Talmud — a life story
The Steinsaltz Talmud (1965-2010)
BThe Talmud (Princeton, £21.95) is an unusual book. It is subtitled, A Biography, and that is exactly what it aspires to be. It tells the life story of the Talmud’s birth, evolution, and cultural and historical significance up to the present (even managing some reflections on Daf Yomi) but not in the conventional way in which most books would choose to do so.
The birth and content of the Talmud is illustrated by a painstakingly exact discussion of two passages of talmudic writing: a piece of halachic reasoning, liability for damage caused by one’s animal spreading a fire; and a wellknown midrash about God holding the mountain itself over the heads of the B’nei Israel at Sinai, to “compel” them to accept the Law.
First, Wimpfheimer traces the details of both discussions, but especially the halachic discussion, in close and fine detail within the talmudic text. His deconstruction of the halachic text in particular is masterful.
His central idea is to distinguish the essential Talmud; the enhanced Talmud (how it was received and elaborated by generations of later commentators); and the emblematic Talmud (how it came to define the very essence of Jewish cultural activity, then and now.)
The subsequent history of the discussions of the two passages in rabbinic literature is used to illustrate the idea of the Talmud’s elaboration. To be sure, the Talmud had its detractors, both Christian and Jewish (early Chasidism, The Haskalah, Reform, secular Zionists). But each of those groups had eventually to come to some understanding of and accommodation with the centrality of Talmud, meaning now the whole corpus of Rabbinic Judaism.
Wimpfheimer’s book, especially in its early pages in which it describes and explains the detailed analyses by the various contributors in the Gemara to the halachic debate about fire liability, does not make for easy reading. It is dense in places.
But it manages to be more or less jargon-free, explaining necessary technical terms clearly, and can be read outside the classroom as well as within. It is, in short, a very good book.
DAVID RUBEN
It explains necessary technical terms clearly