Christine Hayes
Senior Fellow: May–July 2020 –– DEFERRED
Research Project: The Rabbis as Jesters and the Truth Wars of Antiquity
This research employs Leszek Kolakowski’s figure of the jester to argue that the dominant voice in classical talmudic literature (from the second to the seventh centuries CE) expresses an aversion to dogmatic truth claims of various kinds. It documents rabbinic opposition to a range of dogmatic epistemological positions: the positive absolutism of truth-centred rationalist philosophy, ontological realism, and empiricism, as well as the negative absolutism of relativism and nihilism. Christine Hayes argues that against these absolutisms and their associated claims to epistemological certainty, the rabbis deploy the destabilising strategies of play, including not only humour, but also, and specifically, excess. She further argues that the jester’s voice is not confined to non-legal texts; every developed legal argument of the Talmud is an exercise in (serious) play designed precisely to prevent dogmatic certainty in the realm of halakhah, for the rabbinic “jester” stood vigilant against the absolutist within as much as the absolutist without. Against the philosophers’ static “one” and the sophists’ equally static but nihilistic “none,” rabbinic scepticism imagined a dynamic world of manifold particulars that allows neither moral and epistemological certainty nor nihilism. Methodologically, my work is deeply informed by recent scholarship on play theory, humour theory, and the epistemological function of detail in both ancient and contemporary theories of knowledge.
Christine Hayes is the Weis Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University.