I have known David Stern for decades—including as colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in the 2010s and at Harvard University since 2022. The present essay reflects upon his scholarship through the lens of the first two volumes of his collected articles and the recent Festschrift in his honor edited by Naftali Cohn and Katrin Kogman-Appel. Taken together, these three volumes offer a lens onto Stern’s evolving research interests while also illuminating the study of Jewish texts and textuality during critical decades for academic Jewish Studies in the United States.Footnote ¹

I am among those generations of American scholars whose training in Jewish Studies was deeply shaped by Stern’s insights into Midrash as literature, including in his celebrated Parables of Midrash (1991) as well as his classic articles on topics like midrashic polysemy, Hellenism, and comparative exegesis (the latter now handily collected in the first volume of Jewish Literary Cultures).Footnote ² When I first met him in 2001, I was working through these materials together with his Midrash and Theory (1997) for my doctoral exams in Ancient Judaism at Princeton University.Footnote ³ To this day, I put this book on the exam reading lists for my own students. And I know I’m not alone. During my years teaching at New York University, for instance, I had the pleasure of reencountering his ideas anew through discussions with Jeffrey Rubenstein’s Rabbinics students whenever any of them prepared for their exams.

But as much as has been said about Midrash and Theory in relation to the “Midrash-as-Literature moment,” I would suggest that it also speaks to Antiquity more broadly; indeed, in my experience, its interventions prove no less useful for training scholars of Second Temple Judaism, Patristics, and Manichaeism. During the 1980s and 1990s, there had been much concern among scholars of Antiquity about what to make of “Theory”—with a big “T,” typically meaning those (mostly French) thinkers often telegraphed as “postmodern.” In this, literary theory, the “linguistic turn,” and deconstruction loomed especially large.Footnote ⁴ Midrash seemed especially promising for the Derridean critique of logocentricism and the challenge of de-Hellenizing the Humanities in American academe.Footnote ⁵ As a quintessentially Jewish mode of engaging Scripture, Midrash seemed to offer a non-Hellenized counterpart to Christian biblical interpretation.Footnote ⁶ As a quintessentially Rabbinic approach to textuality and meaning, Midrash seemed already indeterminate where and when Patristic approaches were imagined to have become doctrinal, univocal, and authoritarian. In effect, Midrash seemed to offer a non-Christian premodern precedent from the periphery of the West, embodying the pre-modernly proto-postmodern. This accounted for what Stern has often called Midrash’s “15 minutes of fame,” as a non-Christian tradition deemed useful for the “problematizing” of older academic categories and “master narratives” shaped by the literary heritage of Classics and Christianity.

Trained in Comparative Literature at Harvard University (PhD 1980), Stern was especially well suited to contribute to this conversation.Footnote ⁷ He wrote articles responding to some of the more prominent examples already in the 1980s.Footnote ⁸ What stands out about Midrash and Theory, however, is his modeling of a text-up approach to Rabbinic literature in deep conversation with postmodern questions while in no way subordinated to them. He did not approach Rabbinic corpora as mines for data that might fit a postmodern model of meaning-making. Nor did he dismiss postmodernism as irrelevant. On its very first page, Midrash and Theory poses the problem of “what theory has done to midrash.”Footnote ⁹ But the book takes this problem as an invitation to “forge. . . an approach that is both responsible and responsive, true to the literary integrity of classical Jewish literature and yet open to our desire for this literature to mean something to us.”Footnote ¹⁰

To this I would add that Stern’s approach stands out as unusually “responsible and responsive” also to those Christian sources too often stereotyped both in Jewish Studies and in the postmodern rejection of modernist ideas. Its paired title notwithstanding, for instance, Midrash and Theory includes notable insights into Patristic intertexts, adduced in juxtaposition with Rabbinic sources in a manner that models the best of comparison, whereby neither comparand is devoided of its particularities but each is enhanced by the act of reading alongside.Footnote ¹¹

Here as elsewhere in Stern’s scholarship, it matters where and when Jewish sources resist reduction to Christian or modern or postmodern ideas. But such moments never become excuses for isolationism. They offer invitations to read and read again, read and read more broadly. And thus in a far more cautious manner than many other specialists in Jewish Studies—then and now—Stern has done much to model a praxis conducive to conversation with specialist research on other ancient corpora. What he has modeled, after all, is how academic approaches to Rabbinics need not assimilate Jewish materials into either Christian or postmodern categories, but also need not reduce them to a non-Christian position flattened for the sake of contrast with Christianity. Rather, his scholarship on Midrash exemplifies the power of letting Jewish materials both define themselves and serve as a space from which to speak to the broader intellectual conversation.Footnote ¹²

In the late-twentieth century, there was a vision of Rabbinics taking shape that was heavily inflected by Theory and saw the engagement with postmodernism as a path for the further inclusion of Jewish Studies within the Humanities at large. And there was a counter-vision that insisted on its irreducible particularity, fearing the loss of the traditional philological rigor needed to do justice to these and other works of Jewish literature. Both got a lot of attention, and both continue to have their proponents. Stern chose to forge a somewhat different path—both here and elsewhere. He heeded a call to be critical (in the theoretical sense of that term), while remaining committed foremost to reasoning from within the specific text at hand. This approach is far slower: one has to read more, and read more carefully, then read again. But its results may be more enduring. At the outset, for instance, Midrash and Theory describes its aims as more about articulating a “stance” than finding an “answer.”Footnote ¹³ And this may be why the book still feels relevant: whereas an answer marks the end of an inquiry, a stance enables new beginnings.

Stern chooses to open Jewish Literary Cultures by reprinting a celebrated essay that makes much the same point in biographical terms. In “Vayikra Rabbah and My Life in Midrash,” first published in 2001, Stern reflects back on the early work noted above. In the process, he describes himself as beginning his career as a student who “read Midrash—and myself—through the prism of postmodernism”—after which he spent the rest of his career learning what was helpful about that lens but also primarily “un-learning.”Footnote ¹⁴ Those familiar with his sense of humor won’t be surprised at the self-depreciation. But I think it may be more than that—another example of the epistemological humility that resounds across Stern’s scholarship, then and thereafter. Where others would reflect on such a career through a litany of achievements, Stern here tells the story of himself as someone who failed, made mistakes, learned, and changed.

This is part of why I found it so meaningful when I encountered it as a student back in 2001. Now I assign it to my students. It is a reminder of how the best academic work is done from a position of uncertainty—and thus also apart from the fear of failure that leads so many to freeze before writing, hesitate before questioning an old consensus, dismiss anything new as a passing fad, or stay still instead of moving. In the context of Jewish Literary Cultures, “Vayikra Rabbah and My Life in Midrash” aptly gains a new life while also framing the essays that follow as examples of the scholarly encounter with premodern texts and textuality—with all the humility and uncertainty and mistakes and learning-from-mistakes that this entails in practice.

It is striking that Stern did not follow his celebrated early publications with some grand synthesis of Midrash. Rather, he went on to explore a number of different avenues that laced out from this work—including through literary activities not limited to “authorship” and through collaborative translation and editorial work making those insights into sites for conversation. In Rabbinic Fantasies, for instance, he and Mark Jay Mirsky invited the reader into the often puzzling world of medieval Hebrew narratives like the Alphabet of Ben Sira.Footnote ¹⁵ Likewise, his editorial work culminating in The Anthology in Jewish Literature created a vitally new interdisciplinary conversation; by collecting inquiries into varied Jewish examples, Stern has served to open up new ways of understanding literary production more broadly, drawing attention to dynamics habitually neglected both in modern ideas about “authors” and in postmodern attempts to “move beyond” those ideas.Footnote ¹⁶

At the end of his essay on “Vayikra Rabbah and My Life in Midrash,” Stern reflects a bit on why he chose the directions that he did:

Stern himself has arguably changed the horizon of Jewish Studies through the accretion of these insights as well as through the reminder that what is truly transformative are always the details—and the process of looking for and at and from them, letting our sightlines change. This is certainly true now, but it was no less true when Stern wrote these words in the 2000s.

Most scholars would have stopped there, content to synthesize and repeat. He had already accumulated a career’s worth of insights and influence. But as we all know, that is not what happened. By that time, inspired by Peter Stallybrass and the Material Texts Workshop at Penn, and spurred by his 1997 Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, Stern had already begun the arduous process of re-training in a completely different approach to literature that had been almost wholly neglected in both Rabbinics and critical theory—namely, the approach to texts as material.Footnote ¹⁸

For all that has been said about Theory as revolutionary for the study of Antiquity, I would suggest that we might have even more to learn from taking seriously the material forms of our texts, as more than mere containers of words or ideas. So much philological research aims at creating critical editions, typically eclectic, largely replacing manuscript consultation in practice, and with effects of shaping what works are and are not studied. And arguably, the scholarly practice of treating the critical edition as if “the text” only compounded at the end of the twentieth century, with the first stages of digitization tools, when older critical editions (shorn of apparatus) formed the bases for the searchable electronic databases that became so central to the teaching and study of Hebrew and other ancient literatures.

Now, of course, digitization can include high-resolution images of books and manuscripts, and a concern to understand them as objects has become more common, often hailed as if innovative under labels like “New Philology” or “Material Philology.” But it’s worth remembering that Stern was making this turn over twenty years ago!Footnote ¹⁹ And unlike too many who take up this approach today, he did so by backing up and working slowly to gain expertise—by reading very widely in the History of the Book and especially by visiting collections around the world to see and touch those Jewish manuscripts and books that had largely been left out of the story of the History of the Book.

“After taking this course, you will never look at a book in the same way.” This is how Stern ends the course description of his General Education (Gen Ed) class at Harvard on “What Is A Book? From the Clay Tablet to the Kindle.”Footnote ²⁰ I felt much the same as a colleague watching his deep dive into this new domain and hearing how his ideas have taken shape over these decades, shifting and deepening and enriched. It seems simple, at first sight, to note how “what we read are texts that are inscribed on a specific type of ‘writing’ platform—a scroll, a codex, a digital screen—in a particular way. . . and the particular way has a deep impact on how we understand—interpret, in the largest sense of the meaning of the term—the meaning of the text.”Footnote ²¹ But that insight is transformative. Perhaps especially for scholars of Antiquity, who so often fret about how our material relates to the present, it is striking to realize how “the material text [is] a window through which one [can] understand what these books meant to their readers, not only as conveyers of meaning but as objects with meaning in their own right,” connecting the past with an evolving present.Footnote ²²

The latter quotes come from Stern’s introduction to the second volume of Jewish Literary Cultures. There, he tells the story of his own surprise at this insight. Yet it stands as a poignant example of the power of anthologizing that the first volume of his collected essays makes the shift look smooth—as if an obvious extension from Midrash to exegesis to anthologizing to canonization to materiality. Elided is the sheer laboriousness of getting from that beginning to this end. Stern gave the Stroum Lectures in 1997 but did not publish a major article on the topic of Jewish bookishness until 2008.Footnote ²³ The Jewish Bible came out ten years after that!Footnote ²⁴

The results hide the laboriousness. One need not know anything about his earlier career in Midrash to read and enjoy The Jewish Bible. Nevertheless, he begins the book with a wink at those who know. The first page quotes a Rabbinic dictum often cited in discussions of midrashic polysemy: “The Torah has seventy faces” (Numbers Rabbah 13:15–16). In his midrash-on-a-midrash, Stern here invites us to take this literally, since the “Torah. . . also possesses multiple. . . actual faces, the changing appearances it had assumed with varying material features, the numerous physical forms and shapes that [it] has taken through the centuries, from the distant reaches of the ancient Near Eastern past down to the present day.”Footnote ²⁵

The multi-geographical and transhistorical curiosity, which strikes me as a persistent feature of Stern’s scholarship, finds powerful expression within Jewish Literary Cultures; the contents of the first volume of his collected studies are sweeping, and this only compounds with the second, which moves from the Mishnah to the 1695 Amsterdam Haggadah. And there is a third volume still yet to come.

There is a sense, however, in which the structure of these volumes tames the sprawl of Stern’s research into an arc of development from text to materiality, paralleled with the chronological shift from Rabbinic Midrash to the Middle Ages. By contrast, the structure of Naftali S. Cohen and Katrin Kogman-Appel’s Beloved David—Advisor, Man of Understanding, and Writer: A Festschrift in Honor of David Stern embraces the thrill of Stern’s sprawling interests by collecting examples of his impact on those whom he has taught and inspired.

Part One of Beloved David includes chronologically-arranged contributions from Jewish antiquity (e.g., Jon D. Levenson on Genesis, Naftali Cohn on the Mishnah, Seth Schwartz on the Decian persecution) to modern Jewish scholarship and literature (e.g., Yaacob Dweck on Gershom Scholem and Judah Goldin; William Cutler on Yehuda Amichai). Part Two is also chronological, albeit featuring close readings of Rabbinic sources (e.g., Steven Fraade on m. Ta‘anit, Jeffrey Rubenstein on b. Shabbat 127b, Marc Hirshman on Midrash Psalms §3) and analyses of medieval texts, authors, and editors (e.g., Martha Himmelfarb on Sefer Zerubbabel; Raymond Scheindlin on a chapter of Judah al-Harizi’s Tahkemoni; Joseph Yahalom on editions of the poetry of Yehuda ha-Levi).

Part Three, the largest, showcases the many and varied horizons that open up with a focus on the materiality of Jewish literature. Articles on trajectories in Hebrew typography (Javier del Barrow) and Yiddish printing (Susanne Klingenstein) are juxtaposed with those focusing on a single scribe (Ezra Chwat on Solomon b. Samuel Halevy), manuscript, or book; the latter, in fact, predominate (e.g., Tamar Kadari on Codex Warsaw 258, Evelyn Cohen on the 1441 Schottenstien Italian Mahzor, Annett Martini on the Erfurt Bible Codex MS or.; Paul Mandel on the first edition of Ein Ya’aqov, Jordan Penkower on the 1525 Rabbinic Bible). This section also includes essays on other modes and materialities of writing—from recordkeeping (Elisheva Carlebach) to bookcases (Katrin Kogman-Appel)—as well as art (Shalom Sabar as well as Cohen).Footnote ²⁶

In their introduction, the editors of Beloved David focus on how personal relationships shaped scholarly trajectories; hence it is fitting that the Festschrift includes a piece by his brother, Josef Stern, but also by Stallybrass, the Penn colleague whom Stern often credits with inspiring his material turn. To their insights, I would add that I think more could be said about Stern’s scholarship in relation to Jewish Studies in the United States.

When another Harvard-based scholar formative for Jewish Studies, Harry Austyn Wolfson, wrote of “The Needs of Jewish Scholarship in America” in 1921, he lauded the potential of American Jewish scholars to “bring. . . to light many treasures of Hebrew literature which are now rotting in the holds of the world’s libraries.”Footnote ²⁷ For Wolfson, medieval Jewish philosophy remained exemplary: his contention there was that philosophy, although peripheral to the Jewish tradition, proved most amenable to inclusion in the university by virtue of being the most legible within classical and Christian categories.

Stern himself quotes this passage when reflecting on Jewish Studies and the Humanities in his 2012 article on “Rabbinics and Jewish Identity: An American Perspective.”Footnote ²⁸ He does so to point to a historical irony. It so happened that the Jewish materials least comparable and legible in classical and Christian categories—namely, Midrash—were what ended up making a space for Jewish literature within the American university as part of the Humanities!

To this irony, we might add another that is currently unfolding. What the rest of Stern’s career has shown us, after all, is that there are “treasures of Hebrew literature. . . in the holds of the world’s libraries” also in a much more literal sense—that is: those Jewish books that are mostly just stored, sometimes read for their content, sometimes mined for editions, but rarely considered as objects worthy of analysis in their own right.Footnote ²⁹ There is even more to be done now to “bring. . . [these] to light”—the very task in which Stern has been so intensely engaged in his teaching and research.

When we consider this task from within Wolfson’s frame, we might wonder whether the result may be even more than the integration of Jewish Studies into the American university then imagined possible in the 1920s. I have already mentioned Stern’s popular undergraduate course on “What Is A Book?” at Harvard. He has also co-taught a graduate version with Stallybrass. What’s so striking is that neither of these courses focus on Jewish books: these are courses designed and taught by a Jewish expert on Jewish books that open up a transformative perspective on books—such a central part of our own lives especially but not only in universities. Tacit, or at least enacted, is the potential for a vision of Jewish Studies, cast not merely as some periphery to be “included” within the frame of non-Jewish knowledge but rather as another center from which it is no less possible and valuable to see and know and speak and teach.

Stern is a scholar of Midrash and hence Rabbinics and hence Judaism. His research remains centered in a deep understanding of Hebrew language and Jewish literature. But this centering is less centripetal than centrifugal—with the result that his research is both rooted and capacious, both detail-oriented and sprawling, spreading out with the power of his love of textuality in all its messy and surprising and strange and curious details throughout millennia of Jewish life, by virtue of following the many threads that constitute what he describes (with continual wonder) as the “continuity of Jewish literature as it spanned multiple historical periods across numerous geographical centers” around the world.Footnote ³⁰

For Stern, the anchor throughout remains the act of reading. He has embodied this throughout his career—and not just in these and other publications. I have sat in many rooms where brilliant scholars presented brilliantly on this-or-that text, which Stern had seen there for the first time simply on a handout, only to raise his hand and offer some totally new interpretation. This is partly because of his immense learning. But it is perhaps mostly because even despite this learning he never assumes that he already knows what a text means. This is what makes him so delightful as a colleague and co-teacher. Even when we’ve covered the same materials before—as when he and I reworked our old Penn class on “Jewish Messianism” to teach again at Harvard—he always reads as if anew, and thus often sees or finds something we hadn’t noticed.Footnote ³¹

For me, it has been a delight to read the articles reprinted in Jewish Literary Cultures (some for the first time, some for the twentieth or more). And this is partly because I know his curiosity remains open-ended and productive. Recently, for instance, I wrote to him about yet another piece that I happened across—namely, his remarkable introduction to the 2003 reprint of Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews.Footnote ³² He instantly emailed me the draft of an extended version that he is now reworking for inclusion in the third volume of Jewish Literary Cultures. And of his project on writing the unwritten history of the material Jewish Book, of course, much more remains to be done: so far, he has published only on the one Jewish book (i.e., the Bible) that he considered the necessary preface to the three Jewish books discussed in his 1997 Stroum Lectures (i.e., the Talmud, the Siddur, the Haggadah).Footnote ³³ He is still working on all three.Footnote ³⁴ For this and so much else, neither the publication of his Festschrift nor the collection of his essays nor his retirement from Harvard marks an end.

Stern has served many of us as a guide—erudite, humble, and humorous—through recent decades marked by major rethinking about Jewish texts and textuality. He has been a superb guide to changing times because he is not afraid to change. I would like to conclude, however, by thinking back to another beginning, and in keeping with the themes of his very first book, turn instead to a story.Footnote ³⁵

At dinner recently, Stern regaled us with the tale of how his early publications include a recipe—and a recipe for cholent no less! The context is a cookbook compiled by friends who had hosted him for dinners when he lived in Cambridge as a student. Yet the point of the tale, in his telling, is not merely a quirky publication. It’s the tale of a typo. What Stern had written up as the recipe for an “exotic” cholent had been printed as the recipe for an “erotic” cholent. Someone else might have elided this mistake. Stern, however, wished to include the detail in his CV—insisting on its inclusion as “David’s Erotic Cholent” in his tenure dossier (apparently to the horror of his senior colleagues at Penn).

Now, of course, we know that he got tenure at Penn, and he went on to be one of the major scholars of Jewish literature in the world, significantly shaping academic Jewish Studies at Penn, where he taught for over 30 years, and at Harvard since 2015 (including as the director of the Center for Jewish Studies from 2016 to 2023). What strikes me about this story, however, is how it embodies his refusal to take himself too seriously. His is not a self-aggrandizing erudition. Rather it is rooted in delight—and, more specifically, in what shimmers throughout his writing, throughout his teaching, and perhaps throughout his life as a never-ending delight with reading, writing, reading about writing, and writing about reading.

This is not an easy time for Jewish Studies in the United States. Part of what I have enjoyed about writing this essay has been the excuse to read these three volumes and revisit the rest of Stern’s published oeuvre. I was expecting to find a lot with which to think about the field’s past. But I also found much hope for our future. In a moment in which the future of academic Jewish Studies might feel precarious, there is hope to be found in the reminder of the sheer power that resides in the act of reading Jewish books. Stern and his scholarship exemplify this power—the love of Jewish literature, the deep commitment to Jewish learning, and the reminder that Jewish Studies, as an academic discipline, makes a home for thinkers whose curiosity roams the centuries but whose attention remains drawn to the details, rooted in the irreducible magic of the humble and ever-humbling act of reading.