Lecture: Socrates and the Fat Rabbis
Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, will talk about his recently published book, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis.
What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, Daniel Boyarin looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts he finds similarities, both in their unique combination of various genres and topics and in their dialogic structure. But Boyarin goes beyond the typological parallelism between the texts, arguing also for a cultural relationship. Boyarin thus brings together issues of cultural difference, cultural regulation, and the specific interface between Jewish and Greco-Roman culture.
In Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Boyarin suggests that these dialogues are not dialogic at all. Using Michael Bakhtin’s notion of represented dialogue and real dialogism, Boyarin demonstrates, through multiple close readings, that the give-and-take in these texts is actually monologic in spirit. At the same time, he shows that there are other elements that manifest genuine dialogicality. Boyarin ultimately singles out Menippean satire as the most important genre with which to understand both the Talmud and Plato, pointing out their seriocomic peculiarity. An innovative contribution to rabbinic studies, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis makes a major contribution to scholarship on the discursive and cultural practices of the ancient Mediterranean.
This is the fourth lecture sponsored by the CHFA Visioning Grant Lecture Series in Religious Studies. It is also sponsored by the Posen Foundation in Jewish Secularism and the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at UMass.
The UMass CHFA Religious Studies Visioning Grant Fall Lecture Series will include, among others, lectures this fall by:
Professor Willi Goetschel, University of Toronto, on “Moses Mendelssohn's 'Indigenous Colonist': State, Power, and the Question of Sovereignty” at 4:00 PM on Thursday, November 19th.
All lectures are free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible.