Abstract
AbstractThis chapter explores the diverse manifestations of lists in rabbinic texts of late antiquity and their complex strategies of structuring, producing, and conveying knowledge through lists. The discussion is embedded within a broader perspective on lists as didactic and epistemic tools within ancient cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. I argue that lists play an important role in the production of knowledge in premodern Jewish culture. The following examples aim to demonstrate that in Talmudic medical discourse, in legal prescriptions, in exegetical and in ethical midrashic texts, lists function as a versatile “epistemic form.” Lists shaped the rabbinic collections of law and lore that functioned simultaneously as cultural inventories, store houses of knowledge, and practical reference works. They thus facilitate the transfer of knowledge of the world and of the body into the world of the rabbinic study house and eventually into the quasi-canonical Talmudic corpus, an encyclopedic body of knowledge.
Funder
European Research Council
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Reference80 articles.
1. Abrams, Judith Z. 1998. Judaism and Disability: Portrayals in Ancient Texts from the Tanach Through the Bavli. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
2. Adelman, Rachel. 2009. The Return Return of the Repressed: Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha. Brill: Leiden.
3. Belknap, Robert. 2000. The Literary List: A Survey of Its Uses and Deployments. Literary Imagination 2 (1): 35–54.
4. Belser, Julia W., and Lennart Lehmhaus. 2016. Disability in Rabbinic Judaism. In Disability in Antiquity, ed. Christian Laes, 434–452. London/New York: Routledge.
5. Bernard, Daniel. 2008. Listing and Enlisting: The Rhetoric and Social Meaning of Tractate Avot. PhD dissertation, Concordia University, Montreal.