In this thorough revision of her 2014 dissertation, Mira Wasserman analyzes both homiletic and legal sugyot from tractate Avodah Zarah of the Babylonian Talmud, reading them as discussions of “rabbinic anthropology,” delving into topics such as Jews and gentiles, sages and laypeople, but also humanity at large, and the relationship between people, animals, and things. The book is arranged by the order of the tractate (excluding, for the most part, its final chapter), and aims to expose the underlying logic of the discussions, assuming that each chapter, as well as the tractate as a whole, carries a wider “message.”
Chapter 1 reads through the relationship between Jews and gentiles that chapter 1 of Bavli Avodah Zarah sketches. After discussing the long opening narrative on the eschatological judgment of the nations of the world, Wasserman surveys the rest of the aggadic material embedded in the chapter, highlighting hidden connections, both thematic and linguistic, between the different narratives (e.g., God holds a Torah scroll in his lap in the first narrative, while Ḥaninah b. Terdayon holds one during his martyrdom narrative on page 18a). She then argues that these aggadot build a dichotomy that they simultaneously undermine. All this allows her to read the various narratives in the chapter as advancing a single dialectical move on the nature and border of Jewishness.
In chapter 2, Wasserman discusses the first page of B. Avodah Zarah chapter 2, admittedly one of the nastiest sugyot in the Bavli, replete with gruesome stereotypes of gentile bestiality. (“I saw a gentile who bought a goose in the market; had sex with it, strangled it, roasted it and ate it.”) In an impressive rescue operation she recasts the sugya as “a theory of human animality,” a discussion on what makes humanity human. Employing theories of posthumanism and neomaterialism, this rescue operation is as graceful and erudite as it is bold.
Chapter 3 is devoted to the remainder of Avodah Zarah chapter 2, which is about gentiles’ foods and wine. Wasserman claims that the Bavli—based on some clues in Mishnah 2:3–5—deliberately blurs the clear-cut status of gentile wine. This, she says, reflects an ambivalence both about gentiles and toward rabbinic decrees. Wasserman uses the images and metaphors evoked in the chapter (mostly snakes and hiding places) to understand the underlying logic of the legal discussions, and unpacks the connection between gentiles and women that they construct (e.g., “when the snake copulated with Eve he placed filth in her.… gentiles, who did not stand at Mount Sinai, still have this filth.”)
Chapter 4 discusses Avodah Zarah chapter 3. The Talmud's give-and-take on broken statues is for Wasserman a philosophical discussion about how much an object can change while still remaining the same. Through a comparison with the parallel sugya in the Yerushalmi, she argues that the Bavli makes this into a theoretical discussion of the status of icons in general. She rereads the Babylonian Talmud's famous leniencies toward statuary—which is usually explained simply as a function of the context of the Sassanian Empire, which lacked statues—as the product of a new conceptualization: “in a move that anticipates and inverts Orthodox Christianity's insistence of the ‘real presence’ within icons, the Bavli authorizes image making on the basis of absence” (201). Whether this is truly a “nascent Jewish theory of mimesis,” the result of Wasserman's analysis, together with the comparison with contemporary Christian and pagan Neoplatonist theories of iconism, is fascinating. In fact, this is the most original and profound reading of this chapter that I have encountered!
Chapter 5, on Bavli Avodah Zarah chapter 4, begins with the laws of statuary and moves on to the laws of wine. Following Mishnah 4:9 (“An Israelite who works in a defiled state”) there is an elaborate discussion on the status of non-rabbinic Jews, which Wasserman uses as a springboard to discuss the social status of rabbis. The end of this chapter is devoted to the narrative that concludes the tractate, about the Persian king Shapur who teaches a rabbi a sly lesson about being too diligently observant. Wasserman reads this as a redemption of the homily that begins the tractate, in which all gentiles are painted with the same broad brush. It is, for her, also the high point of a number of narrated encounters between rabbis and gentiles in the tractate, which together undermine the possibility of broad dichotomies.
Throughout the book, Wasserman employs two complementary strategies to liberate the sugyot from their own chauvinism. The first is more familiar. Wasserman exposes the voices that challenge the broad dichotomies and problematize them. Boundaries between Jews and gentiles, men and women, rabbis and nonrabbis, humans and animals are easily broken down in the give-and-take of the multiple sources of the talmudic sugya. The second strategy is bolder and more interesting. Wasserman exposes the plane beyond xenophobia, pointing to what is “really” at stake in these sugyot. Beyond (the spatial terminology is hers) the detailed legal discussions, Wasserman argues, lies an ethical and philosophical project. The redactors of the Bavli are “using the tractate as an occasion for setting out their views on what it means to be a Jew and a Human” (169).
The tractate's aggadic material is for her not only another voice, but a more privatized, individualized viewpoint. The higher resolution of aggadah undermines the broad strokes of legal generalizations. Thus, while in the narrative that begins the tractate gentiles are barred from the world to come, in subsequent narratives individual gentiles (R. Ḥanina b. Dosa's hangman, or Qeti'a b. Shalom, the emperor's advisor) are admitted. One wonders whether Wasserman intended this to be a generic characterization of Halakhah-Aggadah relations in the Bavli, in which case it has little import for the “rabbinic attitude” to the specific subject at hand.
Wasserman exposes the “beyond the law” not only through Aggadah but through careful readings of complete sugyot. She does so, among other things, by revealing a descriptive excess that seems redundant if only halakhic decision-making is at stake. A brilliant example is her analysis of the detailed description of the relationship between a widow and her dog in the first sugya of chapter 2. Wasserman then offers a metaphorical, Mary Douglas-like, reading of legal motifs, unpacking the discussion of wine vessels as a conversation about social containment and the borders of the community. These readings vary in their persuasive power, but they always reflect a serious and detailed attention to the text. She avoids falling into the Neusnerian trap of reducing Halakhah to a philosophical discussion in disguise. Her readings always start from the text of the sugya and its own internal logic, before claiming that there is also something else. There are, to be sure, apologetic moves in this book, noble attempts to “save” the sugyot, but these are reflective and smart, and Wasserman performs them with both literary skill and textual sensitivity. As the Talmud says in a different context (B. Berakhot 35b) “many have tried and have not succeeded.”
Moreover, this book is an invitation to learn Talmud. Wasserman has a rare ability to make complex sugyot and complicated halakhic discussions accessible to those whom she calls the “uninitiated.” This is a delightful introduction to talmudic discourse, as well as to contemporary literary and cultural studies of the rabbinic literature.
My central critique is that although her arguments are literary rather than thematic, and touch on the very structure and nature of the Bavli's sugyot, Wasserman never tries to test whether her speculations about the specific sugyot she reads can be generalized. Without an attempt to ground her readings in a broader study of what talmudic sugyot are and how they operate, they remain just that: brilliant readings rather than a thesis about the Bavli. For example, one could argue with the attempt to read an entire tractate in the Bavli as a continuous thematic narrative—moving from humans (B. Avodah Zarah 1) to animals (2) to objects (3–4). But even if one is sympathetic to such a reading, it should be argued for in light of what we know about the Bavli and its editing, and cannot be simply assumed.
Wasserman's analyses are synchronic, and she does not break them down to layers or sources. There is no discussion of higher criticism and questions of lower criticism and any parallels are relegated to footnotes. Specialists will find much to quibble with here. Wasserman's interpretations are sometimes questionable, as on p. 193 where “Is there a change” (yesh shinuy) (in the worshipped object) should be read as a legal conceptual question (i.e., “is change relevant at all in this context,” see Rashi ad loc.), rather than a question about the reality of the object (“Is there a sufficient change” in a given case). The sugya that begins chapter 2 does not “go back in time” (103), as it begins the discussion with a saying attributed to Rav. There are also some significant bibliographical lacunas, mainly in Hebrew, such as Israel ben Shalom's book on the eighteen decrees, Daniel Schwartz's article on Dama ben Netina's martyrdom (“And you shall live by them”), and the oeuvre of Yair Lorberbaum on questions of image and representation in rabbinic ẓelem theology, which has recently appeared in English translation. The chapters of the book also vary in their commitment to historical accountability. While Wasserman places statues and idols in historical context, the issue of human animality, discussed in ancient philosophy at least since Aristotle, is only read in light of contemporary thinkers.
All of these quibbles do not detract from the sheer fun of reading and learning from this smart book. It is a bold experiment in a field where experiments are seldom made and hardly welcomed.
