Boyarin, Daniel
Senior Fellow: July–August 2023
Research Project: Talmudic Scepticism
Daniel Boyarin will work on two projects during his fellowship. The first will deal with the Babylonian Talmud as a sceptical work, including discussions of the virtual refusal to provide or even endorse solutions to outstanding problems in Jewish law or thought within that work. This aspect of the Talmud will be considered in the light of texts such as the Dissoi Logoi and Sophist thought more generally. Another aspect of this project will focus on the Menippean satire in the Talmud as bearing an inner critique of the foundations of the rabbinic search for the good, the true, and even the beautiful. The second project will deal with the Midrash as sceptical hermeneutics. Christian writers from Paul to Origen and beyond characterise the rabbinic enterprises of biblical interpretation as refusing true interpretation by eschewing the Son (who alone knows the Father) and/or the Logos as the guide to that Truth. This project seeks to take up this theme, taking it seriously as a good reading of the rabbis and describing midrash as a hermeneutics of the opacity of the text and thus leading necessarily (as Origen already saw) to a sceptical hermeneutics of the uninterpretable text. Rabbinic alternatives to interpretation will also be discussed, such as the use of narratives to go alongside other narratives (the mashal).
Daniel Boyarin is Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor (emeritus) of Talmudic Culture at the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, USA.