What Is Talmud?: The Art of Disagreement

By Sergey Dolgopolski

True disagreements are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement, and provokes unsettling questions: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine relationship between minds? Are disagreements always only temporary steps toward final agreement? Must a community of disagreement always imply agreement, as in an agreement to disagree?

What is Talmud? rethinks the task of philological, literary, historical, and cultural analysis of the Talmud. It introduces an aspect of this task that has best been approximated by the philosophical, anthropological, and ontological interrogation of human being in relationship to the Other-whether animal, divine, or human.

In both engagement and disengagement with post-Heideggerian traditions of thought, Sergey Dogopolski complements philological-historical and cultural approaches to the Talmud with a rigorous anthropological, ontological, and Talmudic inquiry. He redefines the place of the Talmud and its study, both traditional and academic, in the intellectual map of the West, arguing that Talmud is a scholarly art of its own and represents a fundamental intellectual discipline, not a mere application of logical, grammatical, or even rhetorical arts for the purpose of textual hermeneutics.

In Talmudic intellectual art, disagreement is a fundamental category. What Is Talmud? rediscovers disagreement as the ultimate condition of finite human existence or co-existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780823229369

Sergey Dolgopolski

Sergey Dolgopolski is an associate professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and of Jewish Thought and is the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Thought at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). He holds a joint PhD in Jewish studies from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, and a Doctor of Philosophical Sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences. His general area of interest is in philosophy and literature. He is the author of What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (Fordham University Press, 2009), The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2012), and Other Others: The Political after the Talmud (Fordham University Press, 2018).

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What Is Talmud?

What Is Talmud?

THE ART OF DISAGREEMENT

Sergey Dolgopolski

Copyright © 2009 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dolgopol’skii, S. B. (Sergei Borisovich)

What is Talmud? : the art of disagreement / Sergey Dolgopolski.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-2934-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Talmud—Methodology. 2. Talmud—Criticism, interpretation, etc. 3. Talmud—Philosophy. 4. Reasoning. 5. Rhetoric. I. Title.

BM503.6.D65 2008

296.1'2506—dc22

                                                          2008043310

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09   5 4 3 2 1

First edition

To the blessed memory of my mother z"l, my most important teacher

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE: WHAT IS TALMUD?

1. What Is Talmud?

2. The Talmud in Heidegger’s Aftermath

3. The Art of (the) Talmud

4. Talmud As Event

PART TWO: THE WAYS OF THE TALMUD IN ITS RHETORICAL DIMENSION

5. The Ways of the Talmud in Its Rhetorical Dimension: A Performative Analytical Description

PART THREE: THE ART OF DISAGREEMENT

6. The Art of Disagreement

Notes

Works Cited

Index

PREFACE

It is no secret that prefaces are written after the work is already done. Although the preface is placed at the beginning of the book, I am writing it to highlight my current position in my larger intellectual journey and the role this book plays within it.

This book grew out of my interest in the rhetoric of religious discourse, in particular the rhetoric of the Talmud, the main normative text of Jewish tradition originating in late antiquity. Because the Talmudic tradition developed in the same intellectual times and places as did Western philosophical and rhetorical traditions, I began to wonder how their approaches came to differ so much, and why one of them became dominant while the other remained largely unknown. In particular, why does the Talmudic approach to disagreement as a goal in itself seem exotic and esoteric while Western philosophy’s goal of reaching agreement in any discussion, intellectual or political, shapes common parlance? These questions intrigued me, and this book is my way of addressing that unfamiliar side of Western civilization, the side of disagreement as an end rather than as a means.

Entering the area of the unfamiliar realm of Talmudic disagreement as a goal of discourse required me to reconsider the familiar boundaries—only recently established in the twentieth century—between studies in philosophy and studies in the Talmud. Doing this required my undertaking a complicated and complex intellectual journey into two hitherto separate fields—rabbinics or the academic study of the Talmud, and studies in German and Jewish philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and establishing a mutual connection between them. Having done so in the present work, in my next book I am eager to probe more deeply and widely into late ancient texts in order to develop a mutual hermeneutics of Talmudic, philosophical, and rhetorical traditions of thinking.

Let me conclude this preface with a conversation that both subtly exemplifies the question about the connection between the Talmud and philosophy and hints at the future directions of my intellectual journey:

A critical historian of twentieth-century philosophy once asked me, We lived at the epoch of Enlightenment, at the time of Technology, and at the time of Metaphysics. Do, or did we, live at the time of Talmud? In a sense, this book is a long answer to that short question. Yet, here is my short answer: We do not and we do, and perhaps we already did.

We do not, but only because we do live in the time of philosophy, and therefore we still strive for agreement to which philosophy ideally leads.

We do, because Talmud as an intellectual project expands even outside of the quarters in which the Talmud as a book is learned, and because it represents a significant other for the philosophy of agreement.

We did, or perhaps even will do, because Talmud reveals a radically different sense of past that has nothing to do with hitherto philosophically or scientifically recognized ideas of time. Perhaps it has nothing to do with time either, and it is up to us to live or not to live to that radical past.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is with great pleasure that I thank Daniel Boyarin, whose endless intellectual generosity, openness, courage, and inspiration helped me finish this work. I would like to thank Martin Jay, the head of the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, for his continuing support of my project. I am very thankful to David Bates at the Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, whose suggestions and the sense of intellectual friendship he always cast made an enormously important contribution to bringing this work to completion. I am indebted to Pheng Cheah, Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley, for very fruitful discussions of Kant’s and post-Heideggerian texts, and for his support in my intellectual endeavor. I am very grateful to Naomi Seidman, the director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union, for her continuing guest-friendship and existential support, which I felt from the very first day of my arrival at Berkeley. I would like to thank Dina Stein, University of Haifa, for her great heuristic power, which was constantly surfacing in her readings of earlier drafts as well as in our multiple discussions of my work, from the very early stages of its writing. I am grateful to Jonathan Boyarin, Anthoni Lioi, Hindy Najman, Robert Gibbs, Herman Waetjen, and Devora Shoenfeld, who read earlier drafts or intellectually influenced me in different ways on various stages of this work. I am very grateful to Bruce Rosenstock, for his reading of the entire manuscript with the very careful eye of a historian of philosophy; for critical remarks that he offered; and even more for the discussion we had following these remarks. My endless thanks are due to Bud Bynack, who worked gently and thoroughly, for making my prose more English, both in idiom and in pace.

I am also very happy to recognize both my intellectual indebtedness and gratitude to my colleagues, friends, and teachers: Edouard Nadtochii, the University of Lausanne; Serguei Zimovetz, former rector of the Moscow Institute for Psychoanalysis; Ishai Rozen-Tzvi, Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and The University of Tel-Aviv; Michael Schulman and Eugenie Re abek, the Rostov University; and Dmitry Frolov, the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Moscow University. I am thankful to Igor Koubanov, the University of Freiburg, for his moral-intellectual support of my project. I thank Benjamin Wurfgart, for his reading of an early draft of the second chapter and for very useful suggestions that he gave to me.

This work would not be the way it is without the firm support I received from the UC Berkeley Judaic Collection librarian, Paul Hamburg, to whom I remain very grateful. I thank my new colleagues at the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, who welcomed me in my new position so nicely and provided the excellent working environment and time needed to revise the manuscript. I thank Mr. Jory Gessaw for proofreading a chapter and sharing with me his opinions about my argument. My extended gratitude goes to Aldene Fredenburg for a very careful copy editing done to the text. Getting this text ready for publication was made partially possible through a very generous grant from the Association of Jewish Studies Cahnman Publication Subvention Grant Award. I also thank Yad Vashem Archive authorities for granting permission to an image from their collection for the front cover design.

Last but not least, I cordially thank my dear wife, Lilia Dolgopolskaia, and our daughters, Polina and Elen-Sarrah. Without their patience, daily support, encouragement, and love, this book would not be written. I dearly thank my mother, blessed be her memory, who is my first and most important teacher. I am very grateful to her for all the lessons she gave me and, now posthumously, continues to give through her deeds, echoed in people who knew her. From that, I continue to learn. I dedicate this book to her memory.

What Is Talmud?

INTRODUCTION

This book returns Talmud to the Talmud.¹ Its subject is Talmud (without the the) as an intellectual project, and it returns that project to the Talmud, that is, to the Talmud as either a traditional source or a historical object. It isolates this intellectual project in one of the historical instances of its emergence, immediately preceding and following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. It also maps Talmud as a scholarly art vis-à-vis the major intellectual projects and traditions of the West—philosophy, rhetoric, sophistry and, more specifically, the philosophical arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. It then returns this intellectual art and practice of Talmud back to the tradition to which it belongs, from which it stems, and in which it simultaneously flourished and was subverted for a period of approximately two hundred years, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The book attempts to undo this subversion and thus to free the intellectual project that is Talmud from the hitherto dominant readings of it dictated by its major competitors—philosophy and its tacit ramifications in historiography, or even within the tradition itself. Finally, it returns Talmud as the art of disagreement to the broader context of the philosophy of agreement, which I see as the central anthropological category of the philosophical West.

My argument consists of three parts. Part I introduces the question, What is Talmud? (Chapter 1) and its context in philosophy and rhetorical theory (Chapter 2). It then narrows the focus to an analysis of Talmud as an intellectual project in one specific historical moment of its emergence, the fifteenth-century work of Rabbi Iz ak Canpanton of Castalia, also known as the Gaon of Castalia (d. 1463), and his followers (Chapter 3). It also examines Canpanton’s concept of the art of Talmud in more remote instances of its emergence, both traditional and academic, through studying an example of the Talmud of late antiquity as seen in Canpanton’s conceptual perspective (Chapter 4).

Part II empirically explores the written work of R. I. Canpanton: his The Ways of (the) Talmud. It slowly and carefully studies this work of Talmudic methodology, both to compensate for the lack of its existence in English and, more importantly, to show how Canpanton’s book corresponds empirically to the theoretical perspectives established in Part I.

Part III takes Canpanton’s intellectual art of Talmud—in particular, one of its central categories, the category of disagreement—back to the contexts of the Western philosophy of agreement. It analyzes the import of both Canpanton’s art of Talmud and the more general intellectual project of Talmud, to which Canpanton serves as an entrance, for a revisitation of the hitherto marginal and/or auxiliary role that the category of disagreement played in Western thought.

I can suggest several methods of reading this book. For a merely cursory acquaintance with the intellectual territory it introduces and explores, a reading of the first two chapters, followed by the last chapter, could do. A stronger grasp of my argument requires reading the first, second, third, and last chapters. In order to appreciate Canpanton’s work in full in terms of its importance for such different, yet tacitly connected, fields as philosophy and Talmudic studies, a reader needs to proceed in linear order, while looking at the earlier chapters in the light of the later. At any rate, reading the first chapter will help a reader decide which way he or she prefers to go.

At this point, a methodological disclosure is also due. In terms of methodology, or rather a broader intellectual context, recovering and reconstructing an intellectual project of what I call Talmud (without the the) from a specific historical instance of its emergence in fifteenth-century Spain is a task less historical in nature than philological. By philology, I mean both the empirical philological-historical analysis of rabbinic texts in the sense of I. N. Epstein and their critical reading in the sense of Nietzsche. Unlike the philology in the first sense, the philology in the second sense involves anthropological considerations raised by Nietzsche as well as by Hermann Cohen and Martin Heidegger. Even if these two traditions of philology have hitherto been disconnected, in this study of the intellectual tradition of Talmud they must work together. In a way, this book is also an answer to the question of why that is so.

The book complements already existing philological-historical and cultural approaches to the traditions of the Talmud and philosophy with a rigorous anthropological, ontological, and Talmudic inquiry. Intrinsically interdisciplinary in nature, the book holds appeal for scholars of the Talmud on the one hand and those of philosophy and rhetorical/critical theory on the other. Addressing such disconnected and even mutually remote audiences together makes it speak to a much broader readership. Yet this also defines what the book is not. Not a work in cultural history, it nevertheless appeals to readers interested in the history of ideas, although, due to its methodological orientation, it does not specifically make any cultural-historical claims. While it entertains historical-philosophical contexts, engaged, among other works, in Martin Kavka’s recent Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy,² the present book is not a historical-philosophical analysis of the intellectual tradition of Talmudic learning; much less is it a direct contribution to the history of philosophy, either Jewish or general. Instead, it takes its subject beyond the limits of either philosophy or its history.

The book directs itself to a broader readership of the scholars of Jewish studies, Jewish thought, and philosophy, as well as to readers interested in the theory and history of Talmudic interpretation. It also addresses the broader realms of religious studies and philosophy, both medieval/early-modern philosophy and contemporary Continental philosophy.

PART ONE

What Is Talmud?

ONE

What Is Talmud?

My argument arises in the space opened by the seemingly innocent omission of a grammatical article from a complicated question with a long history: What is Talmud?—not What is the Talmud? The question What is the Talmud? of course has received many answers, and I am not going to add to them. Within the diversity of the approaches to the Talmud we will see two distinct, but not mutually exclusive, types: the Talmud as an object and the Talmud as an origin. Instead of following these approaches, however, I will rethink the question itself and attempt to isolate a new layer, a layer in which Talmud is not only a book or a traditional source, but a rationality of a unique kind, explainable only if it is both carefully correlated with and differentiated from other types of rationality known in the history of the West.

I will begin by mapping a variety of answers already given to the question What is the Talmud? In most of these approaches the question What is the Talmud? has not been asked explicitly, since any answer seemed merely axiomatic and thus definitive for any given approach. Yet we will soon be interrogating these axiomatic answers by relating them to a new question, one that will prove more serious than a mere call for axioms.

I start from the view on the Talmud offered in the work and thought of the Gaon Rabbi Eliyahu (the GRA), also known as the Vilna Gaon1 ¹ (1720–1797 C.E.), the intellectual leader of the movement of mithnagdim that formed at the end of the eighteenth century and became very important and influential during at least the two following centuries. However, in what follows, I will map the views on the Talmud typologically, rather than chronologically, and rather than in terms of the specific names associated with the question of the Talmud in its intellectual history. This is not to say that chronology is abandoned, but that the names here are only synecdoches or landmarks for different views of the Talmud, views not found exclusively in the work of any given representative.

The Vilna Gaon’s view on the Talmud originates from a project of emending the printed Talmudic texts based mainly on considerations of his own and others’ intellectual experience of Talmudic learning. What this means, however, is that at the end of the project of its emendation, the Talmud emerges as a book on the shelf, rationally emended and now ready for the scholarly enterprise of learning.

Approximately a century later this goal was met by the publication by the widow and brothers Romm of the Babylonian Talmud with the GRA’s emendations, followed by the reception of this edition as the Talmud in the world of yeshivas, or modern Jewish religious academies. It became the book on their shelves, the traditional given. Thereafter, the question What is the Talmud? was closed by a simple act of opening the book. From then on, the learners of the Talmud would try to take the book further only through an ongoing process of learning. In looking at the Talmud as an emended book on the shelf, no historical distance between the book and its learner was conceivable.

In the nineteenth century, the Vilna Gaon’s view on the Talmud won another continuation. Because of the pan-European process of emancipation, including the emancipation of Jews from the ghetto, another view of the Talmud as a book came into being. Inspired by the new concept of culture, coined, at least in the Jewish context, by the philosophy of neo-Kantianism,the Talmud was viewed as a cultural artifact, a historical source, a book that, although belonging to late antiquity, could now be rethought as a cultural source, or at least one of the cultural sources, for Kant’s religion of reason.² The book of the Talmud therefore became historically distanced as a source. The Talmud became a source for Jewish culture, as it did for Hermann Cohen in his project of the Sources (Quellen) and in his accounts of the Talmudic ethics in Die Naechste,³ or as in Bialik’s transformation of the Talmud into a source of Jewish folklore. In accord with the principles of cultural emancipation, this source was seen as universally and openly accessible to every human being, Jews and non-Jews, but also had a particularity. Its particularity was important for the universalistic legitimization of the Jewish tradition under the title of a specific culture—Jewish culture. In the cultural project of emancipation, the Talmud thus emerged as a book, an object, but this time less empirical and more historical: a historical and cultural source for the Kantian universalistic religion of reason.

However, the neo-Kantian, cultural-historical, universalistic view of the Talmud as a book had not only a philosophical manifestation, but a philological one as well. This time the Talmud emerged not as a cultural source, but rather as a cultural-historical object, belonging only and exclusively to its authentic historical period, late antiquity—a moment in the inner past of Western culture. In the works of Leopold Zunz,⁴ Abraham Geiger,⁵ and other pioneers of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the nineteenth century, the Talmud was, again self-evidently, seen as a book, although not as a real, empirical book, as in the mithnagdic tradition, but rather as a historically relative book that needed a correct historical interpretation. If the Talmud pertained to any philosophy, then it did so to only one: the philosophy of late antiquity, not to that of Kant. Julius Guttman’s project of Jewish philosophy ⁶ and Efraim Elimelech Urbach’s The Sages⁷ are representative of such an approach.

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the classical project of the Wissenschaft des Judentums reached a new stage, marked by the discovery of Talmudic manuscripts as a new object for scholarship. Since the work of Raphael Nathan Nata Rabinovicz,⁸ research aimed at establishing the right version of the Talmud by comparing different manuscripts and early printed editions of it. The discovery of these manuscripts changed the previous way of thinking of the Talmud as either a traditionally given book or a culturally attainable object or source. This discovery caused a transformation of the empirically given book into an ideal book, to be reached through the scientific comparison of Talmudic manuscripts, no longer through a traditional intratextual hermeneutics. This scientific project was to result, if not in a monolithic text, then at least in a scientifically correct description of a variable model of its transmission. Again, unlike the practice of traditional scholars of the Talmud in the era before printing, and unlike the practice of the followers of the Vilna Gaon, this was a turn from what became a merely intratextual hermeneutics of the Talmud to the scientific analysis of it through the texts of the manuscripts, not through their hermeneutical content.

Yet despite the differences among the three projects of the Talmud— the traditional (mithnagdic), the cultural-philosophical, and the scientificphilological—the answer to the question What is the Talmud? remained self-evident. The Talmud was envisioned as an object, either in the form of a book, ideal or even real, or in the form of the same book taken as a cultural source. All three projects—rational emendation, cultural-philosophical actualization, and philological historicization—envisioned the Talmud as an object of science, tradition, or culturally oriented philosophy. Emphasizing the common feature of all three modern views on the Talmud, I will generically call them the project of objectification.

The second overall approach to the Talmud views it as an origin of the practical law, halakha. As such a source, the Talmud would always remain important, but nevertheless would be replaced by a rational codification of the practical law, for example in Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a twelfth-century codex of practical law, or in Joseph Habiba’s Nimuqe Yosef,⁹ a fifteenth-century recomposition of the Talmud, or Caro’s Shulkhan Arukh,¹⁰ a sixteenth-century codex that freed the Talmud from anything not leading directly to what was established as the practical law. However, such a substitution for the Talmud by a rational codification meant leaving the Talmud in the past and thus also making it into an object: if not into a book, then into an origin to be substituted by another object, the rational codex of the law. To highlight the most important feature of this process, it may be called a rationalistic departure from the original Talmud. Such a departure already can be found in the period of the Rishonim (lit: the first, those who were the intellectual and social leaders of the Jewish rabbinic communities approximately from the years 1000 to 1500 C.E.) or even earlier, in 987 C.E., in the work of Rav Sherira Gaon,¹¹ for whom the Talmud was already clearly so much a product of the past that he felt a need to undertake the reconstruction of the intra-Talmudic order of generations of the scholars—sages and masters—who were its producers.

At the same time, the departure from the Talmud for the sake of a rational replacement led to an intellectual compensation. Thus, Rabbenu Chananel (d. 1055 C.E.) envisioned the Talmud as an object, in principle replaceable by a periphrastic, linear, and self-sufficient interpretation of it. In a different way, Rashi (1040–1105 C.E.) offered not a replacement, but rather a commentary in which the Talmud is no longer replaced by any paraphrase, but rather subjected to what Israel Ta-Shma ¹² called emphatic commentary, aimed at making the reading of the Talmud a rationally linear process, without, however, attempting to replace the original with anything else. Through his emphatic commentary Rashi also protects the reader from misleading interpretations and, as a result, the Talmud became rationally accessible for a linear reading. The effect of Rashi’s commentary was that the Talmud was no longer an irrational conglomerate of discussions, but rather a reading, although dispersed in its form, still complying with reason without any substitutions. A culmination of this process can be found in the followers of the school of Rashi, the Masters of the Tosfoth (1110–1328 C.E.), who saw the Talmud as a giant, weblike, but harmonic argument, seemingly dispersed in its form, yet strictly rationally coherent in its content.

Again, despite the variety of medieval or early modern rationalistic approaches to the Talmud, without any question it emerged as a traditional given of the past—the origin, which therefore had to undergo a process of rationalization. One result of this process was the substitution of the Talmud by either a rational code or a paraphrase. Alternatively, the rationalizations led to a rationalistic commentary by turning the Talmud into a linear reading or even into a harmonic whole.

Despite all the differences between the overall medieval/early modern rationalistic views of the Talmud as an origin and the modern view of it as a book, in both the Talmud invariably emerged as an object—either an origin a book. There is, however, another way of looking at the Talmud, in which it intrinsically relates to a more fundamental question: What is Talmud? This option is represented in R. I. Canpanton’s The Ways of the Talmud,¹³ a fifteenth-century work that strongly defined Talmudic learning for at least two centuries thereafter, and that indirectly affected other developments in Talmudic learning. Canpanton’s influence was so unquestionably strong that for many centuries, his principles of Talmudic learning were considered so intrinsic to the Talmud itself that Canpanton’s views were no longer related either to his name or to his time.

However, in his work the question What is the Talmud? became crucial, because the whole of Canpanton’s discourse heavily depended on it. At the very heart of his projects was the idea that to answer the question What is the Talmud? is to put Talmud into equal relationships to the philosophical arts of logic, hermeneutics, and rhetoric. In his work, the Talmud is not only, not even mainly, a book or origin/source, but rather an art, techne, paradigmatically represented or discovered in the original Talmud, but equally found in Rashi, in the Masters of the Tosfoth, and in other commentators. As a result, the Talmudic art—Talmud, without the the—is in no way limited to the Talmud as its origin. As an art or techne, Talmud therefore has to be correlated with other arts, such as logic, hermeneutics, and rhetoric. However, according to Canpanton, it also cannot be reduced to any of them. Talmud thus becomes comparable but not reducible to other classical arts of its rank, such as ars rhetorica or ars logica. The Talmud thus becomes Talmud. It is no longer only a traditional origin or a historical object, but is also a scholarly discipline/art sui generis, strongly interconnected to other disciplines.

In Canpanton’s discourse, the Talmud as traditional origin/historical object becomes indiscernible from Talmud without the, Talmud as a rational art,¹⁴ a type of rationality different in its own kind, thus different from such philosophical arts as logic, rhetoric, or even hermeneutics. However, this indiscernibility is no longer a self-evident answer to the question What is the Talmud? Rather, it teaches us how the critical questioning What is Talmud? with regard to philosophical arts shows not only the main point of Canpanton’s enterprise, but also opens up a new theoretical look at what, following Canpanton, now may be called Talmud. Canpanton’s turn from the Talmud to Talmud must therefore be related not only to Canpanton’s own version of the relations between Talmud and the philosophical arts, but also to a broader realm of research that, although opened up by Canpanton’s precedent, is not necessarily limited to it.

Canpanton teaches us how to seriously and unhurriedly ask the question What is Talmud? without making any answer into an axiom. The most important result of Canpanton’s work is the transition he made from a seemingly obvious and almost rhetorical question—What is the Talmud?—to a much more fundamental and indeed much more crucial question, What is Talmud as a scholarly art, or more generally, as a type of rationality? The most immediate implication of the question What is Talmud? is a change in the disciplinary frame of research. Following Canpanton, we should no longer attempt to bridge the gap between the positive philological science of the Talmud and philosophical analysis of it, but rather think through the relationship between Talmud and philosophy anew. If the question of Talmud is addressed, following the precedent of Canpanton’s linkage between (the) Talmud and logic and rhetoric, we programmatically need to situate the question What is Talmud? with regard to fundamental questions already asked, for example in Kant’s What is Enlightenment? and in Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? as well as in Deleuze’s What is Philosophy? In particular, the clarification of the relationship between Talmud and philosophy must be more radical than any translation of the Talmud into the language of philosophy can afford, all the more so because the stakes of such a clarification can be equally high, not only for the question What is Talmud? but also for the question What is philosophy? What follows both exemplifies the question of Talmud and tests it by analyzing the intellectual relationship of Talmud with both philosophy and philosophy’s classical counterparts, rhetoric and, ultimately, sophistics

TWO

The Talmud in Heidegger’s Aftermath

Just as philosophers have done their best to draw a borderline where traditional wisdom ends and philosophy begins, the rabbis did their best to build a strong boundary between the Talmud and philosophy. The issue goes back to Socrates and to the origins of the Talmud: the philosopher demarcated himself from the Sophists as carefully as the sages demarcated themselves from their fellow philosophers. Both sides were unanimous in their feeling that proximity to each other was dangerous. Moreover, each group excelled in the effort to maximize the distance between them.

Only the crisis of modernity, both in the study of the Talmud and in philosophy, has allowed new light to be shed on this unacknowledged unanimity, almost cooperation, between philosophers and the sages of the Talmud. I refer here not only to the crisis of modernity itself, but also to its reflection in the (mostly Jewish) philosophy of neo-Kantianism, as well as to the anti-Jewish position of Heidegger in opposition to neo-Kantianism. I also will refer to the thought of Heidegger’s students (Jewish and non-Jewish) who disengaged with Heidegger, remaining, nevertheless, controversially connected to his thinking.

The secularization of Christian society and the political emancipation of Eastern European Jews from the ghetto was the context in which the new developments in philosophy and the study of the Talmud occurred. This emancipation was not a single fact of history. Rather, it became an ongoing spiritual, intellectual, and even religious process of liberation that is not over today. The philosophy of neo-Kantianism provided a philosophical vision and intellectual foundation for this emancipation. Neo-Kantianism defended and even made obvious the new, mutually implicated, universalist concepts of culture and of man that made the liberation intellectually viable. By that, I mean that the concept of culture and the concept of a universal human nature that underwrote it contained the power of liberation, regardless of any particular ways in which culture or man might have been defined. Remarkably, these concepts became relevant not only for secularizing Jews, but also for a whole spectrum of new traditional Jewish institutions.¹

In the many scenarios of liberation, the Talmud always played a role—either negative or positive. The Talmud became an issue in the split between academy and the postliberation versions of the traditional Yeshiva. The academy launched the discipline of Talmudic studies, calling it a strict science of the Talmud. As if in response, the Yeshiva developed the traditional Talmud through propagation of the Vilna printed edition, which was reprinted worldwide and then treated as the authentic Talmud to learn in any traditional setting.

The innovative approach of Talmudic science and the traditionalist approach of the postliberation Yeshiva brought about a sharp distinction between Talmudic studies and Talmudic learning, respectively.² It did not seem to matter that the tradition emerged after the innovation, not the other way around. At the same time, the split between Talmudic studies and Talmudic learning does not always have a clear sociological equivalent, because sometimes the competing approaches coexist within the same communities. Moreover, however strict the modern split between Talmudic studies and Talmudic learning may be, it retains a common conceptual ground, expressed most clearly in the philosophy of neo-Kantianism. Humanistic and cultural concepts in the Jewish philosophy of neo-Kantianism, for example in Hermann Cohen, remained relevant for both sides of the split over the Talmud.

Indeed, in academic Talmudic studies, neo-Kantianism is responsible for a concept of culture in which a unified framework is created for the heterogeneous disciplines that study the works of man, such as philology, history, literary analysis, ethnography, and linguistics, under the rubric of cultural studies. Likewise, in the traditional Talmud of the Yeshiva—as we know the traditional Yeshiva today—the neo-Kantian concept of the universal human being underlies the most recent traditional forms of learning and of transforming a student into a harmonic personality or a human being of the Jewish Law³

The split between the Talmud of Talmudic studies and the Talmud of learning is found at the very outset of the academic approach to the Talmud, when the Talmud became an object or entity given to historical, philological, literary, and cultural research⁴. In an outcome that will be interrogated below, the premise that the Talmud is an entity turns the Talmud into a printed book or manuscript or, in a more sophisticated approach, into an original manuscript, a writing that was lost and that is to be found behind the manuscripts at hand.

Within Talmudic studies all the disciplines unanimously portray the traditional approach to the Talmud as anachronistic or ahistorical. Regardless of how exactly one defines culture, this concept always granted researchers and their audiences a way to connect to any tradition in a nontraditional, universalist way. The universal connection via the concept of culture allowed a Jew to connect to his or her own tradition and at the same time to remain universal, being both inside and outside the tradition.

The concept of culture allowed a secularizing Jew who was integrated into a larger society either to connect to his or her tradition symbolically through culture or to remain a Jew only because of anti-Semitism (or even ultimately to become anti-Semitic). The concept of culture allowed Jews to shift their self-identification from being Jews to becoming Jewish. Moreover, the conceptual framework of Jewish culture touched the very concept of Jew, as well. Since the rise of cultural anthropology in the nineteenth century, the empirical—sociological, aesthetic, or ethical—correlate of the concept of culture was an image of an ethnic group, the bearer of a culture. Thus, Jews, whoever they were in other contexts, now became an ethnic group, a bearer of a particular culture, Jewish culture. In this ethnic-cultural framework, a possibility for a split Jewish identity emerged: From now on, a Jew could say, I am an ethnic Jew, and I am also culturally Jewish. However, the conjunction and created a possibility of the disjunction but, as well, as for example, I am an ethnic Jew, but, culturally, I am not Jewish, but German, [or Russian, French, American, or even, sometimes, Israeli]. It may mean also, I am an ethnic Jew, but I dissociate myself from Jewish culture, or even ultimately I am anti-Semitic, as Leo Strauss argued.⁵

Understood as above, the concept of culture creates a historically new political and intellectual space for Jewish existence. Jews now relate to their tradition under a new angle. They treat it as culture. They thus enter not only into a new historical period of their existence, but also, and more importantly, into a new space, the political and intellectual space of culture. Just as that space proves itself independent of any more particular theoretical definitions of the notion of culture, so also the concept of culture proved to exceed any particular theoretical notion or definition of Kultur. I refer here to Kultur as both a notion and a concept. As a concept, Kultur functions both politically and intellectually, regardless of its specific theoretical or practical content. As a notion, it appears in different avatars in a variety of intratheoretical contexts of either philosophical anthropology (Cohen, Windelband, Cassirer) or of historical anthropology (Herder) or even under the name of Bildung (education). In the latter case, for assimilating Jews, it meant a path for both education and acculturation.

However, the notion of culture was not only defined and defended in a great variety of ways, it was also strongly criticized—not only as a theoretical notion, but rather as a concept of power claiming its own political and ontological primacy. This criticism was expressed in 1929 in the famous Davos disputation between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer.⁶ At this time, breaking up with the philosophy of neo-Kantianism, Heidegger argued that the ontological question should come before entering the premises of culture and before accepting the power of this concept. The finite character of Dasein (sometimes interpreted as human being-here) enabled Dasein to gain access to infinite being. The finitude of Dasein is prior to culture and to the commonality of human beings that the concept of culture entails, Heidegger argued. In his view, cultural difference remained metaphysical, stemming from man as general entity, which alone made this difference possible.

The consequences of Heidegger’s argument for Talmudic studies are hard to overestimate. It both denounces the cementing concept of Talmudic studies, culture, and heavily doubts the validity of modern Jewish identities, because the latter depend on this concept. Yet the confrontation of the ontological and cultural arguments (for instance, Heideggerian and neo-Kantian) is not the conceptual question to be resolved. The disagreement is so deep,