The field of rabbinics has historically desired to use the Talmud as a source for studies of either culture or philosophy. Scholars who are interested in culture try to recreate the physical and social reality of the rabbinic period, while those who are interested in philosophy compare and contrast rabbinic ideologies to those of ancient Greece, Rome, or Persia. The projects of these scholars have always been tempered by those in the field, who felt that the requisite scientific-philological work had not yet been done on the Talmud to allow for the historical claims of the former. One might find it surprising, then, that an academic book titled What Is Talmud? spends so little time engaging current academic Talmud scholarship, whether cultural-philosophical or scientific-philological. In fact, only a single talmudic passage is analyzed in the first 125 pages of the book. However, it seems that Sergey Dolgopolski has carved out a new space for himself in the field of rabbinics—one that has received very little attention to date.
Although Dolgopolski has his predecessors, and certainly builds on the work of H. Z. Dimitrovski and Daniel Boyarin in his treatment of the fifteenth-century Spanish talmudist Isaac Canpanton, there remains a paucity of studies centered on traditional talmudic methodologies and their relationship to other disciplines of thought, whether Western or Eastern. This book is undoubtedly of much use to students of modern philosophy searching for out-of-the-box solutions to queries as well as models for inquiry. It is, after all, written in the style and language of philosophy. However, how does this book relate to the field of rabbinics? The answer is, by creatively relating rabbinics to modern philosophy. As Dolgopolski demonstrates, an in-depth analysis of a nonacademic analytical methodology can shed much light on the humanities in general. There exists a wealth of post-talmudic rabbinic intellectual production that has yet to be mined for this purpose. Dolgopolski has devised an excellent example of how this work should be done.
By centering his discussion on “Talmud as activity” rather than “the Talmud as historical artifact,” Dolgopolski makes the Talmud a relevant player in the age-old debate between the fields of philosophy and rhetoric. Talmud, for Dolgopolski, is synonymous with the art of speculation as defined by Canpanton. An understanding of Canpanton's method, using tools developed by philosophers from the mid-twentieth century, such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, lends much insight to the Heideggerian project of envisioning a pre-Western philosophy, one that is not tainted by a Platonic understanding of Being. Canpanton's method of approaching Talmud as speculative art is an alternative to the ways of Western philosophy. It is neither philosophy nor rhetoric. Whereas for Plato, rhetoric was the enemy of philosophy, and for Aristotle, a lower form of philosophy, Canpanton's art of talmudic speculation is something completely different and perhaps more akin to how the Sophists viewed their own endeavors rather than how philosophers saw the Sophists. The driving point of this book asks exactly how the talmudic art of disagreement relates to Western philosophy and explores how the Talmud can teach us about problems in Western philosophy.
Before summarizing some of the details of Dolgopolski's argument, it is necessary to outline the nature of Canpanton's method. Canpanton's Darkhe Ha-Talmud (The Ways of the Talmud) seems to vacillate randomly between two distinct agendas. At some moments, it acts as a guide for students seeking to learn the speculative art of Talmud. At other times, it appears to be a description of the analytical methodology of the Talmud itself. It is perhaps Canpanton's blurring of the line between these two projects that serves the rhetorical function of leading his reader to see them both as one and the same. In any event, Canpanton was effective in implementing a shift in the mode of traditional Talmud scholarship and was the intellectual predecessor for most of the analytical methods that came to dominate traditional Talmud scholarship over the next five centuries.
The starting point for Canpantonian talmudic speculation is the fact that every statement in the Talmud serves to negate an unstated and implicit position. This is the case because no obvious statement would ever have been made in the Talmud. If a statement were obvious, it would remain unstated. The student must therefore ask what unstated position the stated position comes to refute, and must then abstract from the page of the Talmud and envision all possibilities for these refuted implicit statements. The student would then return to the text to see which of these possibilities fits most directly within the language of the actual statement in the text. As most talmudic discussions involve two or more parties, the student's next step would be to put himself or herself in the mind of the disputant and apply the same procedure to the disagreeing position. The student continues this process back and forth, uncovering themes and inventions for each implicit and unstated position that is being refuted and then grounding these discoveries in the language of the actual statements made in the Talmud. This process becomes exponentially more complex as it is applied to entire passages and tractates.
Although this is a gross oversimplification of Canpanton's methodology, it should serve the purposes of this review. Dolgopolski spends an entire section of his book detailing and analyzing every one of the fifteen chapters of Canpanton's work. Because no English translation of Darkhe Ha-Talmud exists to date, Dolgopolski's work in this area should serve as an excellent starting point for an English reader trying to gain access to the foundation of most traditional analytical methodologies for the study of Talmud in the period of the Aharonim.
As Dolgopolski's aim is to situate Talmud in the framework of its relationship with philosophy and rhetoric, it is important for him to explain how Talmud, for Canpanton, is not a book or set of books but an event. This event has no claim of presence. In contrast to rhetoric, there is no audience to witness this event and be persuaded by it. And unlike in philosophy, there is no goal of agreement that linearly and temporally drives a debate toward agreement. Talmudic speculation is always oriented toward the past and the authority of the past. However, this past is a “radical-past.” A radical-past is a past that has never claimed to be present. Hence, the student who engages in Talmud is not trying to recapture a lost moment of history but rather merely situates himself or herself in the speculative sphere of the disagreement. In other words, the student is not trying to recapture a moment of argumentation that took place at some point in time, but rather aims to be in a state of “becoming” through speculating on the disagreement. This is because the disagreement that the student speculates on is not one that endeavors to lead toward agreement, but rather is one that seeks to remain in a state of disagreement. If the student properly follows the formula laid out in Canpanton's method, he or she will arrive at the truth of the disagreement and only that.
The concluding chapter of the book masterfully lays out a complex genealogy of the shifts in modern philosophy that have allowed for Talmud to be recognized as something pre-Platonic or anti-Platonic. Dolgopolski brilliantly maps how each subtle shift in twentieth-century philosophy has established the groundwork for presenting Talmud as a third way between philosophy and rhetoric. Western philosophy is based on a conflation of Being and Truth. Therefore, all of Western philosophy has been an attempt to rediscover either the truth that once was or the truth that exists in the human soul. This rediscovery, however, is forward looking—a search for agreement. In this way, Western philosophy is very attached to notions of linear time. Talmud, however, is not forward looking toward agreement, nor does it look back to a past prior to disagreement. Talmud is not an analogue to Western philosophy, but rather is a distinct art, an art that sheds much light on the problems raised by the twentieth-century innovations made in the fields of phenomenology, anthropology, and ontology.
