Throughout classical rabbinic texts, we find accounts of sages expounding Scripture or law, while "walking on the road." We may well wonder why we find these sages in transit, rather than in the usual sites of Torah study, such as the bet midrash (study house) or ʿaliyah (upper story of a home). Indeed, in this corpus of texts, sages normally sit to study; the two acts are so closely associated, that the very word "sitting" is synonymous with a study session or academy. Moreover, throughout the corpus, "the road" is marked as the site of danger, disruption and death. Why then do these texts tell stories of sages expounding en route?

In seeking out the rabbinic road, I find that, against these texts' pervasive notion of travel danger runs another, competing motif: the road as the proper - even necessary - site of Torah study. Tracing the genealogy of the road exposition (or "road derasha"), I find it rooted in traditional Wisdom texts, which have been adapted to form a new, "literal" metaphor. The motif of sages expounding en route actualizes the Proverbial "Way of Wisdom" making it a real road upon which sages tread. That way is paved by a (literalized) reading of the Shema's command, "speak [these words] as you walk on the road..."

In the first part of my study, I consider the motif's setting, asking what rabbinic texts tell us about this site. I find that danger is the keynote of discourse about the road; indeed the multitude of dangers and risks indicate that this is a far from suitable place for Torah study. Rabbinic discourse about the road seems to preclude discourse while on the road. The second part of my work focuses on teachings that (in spite of this pervasive sense of road danger) actually adjure travelers to study en route, declaring that Torah study protects travelers on the way. Not only do these teachings seem to justify the accounts of road exposition, but they also point the way to the roots of the motif; by closely reading each teaching and its links to the larger corpus, I mark the way to the Wisdom tradition in which the motif is grounded, and which it transforms. Finally, in the last part of my study, I consider a text containing many road derashot - and of which the main theme is the journey. This text, which concerns esoteric wisdom, complicates our motif, for here (instead of guiding and protecting us on the way), Wisdom is considered a dangerous path, from which we are warned away. And yet, even against warning and prohibition, it seems that the imperative to "speak [these words] on the way" is still in force. For here too, we find sages expounding on the way - accounts that are emblematic of the text's larger discursive journey towards this dangerous wisdom.

Among Philo of Alexandria’s many writings, he dedicated quite-a-few treatises to the exposition of Jewish Law. The purpose of this dissertation is to identify what is distinctive in Philo’s approach towards Jewish law and to reveal the ideological, hermeneutical and practical considerations behind it.

In addition, I have presented the study of Philo’s Jewish law from a comparative point of view, introducing many Second-Temple --and especially rabbinic texts-- in order to better understand the processes underlying the development of Jewish law in Late-Antiquity and Philo’s place in it. I analyze the relationship between Philo’s own different writings and genres such as law, narrative and allegory, as well. The dissertation deals with five major halakhic subjects: the halakhic implications of both the Septuagint and Speech-Acts, Marital laws, The Sabbath, and the Temple Cult and Priesthood.

My examination of Philo’s law raises the following observations:

1. Philo reflects an internalization of Hellenistic concepts and values while implementing these concepts into distinctively Jewish practices. Occasionally, laws which were shaped by Greco-Roman concepts found their way into other halakhic corpora. This phenomenon attests to a process through which rabbinic traditions were influenced by Greek ideas through the agency of Jews like Philo.

2. At times, Philo shared certain halakhic traditions with other Palestinian corpora, while at others he reflected a totally independent approach. While in certain cases Philo’s independence can be accounted for by his essential, distinctive views in quite a few cases Philo represents an early stage in the development of halakha.

3. Philo’s formulation of Jewish law gives weight to ideological (predominantly Greek), exegetical and practical considerations. Among the exegetical considerations I identify several midrashic interpretations, some of which are similar to other Second-Temple and rabbinic traditions. This does not render Philo as “eclectic” but rather his approach is a typical example for the formulation of Jewish law in Late-Antiquity.

4. Philo indeed reflects certain sentiments, which could be characterized as “Diasporic”, but more than a representative of a Diasporic version of Judaism, Philo should be understood as a representative of Greek-Speaking Jews, a group which was part of the Social reality of Palestine, as well.

5. Philo’s most distinctive feature with respect to Jewish law is his view of Jewish law as a cure against excessive desires (ἐπιθυμίας) through the exercise of self-control (ἐγκράτεια). While Philo lacks a conception of defined measures for the fulfillment of religious obligations, this is consistent with both the early stage Philo represents in the development of halakha and with the view of Jewish law as geared towards self-improvement, rather than appeasing or pleasing God.

This dissertation proposes a poetics and semiotics of the Bavli (Babylonian Talmud)--how the Bavli, through a complex network of linguistic signs, acts on its implied reader's attempt to find meaning in the text. In doing so, I advance a new understanding of how the Bavli was composed, namely as a book written by its own readers in the act of transmission. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Bavli scholarship focused on the role of the Stam (the collective term for those people responsible for the anonymous voice of the Bavli) in the construction of individual Bavli passages (sugyot). Stam theory details how sugyot were crafted out of pre-existing sources and how the Stam works to control those sources in the service of a particular worldview. This dissertation locates a different force at work in the construction of the Bavli as a single unified book, an authorship that is above and against the work of the Stam--a Superstam.

By examining the effect of the Bavli's use of rare and ambiguous terminology, I expand the unit of inquiry from the individual Bavli passage (sugya) to the Bavli in its entirety. I argue that, for the Bavli's implied reader, meaning is not found in the work of the Stam. While the Stam conveys meaning for a local reader, the global reader I explore does not artificially divide the Bavli into its constituent parts. For this reader, the Superstam acts to subvert the controlling work of the Stam through the placement of key words throughout the book. These words, when rare or ambiguous, direct the reader to other sugyot in which they appear. These sugyot, when read simultaneously, work to convey, for the reader, an expression of ambivalence on the part of the Superstam toward those moments of Stammaitic certainty. I conclude that Super-stammaitic activity itself is the result and product of readers who are trained how to read by the Bavli's own expectations. In this way, the Bavli is a text authored by its own readers who, in transmitting the text, become writers again and again.

AbstractVoicing the Shekhinah: The Ḥabad Discourse in the Seventh Generation by Shmaryahu Brownstein Doctor of Philosophy in Near Eastern Studies Designate Emphasis in Jewish Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Daniel Boyarin, Chair

While much work has been done on the history and thought of Ḥabad Hasidism, there has been insufficient attention paid to the interconnectedness of the two areas, particularly as it relates to the seventh Ḥabad rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Much scholarship on Schneerson’s thought does not adequately apprehend the subtle nuances of his philosophy, sufficing with analyzing his overt declarations without excavating the structures and patterns of his thinking. To greater regret, works that deal with the history and sociology of Ḥabad under R. Menachem Mendel’s influence often focus almost exclusively on the political aspects of his undertakings, paying little attention to his scholarship altogether. The present dissertation seeks to provide a methodology for rectifying this lacuna, by identifying the central component of Ḥabad identity and society, as well as the primary facet of the function and definition of a Ḥabad master, namely the ma’amar or discourse. The Ḥabad discourse is distinctive in its content, as well as in the ceremony with which it is delivered. Its draws on ideas from the Kabbalah, interpreted through the constructs of Ḥabad thought. It is conceived of as the “wellsprings of the Baal Shem Tov,” the putative founder of the Hasidic movement, meaning that it is supposed to promulgate and explicate the teachings and concepts conveyed by the Besht. From the second generation of Ḥabad and on, following its founding by R. Schneur Zalman, the discourse has also been presented as developing the ideas of the preceding rebbes. These concepts are explicitly present in the set of discourses discussed in this dissertation, called Bosi legani. Each of these discourses contains teachings from all the Ḥabad masters, who are cited by name. Additionally, the notion of disseminating the wellsprings of the Besht is a recurring theme throughout this series. The ceremony of its initial oration includes a number of practices such as the singing of a preparatory melody and of listening to it while standing that represent an awareness of hearing the words of the Living G-d as they emerge from the mouth of the rebbe. I propose a concept called “midrashic intertextuality” as a method to approach the discourse, understand how it works, and assess the metamessages it conveys. This approach recognizes that intertextuality signifies that the interaction between texts can take a variety of forms and “tones.” When one appreciates the relationship of Midrash to the Biblical texts it interprets, they may extend that same concept to describe the relationship between the various texts within the Ḥabad corpus, as well as that between the various rebbes who authored the texts. Thus a new dimension of the inner lives of the rebbes, as well as of their adherents, comes into view, and enriches our insight into their society and life choices.

Stealth Stamma: Queer Time and Affect in the Babylonian Talmud uses queer theory to tease out overlooked aspects of the Babylonian Talmud, shedding light on specific discursive impulses for meaning-making and, especially, subversion of Torah law. The queer Talmudic methods I draw out and discuss are the stamma’s stealth argumentation, a non-linear orientation to temporality, and the use of affective interruption for complicating the discourse. I argue that, in turn, the Talmud and its methods can serve as a cultural case study useful to queer theorists via the practice of discursive subversion as a response to oppressive power structures. Alongside textual analysis and theory, I also incorporate autoethnography toward a reading of Talmud that is queerly embodied and a reading of queer that is, in part, constituted by my deviant relationship to the Talmud. I argue that the interpretive possibilities for understanding this critical cultural text can only be expanded by upending the exclusivity that has defined Talmud study for centuries.

The dissertation is comprised of an introduction, three chapters, and an epilogue. My introduction first lays the foundation for my usage of the term “queer” throughout the dissertation and the ways that it is and is not bound to identity. Then, I argue that queer readings of Talmud must strive to attune to the pre-institutional charismatic impulses that characterized the rabbinic project before the Talmud’s cultural ascendance and canonization. Chapter 1, “Stealth Subversion in the Talmud: The Case for Queer Readership,” utilizes queer theories about visibility, performativity, and especially, the trans notion of "stealth" in order to construct a model queer Talmud reader whose orientation to vulnerability and attunement to the stakes of visibility make them more sensitive to the radical “stealth” innovations being made in the stamma’s construction of the discourse. Chapter 2, “The Talmud as Queer Archive: Claiming Power through Discourse,” uses theories of queer historiography and queer temporality to look at the Talmud's orientation to time and history, arguing that alternative relationships to time, such as non-linear, nonbiological inheritance and inter-generational dialogue, are themselves queer expressions of resistance, comprising a particular discursive strategy for undermining hegemonic power structures whose authority and legitimacy are endowed by a particular imagined past. Chapter 3, “Affective Pedagogy and Discursive Prosthesis in the Bavli,” looks at one strategy in the Talmud that I term the "affective interrupter," as an overlooked method for meaning-making that interrupts a more “objective,” detached discourse in favor of a more holistic approach accounting for the lived consequences of the topic at hand and the insufficiency of reason and language alone to account for the whole of human experience. The discussion in this chapter is organized primarily around Talmudic excerpts related to disability, as affective interruption is a Talmudic pattern that in some cases interferes with ableist discussions, and it is in these cases that affective interruption holds the most liberatory potential for subversive readings. I discuss the Talmud’s use of disability as a kind of "discursive prosthesis" that pushes argumentation forward but which neglects the lived experiences of disabled people and the impacts of Talmudic legal discourse on the lives of disabled people. The Epilogue zooms out to argue that subverting discourse evolved as a method extracted from the Talmud to become a characteristically Jewish way of responding to unjust power structures.

Recently, disciplines such as religious studies, anthropology, and sociology have been revolutionized by an interrogation of the secularization narrative and of the secular more generally in light of its dialectical relationship with “religion.” Literary studies, however, has undertaken less disciplinary self-examination. As a result, literary texts are often still analyzed based on uncritical assumptions about religion and the secular: that which is “modern,” “Western,” and “a-religious” is presumed secular, while the postcolonial and diasporic becomes the site of that which is named “religion.” “The Secular Undone: Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and the Question of Time” challenges this binary mode of reading and criticism by revealing what I term a postsecular sensibility in contemporary Anglo-American literature. Such a sensibility works to deconstruct the secular-religious binary, troubling the oppositions that secularism erects. This sensibility, I argue, is evinced in textual forms whose temporalities cannot be reduced to what is often considered to be the homogeneous empty time of secular modernity. Deploying a postsecular formalism, I thus examine formal structures that are mobilized beyond the rubric of the secular, and that necessitate or engender a complex multitude of temporalities. Reading such forms beyond secularism’s structuring antinomies reveals impulses, forms of life, and modes of being that demand conceptualization beyond a “return of the religious” or “secularity.”

The Secular Undone analyzes works by Cormac McCarthy, J.D. Salinger, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten, Anne Carson, and Ariana Reines. Each chapter considers a formal structure, or what I call “forms under pressure”: forms that variously respond to and are shaped by the pressures of their presents, whether of neoliberalism, of climate catastrophe, or of a secularism that seeks to conscript them. In each chapter, I seek to uncover a text’s postsecular sensibility as it has gone unnoticed by critical scholarship, as well as to consider how each text’s form mobilizes and engenders its sensibility. In other words, I examine how form creates affective discursive effects as well as temporalities that exceed and collapse the notion of homogenous empty time traditionally associated with the secular modern. In Chapter One, I argue that the allegorical form of McCarthy’s The Road generates a space of disjunctive repetition and reiteration that allows the novel to retain a sense of tentative “ongoingness” against the apocalyptic vision of non-futurity its landscape seems to impose throughout. Here, allegory mobilizes a temporality beyond the teleological or the so-called “secular modern,” offering, through its fragments and figures, a time both recursive and cumulative. In Chapter Two, I explore how the metafictional form of both Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and Lerner’s 10:04 ungrounds the secular-religious binary by destabilizing the supposedly stable subject—author, narrator, protagonist—of secularism and religion. Here I consider how the postsecular sensibility I identify emerges as simultaneously a product of and reaction to neoliberalism. In Chapter Three, I read Nelson’s Bluets and Moten’s All That Beauty, uncovering in them serial structures that, in the case of the former, stage the dissolution of the subject, and in the case of the latter, function as rupture and undoing-towards-flesh. Such serial forms complicate the standard account of modern time—as well as the standard account of the serial—as homogeneous and empty. Chapter Four explores what I term “the elliptical,” a form that encompasses the use of omissions, silences, and blanks, in Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera and Reines’s A Sand Book. I read both works alongside the Kabbalistic notion of tsimtsum, tracing how the texts play with ellipsis and the processual expansion of divine absence in a subversion of the standard account of secular modernity as the moment of God’s evacuation from the world. While Carson turns to the elliptical and to that which language cannot capture, Reines moves from decreation to creation, transforming the elliptical into a kind of prophetic speech.

The justification a speaker offers for a given action, stance, or identity may serve the discursive purpose of veiling motivating reasons or rhetorically appealing to the audience. This dissertation defines such speech as ‘pretext,’ presenting ten tests for identifying pretext rhetorically rather than psychologically, then demonstrates through the example of religion the stakes of treating such justifications as reflecting motivating reasons rather than constituting a rhetorical trick. I argue that the naturalized concept we call ‘religion’ is a modern European construct with ten identifiable characteristics; this ‘religion’ enjoys epistemic privilege that makes it a potentially dangerous basis for pretext. Examples from social, legal, and literary texts show that audiences tend to evaluate ‘religiously’ justified actions and ethical stances as valid or incontrovertible, even when those justifications fall into the discursive category of pretext.

Chapter One, “Fallacy of Justification: ‘Pretext,’” bridges rhetoric, epistemology, and linguistics to define pretext. Diverging from past scholarship, I define pretext rhetorically, by how that category of justification functions in spoken and written texts, rather than analyzing a speaker’s psychology. I design ten tests for identifying pretexts in discourse, conduct a discourse analysis of how scholars use the term in relevant literature, and read pretext against core rhetorical theory.

Chapter Two, “The Privileged Space of ‘Religion,’” responds to discourses of religion scholarship in arguing that the epistemically privileged world that ‘religion’ creates for itself is a historical and conceptual mistake with dangerous ethical implications. Beginning with evidence that what we call ‘religion’ is an Enlightenment European construct, I identify ten common characteristics of the construct, then proceed to argue that ‘religious’ justifications for imperialism are fallacious, the concept’s epistemic privilege is undeserved, ‘religious’ pretexts can have dangerous implications, and there are strong reasons to be suspicious of ‘religious’ pretexts.

Chapter Three, “Religious Pretext for Imperialist Violence in Science Fiction,” systematically applies the previous two chapters’ theoretical interventions to two objects of science fiction literature: Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996) and Octavia Estelle Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy (1987-1989). For each text, I analyze the discursive construction of a ‘religion’ with reference to my ten characteristics of ‘religion,’ then examine how these constructed ‘religions’ serve as sources of pretext for imperialism.

Chapter Four, “Clearing up Pretext and ‘Religion’ through Scientology,” echoes this methodology with a border case between ‘religion’ and science fiction: the Church of Scientology. In conversation with scholarship on New Religious Movements, science fiction studies, and American studies, I systematically trace the discursive construction of Scientology as a ‘religion.’ Presenting evidence of how Scientologists use the institution’s status as a ‘religion’ pretextually, and their ‘religion’ as a basis for pretexts for imperialism and other violence reinforces the dissertation’s overarching argument.

The conclusion suggests how readers can generalize the four chapters’ analyses and apply this dissertation’s central theoretical contributions that critique how audiences think about ‘religion’ and pretext.

“Locating Matthew in Israel” renders visible the Second Temple Jewish ethos of Matthew’s gospel, while at the same time producing a more ethical contemporary scholarly reading of the First Gospel. This inquiry is undertaken without recourse to the arborescent and epochal framings that characterize most scholarly inquiries of Matthew. Drawing on an eclectic mix of conversation partners – including the works of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Bertolt Brecht – this reading begins the progress of remediating the epochal blockage pervasive in Matthaean studies through the introduction of the off-epochal. By off-setting epoch, new possibilities and space are opening in this reading. “Locating Matthew in Israel” demonstrates that Matthew’s composition is best described as Torah-formed. Additionally, this close reading centers on three key divine presence passages (Matthew 1:23; 18:20; 28:20) to provide an alternative non-incarnational figuration of Jesus. Functionally, Matthew’s bricolage presents Jesus as Torah-transfigured not as the incarnate logos.