Overview

Comprised of debates among the rabbis of late antiquity in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.), the Talmud has provided the basis for Jewish ethical and practical norms for centuries. It is also an extremely long and forbiddingly difficult work that has accumulated countless commentaries just as complex over the ages. A recent translation with extensive notes has made it more accessible to English-language readers, but the textual difficulties remain. This volume looks at the tractate Horayot (Decisions), page by page, and offers a modern commentary with doses of humor and comparative examples in an effort to both explain and humanize the text and make it even more accessible to contemporary readers. The central focus concerns how to adjudicate cases when the governing body, the Sanhedrin, incorrectly designates certain practices legal and people follow the erroneous advice as a result.

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9780761861317

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Joshua A. Fogel is Canada Research Chair in the Department of History at York University. His previous work has focused primarily on the cultural relations between China and Japan over the past two centuries. His most recent works include Daily Reflections on Idolatry: Reading Tractate Avodah Zarah of the Babylonian Talmud (Hamilton Books, 2012); Japanese Historiography and the Gold Seal of 57 C.E.: Relic, Text, Object, Fake (Brill, 2013); Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time (Harvard University Press, 2009); and Czernowitz at 100: The First Yiddish Language Conference in Historical Perspective (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), co-edited with Kalman Weiser.

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