Sometime in 1995 a book arrived that had her name in the title. Are the Talmuds Interchangeable? Christine Hayes’s Blunder. One hundred sixty-six pages, plus a twenty-nine-page introduction. Scholars Press, Atlanta. The author was Jacob Neusner (1932–2016), then the most published scholar in the humanities, a man with hundreds of volumes to his name who had done this before to Adin Steinsaltz and would do it again to others, who kept an attorney on retainer to warn critics that their reviews looked like libel, and who was known to close his letters with instructions to drop dead.
Christine Hayes (b. December 6, 1960) was thirty-four. She was an assistant professor of Hebrew studies at Princeton, two years out of Berkeley, without tenure. Her first book had not yet appeared. What Neusner had read was the dissertation.
She answered him in the Journal for the Study of Judaism in 1996 and again in an appendix to the book when Oxford published it in 1997. The appendix carries the title “Response to Jacob Neusner.” The book won the Salo Baron Prize for a first book in Jewish thought and literature. Twenty-six years later, when Yale read out the tribute at her retirement, the dean’s office noted that a dissertation had so electrified the field that a leading scholar published an entire volume against it, and placed her, in the tribute’s phrase, “at the head of your field.”
That is the shape of her career. She takes a technical problem, finds a larger problem sleeping inside it, and says so in a way that makes established people either furious or persuaded, sometimes in that order.
The route in was accidental. Hayes was born in the United States to Australian parents who moved often. When she was eleven the family went home, first to Sydney, then to Adelaide, where she finished school. She credits her parents’ appetite for philosophy, religion, literature, and other people’s cultures with forming her own.
She came back to America for Harvard and studied religion. At some point she wandered into Hillel and began teaching herself to read Hebrew. In 1982 she stopped her degree and went to volunteer on an Israeli kibbutz. She finished the B.A. summa cum laude in March 1984, spent two years working in the nonprofit world, and returned to school in 1986, entering Berkeley’s Department of Near Eastern Studies.
One story from the Harvard years circulates among her students, and Shlomo Zuckier, who wrote his dissertation under her, tells it as legend rather than record. She told Isadore Twersky (1930–1997), the Littauer Professor at Harvard and the Talner Rebbe of Boston, that she wanted to study the intellectual history of the Talmud with the same rigor he brought to medieval Jewish thought. Twersky told her it could not be done. She then spent a career doing it.
Take the story as a story. What it preserves is a temperament. She heard an authoritative no and treated it as a research program.
Berkeley in the late 1980s was a good place to be told what was possible. Her advisor was Daniel Boyarin (b. 1946), who was breaking rabbinic literature open to literary theory, cultural studies, and comparative religion. She also worked with Jacob Milgrom (1923–2010), the Leviticus scholar, whose priestly purity system would supply the raw material for her second book. In 1987–88 she went to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as an exchange student and studied with Yaakov Sussmann (b. 1931)
Those two educations do not obviously belong to the same person. Boyarin forces distant bodies of thought into collision. Sussmann counts words in Genizah fragments. Hayes took both and produced a third thing: controlled comparison. She separates categories other people have run together, follows the split through individual passages, and only then reaches for a large claim.
The dissertation, published as Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds: Accounting for Halakhic Difference in Selected Sugyot from Tractate Avodah Zarah, worked on a problem everyone in the field agreed was central. The Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud sometimes inherit related material and reach different legal results. Why?
The available answer was history. Rabbis in Roman Palestine and rabbis in Sasanian Babylonia lived under different empires, different economies, different neighbors, different religious competitors. Different worlds, different law.
Hayes said the field reached for that answer too fast. Working through parallel passages in tractate Avodah Zarah, she showed that a legal divergence can come from causes inside the texts. The two Talmuds may hold different versions of the Mishnah. A Mishnaic sentence may contain a gap that each Talmud fills differently. The Bavli pursues a theory of verbal economy, assuming that legal language carries maximum information in minimum words, and that assumption generates rulings the Yerushalmi never produces. Editors pursue different dialectical strategies. Material passes through different hands.
Only after those possibilities are exhausted should a scholar say that Persia or Rome caused the difference.
The point was run the internal analysis first and the historical inference gets stronger, because a divergence that survives every textual and hermeneutical explanation becomes evidence about the world outside the study house. Knowing how a Talmud normally makes law is what lets you notice when it has done something strange.
Neusner read this as an attack on his own program and answered with a book. The Jewish Quarterly Review called her formulations incisive and often elegant, and said the work should correct some recent scholarship. Yale’s tribute later reported that her account of the divergences became the accepted one.
The second book took a rule about ritual purity and turned it into a theory of who counts as a Jew.
Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud appeared from Oxford in 2002. Earlier scholarship often wrote as though ancient Jews regarded gentiles as ritually impure and therefore kept away from them. Hayes argued that this collapses several different things into one word.
Following Jonathan Klawans, she separated ritual impurity from moral impurity. Ritual impurity is temporary, non-moral, and contagious by contact: a corpse, a flow, a menstruant. Moral impurity attaches to grave sin and does not transfer by touch. No biblical text, on this reading, treats gentiles as ritually impure. What Leviticus 18 ascribes to them is moral defilement, which is a function of conduct.
Then she added a third category of her own. Genealogical impurity attaches to descent. It is a property of offspring. In the Pentateuch and Ezekiel it constrains priests, who may not marry certain women because the seed must stay unmixed. Ezra and Nehemiah take the priestly rule and extend it to all Israel. The whole nation becomes holy seed. Under that logic, intermarriage becomes defilement for everyone, and Nehemiah purifies the community by separating out the foreign wives.
Once the categories are pulled apart, arguments about impurity stop being arguments about ritual. They become competing theories of what a Jew is, and each theory sets a different price on the border.
A temporary ritual condition washes off. A moral defilement depends on behavior and can be renounced. A genealogical defect sits in the ancestry and cannot be washed, renounced, or argued away. So the question of whether a gentile can become a Jew turns on which kind of impurity you think stands in the way.
Hayes traced the consequences from the Bible through the Second Temple sects, Qumran, Josephus, Philo, the New Testament, and the rabbis. Communities that made the boundary genealogical closed it. Communities that made it moral or ritual left a door. Oxford’s summary says differing views of gentile impurity and the permeability of Jewish identity fed both Second Temple sectarianism and the eventual separation of Christianity from rabbinic Judaism.
The book was a finalist for the 2003 National Jewish Book Award. It also moved her out of Talmud studies. The question was no longer how a passage developed. The question was how legal categories manufacture a people.
In 2003 the Mellon Foundation gave her a New Directions Fellowship, and in 2005–06 she spent the year at Yale Law School learning legal history and legal theory. She had studied how rabbinic law works. She had studied how it builds insiders and outsiders. Now she went after the thing underneath both: what does anyone mean when he calls a law divine?
In November 2005, midway through that year, she gave a talk to the fellows of the Whitney Humanities Center and repeated it to the fellows of Silliman College. The title was “The Talmudic Martin Guerre, or Death of a Legal Fiction.”
A man goes on a journey. He does not come back. A credible report reaches the court that he is dead. Two witnesses testify. The court accepts the testimony and releases his wife to remarry, which she does. Then the first husband walks back into town, alive.
By the rules, disaster follows. She is an adulteress. She must leave the second man. Her children by him are mamzerim. The Mishnah will not let her return to the first husband either, since she has been with another. A woman who did everything the law told her to do is ruined by the law’s own procedure.
Rav, the third-century Babylonian sage, proposed a way out that the Yerushalmi records. If she remarried on the testimony of two witnesses, then when the first husband returns, the court says to him: you are not him.
Not “you appear to be dead.” Not “we were mistaken.” You are not him. The man is standing in the room. The court declares him a stranger.
The Yerushalmi squirms. What if he is a well-known figure, someone everybody recognizes? Are there not many men who resemble a well-known figure? A case comes before the rabbis and they tell the man he is not himself. An old man whispers to him to give her a divorce document just in case, and Rav’s students beat him for it. Rabbi Imi, handling a similar case, tells the second husband that the marriage stands and the children are illegitimate before Heaven, which is a compromise that hands the ruling to human law and the truth to God.
And the Bavli reports that in the West, in the Land of Israel, they laughed at Rav. The man came back. He is standing right here. And you say there is no need for a divorce.
Hayes published on that laughter in 2013, in the Journal of Law, Religion and State, under the title “‘In the West, They Laughed at Him’: The Babylonian Talmud’s Mocking Realists.” Her argument was that the recurring motif of mocking westerners lets Babylonian editors voice their own misgivings about the anti-realist side of rabbinic law: the legal fictions, the contrary-to-fact presumptions, the heavy weighting of intention, the readings that ignore context. Somebody inside the tradition noticed that the law had come loose from the world, and the tradition kept a record of the joke.
What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives came out from Princeton in 2015 and made her an intellectual historian.
The book opens on a collision. In an important strand of Greek and Roman thought, a law is divine because of what it is like. It is rational. It matches the truth. It holds for everyone. It never changes. Cicero’s version has divine law as right reason in agreement with nature, the same everywhere, permanent. A law that could be improved was never perfect, and a law that was never perfect was never divine.
Biblical law does not behave that way. Its authority comes from its source. God spoke, Israel accepted, the covenant binds. The rules are particular to one people. Their reasons are often unstated. God changes their application, and human beings can prompt Him to do it, as the daughters of Zelophehad do when they petition for their father’s inheritance. To a Greek, Ezra’s scroll shows every mark of human, fallible law. To Ezra, calling a law divine because it is reasonable would sound close to blasphemy.
Alexander’s conquests put the two conceptions in the same room. Jewish writers had to do something about the mismatch.
Philo and others closed the gap. Torah is rational. Its commandments have reasons. Mosaic law expresses the natural order, which is why Abraham kept it before Sinai, having it written into his constitution. What looks tribal is universal wisdom awaiting a wider audience.
Paul widened the gap and uses it to create gentile membership in the new movement.
The rabbis did a third thing.
They declined the rescue. Torah does not have to be universally rational to bind. A commandment whose reason is inaccessible remains a commandment. The hukkim, the decrees with no transparent explanation, sit in the system without embarrassment. Rabbinic argument is ferocious about reason and uses it constantly, deriving hundreds of rulings by kal va-homer and other moves borrowed from Greco-Roman rhetoric. What they reject is the further claim that law draws its authority from conformity to an independent rational order.
They unhooked divine law from truth. Hayes shows the rabbis treating emet in legal contexts as trustworthiness and procedural validity rather than correspondence to a fixed fact. She finds texts where peace outranks strict justice and a compromise settlement beats the correct ruling. She finds the midrash where God throws truth to the ground so that mercy can win and the world can survive. As she puts it, nobody is surprised when human law departs from metaphysical truth. The surprise is that the rabbis do this to divine law.
Follow that and the famous tolerance for disagreement stops looking like a temperament and starts looking like a doctrine. If divine law were a set of eternal propositions, interpretation would be discovery and error would be the only alternative to truth. Rabbinic law runs on argument, precedent, majority rule, and authorized judgment, and those produce the operative content. Rabban Gamaliel declares the new moon on the wrong day and pressures Rabbi Joshua to keep Yom Kippur on the date everyone knows is astronomically wrong, and Rabbi Joshua submits. The court outranks the sky.
The awards came fast: the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship, the 2016 Jordan Schnitzer Award, the 2016 PROSE Award in Theology and Religious Studies.
So did the objections. Writing in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the reviewer granted her claim about the dominant tendency of each tradition, then pressed on the edges. There is a minority biblical strand identifying God’s will with a universal moral order, which Hayes herself documents. On the Greek side, Socrates asks Euthyphro whether the holy is loved by the gods because it is holy or holy because they love it, which is the same question from the other end, posed with no help from Judea. Each tradition could reach Hayes’s problem on its own. Reviewers in the AJS Review and elsewhere raised versions of the same worry.
Hayes anticipated much of this. She names the exceptions inside both traditions and argues about tendencies. Whether a tendency can bear the weight of a civilizational story is the live question the book leaves open.
There is a domestic footnote to the argument that a novelist would be told to cut.
Hayes married Michael Della Rocca (b. 1962) in 1988. He teaches philosophy at Yale, works on Spinoza and metaphysics, and is the leading contemporary defender of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the claim that every fact has a complete explanation and that brute inexplicability is not allowed anywhere. In 2021 he was named Sterling Professor of Philosophy, months after she was named Sterling Professor of Religious Studies. Yale’s philosophy department reported them as the second married couple in the university’s history to hold two Sterling chairs.
Her contribution to a volume he co-edited on the Principle of Sufficient Reason is called “The Principle of Sufficient Reason in Religion.”
She spent thirty years documenting a tradition that keeps commandments whose reasons nobody can state.
The teaching went in the other direction from the scholarship.
Her Introduction to the Hebrew Bible ran twenty-four lectures and became one of the pilot courses for Open Yale Courses in 2006. Yale University Press published it as Introduction to the Bible in 2012. She had already written The Emergence of Judaism for Fortress in 2010. She won the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities in 2005, chaired Religious Studies from 2011 to 2015, and served as director of graduate and undergraduate studies more than once.
The retirement tribute quoted the comments of ordinary readers who had found the lectures online, people who wrote in to say it was the best introduction to the Old Testament they had read.
She has supervised a generation.Chaya Halberstam, whose dissertation became a book that won the same Baron Prize her advisor won. Tzvi Novick, now at Notre Dame. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, now at Ben-Gurion. Sara Ronis at St. Mary’s. Simcha Gross at Penn. Shlomo Zuckier. Several of them appear in the volume she has just edited.
On August 3, 2014, at the Tikvah Fund’s summer fellowship, Hayes sat down opposite Rabbi Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbinic judge and a former clerk on the Israeli Supreme Court, and the two of them talked about how to read the Talmud. Each described what Tikvah called a love affair with rabbinic literature. Each then gave a shiur and responded to the other’s.
Hayes is among the few accomplished academic Talmudists who was neither born nor raised Jewish, and who decided, deliberately, not to convert.
A woman outside Jewish legal status spent her working life on how Jews built and policed that status. She wrote the book on gentile impurity. She translated Mishnah Avodah Zarah, the tractate on idolatry and on what you may accept from a gentile’s hand, for the Oxford Annotated Mishnah in 2022, three decades after the dissertation on the same tractate. In 2015 the Jewish Theological Seminary would give her an honorary doctorate and call her an ohevet Yisrael, using a category of affection where the categories of law do not apply. That was in May 2025, and she delivered the commencement address.
A scholar who has spent her life near a line she has not crossed has been unusually alert to the difference between what a man is and what a community’s law says he is, and unusually careful about not letting the second question answer the first.
Since her retirement she has been the Gruss Visiting Professor in Talmudic Civil Law at Harvard Law School in 2024, the Gruss Visiting Professor in Jewish Law at Penn Carey Law in 2025, and a visiting professor and affiliated scholar at Yale Law School, where she teaches Concepts of Divine Law in Historical Perspective. She has written on Dworkin and the rabbis, on legal truth and best answers, on the reception of Roman law by Jewish courts. She is a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and a faculty member and curriculum supervisor in its rabbinical ordination program.
In February 2024, in an episode of the Hartman podcast TEXTing, Elana Stein Hain sat with Hayes and read a story from Bavli Bekhorot 8b–9a while Israel was at war and Israeli satirists were mocking everyone in sight.
The story: the emperor asks Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah how long a snake carries its young. Seven years, he says, without hesitating. The Athenian sages bred one and got three, says the emperor. She was already four years gone, says Rabbi Yehoshua. They mated, says the emperor. Snakes do that for pleasure, says Rabbi Yehoshua. Are the Athenians not wise men? We are wiser. Then go defeat them and bring them here.
He builds a ship with sixty cabins, sixty cushions in each. He gets past the guards, tells the sages he has come to learn, and takes their riddles.
How do you salt salt that has gone bad? With the placenta of a mule. A mule has no placenta. Does salt go bad?
Build us a house in the sky. He pronounces the Name, hangs between heaven and earth, and calls down for bricks.
Which egg came from the black hen and which from the white? He hands them two cheeses and asks which came from the black goat.
Hayes noted that several of these riddles are lifted from Ahikar and the Life of Aesop, folk contests between a king and a clever advisor that circulated across the ancient world, one copy of Ahikar turning up in the Jewish colony at Elephantine in the fifth century BCE. The rabbis are working inside a genre their neighbors also read.
Then she said what the story is doing. If you answer a challenge by saying it can’t be done, the challenger wins. If you say certainly, hand me the bricks, the burden goes back across the table. In her formulation, the rabbis don’t beat the Athenians at their own game. “They blow up the game.”
She has been writing this book for years and the working title keeps moving. Her Harvard Law curriculum vitae lists it as The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Talmudic Humor. Yale’s website calls it Laughter, Comedy, and Play in Rabbinic Literature. She has lectured on Talmudic law as play, on law as performance, on the rabbis as jesters, on humor as an epistemic barometer, on whether we can laugh at God.
The lecture description she uses runs like this. In the legends the rabbis put God in a body and a life. He wears tefillin. He prays. He studies Torah. He weeps. He makes mistakes. He accepts correction from human beings and loses arguments to them. Were they having fun, or is the comedy carrying a position against the Greco-Roman divine, the one that is perfect, unmoved, and incapable of surprise?
Her own account of why she started is simple. Both the Bible and rabbinic literature are countercultural, and countercultural writing produces incongruity. Human beings do one of two things with incongruity. They work to make it disappear, or they find it funny, enjoy it, and double down. She thinks the rabbis double down.
That is the sequel to What’s Divine about Divine Law? If Greek divinity means perfection, immutability, and freedom from need, then a God who argues, changes His mind, regrets, and studies is a theological claim delivered as a joke. And if divine law is contingent, historically embedded, and handed to human interpreters, then the endless hypotheticals, the impossible cases, the fictions, and the arguments nobody will ever need to resolve are not decoration around the law. They might be how a law like that gets lived in.
The safety-valve reading is available: the rabbis joked to survive the anxiety of interpreting God’s words. There may be something in it. It goes past what the evidence carries. The other possibility is that play belongs inside the conception of law rather than relieving pressure from outside it. A tradition that can hold a proposition without endorsing it can explore further. Humor can expose a contradiction without collapsing the system that contains it.
In late spring 2023, Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies, the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, and the Littauer Chair convened a conference. The sessions ran on Zoom across several weeks in May. Hayes and Noah Feldman gave the opening remarks. The title was four words long.
What is the Talmud?
After a century and a half of academic Talmud study, the answer is unsettled. A record of legal debate. A literary construction. A scholastic culture. A redacted anthology. A product of Sasanian Persia in conversation with Zoroastrians, Christians, Roman law, medicine, and magic. Who produced the anonymous argumentative layer, and when. How traditions traveled between Palestine and Babylonia. When the text firmed up. What later readers turned it into.
What Is the Talmud? The State of the Question was published by Harvard University Press on May 12, 2026, edited by Hayes and Jay M. Harris, 904 pages, in the Jewish Law and Culture series. The contributors run from Robert Brody and Yaakov Sussmann’s philological tradition through Boyarin, Charlotte Fonrobert, Shai Secunda, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Simcha Gross, Talya Fishman, Barry Wimpfheimer, Ruth Calderon, and thirty more.
The old geography of the field, Israeli philology on one side and American theory on the other, is gone or going. Her career runs through both, Berkeley and Jerusalem, Sussmann and Boyarin, variant readings and jurisprudence, and the volume reads as a field that has stopped choosing.
The method has held for thirty-five years. Find a word everyone uses as though it named one thing. Ask whether it does. Talmudic difference turns out to be textual, hermeneutical, dialectical, or social. Impurity turns out to be ritual, moral, genealogical, or carnal. Divine law turns out to mean either law issued by a divine sovereign or law bearing supposedly divine properties. Once the split is made, arguments that ran for decades turn out to have been two arguments wearing one name.
A discrepancy between two passages becomes a lesson in historical method.
A purity rule becomes a theory of who belongs.
A commandment becomes a question about what law is.
A legal fiction becomes a question about truth.
A joke becomes a question about God.
The subject under all of it is a civilization that made two commitments at once. The Torah comes from God. Human beings have to argue about what it means.
Most systems reduce the strain between those two. On Hayes’s reading, the rabbis raise it. Revelation does not end interpretation. Divine authority does not crowd out human authority. Disagreement does not break faith. Adaptation does not refute eternity. A command with no visible reason does not stop being divine. A ruling need not reproduce a fact fixed outside the courtroom. Even the laughter is not unbelief.
Whether she is right is a live question.
At each stage of the work the finding has been the same. The question the field thought it was asking was not yet the right question.
Notes
Wikipedia, “Christine Hayes” — birth date December 6, 1960; Australian parents; Sydney and Adelaide; Hillel; 1982 kibbutz; two years nonprofit; return to academia 1986; Hebrew University 1987–88; M.A. 1988, Ph.D. 1993; Boyarin as advisor; marriage to Della Rocca 1988; two sons; “Hayes is not Jewish.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Hayes
Hayes’s curriculum vitae, Harvard Law School faculty site — the single most useful document here. Full employment history and ranks (Assistant 1996–99, Associate 1999–2002, Full 2002–05, Weis Professor 2005–21, Sterling 2021–23, chair 2011–15); B.A. March 1984; Salo Baron Prize dated 1999; Mellon New Directions awarded 2003 for use in 2005–06; complete publication list; the November 2005 Whitney Humanities Center talk “The Talmudic Martin Guerre OR Death of a Legal Fiction”; Dworkin article; Urbach translation; Mishnah Avodah Zarah translation (2022); the in-progress book listed as The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Talmudic Humor; the full list of doctoral advisees; Limmud Oz Melbourne 2022; Los Angeles synagogue lectures. https://helios.law.harvard.edu/Public/Faculty/Cv.aspx?i=12356
Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2023 retirement tribute (written by Penelope Laurans, read by Dean Tamar Gendler) — “at the head of your field”; the dissertation “so electrified a field that a leading scholar published an entire volume”; the reader comments about the Open Yale course. https://fas.yale.edu/news-announcements/faculty-retirement-and-memorial-tributes/faculty-retirement-tributes-2023/christine-hayes
Yale Jewish Studies faculty profile — current status; Hartman ordination program role as faculty member and curriculum supervisor; Laughter, Comedy, and Play in Rabbinic Literature as the current working title; Lund honorary doctorate 2023; Gruss chairs 2024 and 2025. https://jewishstudies.yale.edu/profile/christine-hayes
Yale Law School faculty page — visiting professor (adjunct) of law, spring term; affiliated scholar, Brodie Center for Jewish and Israeli Law; course title Concepts of Divine Law in Historical Perspective; honorary doctorates from Lund and JTS. https://law.yale.edu/christine-elizabeth-hayes
Yale News, April 12, 2021, Sterling appointment. https://news.yale.edu/2021/04/12/christine-hayes-appointed-sterling-professor-religious-studies
Yale Religious Studies, May 28, 2025 — JTS honorary degree, commencement address, and the citation text including ohevet Yisrael. https://religiousstudies.yale.edu/node/7224
Yale Daily News, December 1, 2021 — Della Rocca’s Sterling chair and the second-Sterling-couple claim, attributed to acting philosophy chair Kenneth Winkler. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/12/01/catching-up-with-michael-della-rocca-yales-newest-sterling-professor-of-philosophy/
Wikipedia, “Michael Della Rocca” — b. 1962; Spinoza; the Principle of Sufficient Reason; Yale since 1991.
Shlomo Zuckier’s retirement tribute on LinkedIn is the source of the Twersky anecdote and of the detail that she studied with Milgrom, Sussmann, and Boyarin. He introduces the Twersky exchange with “Legend has it,” and I have kept that qualification.
The Neusner episode
Cambridge Core, Journal of Law and Religion review page, which supplies the full bibliographic chain: Neusner’s Are the Talmuds Interchangeable? Christine Hayes’s Blunder, South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism no. 122, Scholars Press, 1995, xxix + 166 pp.; Neusner’s 1995 review in JSJ 26; Hayes’s “Response to Jacob Neusner,” JSJ 27/3 (1996) 324–333.
Oxford Academic listing for the book’s appendix, “Response to Jacob Neusner.”
Maclean’s, May 16, 2005 — Neusner’s 900-plus books, the “Drop Dead” sign-offs, and the habit of answering critics with a whole volume bearing their name.
Ben Rothke’s review of Aaron Hughes’s Neusner biography, Times of Israel, on the lawyer on retainer and the Steinsaltz volume.
Oxford University Press page for Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, including the Jewish Quarterly Review line about incisive and elegant formulations.
Project MUSE review summary, which lays out the book’s parts: textual causes, ambiguity, the Bavli’s verbal-economy assumption, dialectical strategies.
Gentile Impurities
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2004.12.06 — the clearest short account of the argument: gentiles subject only to moral purity law; genealogical impurity a priestly concern in the Pentateuch; Ezra and Nehemiah extending holy seed to all Israel.
Project MUSE review — the Klawans debt, the ritual/moral distinction, and the addition of genealogical impurity as a property of offspring rather than of the actor.
Oxford University Press page for the book, on sectarianism and the Jewish-Christian separation.
What’s Divine about Divine Law?
Princeton University Press page — the two conceptions and the “scandalous” third path.
Richard Hidary, “God’s Law in Human Hands,” Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2018. This is where the returning-husband case, the Yerushalmi passage with Rabbi Imi and Aba the son of Aba, the Bavli’s report of the western mockery, the Gamaliel–Joshua calendar story, the Cicero definition, and the Zelophehad point all appear together. Hidary also raises the objection that Hayes overstates R. Yehudah’s nominalism.
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2016.04.40 — the Euthyphro objection and the claim that both traditions could reach her problem without each other.
AJS Review notice summarizing parts 2 and 3.
The Lehrhaus review, which notes that she does not oversimplify either pole.
