Diversity and Rabbinization: Jewish Texts and Societies between 400 and 1000 CE
About this ebook
This volume is dedicated to the cultural and religious diversity in Jewish communities from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Age and the growing influence of the rabbis within these communities during the same period. Drawing on available textual and material evidence, the fourteen essays presented here, written by leading experts in their fields, span a significant chronological and geographical range and cover material that has not yet received sufficient attention in scholarship.
The volume is divided into four parts. The first focuses on the vantage point of the synagogue; the second and third on non-rabbinic Judaism in, respectively, the Near East and Europe; the final part turns from diversity within Judaism to the process of "rabbinization" as represented in some unusual rabbinic texts.
Diversity and Rabbinization is a welcome contribution to the historical study of Judaism in all its complexity. It presents fresh perspectives on critical questions and allows us to rethink the tension between multiplicity and unity in Judaism during the first millennium CE.
L’École Pratique des Hautes Études has kindly contributed to the publication of this volume.
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About the author
Gavin McDowell (PhD, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2017) is a membre régulier spécial of the Institut d’études anciennes et médiévales at Université Laval (Québec). His doctoral thesis examined the relationship between the rabbinic Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and two cognate works, the Second Temple Book of Jubilees and the Syriac Cave of Treasures. He is currently working on a project entitled ‘Old Testament Saints: The Pseudepigrapha as Hagiography’. His research interests include the reception of biblical, deuterocanonical, and parabiblical literature within Judaism and Christianity.
Ron Naiweld (PhD, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2009) is a researcher at the CNRS and a member of the Centre de Recherches Historiques in Paris, France. A historian of rabbinic Judaism, he is particularly interested in the history of rabbinic discourse and its spread among Jews. Among his publications are a book about the ethics of the self in the Talmud, Les antiphilosophes. Pratiques de soi et rapport à la loi dans la littérature rabbinique (2011), and another about the history of biblical myth, Histoire de Yahvé. La fabrique d’un mythe occidental (2019).
Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (PhD, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2001) is Professor of Hebrew and Aramaic Language, Literature, Epigraphy, and Paleography (4th century BCE–4th century CE) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL, in Paris and member of the research center Archéologie et philologie de l’Orient et de l’Occident (UMR 8546). His research focuses on early rabbinic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish-Christian relations, and Computational and Digital Humanities. His publications include The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity (2003), Qumran(
