Welcome to Part Six of the project “Interviewing Religion,” where I interview scholars of Middle Eastern religions about their research, discuss how their work connects to broader public issues, and ask for suggestions for further reading. [You can read the other interviews here!] A huge thank you to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Luce Foundation, who supported my work with one of their Advancing Public Scholarship Grants. I couldn’t have launched this project without their assistance.
For my sixth interview, I’m excited to introduce Dr. Sarit Kattan Gribetz. Gribetz is an associate professor in the Theology Department at Fordham University. Her areas of research and teaching include rabbinic literature, the history of Jews in the Roman Empire, the city of Jerusalem, conceptions of time and time-keeping, and gender and sexuality. I love the breadth of her work — which covers everything from the gendered history of Jerusalem, to the concept of time in rabbinic literature, and the history of the Babylonian Talmud in South Korea.
I recently spoke to Gribetz, who graciously answered a few questions about her research and publications. I encourage you to get a copy of her book Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, read her other work, and check out the great resources she mentions here.
1) How did you first get interested in studying rabbinic texts and their conceptions of time and gender?
Gribetz: There are several ways I could narrate how I came to work on the topic of time. In the prologue of my book, Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, I share my personal experiences growing up with two sets of times – one Middle Eastern and one European – and how familiarity between two traditions of timekeeping helped me to notice the role that time plays in the formation of identity, community, and difference both in the current world and in our ancient sources.
The book examines the corpus of rabbinic literature, a set of works composed by rabbis in the Roman Galilee and Sasanian Babylonia between 200-600 C.E., and how these generations of rabbis thought about, organized, and used time. I found that while we often think about time as something that exists or passes, time is also used as a tool or mechanism to accomplish certain things. In many cases, individuals and communities use time – including calendars, holidays, daily schedules, conception of the origins of the world or the end of the world, and so on – to both unify and divide themselves and others.
My work on conceptions of time and gender emerged out of this broader interest in understanding how time works. I noticed that, among the many realms of life and practice that they address, rabbinic sources foreground instructions for performing rituals and reciting prayers, but that some of these obligations were gendered. Certain morning and evening prayers were presented as men’s practices, while other morning and evening rituals were framed as women’s practices. I began to wonder: what impact did these daily practices have on how the rabbinic community constructed and conceived of gendered difference? I was interested in understanding how the rabbis used time to create gender, and how gender in turn impacted experiences of time for different members of this community. These are some of the questions I try to answer in my book.
2) You’ve been asked to present your work at a local community center. How would you describe your research on rabbinic literature?
Gribetz: The corpus of rabbinic literature encompasses texts composed by groups of rabbis who lived in Roman Galilee and Sasanian Babylonia in the first half of the first millennium. The Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic composition, was compiled in the early third century CE. It consists of six “Orders” that are further subdivided into “Tractates,” “Chapters,” and individual “Mishnayot.” The tractates include laws, stories, interpretations, and other traditions about the calendar and holidays, agricultural and charity practices, marriage and family practices, civil law, purity and sacrificial rituals, and discussions related to the temple.
The Tosefta, another early rabbinic text fairly contemporaneous with the Mishnah, is quite similar in its organization, content, and style. Other rabbinic compositions from this period include biblical commentaries (called “midrashim”) on the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Later rabbinic sources include the Palestinian Talmud (also known as the Yerushalmi) and Babylonian Talmud (also known as the Bavli), which both function as extended commentaries of the Mishnah, each composed in a different context, the former in the land of Israel and the latter in Babylonia. Additional midrashim, including on the book of Genesis and other biblical books, were composed in this period and later as well.
The Babylonian Talmud, in particular, came to occupy a central place in Jewish communal life in the centuries that followed its composition, to this day. Its complex discussions – filling 2,711 folios in the printed edition typeset by the Widom Romm and Brothers in Vilna in the late nineteenth century and used ever since – were and continue to be studied in yeshivot and religious seminaries. Its laws were debated, developed, adapted, and adopted, and its ideas guided Jewish thought and practice. The Babylonian Talmud, along with the entire rabbinic corpus as well as adjacent sources, have also been studied in academic contexts since the establishment of Wissenschaft des Judentums (a movement devoted to the critical study of Judaism, founded in the nineteenth century) and, more recently, in academic departments of Religious Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Culture, Literature, and Law in universities.
Scholars who work on these texts are interested in numerous different dimensions. Some scholars focus on the history of their composition or their literary and philological dimensions. Others seek to situate them historically, culturally, and linguistically, or use them to shed light on the context from which they emerged and to which they contributed. Yet others are interested in how they contribute to legal or political theory, critical theories, philosophy, or theology. And so on. In my work, I experiment with different ways of reading these texts, and I am particularly drawn to interdisciplinary work, for example thinking about the conceptual dimensions of a text in terms of social history and how the two might intersect in counterintuitive ways.
3) You are now writing about the gendered history of Jerusalem. How did you become interested in that topic?
Gribetz: For the past decade, I have taught an undergraduate seminar on the history of Jerusalem. The course, titled “Jerusalem: Jewish, Christian, Muslim Perspectives,” explores the history of the city from our earliest archaeological sources until today, with a focus on the significance of Jerusalem to diverse religious communities. Each time I teach the course, I am amazed by how many women I kept meeting in the sources, and how focusing on the gendered dimension of Jerusalem’s history has transformed my understanding of the city.
The history of Jerusalem is usually told as a story about King David, Emperor Constantine, and Sultan Salah ad-Din – that is, as the history of a city that was founded, built, and ruled by powerful men. Throughout its history, however, from antiquity through the medieval and modern periods, the city of Jerusalem has been built, ruled, mourned, visited, and populated by women. Jerusalem’s women have served as key agents literarily, theologically, architecturally, and politically. Moreover, Jerusalem is often personified as a woman and depicted in feminine terms, a common trope throughout the literary corpus (e.g., in biblical sources, apocalyptic literature, Crusader texts, Fada’il al-Quds, and modern Israeli and Palestinian fiction), providing important angles through which to explore how constructions of gender so profoundly shaped historical and theological conceptualizations of the city.
Yet despite the fact that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women have participated in every aspect of Jerusalem’s history, in every chronological period, women’s contributions and the role of gender are rarely foregrounded in accounts of the city’s history. I thus decided to write a book, Jerusalem: A Feminist History, which retells the history of Jerusalem with a focus on the city’s women and from a feminist historical perspective.
The region of Jerusalem is once again in the midst of war and turmoil, and as I continue to research its long and complicated history I have been constantly thinking about the city’s residents and their diverse communities. I hope that one day there will be peace.
4) Tell me about your recent projects and publications. Which works are your favorites and why?
Gribetz: I am currently writing a book about a first-century queen, Helena of Adiabene, and how she has been remembered in a variety of contexts for the past two millennia. In his twenty-book history of the Jews, titled Antiquities of the Jews, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius tells the story of Helena of Adiabene’s conversion to Judaism and her pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I did not set out to write a book about this figure. She was a character I began exploring for my feminist history of Jerusalem and whose story became more fascinating as I kept learning more about her. One thing led to another: a footnote turned into a sentence, which soon became a paragraph, an article, and eventually a book proposal.
I have loved spending my time discovering how this second temple era queen from northern Mesopotamia was reimagined in early Christian sources, rabbinic texts, medieval Jewish-Christian polemics, modern Jewish historiography and popular literature, and archaeological research. The book concludes with a chapter about the history of Rehov Heleni ha-Malka (Queen Helena Street), a street located in the heart of Jerusalem that is named after this queen. I am so grateful to be working on this project and can’t wait to share my book with readers soon.
Two articles I published a few years ago bring me particular joy. And I did not set out to write either of them! Rather, the topics found me, and then I became so enthralled by them that I couldn’t let go, falling down the rabbit hole – and eventually far past the rabbit, too.
The first, “Women as Readers of the Nag Hammadi Codices,” was published in the Journal of Early Christian Studies in 2018. This article analyzes a collection of ancient non-canonical texts that were translated from Greek into Coptic and then bound into a set of books, known as the Nag Hammadi codices, in fourth- or fifth-century Egypt. Most studies have assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that the codices’ primary readers were men—either in monastic, scholastic, or other settings. This article proposes that, in light of evidence for women’s literacy in the region, we ought to consider that women, too, were among the codices’ readers, even if they weren’t the codices’ primary audience. It then argues that imagining women as among those who might have encountered these texts and read them in these codices matters for our interpretation of the textual collection and how we understand their reception and transmission. The article, in its published form, explores not only historical questions about women’s literacy and access to books in that particular context, but also methodological questions about how we read and interpret ancient sources.
The second article represents two years of research and collaboration with my undergraduate student, Claire Kim. Serendipitously, we found ourselves researching the history of the Babylonian Talmud in South Korea (you can read more about how we started working on this topic here). The research took us to Seoul and San Diego, and I learned so much both about Korean history and culture and also about how Talmudic traditions – and the idea of Talmud – can change in new contexts.
Our article, “The Talmud in Korea: A Study in the Reception of Rabbinic Literature,” was published in the Association for Jewish Studies Review, also in 2018. It is relevant of course to the study of religion and education in Korea and the reception of rabbinic literature in the contemporary world, but also to thinking about how texts and traditions are preserved, transmitted, anthologized, popularized, and transformed more generally. Working with Claire was another wonderful dimension of this project; we have kept in touch, and I have followed Claire’s career in the art world with much excitement.
5) Your neighbor wants to know more about your field. What books, websites, videos, or other resources would you recommend to them? (why?)
Gribetz: One of the most exciting online resources for learning about the academic field of ancient Judaism is the “Ancient Jew Review” digital forum. Founded and run by a team of scholars, the website publishes original articles, book reviews, panels from conferences, publication spotlights, interviews, and other innovative pieces. I love it because each contribution on the site is thought-provoking, accessible, and new. I have shared some of my teaching ideas in AJR’s Pedagogy column (you can find my essays here).
There are also several sites that bridge the academic and non-academic world. On Sefaria.org, readers can find rabbinic sources in their original languages as well as in translation, along with source sheets that curate texts on particular topics and themes. The texts presented on Sefaria are a good place to start, and having such quick and convenient access to them is amazing, though scholars of rabbinic sources rely on manuscripts and critical editions (rather than online editions) when doing their research. TheTorah.com presents academic insights about biblical and ancient Jewish texts and history to general readers in short articles that foreground primary sources and emphasize clarity and accessibility. Recently, I started listening to “The Podcast of Jewish Ideas,” which features interviews with scholars of Jewish Studies who discuss their fields and research.
For those interested in the history of women in antiquity, the podcast Women Who Went Before, hosted by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley, includes 10 episodes, each of which covers a different topic about religion, gender, and the ancient world. I participated in Episode 1 (here), and I appreciated listening to the others. These episodes would also work very well for university courses.
I also want to mention Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies’ YouTube Channel, which features lectures and panels, all of which can be viewed here (full disclosure: I co-direct Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies together with Magda Teter). Other Jewish Studies programs, centers, and libraries also make their campus programs available online and I listen to many of them to keep up with new research. For example, check out the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s videos (all in English) and the National Library of Israel’s offerings (some in English and some in Hebrew).
For those interested in introductory readings about rabbinic literature, Charlotte Fonrobert and Martin Jaffee’s Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, is a good place to start (even though it was published many years ago!). Shaye J. D. Cohen and Hayim Lapin recently published – in collaboration with dozens of scholars – a new translation of the Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic work. The Oxford Annotated Mishnah presents each tractate of the Mishnah with a brief introduction and helpful notes about phrases and passages, making the Mishnah more accessible to new readers. It was just released in paperback. An accompanying volume, titled What is the Mishnah? The State of the Question, edited by Shaye J. D. Cohen, is likewise a good collection of essays that maps out the big questions that scholars have been asking about the Mishnah in recent years. Soon, a similar volume, edited by Christine Hayes and Jay Harris, will be published about the Babylonian Talmud, also by Harvard University Press.
6) How does your research connect to broader public issues? What overlap do you see between the topics you study and contemporary issues around the world today?
Gribetz: This fall, I published a book with my colleague Lynn Kaye titled Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. We wrote this book with students in mind, based on our own experiences teaching and researching the history of time. The first half of the book consists of a series of chapters that Lynn and I wrote about time, and the second half of the book features various essays about time each written by an expert in a different field that delves into a particular idea from that person’s area of research (e.g., biology, dance, literature, and so on).
Lynn and I wrote our portion of the book during the COVID pandemic and in the context of the climate crisis, which gave us the opportunity to reflect on what it means to study time during such unsettling times. The first chapter of the book focuses on contemporary issues: how have experiences, conceptions, and organizations of time changed in recent years, and how do these contemporary contexts help us to think in new ways about time more generally? We analyze all sorts of COVID-related topics and how they shaped pandemic times. We argue that even though time often appears to be natural and universal, the altered sense of time during the pandemic highlighted the extent to which time is always also culturally constructed, historically contingent, socially differentiated, and disciplinarily specific.
In general, my work on time – including my books Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism and Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, as well as other articles I have published along the way – seeks to illuminate something about our world (past and present) that we didn’t know or see before.
I don’t believe, though, that work needs to be about contemporary matters to be relevant today. Understanding the intricacies of an ancient text, object, or community has intrinsic value, too. It’s an expression of curiosity and interest, it requires humility and patience, and it can lead to new insights that are hard to envision in advance. I am often surprised that some of my most “specialist” work about ancient rabbinic texts that does not have any obvious contemporary “relevance” is of most interest to the public. That realization has taught me a lot about not assuming I know what interests or intrigues others, and to follow questions wherever they lead me.
7) What other scholars/writers do you think are doing the most interesting work on religion in Jewish antiquity?
Gribetz: One area of scholarship that has been growing rapidly and changing the way we think about religion in antiquity is research focused on material culture. Karen Stern’s Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity, Rina Talgam’s Mosaics of Faith: Floors of Pagans, Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy Land, and the collection of epigraphy from the land of Israel, titled Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae, edited by a team of scholars, all provide intriguing access to religion and religious communities in antiquity, often through a single image affixed to the floor of a synagogue, a warning scrawled on the wall of a tomb, or an inscription carefully carved onto a building dedication. A.J. Berkowitz’s A Life of Psalms, while focused on the history of a text, draws on the materiality of texts to shed new light on a canonical work and the various ways it was used by ancient practitioners.
Work on ancient magic, including amulets and incantation bowls, has also flourished in recent years. One foundational work on this topic is Gideon Bohak’s Ancient Jewish Magic: A History. Recent scholarship in this field includes Margaretha Folmer and Rivka Elitzur-Leiman’s “A Jewish Aramaic Circus Curse Tablet from Antioch,” explorations by Avigail Manekin-Bamberger about the scribes who produced these objects, and the incorporation of such artifacts in Mika Ahuvia’s study of angels in On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel: Angels in Ancient Jewish Culture. These works encourage us to reconsider the relationship between rabbinic texts and apotropaic and ritual sources, as well as the people who commissioned, authored, and used such objects.
Some recent work has experimented with new ways of writing and thinking about our ancient sources in conversation with contemporary challenges and questions. Among these are Max Strassfeld’s Trans Talmud and Rafael Neis’ When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, both of which I have recently enjoyed reading. I also just read Mira Balgerg’s Fractured Tablets, Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg’s The Closed Book, and Emanuel Fiano’s Three Powers in Heaven, which address overlapping sources and topics from different angles. Close to my area of research, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Arjen Bakker’s The Secret of Time, about the quest for hidden wisdom and heavenly knowledge in the Dead Sea Scrolls (you can read a review I wrote of the book here).
This is certainly not an exhaustive list – I could go on for days about the great scholarship in rabbinics that my colleagues are producing! But I hope that this list is a good place to start.
8) How can people find out more about you and follow your work?
Gribetz: I am always happy when someone tells me that they have taken the time to read my book, Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism, which can be found at many libraries and online book sellers. For those interested in reading my articles, some of them are available here at Academia.edu, and I’m happy to email any of my articles not available online to those interested. I also regularly teach for the Jewish Theological Seminary as a Faculty Fellow; a couple of past lectures for JTS can be watched here and here. And everyone is welcome to join us at Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies – online or in person – for public programming (sign up for our weekly newsletter here).
I’m most excited about the book I am currently writing, A Queen in Jerusalem: Helena of Adiabene through the Ages. It is not available yet but it will be published by Princeton University Press and I’m eager to share it with readers soon!
Thanks so much to Dr. Sarit Kattan Gribetz for speaking with me and sharing these details about her studies of rabbinic literature, the city of Jerusalem, and conceptions of time and time-keeping. I really encourage you to check out her books and articles (not to mention her excellent upcoming works) and also consult the many great resources she mentioned here. For a complete list of the books, websites, and articles listed in this interview, you can also visit Interviewing Religion’s Books and Resources page.
And look for more interviews like this to come soon! You can subscribe to my blog here to get new posts directly by email.
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