A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion)

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Description

A word conventionally imbued with melancholy meanings, “diaspora” has been used variously to describe the cataclysmic historical event of displacement, the subsequent geographical scattering of peoples, or the conditions of alienation out of the country and yearning for an ancestral home. But as Daniel Boyarin writes, diaspora could also be more constructively construed as a type of cultural hybridity or a mode of analysis. In A Traveling Hometown, he makes the case that a shared Hometown or past and traumatic dissociation don’t seem to be vital conditions for diaspora and that Jews carry their Hometown with them in diaspora, within the type of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study.

For Boyarin, the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto, a text that produces and defines the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity. Boyarin examines the ways the Babylonian Talmud imagines its own community and sense of Hometown, and he shows how talmudic commentaries from the medieval and early up to date periods also produce a doubled cultural identity. He links the ongoing productivity of this bifocal cultural vision to the nature of the book: as the physical text moved between different times and places, the methods of its study developed through contact with surrounding cultures. In the end, A Traveling Homeland envisions talmudic study as the center of a shared Jewish identity and a distinctive feature of the Jewish diaspora that defines it as a thing with the exception of other cultural migrations.

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