The article examines David Weiss Halivni's post-Holocaust approach to the question of the relationship between faith, halakhah, and history, his reconceiving of the nature and purpose of talmud Torah and the educational implications of these theological reflections. For Halivni, the Holocaust commands the re-imagining of the purpose and nature of Torah study. Torah learning in a post-Holocaust world must recognize the damage incurred by the expansion of human freedom and independence from God, and reflect the hope and yearning for the restoration of God's dominion and presence that was evident at the Sinaitic revelation. Halivni avers that these twin goals are accomplished through historical criticism, which detects the human corruptions that contaminated the Bible and Talmud and attempts to restore the unadulterated word of God through recovering the original revealed text. Hence, he views the historical investigation of canonical texts as the telos of the strivings of a person of faith. The article concludes with 1 I would like to thank Zvi Leshem who reviewed the article and provided helpful comments and criticism.

In 2018, we celebrate the bicentennial of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the early Jewish Studies that began in the nineteenth century and introduced critical historical research into Jewish sources, using all academic methods available, including non-Jewish sources or the comparison with them. Today, the academic study of Judaism exists in various national and cultural contexts. Its three centers – Israel, the United States, and Germany – have different labels and forms for it such as “Jewish Studies,” “Jewish Science” (Madat ha-Yahadut), “Judaic Studies,” or “Jewish Theology.” Their differences notwithstanding, they all refer to the year 1818 as the founding date of their disciplines. In that year, Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) published his essay Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur (“Something on Rabbinic Literature”), which unfolded the thematic field of modern Jewish Studies for the first time.2 As Michael A. Meyer and Ismar Schorsch emphasize in the double interview opening this issu...

Reading Talmudic Sources as Arguments: A New Interpretive Approach elucidates the unique characteristics of Talmudic discourse culture. Approaching Talmudic literature from a linguistic perspective, the book shows the extensive and hidden ways in which later rabbis used early formulations. Applying Quentin Skinner's interpretive question “What was the author doing in composing the text in this particular way?" to Talmudic literature reveals that Talmudic debate is not only about ideas, concepts, and laws but also about the latter's connection to pre-existing formulations. These early traditions, rather than only being accepted or not, are used by later generations to build their own arguments. The book articulates the function of tradition at the time that Rabbinic Judaism was forged. For the entire book please send a request.