimulating work is sure to make rabbinic literature more accesible and relevant to a wider audience."—Charlotte Fonrobert, author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender

"A meaningful contribution to feminist scholarship and studies of women in Jewish society of the Late Antiquities. Hasan-Rokem has succeeded in shifting our attention to women's narratives of Talmudic-Midrashic literature and the significance vested in them."—Dan Ben-Amos, Chair of the Graduate Program in Folklore and Folklife at University of Pennsylvania