Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture

The relationship of the rabbis of Late Antique Palestine to their non-Jewish neighbors, rulers, and interlocutors was complex and often fraught. Jenny R. Labendz investigates the rabbis' self-perception and their self-fashioning within this non-Jewish social and intellectual world, answering a fundamental question: Was the rabbinic participation in Greco-Roman society a begrudging concession or a principled choice? Labendz shows that despite the highly insular and self-referential nature of rabbinic Torah study, some rabbis believed that the involvement of non-Jews in rabbinic intellectual culture enriched the rabbis' own learning and teaching. Labendz identifies a sub-genre of rabbinic texts that she terms "Socratic Torah," in which rabbis engage in productive dialogue with non-Jews about biblical and rabbinic law and narrative. In these texts, rabbinic epistemology expands to include reliance not only upon Scripture and rabbinic tradition, but upon intuitions and life experiences common to Jews and non-Jews. While most scholarly readings of rabbinic dialogues with non-Jews have focused on the polemical, hostile, or anxiety-ridden nature of the interactions, Socratic Torah reveals that the presence of non-Jews was at times a welcome opportunity for the rabbis to think and speak differently about Torah. Labendz contextualizes her explication of Socratic Torah within rabbinic literature at large, including other passages and statements about non-Jews as well as general intellectual trends in rabbinic literature, and also within cognate literatures, including Plato's dialogues, Jewish texts of the Second Temple period, and the New Testament. Thus the passages that make up the sub-genre of Socratic Torah serve as the entryway for a much broader understanding of rabbinic literature and rabbinic intellectual culture.

About the Author :
Jenny R. Labendz is Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Drew University in Madison, NJ.

Review :
"An intelligent study an interesting and bold attempt to contextualize banality within an intellectual space that had engaged Socrates in a quest for arguments and their reverse." --Bryn Mawr Classical Review "A committed, contemporary reading of a distinct subset of rabbinic dialogue...Jenny Labendz's firstling presents us with many intriguing perspectives...Through successive close readings of a small set of texts, she manages to open up a remarkable room for discussion." --Marginalia "Labendz' argument is fascinating- it echoes the endeavors of advocates of Jewish universalism, eager to defend the cosmopolitan essence of Jewish culture... With this work, Labendz certainly points to new directions in framing otherness through the ages, in a Jewish key." --Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Culture "Jenny Labendz does a marvelous job of illuminating narratives of dialogues between ancient rabbinic sages and their Greco-Roman counterparts. Of particular reward are her explorations of the relation of these dialogues to those centered on Socrates in the writings of Plato, uncovering thereby the epistemological foundations of these dialogues and their pedagogic function. She provides precious insights into early rabbinic Judaism's view of non-Jews and non-Rabbis as participants in the production, communication, and consumption of 'rabbinic knowledge.'"--Steven D. Fraade, Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism, Yale University "Jenny Labendz examines a fascinating sub-genre of rabbinic literature, in which a rabbi and a non-Jew enter into a dialogue, what she calls Socratic Torah. The rabbi appeals to the experience of the non-Jew in responding to his questions, then teaches him some truth about God, Israel, or scripture. According to much prior scholarship, these stories are rife with rabbinic anxiety about non-Jewish political, cultural, and religious dominance. Labendz shows how Socratic Torah reveals a rabbinic movement confident in its truths and traditions and curious about others. Labendz's reading of these texts is careful and subtle, and her comparison between rabbinics and Socratic dialogue creative and engaging. Her approach enables her to see the long-ignored productive and cooperative dimensions of the dialogues between rabbis and non-Jews."--Beth Berkowitz, author of Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present "Socratic Torah provides a fresh and provocative rethinking of some commonly held views of the rabbinic eschewing of the hegemonic Greco-Roman culture. By highlighting a number of rabbinic dialogues with non-Jews, dialogues that share in the strategies of the Socratic elenchus, Jenny Labendz argues for a more textured view of the relationship of the rabbis to 'alien wisdom.'"--Marc Hirshman, Mandel Professor of Jewish Education, The Melton Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem