Legal narratives in the Babylonian Talmud.

摘要

This dissertation identifies talmudic legal narratives as a literary genre and models a method of reading such narratives. Rabbinic texts are divided into two categories---Halakhah (law) and Aggadah (lore). This dichotomy has created different reading practices for halakhic and aggadic texts. Where scholars of Halakhah focus on historicizing halakhic texts by attending to textual composition in order to write the evolutionary trajectory of Jewish law, scholars of Aggadah---and specifically of aggadic narrative---employ a varied assortment of literary approaches to think of these texts as literature. Because talmudic legal narratives, stories located within the Talmud's legal discussions, are implicated in the matrix of Jewish legal precedent, they have generally been studied by scholars of Halakhah and, in the process, lost their uniqueness as narratives. This dissertation focuses on the narrativity of these texts and the way such narrativity describes law differently than the way law is described by statutes or discursive talmudic conversations.; The body of the dissertation consists of four readings of legal Sugyot (talmudic discussions) that feature narratives. Though these discussions are located within the same talmudic order (Neziqin-Torts), they are on the disparate topics of martyrdom, monopoly, bailee liability and courtroom postures. All four readings use legal narratives to conceive of the law not merely as a set of rules and institutions, but as a culture of legal meaning which legal rules and institutions both inhabit and help constitute. In thinking about legal meaning as a form of cultural meaning, the four chapters put the discussion of law in each Sugyah (talmudic discussion) into conversation with psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and politics. The forays into these other discourses are facilitated by theoretical incursions into the contemporary fields consituted around those subjects.; The four readings call attention to the tension between the interior space of the rabbinic academy and the world outside those figurative walls. The stories highlight the extent to which assertions of rabbinic power are the product of anxieties about the collapse of the idealized interior world and the position of rabbis within that world.