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The first reading of rabbinic Judaism argues that rabbinic texts promote peace. In the wake of failed rebellions against Rome, the rabbis rejected violence. They claimed that these events came about because of the sins of the Jewish people. The rabbis thus instructed their followers to focus on leading pious lives. Only in the messianic era would Israel’s enemies be defeated, and at that time only God would wage war. The second reading of rabbinic Judaism argues that rabbinic Judaism promotes violence. The desire to do violence to non-Jews is alive and well in rabbinic texts; it is just that the rabbis recognized that they could not act on that desire. They therefore spoke about war as something that either belonged in the distant past or had to be postponed to the distant future. Thus, they celebrated past wars against the Canaanites and the Amalekites and looked forward to the defeat of God’s enemies in the future messianic era.

This introductory chapter argues that not only the emerging Christianity drew on contemporary Judaism but that rabbinic Judaism, too, tapped into ideas and concepts of Christianity to shape its own identity. Common wisdom has it that belief in the unity and uniqueness of God has been one of the firmly established principles of Jewish faith since time immemorial. The emerging Christian sect set out to elaborate the notion of the one and only God in terms of first a binitarian and then a trinitarian theology—that is, they took the decisive step to include God's Son in the godhead, this followed by the inclusion of a third divine figure, the Holy Spirit. The rabbis were certainly aware of such developments and responded to them. The rabbinic literature has preserved a wealth of sources that portray the rabbis as engaged in a dialogue with people who present views that run counter to the accepted or imagined rabbinic norm system.

This book is part of a lifelong effort to make sense of two of the strangest and most difficult, and yet most formative and inspirational aspects of life: fasting and asceticism in rabbinic culture. Chapter 1 outlines that rabbinic Judaism does in fact contain ascetic elements, but that the asceticism of rabbinic Judaism is significantly different from that of Christianity in that it is largely incidental and instrumental rather than essential and that the two could co-exist. Chapter 2 examines the beliefs in theological principle and their implications for the rabbinic pursuit or avoidance of pleasure. Chapter 3 surveys the use of terms in the rabbinic corpus and evaluates what this usage implies about rabbinic asceticism. It is suggested in chapter 4 that fasting is the post-destruction substitute for its biblical predecessor, the Nazirite. Lastly, Chapter 5 explores the differences in attitude toward fasting, and perhaps toward active ascetic behavior in general, between the rabbis of the Land of Israel and those of Babylonia.

Judaism has been opposed to celibacy because marriage was a normal condition and a divine ordinance. The Jewish tradition provides evidence of exceptions to the rule against celibacy among marginal sects, such as the Therapeutrides, Essences, and Qumran community. There were even exceptions made by Rabbinic Judaism associated with Torah study.

This chapter compares Avot's chain of transmission to the succession lists of the early Christian church. It continues the exploration of the wide historical context for Avot by focusing on Christianity. Christianity emerged as a sister religion to rabbinic Judaism during the early Common era, and the relationship between rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity suggests that the early Christian experience may harbor instructive counterparts to Avot. The comparison of Avot's chain of transmission to Christian succession lists suggests that both rabbis and proto-orthodox Christians employed the same literary genre, within the context of two distinct evolutionary histories and in pursuit of some similar political strategies. While God is ever present in the Christian scene, he has essentially been replaced by Torah in the rabbinic setting.

The Epilogue shares personal reflection on the practical ramifications of this study. Most important, if violent and peaceful readings of Judaism are both possible, can Judaism provide Jews with guidance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? The argument is made that guidance can indeed be found in the pragmatism of rabbinic Judaism that allowed Jews to survive and thrive for centuries. Pragmatism should encourage Jews to adopt a two-state solution that is in line with the peaceful reading of Judaism. Also shared here are personal, empirical reflections on relationships with non-Jews, Muslims, and Arabs that strengthen the argument for a peaceful understanding of Judaism.

Introduces key technical terms referring to the composition and transmission of oral tradition, and proposes a general theoretical model for studying the various elements of Jewish oral tradition in particular. The most important technical terms are: “oral‐literary tradition” (defined as “verbal products of a culture that have pretensions beyond everyday speech”); “oral‐performative tradition” (defined as “the sum of performative strategies” for transmitting the content of oral‐literary tradition); and “text‐interpretive tradition” (defined as “the body of interpretive understandings that arise from multiple performances of a text”). The theoretical model of oral tradition employed here enables studies of the interrelationships among three dimensions of Jewish oral tradition: the textual substance of the tradition, the social settings for its transmission, and, most importantly, the ideological system by which the texts of oral tradition are represented. For rabbinic Judaism, the concept of Torah in the Mouth and the description of the earliest rabbinic text (the Mishnah) as repeated tradition are the crucial ideological elements under study.

As Ra‘anan Boustan observes, sacrificial cult remained the dominant paradigm for religious piety among Jews and Christians, despite the absence of sacrificial practices in both contexts. Reinvigorated in discourses of martyrdom, blood remained a charged site of discursive contact, ritual contestation and exegetical competition. Comparing two contemporaneous narratives from late antiquity, rabbinic accounts of the death of Zechariah the prophet and the Story of the Ten Martyrs, Boustan observes that sublimated violence, while relevant to both texts, cannot explain the attitudes adopted to sacrificial practice. In retellings of the story of Zechariah, human and animal victims fail to provide the redemption Israel needs. By contrast, in the Story of the Ten Martyrs, heroic rabbis are represented as sacrificial victims who willingly lay down their lives to atone for Israel’s sin. Quite different in their approach, these texts nevertheless participate in a common project of wresting control over the meaning and function of righteous human blood in the context of an increasingly hegemonic Roman-Christian culture.

This chapter examines several other major learned or religious traditions that flourished during the First Millennium, with particular emphasis on their maturation through exegesis of and commentary on authoritative texts. It first considers Roman law, a tradition rooted in pre-First Millennium, non-monotheistic Antiquity, before discussing rabbinic Judaism, patristic Christianity, and Islam. The goal is to consolidate the argument that the First Millennium was the source not only of the three great texts that have most deeply molded Eurasian civilization (the Christian Bible, the Justinianic code, and the Qur'āan), but also of the exegetical traditions through which these often recalcitrant books were transformed into usable public doctrine.

The ethnic identity of ancient Israelites was constructed in opposition to Gentile, or alien, “others” and was expressed in terms of purity and impurity. Different constructions of Jewish identity entailed different characterizations of aliens and different views on the degree to which Gentiles might acquire Israelite identity. Previous scholarship, which assumes that all ancient Jews viewed Gentiles as ritually impure and thus off‐limits, is reviewed and critiqued. There are, in fact, several distinct modes of impurity (ritual impurity, moral impurity, genealogical impurity) employed by various groups of ancient Jews, and the boundary between pure Israelite and impure alien was more or less permeable depending on the mode of impurity attributed to the alien. These different assessments of the permeability of the boundary between Jews and Gentiles are connected with widely different attitudes to the postexilic phenomena of conversion and intermarriage, and contributed to the sectarianism that characterized Second Temple Judaism as well as the eventual separation of Christianity from rabbinic Judaism.

In the wake of the Destruction rose a new class of Jewish leadership in the rabbis. This chapter discusses the emergence and dominance of Rabbinic Judaism and its sacred literature after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce. The trauma of destruction encouraged the new leadership to develop a different approach toward dealing with conflicts between Jews and Gentiles.

This chapter examines the current state of research into mishnah, the first major work of rabbinic Judaism. It explains that the mishnah is primarily an edited anthology of brief and often elliptical pronouncements on matters of Jewish law and practice, frequently providing conflicting views on the individual matters discussed. It discusses the six sedarim of the mishnah and mentions that the mishnah frequently digresses from its main topics at every level of the organisational hierarchy.

This chapter examines the origins of Jewish mysticism and the Hekhalot liteature. The findings do not confirm the trend in modern scholarship which locates the origins of Jewish mysticism in the Qumran literature and wishes to see an unbroken chain of distinctly mystical ideas leading from Qumran through rabbinic Judaism to the Hekhalot literature. The result also suggests that the category of mysticism has proved to be a dubious one mainly because of scholars' tendency to insert the notion of unio mystica into the ancient texts.

This chapter examines the rabbinic Judaism from the Palestinian context. It suggests that it is not possible to provide any unambiguous framework which will offer clues to the context, or contexts, in which the extraordinary corpus of rabbinic works was composed. It concludes that the composition of the rabbinic literature could only take place in a society marked by a complex interplay of beliefs, ethnic identities and languages and identifies the most common points of reference in Jewish religious writing.