What is Talmud?
Judaism in Five Minutes - Sarah Imhoff
Sara Ronis [+]
St Mary's University, Texas
Sara Ronis is associate professor of Theology at St. Mary’s University, Texas. She holds a Ph.D. in ancient Judaism specializing in the Talmud from Yale University and a B.A. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University. Her research interests include rabbinic subjectivity and definitions of personhood, constructions of gender and authority in rabbinic literature, and rabbinic imaginings of and encounters with the other in late antiquity. She is the author of Demons in the Details: Demonic Discourse and Rabbinic Culture in Late Antique Babylonia (University of California Press 2022).
Description
The Talmud is a body of discussions of the text of the Mishnah together with other traditional teachings, biblical interpretations, and legal discussions produced by the rabbis of Sasanian Babylonia. Compiled over hundreds of years, the Talmud reads as an extensive intergenerational discussion and debate over every aspect of late antique Jewish life. Though in the medieval period, the Talmud was the subject of antisemitic discourse. It remains the foundational rabbinic text for Jewish law and practice today. New translations and new media are spurring a wider engagement with the Talmud across a broader swath of the Jewish world.