A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora
Abstract
A word conventionally imbued with melancholy meanings, "diaspora" has been used variously to describe the cataclysmic historical event of displacement, the subsequent geographical scattering of peoples, or the conditions of alienation abroad and yearning for an ancestral home. But as Daniel Boyarin writes, diaspora may be more constructively construed as a form of cultural hybridity or a mode of analysis. In A Traveling Homeland, he makes the case that a shared homeland or past and traumatic dissociation are not necessary conditions for diaspora and that Jews carry their homeland with them in diaspora, in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study. For Boyarin, the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto, a text that produces and defines the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity. Boyarin examines the ways the Babylonian Talmud imagines its own community and sense of homeland, and he shows how talmudic commentaries from the medieval and early modern periods also produce a doubled cultural identity. He links the ongoing productivity of this bifocal cultural vision to the nature of the book: as the physical text moved between different times and places, the methods of its study developed through contact with surrounding cultures. Ultimately, A Traveling Homeland envisions talmudic study as the center of a shared Jewish identity and a distinctive feature of the Jewish diaspora that defines it as a thing apart from other cultural migrations.
... Ophir, Bielik-Robson and Dubow generate opposition to the Jewish state by separating Judaism from secularism. A profound critique of this move from within the opponents of the Jewish state is formulated in Daniel Boyarin's latest book, The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto (Boyarin 2023). A professor emeritus of Talmudic cultures at UC Berkeley, Boyarin is one of the foremost scholars of Judaism and one of the best-known Jewish intellectuals. ...
... Hence Boyarin's conception, developed in the past, that Jewish galut should not be understood negatively, as exile, but positively, as diaspora (Boyarin 2015). Unlike exilic, stateless existence, which is at home nowhere, Jewish diasporic existence is, on the contrary, at home everywhere. ...
This article reviews recent books by Jewish thinkers that critique the idea of a Jewish state from the perspective of Jewish exile. It outlines two main approaches. The first, secular approach, rejects the Jewish state in favor of a secular state, seeing Judaism itself as the problem, whether arising from biblical violence or collective identity. The second, post-secular approach, rejects the Jewish state as secular, and finds resources in Jewish tradition for an alternative political vision centered on exile, understood as resistance to sovereignty and violence. This article argues that Jewish opposition to the Jewish state aims to limit sovereignty, integrate Jews into the Middle East space, and recover an exilic Jewish tradition of social ethics and pluralism. The idea of exile thus provides resources for envisioning decolonization and coexistence in Israel–Palestine.
... The diasporists and anti-Zionists mentioned above would likely not identify as post-Zionists since for many of them, the problem is not Zionism per se. Rather, many of them argue that living in the diaspora where, as Boyarin argues, Judaism as we know it really began, is the best, or most fruitful, way for Jews to fulfill their Jewishness (Boyarin, 2015;Boyarin, 1994, pp. 228-260;D. ...
... Especially impressive are her descriptions of the social and even the psychological background and context of the Babylonian exile when the fourth commandment was formulated (Shulevitz 2011, p. 31). Scholarly discourse has recently chosen to disregard the historical fact that exile is in most cases not voluntary (Boyarin 2015). Exile often follows violence and threats to life. ...
In this essay, I explore how Christians can relate to the Sabbath in a way that adequately expresses Christian traditions about sacred time while showing respect for distinctly Jewish practices. My basic claim is that a Christian sanctification of the Sabbath presents an entirely new challenge for a Christianity that does not view Judaism as superseded or outdated. Thus, I ask: What should be the meaning of the Sabbath commandment for Christians? How can Christians sanctify the Sabbath while affirming it as a sign of the Jewish people’s living covenant? First, I will lay out the questions that are raised for Christian theology when affirming Jewish Sabbath observance as part of practiced Judaism, that is, as lived Torah and as a tradition passed on from generation to generation. Next, I will consult contemporary Jewish literature on the topic, then look for Christian accounts of the Sabbath in Christian systematic theologies. I will ask: What happens when Christians affirm that Sunday does not abrogate the Jewish Sabbath, while also asserting their own commitment to the Bible’s holy day? I will subsequently sketch an outline of a Christian theology of Shabbat that acknowledges distinctive Jewish legal traditions as well as its own connectedness to Biblical temporal structures.
... In doing so, Zionist ideology "forgot" about previous attachments that Jews might have had-to Germany, to Poland, to France, to Iraq (Ricoeur 2010). As such, Daniel Boyarin (2015) then argues that we should understand that there is not one Jewish diaspora, but many-Spanish, Iranian, Iraqi, and German diasporas, and so on. A tension can then be identified between different positions-between Israeli attempts to create a single Jewish-Israeli identity, largely based on European Ashkenazi aesthetics (Dardashiti 2008), and resistances to this narrative that have come in the form of identity claims to Arab-Jewishness, national belonging to states other than Israel, and demands to recognize a plurality of identities in Israel and in other states (Fonrobert and Shemtov 2005;Roby 2015;Shohat 2017). ...
This article looks at the case of Ezekiel’s shrine in Kifl, Iraq. The shrine houses the grave of the Jewish prophet Ezekiel and originally consisted of a synagogue and associated buildings. Shiʽa Muslims claim it is a holy site for Muslims. Since Iraq’s Jews largely left Iraq after 1950 as a result of government repression, it is now controlled by the Iraqi Shiʽa Waqf. It has been largely changed into a mosque, with many Jewish elements having been removed. Too few Jews are left in Iraq to challenge this. This article asks how changes to this site play into notions of belonging and identity for Iraqi Jews today, as well as how the effects of pressure from dominant Jewish identities and a general ignorance of Arab Jewish identity interacts with this important site of memory. An analysis of the relationship between the site and Iraqi Jewish identity is conducted via on-site work and thirteen interviews with Iraqi Jews from around the world. It argues for the importance of the site and that heritage sites such as Ezekiel’s shrine are powerful sites for anchoring diasporic identities mnemonically. In the case where those identities are under strain, these sites serve a role to further strengthen and provide historical weight to claims of belonging. However, this relationship changes through generations because of internal and external identity and political pressures. Unchallengeable pressures increase the likelihood that memories are not passed on. The article argues for a dynamic understanding between site, politics, and identity.
... For the centrality of this motif in Babylonian rabbinic self-fashioning see Gafni (1997: 96-117). See now Boyarin (2015); unfortunately this work reached me too late for it to be fully incorporated here. While I reserve judgment on some of Boyarin's larger claims, I happily concur with his rich insight that "the concepts of homeland and Holy Land are thus, at least for these Rabbis not coterminous" (44). ...
This article examines a travel narrative of sexual captivity in Rome from rabbinic literature of late antiquity. By comparing two textual versions, Palestinian and Babylonian, the article discusses not only the dynamics of cultural identity formation as negotiated in the “contact zone” of captivity, but also the tradition history of this tale as it migrated from late antique Palestine to the rabbinic circles in the Sasanian Empire. While the Palestinian version is a narrative about the reunification of space and identity disrupted by exile, the diasporic rabbinic community in Babylonia creates a fiction of identity despite place; de-territorializing the physical component of place in identity and replacing it with a textual self-fashioning.
For many years, anthropology contributed significantly to the reinforcement of “dominant notions of culture and identity as being closely tied to specific territories” (Jansen and Löfving 2009, p [...]
This chapter offers a conclusion to the book by retracing the premises and arguments contained in the preceding pages. This is followed by reflections on the writing process and the work as a whole, and engages in dialogue with the scholarship of Daniel Boyarin, Emmanuel Levinas, Daniel Mendelsohn, Elad Lapidot, Vivian Liska, and Theodor W. Adorno. Strosberg reflects on the difficult questions that arose in writing the book and calls on scholars to stay with difficult questions about anti-Semitism and Jewishness as a force of resistance to destructive solutions. It is not enough to acknowledge that anti-Semitism is still a question for our time that must be answered by urgent action, since too often efforts to achieve social justice unwittingly perpetuate the very thing those efforts strive to dismantle. The concept of proteophobia can help in addressing anti-Semitism without neglecting other marginalized groups or reinforcing anti-Semitism by collapsing Jewish forms of life into oversimplified categories.
From the image offered by the Babylonian Talmud, Jewish elites were deeply embedded within the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE). The Talmud is replete with stories and discussions that feature Sasanian kings, Zoroastrian magi, fire temples, imperial administrators, Sasanian laws, Persian customs, and more quotidian details of Jewish life. Yet, in the scholarly literature on the Babylonian Talmud and the Jews of Babylonia , the Sasanian Empire has served as a backdrop to a decidedly parochial Jewish story, having little if any direct impact on Babylonian Jewish life and especially the rabbis. Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity advances a radically different understanding of Babylonian Jewish history and Sasanian rule. Building upon recent scholarship, Simcha Gross portrays a more immanent model of Sasanian rule, within and against which Jews invariably positioned and defined themselves. Babylonian Jews realized their traditions, teachings, and social position within the political, social, religious, and cultural conditions generated by Sasanian rule.
As if by design, crisis reveals basic structural fault lines. In the middle of the COVID-19 crisis, non-Haredi Jews expressed surprise and even outrage about the ultra-orthodox Haredi response to the pandemic. It was not understood how large-scale violations of public health protocols comported with the legal-halakhic principle of Pikuaḥ Nefesh (saving human life). In this essay, I explore Hasidic response to COVID-19 as reported in the secular and Haredi press and in emergent social science literature about this crisis. I place Haredi response to crisis in relation to the clash between two sets of values: the value of saving human life and the value of intensive Talmud study (talmud Torah) and ritual-communal practice. In what Robert Cover called a paideic nomos, there are more important things than human life. What we see already in the Babylonian Talmud is the profound ambiguity of paideic norms vis-à-vis the larger public good.
The Babylonian Talmud or Talmud Bavli (“Talmud”), redacted c. the sixth century in Sasanian Babylonia, is structured and arranged as a commentary to the Mishnah and, ultimately, came to be regarded as the source of normativity and authority in rabbinic Judaism . The Talmud is a multifaceted and eclectic work containing a variety of tannaitic traditions; amoraic statements attributed to Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis; anonymous legal discussions; legal narratives; scriptural exegesis; extended “historical” narratives; and a host of traditions pertaining to popular wisdom, astrology, mythology, medicine, demonology, and other miscellaneous areas of knowledge. The Talmud can be illuminated by recourse to a variety of critical methodologies and perspectives, including source‐critical, historical, literary, philosophical, comparative, and cultural analysis.
This book explores the many strategies by which elite Greeks and Romans resisted the cultural and political hegemony of the Roman Empire in ways that avoided direct confrontation or simple warfare. By resistance is meant a range of responses including 'opposition', 'subversion', 'antagonism', 'dissent', and 'criticism' within a multiplicity of cultural forms from identity-assertion to polemic. Although largely focused on literary culture, its implications can be extended to the world of visual and material culture. Within the volume a distinguished group of scholars explores topics such as the affirmation of identity via language choice in epigraphy; the use of genre (dialogue, declamation, biography, the novel) to express resistant positions; identity negotiation in the scintillating and often satirical Greek essays of Lucian; and the place of religion in resisting hegemonic power.
This article is about Israel’s West Bank settler-colonial project from the standpoint of settlers who are of Mizrahi origin (i.e. Jews of African or Middle Eastern descent). While historically predominantly Ashkenazi (i.e. Jews of European descent), with time many Mizrahim have moved to the West Bank and joined the settlement project. And yet, there is more or less scholarly silence regarding the existence of Mizrahi West Bank settlers, and when they are addressed, their motivations are reduced to simplified “economic” considerations; in a way that devoid them of political consciousness compared to their Ashkenazi counterparts. While there has been an immense body of work dealing with ethnic tension between settlers and the indigenous population, by centreing the experience of a particular group of Mizrahi settlers, this article examines how internal ethnic tensions within the society of settlers play into and are transformed in the settler-colonial process.
Drawing on close readings of an understudied Hebrew-language archive—the journal Ma'arakhot—this article examines the emergence of a new political and technical vernacular for the “doing” of national security. That vernacular was both practical and poetic/rhetorical. That is, it aimed to produce intuitive Hebrew-language equivalents for strategic, operational, and tactical concepts used in foreign—especially British, Soviet, and American—sources and to foster a vibrant, expressive, Hebrew-language political vernacular into which they could be placed. The article considers tensions that arose between these two aims, and the ways in which the journal's editors and translators attempted—ultimately unsuccessfully—to deal with them. “Realism,” whether literary or political, requires a mythic framework for which it cannot itself give account. Unable to resolve these tensions, the journal took up to a fulsome, faux-biblical prose style for its fictional offerings, producing what I call an “absent sublime.” The article describes the “absent sublime” in some detail, along with the specific stylistic choices upon which it relied. It then considers the backlashes such usages may engender, in light of the tensions they conceal and are predicated upon but cannot resolve.
Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.
Are museums places about a community or for the community? This article addresses this question by bringing into conversation Jewish museums and Indigenous museum theory, with special attention paid to two major institutions: the Jewish Museum Berlin and the National Museum of the American Indian. The JMB’s exhibitions and the controversies surrounding them, I contend, allow us to see the limits of rhetorical sovereignty, namely the ability and right of a community to determine the narrative. The comparison between Indigenous and Jewish museal practices is grounded in the idea of multidirectional memory. Stories of origins in museums, foundational to a community’s self-understanding, are analyzed as expressions of rhetorical sovereignty. The last section expands the discussion to the public sphere by looking at the debates that led to the resignation of Peter Schäfer, the JMB’s former director, following a series of events that were construed as anti-Israeli and hence, so was the argument, anti-Jewish. These claims are based on two narrow conceptions: First, that of the source community that makes a claim for the museum. Second, on the equation of Jewishness with a pro-Israeli stance. Taken together, the presentation of origins and the public debate show the limits of rhetorical sovereignty by exposing the contested dynamics of community claims. Ultimately, I suggest, museums should be seen not only as a site for contestation about communal voice, but as a space for constituting the community.
The series Diaspore. Quaderni di ricerca originates from the desire to investigate the human being’s diasporic dimension, in its various forms. In the mechanisms implemented by the globalisation’s processes, which tend to assimilate the diversity and to blend the inevitable conflicts arising from the difference, the diasporic and migratory phenomenon can paradoxically be the original element to safeguard an individual and a culture in a new territory, providing a peculiar reflection area in which the conservation of that starting culture, but also the interstitial territories and the hybridism phenomena between this and the target culture can be preserved. Research laboratories of these realities will be mainly the cultural, literary, and artistic productions, generated in particular historical contexts, in territories including Europe and Africa, the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Americas, regions where the culturally-composite identities, on heterogeneous bases, reveal the vitality of moving cultures.
In Who Sings the Nation-State?, co-written with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler identifies the paradox between the seemingly global decline of the nation-state and the steadfast strength of its genealogical force. According to Butler, “Arendt allows us to realise that this may also be because the nation-state as a form was faulty from the start.” In the first section of the article, I focus on Butler’s analysis of Israel/Palestine as a failed nation-state and seek to identify its faulty start. I propose that the nation has been masked by the race-religion constellation in the creation of the Westphalian race-state and identify this as the “faulty start” of the nation-state in European history. The term “race-religion constellation” refers to the connection or co-constitution of the categories of race and “religion” and the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term “religion.” I contend that it is this genealogical force of the nation that frames Israel/Palestine, which was, and is, Europe’s offspring, and at times its prodigal son. In the third and final section I discuss alternatives to the nation-state by means of the notion of diasporic political communities, as taken up by Butler and Paul Gilroy respectively, to assess what such communities can provide instead of the exclusionary racist binary that is the faulty start and driving force of the race-state.
Looking at Leonard Cohen’s life story and song lyrics in terms of fragment and ruin, three traumas stand out: the death of his father when Cohen was nine, coping with depression, and the aftermath of the Holocaust. The concepts of the psychic crypt and the phantom effect delineated by Abraham and Torok highlight links between Cohen’s life and lyrics, between intergenerational trauma and text. The second section of the essay deals briefly with Cohen as a belated Romantic and the neglected parallels between his use of images and visual, particularly collage, art. The final sections treat the condition of the heart theme in Cohen’s lyrics in spiritual terms and in relation to social issues tracing out the implications of Cohen’s contrast between “Babylon” and “Boogie Street.”
The article addresses narratives that tell of a member of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel who comes to the rescue of a Jewish community. The tales were documented at the Israel Folktale Archives, in the second half of the twentieth century, and were told by informants from Morocco and Greece. While it is probably impossible to trace the exact routes of these “cultural possessions”, around and across the Mediterranean, the texts nevertheless provide a glimpse into the ways in which a network of Jewish communities shared a meta-narrative while adapting it to their own regional contexts. Although these tales are quintessentially diasporic, they also provided a platform for negotiating post-exilic identities in the new Israeli national context.
This article focuses on how community-sanctioned pilgrimage to Jerusalem could be employed to establish both the homeland and the diaspora as places of belonging. As a case study, I will analyze Philo's portrayal of the ϵροποµποί - a term unique to Philo used to describe those chosen to carry offerings, especially the annual half-shekels - from the diaspora to the Jerusalem temple. I will argue that, according to Philo, the ϵροποµποί (1) were elected community leaders who functioned as representatives of their communities, (2) enabled those who did not travel to Jerusalem to participate vicariously in sacrifice and pilgrimage, and (3) established both the homeland and the diaspora as places of belonging for their community through providing a context for participating in and perpetuating the collective memory of the Jewish nation, in general, and the Alexandrian Jewish community, in particular.
After 70 CE, when Israel was no longer an independent nation in the land of Israel and their cultic center was no longer physically present there, the rabbis of the Palestinian and Babylonian diaspora reflect from different perspectives on the beginning of the story of the land, on what can be called the "homeland myth" of the patriarchal narratives of Scripture. In doing so, they create their own ancestral homeland myth. In this article, two sets of rabbinic texts are examined in order to illustrate how the rabbis refashioned the scriptural myth and produced two versions of a rabbinic ancestral homeland myth. The first group of texts are related to the promise of the land and its fulfilment, the second to the establishment of the first Jewish grave in the promised land.
This book explores the Pakistani diaspora in a transatlantic context, enquiring into the ways in which young first- and second-generation Pakistani Muslim and non-Muslim men resist hegemonic identity narratives and respond to their marginalised conditions.
Drawing on rich documentary, ethnographic and interview material gathered in Boston and Dublin, Islam, Race, and Pluralism in the Pakistani Diaspora introduces the term ‘Pakphobia’, a dividing line that is set up to define the places that are safe and to distinguish ‘us’ and ‘them’ in a Pakistani diasporic context. With a multiple case study design, which accounts for the heterogeneity of Pakistani populations, the author explores the language of fear and how this fear has given rise to a ‘politics of fear’ whose aim is to distract and divide communities.
A rich, cross-national study of one of the largest minority groups in the US and Western Europe, this book will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and geographers with interests in race and ethnicity, migration and diasporic communities.
Freud’s repression of Judaism and its cultural markers from the published “Rat Man” case history has been noted but never satisfactorily explained. This elision can be interpreted using Freud’s suggestion that the paradigmatic “rat” represents (among other things) a circumcised penis marking an intergenerational, covenantal exchange. When read against the case study as originally published, Freud’s process notes for the Rat Man’s treatment (the only set of such notes on a published case that Freud didn’t destroy) suggest that Freud chose to sanitize the published version of explicitly Jewish content, thus repeating a pattern of absence as a marker of debt. This debt only grows more tortuous and powerful the longer it remains unpaid. This system of elision in the Rat Man suggests that Freud understood deferral and denial to be built into the Jewish system of piety. Thus, it would seem that Freud used the Rat Man case history to explore Judaism through its repression; and that Freud’s relation to and interpretation of Jewish values are revealed as a primary, if unconscious, subject of the text.
Postliberal theology has been a topic of considerable theological debate over the past few decades. In his 2011 book Another Reformation, Peter Ochs deploys a postliberal theological model for the purpose of developing a sophisticated understanding of the future of interreligious relations. Ochs argues that postliberal theology is a reparative theology focusing on alleviating human suffering. He argues that the Christian idea of supersessionism may be the most challenging for Christians to confront as they explore avenues for making interreligious dialogue more effective. Ochs critiques the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder's understanding of Zionism as Jewish Constantianism for being an instance of an ostensibly postliberal theology losing its way. In this essay, I offer a critique of Ochs's reading of Yoder, claiming that Yoder's view actually mirrors an important intra-Jewish debate about the relationship between political power and piety, and retrieves an ingenious contribution of both early Judaism and early Christianity that is effaced in today's growing Constantinian approach to Christian imperialism and Jewish nationalism.
This article traces the political, intellectual, and disciplinary motivations behind the establishment of the field of Jewish political thought, and pursues implications of the field's establishment for the dynamics of Jewish political debate. Jewish political thought is decisively marked by the experience of statelessness. Thus, to establish the possibility of a Jewish political tradition, scholars have had to abandon or relax the received view that sovereignty is the defining horizon for politics. Although the pervasiveness of politics is the field's animating conviction, scholars have yet to mount a sufficiently forceful challenge to sovereignty's conceptual and political priority. This review surveys the reasons why scholars have been reluctant to pursue alternative, diasporic conceptions of the political, focusing on their notions of what constitutes a tradition. The article contends that developing a more ambitious conception of the Jewish political tradition is a prerequisite for encouraging political debate about sovereignty's importance for Jewish political agency.
“Jewish historiography” is a complicated and elusive concept. The tension is even more complicated when we come to discuss “modern Jewish historiography,” namely the writing of Jewish histories according to the European model and European common periodization. This chapter focuses on the concept of exile, which should be seen as the core of Jewish historical consciousness. This focus illuminates both the unique difficulties associated with the modern attempt to write Jewish history from the Western modern (“secular”) perspective, and presents and describes the Jewish traditional perception of history embedded in that concept. The relevance of the Jewish notion of exile for rethinking the modern notion of “historiography” and for current discussions on the notion of progressive history is also explained. The historical perception embodied in the concept of exile received its fullest and most elaborated articulation in the context of Jewish-Christian polemics, and in response to Christian attitudes.
Stefan Helmreich is a graduate student in anthropology at Stanford University. He is interested in anthropological approaches to understanding scientific practice and plans to undertake ethnographic work among a group of computational theoretical biologists.
I would like to thank Bill Maurer, Andrea Klimt, and Renato Rosaldo for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. In his recent talk at the University of California at Santa Cruz, entitled "The Black Atlantic and the Politics of Authenticity," Gilroy was asked by an audience member to account for the androcentrism of his analytical formulations. Since one of the themes of his talk was an examination of the cultural, historical, and ideological freight carried by the concept of "diaspora" in light of its inextricable ties to Jewish experience, Gilroy connected a focus on males in diasporic thought to patriarchal and masculinist traditions in both rabbinical scholarship and black nationalism. He also replied that the normative individual in nationalist rhetoric has been the "soldier-citizen," a masculine figure. Gilroy's reply may illuminate the traditions he is analyzing, but it does not quite answer for the androcentrism of his own analyses.
The past few years have witnessed an expansion of the range of sources that Talmudists regularly employ in their research on the Bavli. Scholars now turn to Iranian epic and folk literature; to Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and Eastern Christian ritual and theological writings; to Sasanian civil law; and to other nonrabbinic sources in an effort to broaden and deepen their understanding of the Bavli and its place in the “splendid confusion” that was Sasanian Mesopotamian society. As Yaakov Elman has pointed out, this research trend serves as a corrective for more than half a century of scholarly neglect, which was only encouraged by a dearth of critical editions of Middle Persian literature and more general studies of Sasanian culture and religions. Now, following a steady output of some long-anticipated editions, and, more significantly, as a result of recent collaboration between Talmudists and Iranists, the coming years hold great promise for a radically new understanding of the Bavli and its world.