Throughout this book, we encounter the voice of a persistent guide: “Read Lucian,” “Read Plato's Gorgias,” “Read Gorgias.” To these injunctions, I would add another: “Read Boyarin.” Reading Daniel Boyarin is a route to understanding poststructuralism in Jewish studies. Having been born into a different tradition, I personally see in Boyarin's oeuvre both a like-minded colleague and an opposite. In Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Boyarin applies the Bakhtinian notion of the seriocomical (spoudogeloion) to the Talmud. In my own book, Between Alexandria and Jerusalem, I was doing nearly the same.Footnote ¹ Yet Boyarin takes the Bakhtinian idea in a totally different direction. And he does so with a great deal of philosophical acumen and profundity.

The book starts with a sharp critique of Socrates. The philosopher is accused of ethical flaws, fallacious argumentation, bad faith, and less than heroic conduct. He is seen to have employed false logic and manipulation to twist his opponents into knots and force them to concede the truth of that which they firmly, clearly, hold to be false. Boyarin is hardly the first to criticize Socrates, but his elenchus is peculiar: His thesis is that Plato himself was criticizing Socrates. Boyarin explores two ways of reading Plato, one that takes seriously Plato's attack on Gorgias and the other Sophists, and one that attends to a voice of internal critique within Plato himself, the vaunted “second accent” of the heteroglossic or dialogical text. What is comical (carnival, Menippean, etc.) is nothing but a self-criticism of philosophy. For Boyarin, it is precisely the “authoritative” nature of dialogue, as opposed to the democracy of rhetoric that renders it so appealing to Plato. In early fourth-century Athens, rhetoric was the epistemology of democracy. Boyarin strongly rejects the understanding of pantagruelism as “comic relief.” He reads for “the deeply antagonistic, dialogical relations between the spoudaios and the geloios in the Platonic writing” (17–18).

The topic of Socrates is but a framework for the major subject of the book (The Fat Rabbis). Boyarin finds a cultural relationship, not merely a typological parallelism, between Plato and the Babylonian Talmud. In his eyes, Babylonian rabbinic literature is part and parcel of an expanded, late-ancient Hellenism. Boyarin reads the Talmud within a broad context, a period marked by the invention and promulgation of Menippean satire and related genres, as well as a general taste for such indecorous texts as the “Attic Nights” and the “Learned Diners.” I would be the last to dispute this thesis; I myself have suggested that early Rabbinic literature shared a great deal with the works of polymaths (meaning “Attic Nights” and the “Learned Diners”)Footnote ² and other seriocomical genres of Late Antiquity (farce, anecdote, dialogues of the Lucian type, “Symposia,” romances, etc.).Footnote ³ I have also explored such features of the Talmud as the grotesque, parody, eroticism (even pornography), scatology (what Boyarin calls “slum naturalism”), moral skepticism, and so on, and have suggested that an audience composed of educated and half-educated laypersons along with highly competent scholars and philosophers could have given birth to spoudogeloion.

Boyarin, in contrast, concentrates totally on the internal self-criticism of the intellectuals as the ultimate source of spoudogeloion. In his opinion, the dominating language of the Talmud is the language of the serious dialectician who guides Jews to the only true way of living in accordance with God's will. This “serious” voice is not properly apprehended without paying attention to the comic. It is the concatenation of the dialectic with the most undignified of descriptions of its very heroes that renders the text of the Talmud comparable to Menippean satire. Boyarin cautions us against the error of assuming that the division between voices is equivalent to that between halakhah and aggadah, for there is serious aggadah, as well as satirical (or self-reflective in a semiparodic manner) halakhic texts. The scholar treats the biographical legends of the Talmud from the perspective of spoudogeloion. He suggests that the talmudic spoudogeloion results from the yoking together of a high-cultural genre, the speech practices of the House of Study, the discourse of the halakhah, and a folk genre, the “hagiographic” narrative. In his view, the rabbinic hero-saint himself, together with his Torah, is toppled from any idealized position and brought down to earth with all his competitiveness, pettiness, and slyness exposed. Such a figure—together with his Mishnah herself—is the very type of the Bakhtinian “carnivalized” hero. Rabbi Me'ir is portrayed as a Sophist and thus as a figure who stands directly against, as it were, the truth claims of the halakhah.

In the end, Boyarin combines the various oppositions of the serious and the comical into a chain of doublings that enhances sociology, ontology, epistemology, and eroticism. To perfect this combination, he analyzes the most comical dialogues in Plato, for example, Symposium:

One can easily identify the philosophical foundations of Boyarin's book. It is not by chance that his analysis of Gorgias's Encomium includes the topic of pharmacon (drug-poison). Boyarin alludes to Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy and reads Encomium as “a kind of parodic response to Parmenides and especially a critique (almost a precisely formal deconstruction in the full Derridean sense) of the binary opposition of persuasion to compulsion on the one hand and of the notion of rational compulsion through logismos, logic, on the other” (94). Boyarin says of Gorgias: “He thus shows the way, in this text, toward a dialogism in which a thesis and an antithesis are not in a dialectical relation that leads toward a synthesis, but in a relation of calling each other into question and leaving each other forever in place, as well: neither pole taking precedence over the other” (100–101). Let us compare this with the following statement of Jacques Derrida: “this being the case, the development of this problematic will inevitably involve the movement of difference as it has been discussed elsewhere: a ‘productive,’ conflictual movement which cannot be preceded by any identity, any unity, or any original simplicity; which cannot be ‘relieved,’ resolved, or appeased by any philosophical dialectic. …”Footnote ⁴ In fact, Boyarin equates Socrates' dialektikē with Hegelian dialectic and Gorgias' rhētorikē with Derrida's “différance”!

Derrida himself (like Boyarin) was aware of Socrates' “sophistic charm.”Footnote ⁵ Yet he never understood it as Plato's elenchus of Socrates. In his opinion, Socrates' art of persuasion is exonerated “on the condition that Socrates overtly renounces its benefits: knowledge as power, passion, pleasure. On the condition, in a word, that he consents to die.”Footnote ⁶ Derrida recognized an Athenian scapegoat (pharmakos) in Socrates.Footnote ⁷

Indeed, Socrates' ugliness is the ugliness of pharmacoi (the ugliest persons in Athens). It fits perfectly with the ugliness of a talmudic sage, a prerequisite of sagacity and a sign of humility (B. Ta'anit 7a–b). Laughably humiliated, a sage is a farcical figure. A villain may be a farcical figure as well. A popular legend tells of Xanthippe emptying a chamber pot over Socrates. In talmudic literature, a servant-maid empties dirty water on a sage (B. Yoma 87a; cf. Y. Mo'ed Qatan 3:1). Haman's own daughter spills the contents of a chamber pot on his head and then hurls herself to her death before his eyes (B. Megilla 16a). In the Talmud, Israel herself is a farcical character in the moments of her tragic humiliation (cf. B. Gittin 55b–58a, etc.). Eikhah Rabbah, which deals with the climax of Israel's sufferings, is the most humorous collection of midrashim. A scapegoat is a clown (either a villain or a saint or both). His death or humiliation is Aufhebung (both sublation and ablution, purification). I believe that comic relief through sacrifice (not “the deeply antagonistic, dialogical relations”) was the nature of spoudogeloion. To clearly formulate this thesis I need Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, a great book that brings notably serious and comical questions to the fore. Read Boyarin!