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In 1999 a rabbinical student at Yeshiva University handed in a Hebrew article and was told it was heresy.
The student was Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, then twenty-six, three years into the semicha program at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and holding a Wexner Graduate Fellowship. The journal was Beit Yitzchak, the Torah publication produced by RIETS, filled with pieces by the yeshiva’s rebbeim and its best students. Appearing in it marked a man as a serious learner. The editor rejected the submission and used the word kefirah. He could not say what in the article was heretical. He believed the roshei yeshiva would not accept it, and that was enough.
The article was an analysis of a passage in tractate Bava Qamma about liability for theft and damage. Wimpfheimer’s description of the piece, given years later, is that it dealt with the rishonim, the medieval commentators, the standard furniture of yeshiva study. Something about the way he handled them read as foreign.
The next editorial board asked to publish it. Wimpfheimer agreed on the condition that it appear as written. They agreed, then lost their nerve, and printed it in the spring of 2000 with the introduction removed. That volume, number 31, also carried an article by two other students, Eliyahu Stern and Meir Katz, which cited academic Talmud scholars. Roshei yeshiva denounced it from the front of the room. Rabbi Hershel Schachter said the authors had abandoned tradition and were spending the yeshiva’s money on the wrong kind of Torah. “It was a big chutzpah,” he told a student journalist a quarter century later, still unmoved. One maggid shiur compared the authors to Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron who brought a strange fire and were consumed by it.
Boxes of Beit Yitzchak were normally left on the bimah of the Glueck Beis Midrash for days, students dropping cash and taking a copy, a new box brought out when one emptied. Wimpfheimer remembers the box being out for a day. On the eve of the annual Seforim Sale, eleven boxes went missing from a freight elevator. The sales manager attributed this to facilities staff and an error. To this day the volume is hard to find in the yeshiva’s collection. A student editor writing in 2024 had to climb to the sixth floor of Gottesman Library to read it.
Wimpfheimer’s summary of the affair is that the objection ran to reputation. Nobody read the pieces closely enough to object to a claim in them. The method carried a smell, and the smell was the argument.
A young man produces a reading of a sacred text. A community that has trained him to read decides his reading is out of bounds without being able to say why. Two questions come out of it, and he has spent twenty-five years on them. How much of a text belongs to the people who made it? How much belongs to the people who inherit it and cannot let it go?
He was born around 1972 in New York and raised in an Orthodox home he has called German-Jewish, with roots in Washington Heights. The family sat on a line inside Orthodoxy that outsiders rarely see. Hats on Shabbat, gray ones. He began formal Talmud in fifth grade. From third grade through seventh he memorized about a hundred mishnayot a year.
High school was the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy, Yeshiva University’s boys’ school. He tested into the advanced Talmud track, which had a curious consequence. The strong students spent so many hours on Gemara that Bible dropped out of the day. He was good at this before he liked it.
Traditional lomdus rewards a student for finding a contradiction and dissolving it with a distinction. A fourteenth-century authority gets harmonized with a nineteenth-century one, and nobody asks whether the later vocabulary could have meant anything to the earlier man. Ingenuity counted. Sequence did not. A brilliant resolution on Monday vanished when Tuesday brought a new sugya. Wimpfheimer wanted a subject that accumulated.
Yeshivat Sha’alvim in Israel and met a teacher named Shmuel Nacham, who showed him a Talmud with a history. Tannaitic material could be separated from amoraic. Babylonian traditions could be compared with Palestinian ones. Midrashic parallels could be laid alongside. Medieval commentators had lived in specific centuries in specific places and could be read accordingly. Nacham did not present this as a break with tradition, and at the time Wimpfheimer did not know how much it resembled what academic critics did.
He knew it worked. He has dated his real study of Talmud to that year, calling it “pretty much nonstop from age 17.” He was in love with the thing now.
At Columbia College he majored in mathematics and history and finished in 1995. He kept up six hours of Talmud a day while doing it. Then back to Sha’alvim for a year on a fellowship, then into the RIETS program in 1996.
He went to rabbinical school on a misapprehension. “I thought rabbis were scholars,” he told an interviewer. Internships taught him what a pulpit asks of a man. Hospital visits. Funerals. Marriages that need saving and cannot be saved. He is a warm, sociable person who sings and plays basketball, and none of that made him want the job. He took the ordination anyway, in June 2000, along with an M.A. in Talmudic Studies, and left.
Columbia gave him David Weiss Halivni (1927-2022).
Halivni was an Auschwitz survivor from Sighet, a childhood acquaintance of Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), identified as a prodigy before the war and tested as an adolescent with the nodl farher, the pin test, in which a pin is driven through a volume of Talmud and the boy names the word it lands on at every depth. He had spent his life on Meqorot u-Mesorot, a critical commentary running to most of the Talmud, whose governing insight was that the anonymous editorial voice of the Gemara, the stam, had reworked the attributed traditions it received, sometimes past the point of recovery.
Wimpfheimer had read Halivni in yeshiva the way boys read forbidden books. Now he was the man’s graduate student and his technical support. Halivni typed his own commentary but never mastered email attachments.
Wimpfheimer had the Bar Ilan Responsa database burned onto his hard drive and could run word searches across the entire corpus. Students would sometimes ask a question a search could answer. Halivni answered faster than the computer, and he was right almost every time. Then a student would ask something a computer could not do: how often does a sixth-generation Babylonian amora reject the midrashic reading of a fourth-generation one? Halivni answered that at the same speed.
Wimpfheimer also studied with Shamma Friedman (b. 1937), Halivni’s younger antagonist in the same enterprise. Halivni built a theory of how the Bavli came to be. Short attributed amoraic rulings were transmitted without their reasoning, and the anonymous editors who came after reconstructed the arguments around them, sometimes from a conceptual world the original speakers would not have recognized. The tell was the forced explanation, the reading strained enough to show a later hand working with material it no longer understood. Friedman reached a related picture from below. His 1977 essay on Perek ha-Ishah Rabbah set out criteria for separating the layers of a single sugya through manuscripts, language, parallel traditions, and literary structure, and it turned the separation into something another scholar could perform and check. Halivni supplied the theory of how the Bavli came into being. Friedman made the dissection reproducible.
His committee shows what else he was collecting. Halivni for source criticism. Jeffrey Rubenstein for the literary study of rabbinic stories. Elizabeth Castelli for critical theory. Alan Segal for ancient Judaism and Christianity in comparison. Michael Stanislawski for modern Jewish history. Around the coursework he added a summer at the CUNY Latin and Greek Institute in 2002, a year as a visiting student at Hebrew University, workshops in codicology and early Hebrew printing, and a summer at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory in 2003. A man who wanted only to be Halivni’s successor would not have gone to Ithaca to read theory.
The dissertation, “Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud,” was accepted with distinction in October 2005 and won Columbia’s Baron Prize for the best Jewish studies dissertation over a five-year span.
Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories came out from Penn in 2011 and went after a division that organizes the entire field.
Rabbinic literature is sorted into halakhah and aggadah. Halakhah is the legal material, the part that generates obligations. Aggadah is everything else: stories, theology, folklore, medicine, gossip about rabbis. Traditional learning privileges the first and treats the second as a rest stop. Academic study inherited the sorting even while questioning the hierarchy.
Wimpfheimer went at the passages that will not sort. A story about a legal actor doing something legal is both at once. He argued that these stories are the places where law admits what a rule suppresses: the particular man, his status, who was in the room, what everyone wanted, and the several moral languages running at the same time. Law becomes one voice among politics, ethics, psychology, and status.
Two thinkers stand behind the method. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) supplied the taste for texts that talk in many voices at once and resist a single authority. Robert Cover (1943-1986), the Yale legal scholar, supplied the claim in “Nomos and Narrative” that no legal rule means anything outside the stories that give it a world. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) arrives in the chapter on Torah as cultural capital, where Wimpfheimer reads intra-rabbinic envy and status competition out of a passage in Bava Batra.
The chapter titles announce the program. Resisting code as the image of Jewish law. Deconstructing halakhah and aggadah. Rabbis and outsiders. Rabbis and students. Rabbis and rabbis. Then a theory of reading the long Bavli narratives, where he separates the storyteller’s centrifugal energy from the editor’s centripetal work of smoothing everything back toward a rule.
The claim about the Talmud carries a claim about law generally. A code is a distillation. The process that makes law, applies it, and is lived under it is thick with everything a code strains out. The Talmud sometimes knows this better than the codes built out of it.
Reviews came from the people whose opinion sets a field. Steven Fraade of Yale gave it a featured review in AJS Review and called it original and valuable, then raised two objections. First, Wimpfheimer treats the Mishnah as a flat statutory code so that the Talmud can be the interesting anti-code, when the Mishnah has legal stories of its own and has been shown to be narrativized. He gets his contrast by monologizing one text in the act of accusing everyone else of monologizing another. Second, the social reading covers about five hundred years of anonymous editors of different periods and habits, and Fraade wondered whether a single diagnosis of rabbinic anxiety, applied that widely, flattens into a lens that stops distinguishing anything. He closed the point with a joke about the rabbis going five centuries without a good night’s sleep.
Northwestern hired him as a college fellow in 2006 after a year at Penn State and a spring at Harvard, made him assistant professor in 2007 with a courtesy appointment at the Pritzker School of Law, and promoted him to associate professor in 2013. He directed the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies from 2012 to 2016 and later chaired the religious studies department. In 2011 he was offered fellowships at NYU’s Tikvah Center and at Michigan’s Frankel Institute and declined both, staying home at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute. He had work to finish and a center to build.
The teaching load: Introduction to Judaism. Rabbinic narrative. Kabbalah. Antisemitism. Hebrew Bible. Reading the Talmud. Talmudic Logic. He also built a Coursera course on the Talmud that has enrolled tens of thousands of students and whose organizing purpose is not to teach people to recognize which method they are watching when someone reads a page.
He talks constantly to communities that would never hire each other’s rabbis. The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance in 2007. Anshe Emet and Adas Israel, Conservative congregations. Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles. The Schechter Institute in Jerusalem. Chicago is also home to SVARA, the queer yeshiva founded by Rabbi Benay Lappe (b. 1960), whose students learn Talmud in the original with a crowbar in hand, and Wimpfheimer has sat down with them on camera to argue about his own book.
The Talmud: A Biography appeared from Princeton in 2018 in the Lives of Great Religious Books series, alongside volumes on the Book of Job, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Book of Mormon.
The book placed him inside the cultural turn in rabbinics. Wissenschaft des Judentums had taught scholars to ask when a tradition arose, how a text was composed, what earlier layer lay under the present one. That work continued. From the 1980s a second set of questions moved toward the center. What social world does a text imagine? What does its literary form accomplish? Daniel Boyarin made critical theory hard to avoid. Rubenstein made the literary shape of the Bavli’s stories a serious historical object. Wimpfheimer brought jurisprudence. From Robert Cover he took the claim that law lives inside the narratives that give it force, and he asked what comes into view once source criticism has finished its work.
He organized it around three Talmuds.
The essential Talmud is the historical object, produced by rabbis and editors in Sasanian Babylonia between roughly the third and eighth centuries. Here the reader differentiates: this saying is early, this frame is late, this conversation was manufactured to look like a conversation.
The enhanced Talmud is what a thousand years of readers made out of that book. Rashi (1040-1105), Maimonides (1135-1204), Rabad (c. 1125-1198), the Tosafists, the codifiers, the yeshiva students. Traditional study collapses chronology on purpose so that Rava and Rashi and a living rosh yeshiva can sit in one room. What the young Wimpfheimer took for a historical error the older one takes as a legitimate object of study.
The emblematic Talmud is the Talmud as a sign of Jewishness. Jews venerate it. Christian tribunals burned it in Paris in 1240. The Karaites rejected it, the maskilim used it as the thing they were leaving, Hasidim and Zionists and reformers pushed off it to establish themselves, and then came back to reclaim it once they had. Koreans buy digests of it by the hundred thousand. Larry Charles told an interviewer that writing Seinfeld resembled writing a dark Talmud, a lot of clever minds working one small ethical question from every angle. A television writer’s throwaway line and a papal burning are the same phenomenon at different temperatures.
The cover reproduces a 2010 work by the American-Israeli artist Andi Arnovitz called If Only They Had Asked Us, a tapestry running red to blue, built from thousands of small scrolls, each one a strip cut from a printed page of Talmud. The artist’s position is that the law would look different if women had helped write it. A book about how the Talmud gets used is wearing a use of the Talmud on its jacket.
Wimpfheimer’s argument about the present is that the Talmud has entered a golden old age. More people study it now than at any point in history, most of them traditionally observant, and daf yomi has turned the text into a way of marking time for people who will never produce a novel reading of anything. He was reluctant about the phrase. Nobody knows whether an old age is the last one.
The book placed him inside the cultural turn in rabbinics. The nineteenth and twentieth-century Wissenschaft tradition asked what the sources say and when they were written. Wimpfheimer’s cohort asked what the sources do as literature and as artifacts of a society. Daniel Boyarin (b. 1946) had made critical theory usable on rabbinic texts. Rubenstein had made the literary shape of the stories a serious object. Wimpfheimer brought legal theory into the room.
The book won the National Jewish Book Award in Education and Identity for 2018. Boyarin called it the best single-volume introduction to the experience of Talmud study. Moshe Halbertal praised its double vision, inside and outside at once.
Both books read intensely and locally, then generalize.
Shai Secunda dissented in the Jewish Review of Books. He said book is not a biography. A biography of the Talmud would cover Sasanian Babylonia in its own right, the manuscripts, the printers, the censors, the pilpul traditions, the Sephardi schools, the effect of the text on Jewish societies and languages across the world. Wimpfheimer gives readings of exemplary passages and an account of how meaning gets made around them. He is strongest where a reader meets a page. He is weakest where the book is an object with a supply chain. Secunda also caught a chronological error about the last generations of named amoraim.
However, by reviewing a synthesis like The Talmud: A Biography by the standard you apply to a monograph is a category error, and a Secunda graded the book he wanted.
In 2018 Wimpfheimer reviewed Aaron Hughes’s biography of Jacob Neusner (1932-2016) in Religious Studies Review and judged that Neusner deserves a biography but that this one sat too close to its subject, letting the man dictate the terms of his own story even where those terms strained belief. A scholar who has spent his career on the distance between what a text meant and what its readers made of it will notice when a biographer takes dictation.
The review’s indictment of Neusner is graphomania: 655 titles, fourteen and a half books a year, volumes assembled by copy and paste that resolve into one book when you lay them on a table. The man who wrote that has published two books in two decades and by his own account writes slowly, revises with a chavruta, and lets things sit. He is the inverse of the Neusner method.
In 2023 he published “The Mishnah’s Reader” in the Jewish Quarterly Review, arguing that the Mishnah’s literary features, its couplets and symmetries, train a reader toward conceptual meaning. Four years earlier the same piece sat on his CV under a different title, “The Postmodern Mishnah: The Role of the Reader and the Instability of Meaning,” listed as under consideration. The published version drops the word postmodern and drops instability. Something happened in review, and the argument came out sounding less like theory and more like philology. In 2024 he contributed an essay to a festschrift on Raphael Nathan Natta Rabbinovicz (1835-1888), the great collator of Talmudic variants, called “Biography as Battleground,” which reads the fights over a scholar’s life story as fights over the legitimacy of a method.
Northwestern still lists him as associate professor. He has held that rank since 2013. Two books, a major prize, a directorship, a department chairmanship, co-editorship of Prooftexts since 2017, and no third book yet. Public sources do not explain the gap. The work that makes a scholar’s reputation with general readers and the work that moves him up a ladder are not the same work.
In the American system the ladder has three rungs: assistant, associate, full. “Professor” without a modifier means the top rung.
Assistant professor is the entry rank, untenured, usually on a six or seven year clock ending in an up-or-out tenure review. Pass it and you get tenure and promotion to associate at the same time, which is why the two get conflated. Tenure means the university cannot fire you without cause or financial exigency. That is the rung where job security arrives.
Full professor is a second promotion and it works differently. There is no clock. Nobody has to apply, and nothing bad happens if you never do. The standard is a substantial second body of work produced after tenure and a reputation in the field beyond your own campus, and the case usually requires letters from senior scholars elsewhere who are asked whether you would be promoted at their institution. Some people go up six years after tenure. Some go up at twenty. Many never go up and retire as associate professors, which carries no stigma in most humanities departments.
The practical differences are money, governance, and eligibility. Full professors earn more and are the ones considered for named or endowed chairs. They vote on tenure and promotion cases that associates cannot vote on, and they staff the committees that decide them, so the rank carries power over other people’s careers. Deanships and provostships come from that pool. Full professors write the external letters. In some places the weight of doctoral supervision shifts too.
Two caveats. Titles vary. Research professor, professor of practice, clinical professor, and teaching professor are separate tracks, often without tenure, and the word professor in them means something else. And the British system runs on different terms, where lecturer and reader occupy the middle and professor is rarer, closer to a chair than to a rank, which is why British academics sometimes read American titles as inflated.
The problem Wimpfheimer works on shows up wherever a community holds a text as both historical artifact and living authority. Nineteenth-century German scholarship gave historical criticism of the Bible its characteristic form, and Protestant theologians spent decades separating the question of how a text came to be from the question of what a church could still make of it. Rome resisted, then authorized. Divino afflante Spiritu in 1943 told Catholic exegetes to work in the original languages and attend to genre and ancient context, and Dei Verbum consolidated the change at Vatican II. Historical-critical study of the Qur’an has run since Nöldeke and now carries a large literature, and its relation to inherited Muslim accounts of revelation and compilation stays contested. In each case the same three things hold. The text has a history its own readers cannot see from inside. What the community does with the text survives criticism untouched. And the men who can hold both at once are rare.
What Wimpfheimer added is the refusal to rank them. The historical critic asks what a passage meant when it was made. The traditional learner asks what it means inside a conversation running a thousand years. The reception historian asks what it means to people who have never opened it. Three questions, three answers, all of them findable. The error is mixing them and then fighting about which answer is the true one. That is what the editor in 1999 could not articulate, and it is what Wimpfheimer has been articulating ever since.
The last scene belongs to Halivni.
Around 2019, after his teacher’s stroke, Wimpfheimer visited him at home. Halivni did not know who he was. He could not manage speech and may not have recognized his family. Wimpfheimer talked for both of them for a while, then mentioned his new book, and offered to share something he had noticed in the sugya on liability for fire damage, the passage that opens The Talmud: A Biography, the one about a dog who carries a burning cake onto a neighbor’s grain.
Halivni’s face changed. He stuttered, then produced the page citation. His eyes came on. He was following, and he had things to say, and he could not say them.
Wimpfheimer left knowing that the Talmud sat deeper in the man than his own name did, “as if the Talmud lived in his body.” He tried it again on a visit in November 2021. Nothing came back. Halivni died in Jerusalem on June 28, 2022.
A biography of a book is a strange genre and Wimpfheimer’s critics were right that he did not quite write one. What he has written instead, across two books and twenty-five years, is an account of what happens to people who give their lives to a text. It gets into them. It outlives the part of them that can talk about it. And when they are gone, what remains is the text, unchanged on the page, meaning something slightly different to everyone still holding it.
Notes
The Beit Yitzchak affair, including Rabbi Hershel Schachter’s rebuke, the Nadav and Avihu comparison, the box on the bimah gone in a day, the eleven boxes missing before the Seforim Sale, Aaron Koller on the absence of editorial instructions, and Wimpfheimer’s own account of the rejection and the removed introduction: Nadav Heller, “The Banned Book: Academic Talmud at YU,” The Commentator, March 2024.
The full title is קרן כעין שגנב, כפל ד’ וה’ כשעת העמדה בדין “Principal as at the time he stole; double, fourfold and fivefold as at the time of adjudication”, with the subtitle סוגיית התלמוד בבלי בבא קמא (ס”ה.-ס”ו.) “The sugya of the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kamma 65a-66a.” The byline is שמעון בן-ציון ויימפפהיימר (Shimon Ben-Zion Wimpfheimer), his Hebrew name.
He told the Commentator the piece was about rishonim and was not critical. The bulk of it is a comparative study of how Rashi, Rabbeinu Tam, the Ri, and the Ra’avad each handle the sugya, and the first third is straight lomdus: a reconstruction of Rav’s position turning on the distinction between mamon, which the act of theft creates, and kenas, which does not exist as an obligation until the court constitutes it. Any lamdan would recognize the move. He writes in the first person plural throughout, סוגייתנו, חידושנו, the house idiom. He is writing from inside.
The frame is academic even where the content is not, and the frame is what a trained reader smells.
Four places do it. He compares the Tosefta version of the baraita with the Bavli’s and concludes that the Gemara’s aim is to fit the baraita to Rav, and that the fit creates problems downstream. He observes that the Gemara makes no attempt to understand Rav against a chronological or historical background and works instead by internal sevara, and says elsewhere that chronology carries no weight in the search for a sevara joining one source to another. He opens the second half by announcing a methodological question, how a commentator should proceed when two sugyot overlap without being identical, and then sorts the rishonim by their answers, with a working vocabulary of hard and soft categories. And he says of Rashi’s categories that they do not exist objectively.
Every one of them describes the tradition rather than performs it. That is the whole of the offense, and it is a shift of grammatical person rather than a claim about God or history. Whatever kefirah means, this is not it, and the text will not support the charge to anyone who reads it.
You can see the amputation of the introduction. Page 214 starts cold, inside the sugya, with no preamble. The methodological program appears around page 222, mid-article, with no setup, as though the reader has already been told what kind of piece this is. An article that announces a comparative methodology in its middle and never in its opening is an article missing its front matter.
The opening problem is when a legal obligation comes into existence, and the answer is that some obligations are made by acts and others are made by courts. Near the end he reads Rabbeinu Tam as holding that the law must change itself when its categorical understanding cannot reach justice. That is Narrating the Law in embryo, written in Hebrew at twenty-six for an audience of yeshiva students, ten years before Penn.
Now we have the Introduction and the notes. You see four pages of methodology before a word of the sugya appears: a הקדמה laying out three goals of learning, then sections on how to analyze the Bavli, how to understand the Rishonim through Talmudic tension, and what counts as a result of a Rishon’s method. Then the sugya.
The introduction explains the charge. Five moves in it would unsettle a rosh yeshiva.
He describes the Bavli’s treatment of its sources as ahistorical, and describes it as a stance the text takes. The Shas does not examine its sources chronologically. It declines to see Amoraim of different generations and different places as disagreeing out of historical accident, and rejects that reading in favor of one that treats every source as if argued in a single beit midrash in a single period. Naming a stance implies a vantage outside it.
He says a ukimta built to resolve a contradiction between two sources must break at least one of their simple readings. Harmonization costs pshat. That is David Weiss Halivni on forced explanations, arrived at in yeshivish and unattributed.
He writes that the Talmud can be read as the interpretive reading of later generations upon earlier ones, that every Rishon is an integral link in that chain, and that apart from the difference in period there is no great distance between the parshanut of the Ramban and that of Rava. That levels the gradient between Amora and Rishon, and the gradient is the thing.
He ends the methodology by saying the most important point in all learning is to know who says what: Tanna, Amora, Rishon, Acharon, or הלומד. The learner joins the list of speakers.
Then he builds a typology. Dialectical answers, resting on sevara, prepared to take a new understanding of the sources. Structural answers, preferring the internal simple sense and a more technical resolution. He runs the four Rishonim through it as men with temperaments and preferences. Rashi collapses the gemara’s four answers into three and reads the whole sugya as one unit. Rabbeinu Tam (c. 1100-1171) goes conceptual and reads the sugya as protecting the thief from paying more than his measure of law, which Wimpfheimer calls a תועלת חברתית reading. The Ri of Dampierre (d. c. 1189) refuses the dialectic, decides which half of the sugya governs, and hangs everything on a technical claim about the animal’s name so that reality stops mattering. The Raavad (c. 1125-1198) is the conservative, defending Rav’s original categories and denying justice claims any power at all.
That is why the editor could not name the heresy. Every source is in the Vilna Shas. The register is a shiur. What is foreign is the posture, and posture is hard to indict.
Third, the through-line to the later work is stronger than I expected. The question the essay keeps returning to is whether טענות של יושר וצדק have halakhic force, or whether they are pressure from outside the law that the categories must absorb or refuse. His answer for Rashi, Rabbeinu Tam and the Ri: these are claims we recognize by our own sense of justice, and they should not carry original halakhic force. For the Raavad: they carry none, and when the law needs changing you change it by another legal route. A book about the friction between the Bavli’s legal voice and the register that will not fit inside it starts here, in 1999, phrased as a question about ana patimna and mah li ketala kula. Reading Rabbeinu Tam as motivated by social utility is already a cultural-turn move made inside the beit midrash. And the essay is reception history: one sugya, four readers, sorted by hermeneutic temperament. Twenty years later that becomes a biography of a book.
Fourth: the essay is not academic Talmud. There is no manuscript work, no attribution of layers by language or formula, no separation of stam from Amoraic material, no citation of scholarship. He rejects chronological-historical reading as a description of the Bavli’s method without performing historical criticism himself. What he was punished for was a frame, not a finding. He got in trouble for describing how the sugya harmonizes rather than for refusing to harmonize. The boundary at RIETS in 2000 sat at description, not at conclusions.
His thesis is that the Bavli sets its sources side by side as if they belonged to one room and one argument, and builds new categories that break the simple sense of both. He was then asked to submit to the same treatment, and the introduction went.
Setting sources side by side. That is what he later did to Jacob Neusner. The 1999 essay says the way of the Shas is to compare sources, the like and the unlike, in order to divide between them and understand them as building units of a single halakhic system. In 2005 he walks into the JTS library with a postcard from University Press of America listing ten Jacob Neusner titles on halakhah and aggadah published in a single year, requests them all, and lays them out on a large table. The finding is that the front matter varies, the order of presentation varies, the illustrating examples vary, and the body does not. Books, compared, resolve into one book.
What differs is the direction. The Bavli compares to unify. It builds a category that holds both sources and pays for it by breaking the simple sense of at least one. Wimpfheimer compares to separate, and the thing he separates is a corpus from its catalogue. The unified reading of Neusner is the one printed on the postcard: 655 titles, one oeuvre, fourteen and a half books a year. The table dissolves the oeuvre back into its parts and finds fewer parts than titles.
Neusner’s own signature contribution was teaching the field to distrust the internal historiography of rabbinic texts, meaning the attributions to named rabbis. Do not believe that the statement belongs to the man whose name sits on it. Require external control. The table applies that rule to Neusner’s shelf. Do not believe that the book belongs to the year on its title page, or that the title names a work. The review does not say this out loud, and it does not need to.
The same rule governs the review’s case against Aaron W. Hughes. Hughes has one witness. Hours of interviews with a living subject, and the result is a station-to-station narrative in which every institutional move is progress, Brown to South Florida included. Wimpfheimer’s charge is that Hughes parrots. That is a tradent objection. The biographer has no independent standing from the source he transmits. Judging a biography of Neusner by the evidentiary standard Neusner imposed on everyone else, and finding it fails, is the review’s argument. He indicts the book with the subject’s own instrument.
Then the comparisons at the other two scales. Hughes claims Neusner’s outsider status forced the methodological revolution and produced the antagonism as a byproduct. Wimpfheimer answers with Shamma Friedman (b. 1937), who matriculated at JTS a year behind Neusner and was also not yeshiva-trained, and Daniel Boyarin (b. 1946), who came a few years later, and both of whom revolutionized the field with colleagues. Same institution, same disadvantage, different result, so the disadvantage is not the cause. Then Isadore Twersky (1930-1997) at Harvard set beside Neusner at Brown. That concedes what Neusner did better. Text-centered program, yeshiva alumni, unfinished degrees, no placements, against Neusner’s students trained outward and placed. Then the control on Hughes’s placement statistic: how many were still in the academy ten years on. Parallels laid side by side to see which variable moves.
So the review compares at three scales, and at each one the finding is that the difference Hughes credits is smaller than advertised. Books that are one book. Outsiderhood that produced no revolution in the men who shared it. Placement that did not survive tenure.
The career point. In 2005 he was finishing a dissertation on halakhah and aggadah, and a postcard arrives announcing that a giant published more than ten books on his topic in 2001 alone. That is a wall in front of a young man’s project. He goes to check, and the wall is a facade, and the ground is clear. Narrating the Law becomes possible in the reading room. The scene reads as a method demonstration and functions as a clearing of the field.
Childhood, hundred mishnayot a year from third through seventh grade, Washington Heights, Shmuel Nacham at Sha’alvim, “I thought rabbis were scholars,” the Arnovitz cover, the Larry Charles line about Seinfeld, Korean interest, Moshe Simon-Shoshan’s assessment: Ilana Kurshan, “The Talmud, Personified,” Tablet, April 10, 2018.
“Pretty much nonstop from age 17,” the age-45 self-description in 2018, the Paris Disputation and Karaite material: Times of Israel, December 27, 2018.
Halivni: the pin test, the Bar Ilan CD races, the technical support role, the maculations, the Friedman contrast, the two late visits and the fire sugya, “as if the Talmud lived in his body”: Wimpfheimer, “Remembering Halivni,” originally Columbia IIJS, reprinted August 4, 2022. The stroke visit is dated “three years ago” from a 2022 piece, so I wrote “around 2019”; the second visit is “this past November,” so November 2021. Halivni’s death date from Wikipedia.
Fraade’s critique, including the Mishnah objection, the five-centuries-of-anxiety objection, and the sleep joke in footnote 5: AJS Review 37.1 (April 2013): 135-39, full text at https://www.academia.edu/3584793/
Secunda’s dissent: “(Almost) People,” Jewish Review of Books.
All dates, ranks, fellowships declined (Tikvah and Frankel, 2011-12), committee membership, the Latin and Greek Institute, the Lehmann codicology and early printing workshops, the Neusner review, and the article list: his CV.
Current rank and the 2023 and 2024 articles: https://religious-studies.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/tenure-track-faculty/barry-wimpfheimer.html
Benay Lappe and SVARA: the Oral Talmud episode with Wimpfheimer is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otWjtc5znys
“Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud” (2005)
This is his dissertation. Four hundred and thirty-three pages, Columbia 2005, “Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud,” advised by Halivni, with Jeffrey Rubenstein, Alan Segal and Michael Stanislawski on the committee and Courtney Bender, Elizabeth Castelli and David Damrosch reading chapters. Four sugyot, all from Neziqin: Sanhedrin 75a on the lovesick man, Bava Batra 21a-22a on education and restricted competition, Bava Metzia 97a on Rava’s anger and shame, and Shavuot 30 with Sanhedrin 19 and Ketubot 105b-106a on courtroom postures.
The argument ends on page 275. Pages 285 through 433 are manuscript synopses, twelve appendices, one per sugya, plus a lower-critical case study on the phrase ashgera de-lishna and how lists travel. A third of the volume is apparatus. The Textual Postscript states the rules: he works from an eclectic text he built, prefers the shorter reading, and names his two exceptions, homoioteleuton and passages where the longer text shows rabbis behaving badly. A friend wrote him an Excel macro to generate the synopses. The 1999 essay said a house without a foundation has no standing and refused to start at stage two. Here is the foundation, printed, so anyone can check the readings on which the literary argument rests.
The intellectual center is an amendment to Robert Cover. In “Nomos and Narrative” Cover set the primogeniture statute of Deuteronomy 21 beside the Genesis narratives where younger sons keep taking what the rule assigns to elder ones, and he defended his use of biblical material to his Harvard Law Review readers on three grounds. Wimpfheimer accepts the enlargement, law as a normative world thicker than its rules, and takes the first two grounds with it. He stops at the third, that the example shows genre irrelevant to the creation of legal meaning. His chapter title is the answer. “The Difference Genre Makes.” Through Mikhail Bakhtin he argues that non-narrative legal writing is monological, working to make the language of law sovereign inside its own frame, while legal narrative is dialogical, letting law compete with desire, status and money and giving none of them the last word. Then the move that makes the argument Talmudic. The Stam is a reader who keeps trying to force dialogical stories back into monological law. Cover put narrative inside legal meaning. Wimpfheimer asks what legal reasoning does when it cannot tolerate what the narrative says once it arrives. That is an original claim made against the founding text of law and literature
Now the line back to 1999. The Hebrew essay asked whether claims of yosher and tzedek carry halakhic force, and found that Rashi, Rabbeinu Tam and the Ri treat them as things we recognize by our own sense of justice which should have no original legal power. The dissertation keeps the question and reverses the polarity. The extra-legal register becomes the object rather than the residue, and the Stam becomes the agent that suppresses it. Chapter One finds the Stam refusing to accept even one attributed position that would take the lovesickness story out of the reach of legal precedent. In 1999 he called this an ukimta that must break at least one simple reading. Here the breaking has an author and a motive.
He cites the four Stammaitic activities from the Bava Qamma introduction, generalization, expansion, completion, alteration, and he notes that Halivni had already identified the stammaim as the final arrangers of the Bavli. He leaves Halivni over what the arranging is worth. Halivni’s Stam is where the forced explanation comes from, the layer you identify to see past it. Wimpfheimer says two of his four chapters are an appreciation of the Stam’s artful work. Chapter Two argues that four pages of Bava Batra usually read as two discussions, one on education and one on restricted competition, are a single composition, held together by the traffic between knowledge and money, by the maxim that rivalry among scholars increases wisdom, and by names carried out of the legal material into the narratives. The courtroom-postures chapter does the same with material that reads as digression until it returns at the climax. That is a claim for the redactor as author.
The single best reading in the volume is R. Dimmi’s figs. Three stories precede it in which rabbis bend the restricted-competition rules, Rava for visiting rabbis, R. Kahana and Ravina out of pity for foreign merchants facing ruin. Then a visiting merchant rabbi arrives and Rava sends his sharpest student to stump him, exposes his poverty in knowledge capital, and destroys him commercially by applying the rule exactly. The law is on Rava’s side. The sequence makes it an abuse. Enforcing the letter as the jurist’s most effective subjective weapon is a finding, and it is available only to someone reading the sugya as a designed literary unit.
The soft spot is the unifying thesis of the conclusion, that assertions of rabbinic power are motivated by anxiety about rabbinic powerlessness. It works beautifully on the lovesick man, where the Stam’s answer converts a myth of power into a myth of impotence, and on Shimon ben Shetach summoning Gabriel into the courtroom, and on the honor-of-Torah ruling read as fear that the Am Ha’aretz view has gotten inside the academy. It works on all four chapters, and that is the problem. A frame that reads every assertion of power as anxiety about its loss has no case that would count against it. He is twenty-six years into the argument now and may have a better answer than he had then.
The anxiety thesis is compensatory and intrapsychic. It says the assertion of power is produced by a fear of powerlessness inside the actor. The lineage runs from Freud (1856-1939) and Adler (1870-1937) through reaction formation and the inferiority complex, and it enters rabbinics through the recognition that the rabbis of late antiquity were a small elite with modest actual authority who wrote a literature in which they command kings and raise the dead. Jacob Neusner helped open that line by distinguishing the rabbis’ expansive literary self-presentation from their marginal place in the larger political order in Judaism in Society: The Evidence of the Yerushalmi. Seth Schwartz pressed the case for limited rabbinic authority in Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E., while Catherine Hezser reconstructed the rabbis as a decentralized movement whose authority depended heavily on personal networks and voluntary acceptance in The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine. Christine Hayes gave the phenomenon the name Wimpfheimer borrows in his footnote, “Displaced Self-Perceptions: The Deployment of Minim and Romans in b. Sanhedrin 90b-91a”. Wimpfheimer’s own phrase, “myth of rabbinic authority,” in Narrating the Law, sits in a conversation that also included Michael Berger’s Rabbinic Authority and Beth Berkowitz’s Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures, both of whom he cites and thanks.
Alliance Theory does not care what is happening inside the man. It says a belief or a claim is held because it advertises loyalty and recruits allies, and it looks for the audience and the payoff. The currency is alliance value. Nobody has to feel anything.
Put the two on the same text and watch them separate. Take the ruling at the end of the courtroom-postures sugya that honor of Torah overrides the requirement to stand. Wimpfheimer’s reading is that the rabbis needed to reinscribe honor of Torah because they feared the Am Ha’aretz view of their standing had gotten inside their own institutions. An alliance reading would say the ruling is a sorting device: it makes deference to scholars a visible, costly, public act, which raises the price of defection and tells everyone in the room who is in the coalition. Whether anyone was anxious is irrelevant to whether the device works. Same with Rava and R. Dimmi’s figs. Anxiety says Rava fears a rival who might unseat him. Alliance says Rava is performing an execution in front of his own students and buying their loyalty with it, and the fear is a story we add.
Alliance Theory also has the better answer to the falsifiability problem. It generates predictions. Beliefs should move when the coalition moves. The same man should hold different positions in front of different audiences in ways that track who is listening. Those are countable. The anxiety thesis as Wimpfheimer runs it generates nothing comparable, because any assertion of power counts as evidence and no assertion of power counts against.
Chapter Two runs on Bourdieu. The academy is a field organized by competition for symbolic capital, Torah knowledge working as a currency that fixes rank and sometimes converts into money and office. That account is structural. Nobody has to decide to build the field and nobody has to be afraid for the competition to run. Wimpfheimer even supplies the device that would keep it structural, a textual unconscious that lets a literature preserve a social order its producers never formulated as sociology. The conclusion drops a level. There, assertions of rabbinic power come from unconscious fears of impotence. The Bourdieu chapter says Rava is playing for position in a field. The conclusion says Rava is afraid. Both can be true, and the dissertation does not say how, though it built the thing that would have let it stay upstairs. The asymmetry is in what can be checked. Positions, resources and who defers to whom leave evidence. Fear in men who left no access to their inner lives does not.
The acknowledgments are a map of the field. Halivni first, at length. Then Shamma Friedman in Jerusalem, with thanks for guidance that year and throughout, which means he sat with both principals of the methodological split and owes both. Christine Hayes at Yale, whom Neusner had attacked in a book-length rejoinder and whom Wimpfheimer defends in the 2018 review. Moshe Halbertal, Shlomo Naeh, Moshe Benovitz and Joshua Levinson at Hebrew University. David Stern at Penn. And in the friends list: Daniel Reifman, the chavruta named in the last footnote of the 1999 essay; Elli Stern and Meir Katz, the two students whose Beit Yitzchak article was denounced from the front of the room; and Shai Secunda, thanked here, and later the author of the harsh review.
And the Megillah 7b opening is the whole method in three pages. Rava gets drunk on Purim, slaughters R. Zeira, revives him, and is turned down the following year with the line that gives the introduction its title. Alfasi deletes the story. R. Ephraim of Kila Hamad converts it into a rule against extreme drinking. Ephraim Zalman Margolioth converts it into a rule that the obligation has a limit. Then the critical historians flatten it to chart the evolution of law, and the Fraenkel school flattens it hunting for the moral. Four constituencies with different reasons, one operation. In 1999 he had a typology of readers and a sorting rule. Here the typology has a victim, and the victim is a joke that nobody would let be a joke.
“Talmudic Legal Narrative: Broadening the Discourse of Jewish Law,” Dine Israel 24 (2007)
This is the bridge document. The dissertation was accepted in October 2005, the book came out in 2011, and this is the argument at the midpoint, already tested in front of legal scholars. Six things stand out.
He steps off Halivni’s road in the introduction. Eliezer Segal explained the friction around case citations diachronically, as a product of redaction. Wimpfheimer allows that the redaction history may be right and says it fails to appreciate the synchronic dilemma. Source criticism asks how the text was made. He is asking what the finished thing does to a reader. His advisor’s entire method is on the other side of that preference, and the piece registers the break in passing.
The acknowledgments footnote is a map of his world in 2007. Robert Post and Nan Goodman critiqued it at the 2005 Law and Humanities Workshop, which is a legal-academic room rather than a rabbinics one. Suzanne Last Stone edited it. The dissertation committee is thanked as a body. Then the readers, and two names in that list are Meir Katz and Eli Stern. Shai Secunda is also thanked, eleven years before reviewing The Talmud: A Biography harshly in the Jewish Review of Books. And footnote 2 records Shamma Friedman feeding him counterexamples, which confirms direct contact rather than method absorbed at a distance.
He corrects Cover. Footnote 30 faults Cover for imagining a second legal system where the primogeniture rule is followed without protest, on the grounds that the move treats family relations as ancillary and reproduces the code-like image of a monological legal world. A thirty-four-year-old is telling the field’s canonical essay that it commits the error it diagnoses. He also takes a swipe at Fraade in footnote 6 for using “narrative” too broadly. Fraade reviewed the book in AJS Review in 2013 and objected that Wimpfheimer flattens the Mishnah to get his contrast. Wimpfheimer poked first.
The passage that would draw Fraade’s sharpest objection is already fully formed here, and he kept it. Power and impotence, he writes, are opposing directional strategies against the same anxiety. That formulation cannot fail. A confident text confirms rabbinic anxiety and a despairing text confirms rabbinic anxiety, and no possible passage disconfirms it. Fraade’s complaint about five hundred years of anonymous editors diagnosed with one condition lands on this sentence. It sits in the 2007 article, survived four years of revision, and went into the book intact.
The most falsifiable claim in the piece is also the most exposed. The reading of the Bavli version as a Greco-Roman lovesickness tale rests on טינא meaning black bile, which rests on a Targum Zechariah usage of the word for tar, which then licenses Hippocratic humoral theory, the doctors, and Mary Wack’s account of priest against physician. It is a chain of four links carrying the whole comparative apparatus. Then footnote 49 reports that MS Karlsruhe has the term deleted. He is candid about it and buries it, which is what everyone does, and a hostile reviewer would bring it up from the basement. Alongside it sit two phallic etymologies, Bar Kocha Nagra as the one capable of hollowing out, and a new suggestion that Natan Tsutsita names a man giving away his manhood, offered as an extension of Boyarin that Boyarin did not make. He promises a separate study of Natan Tsutsita. As far as I can find, it never appeared.
The conclusion crosses back over the line. After twenty pages of description he tells practitioners of Jewish law that they could broaden halakhic decision-making to include non-legal discourses. That is a recommendation to poskim, published in Dine Israel, which both camps read, by a man holding semicha from RIETS. It is the one paragraph in the article where he stops describing the tradition and addresses it. Whatever the 1999 editor was smelling, this is the thing it eventually became, and it took eight years to surface.
The article’s central case is a story whose editors keep trying to constrain it, offer three unsatisfying solutions, invent a counter-narrative with a made-up name to eliminate a position they dislike, and still fail to make the maximal reading go away. He is drawn to the record of an editorial suppression that did not work.
The core of this paper becomes the theoretical chapters of Narrating the Law, and the lovesick man reading becomes part of the rabbis-and-outsiders material. Comparing the 2007 and 2011 versions of the same reading would show you what four years of peer pressure removes from a young scholar’s prose, which is a piece nobody has written.
Matter Out of Place
The editor could not say what was wrong with the article.
In 1999 Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, a semicha student at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, submitted a Hebrew piece on a passage in Bava Qamma to Beit Yitzchak, the Torah journal produced by his own yeshiva. The editor rejected it and called it kefirah. Asked for a reason, he had none to give. He believed the roshei yeshiva would object, and he was right to believe it. By Wimpfheimer’s own later account the article was not source-critical at all. It dealt with rishonim, the medieval commentators every student in the building read every day.
Something in the handling registered as foreign before anyone could name what it was. That sequence, the reaction arriving ahead of the reason, is the subject of Mary Douglas (1921-2007) in Purity and Danger, and it is the reason to read Wimpfheimer’s career through her.
Douglas’s opening move is that dirt is matter out of place. Nothing is dirty in isolation. Shoes are not dirty, and shoes on the dining table are. Food is not dirty, and food in the bedroom is. Dirt is the by-product of a system of classification, which means that wherever you find a strong reaction to dirt you have located a system that someone is defending. The reaction is evidence of the order.
Her second move follows from the first. If dirt is the residue of sorting, then the most dangerous objects in any scheme are the ones that half-fit. Not the outside, which is simply outside, but the thing with one foot in and one foot out. Douglas made her name arguing that the forbidden animals of Leviticus are forbidden on these grounds. Land animals are clean when they have a cloven hoof and chew the cud. The pig has the hoof and not the cud. The camel and the hare and the hyrax bring the cud and no split hoof. Water creatures should have fins and scales, and the swarming things that lack them are abominated. Her reading of holiness in the priestly texts is wholeness, completeness, conformity to the class you belong to. The system abominates the hybrid: the mixed thread, the mixed seed, the crossbred animal. And it abominates the specimen that presents part of the credential and not the rest.
This is what the editor was reacting to. Wimpfheimer’s article had the cloven hoof. It was in Hebrew, on a sugya, in the yeshiva’s own journal, about rishonim. It did not chew the cud. The mode of attention was wrong in a way that produced no citable violation, and pollution reactions do not require one. Douglas is firm on this point: pollution rules are unequivocal and automatic and take no interest in intention. A man who touches the corpse is unclean whether or not he meant to, whether or not he knew, whether or not he is a good man. The editor did not need a doctrine. He needed only the reflex that tells a trained member of a community that something has come in from the wrong direction.
Douglas lists the ways a culture can respond when an anomaly turns up. Reduce the ambiguity by settling on one reading. Control the anomalous thing physically. Make a rule of avoidance. Call it dangerous. Or take it up into ritual and let it enrich the scheme it violates.
The Beit Yitzchak affair produced all five within about a year.
The next editorial board asked Wimpfheimer for the rejected piece. He agreed on the condition that it run as written. They agreed, then printed it in the spring of 2000 with the introduction removed. That is the first response. The introduction was where a piece declares what kind of piece it is. Cut it and the article reads as a rishonim study. The ambiguity resolves by editorial subtraction.
The same volume carried an article by two other students, Eliyahu Stern and Meir Katz, which cited academic scholars by name. Boxes of Beit Yitzchak normally sat on the bimah of the Glueck Beis Midrash for days, students dropping cash and taking a copy, a fresh box brought out when one emptied. Wimpfheimer remembers this box lasting a day. On the eve of the annual Seforim Sale, eleven boxes went missing from a freight elevator, which the sales manager attributed to facilities staff. The volume is absent from the beit midrash collection. A student editor writing in 2024 climbed to the sixth floor of Gottesman Library to read a copy. That is the second response, and Douglas would predict that nobody involved needed to coordinate. Physical control of the polluting object is the least articulate and most available option, and it leaves no minutes.
The third response is the settlement that still holds. Academic Talmud is permitted at Yeshiva University, in the Talmud department, in Bernard Revel, in the library. The beit midrash is for consecrated study. A student told the 2024 interviewer that he leaves the beit midrash and goes to the library to study for the academic Talmud course. Douglas’s account of the avoidance rule is that it does not merely protect the person from the thing. It maintains the definitions the thing threatens. Every trip up the stairs to the library restates what the beit midrash is.
The fourth response was loud. The word kefirah. A maggid shiur comparing the authors to Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron who brought a strange fire and were consumed. Rabbi Hershel Schachter’s public rebuke, and his position twenty-five years later, unchanged: “It was a big chutzpah.” The comparison to Nadav and Avihu is the interesting one, because it is a danger label drawn from the community’s own canon, and the story it invokes concerns two insiders, credentialed priests in good standing, whose offering was structurally wrong. The fire was not forbidden. The fire was foreign. This is precisely the category Douglas is describing, and the yeshiva reached for it without needing an anthropologist.
The fifth response takes longer and is under way. Ari Bergmann, a student of David Weiss Halivni and a professor in Yeshiva College’s Talmud department, has argued in public that academic Talmud allows traditional learning to evolve, that the early fear of clash and devaluation was mistaken, that with the right religious grounding the methods carry the study forward. The anomaly gets taken up and made productive. Douglas’s fifth path is the discovery that the thing which breaks the categories can be used to say something the categories could not say alone.
The frame pays a second time on the object of Wimpfheimer’s scholarship.
Rabbinic literature is sorted into halakhah and aggadah. Halakhah generates obligation. Aggadah is the remainder: stories, theology, folklore, medicine, reports of what a rabbi said to his wife. The sorting hardened in the gaonic period and organizes the field to this day, in the yeshiva and in the university both.
Narrating the Law takes as its subject the passages that will not sort. A story about a legal actor doing something legal is both categories at once. Steven Fraade, reviewing the book for AJS Review, wrote that such stories have baffled or annoyed commentators for centuries. Douglas explains the annoyance. These are the animals with the hoof and no cud. The tradition’s response to them has been the standard menu. Reduce the ambiguity, by reading the story as illustration of a rule and discarding what does not illustrate. Control it, by not teaching it. Avoid it, by consigning it to the aggadah shelf where nothing is binding and therefore nothing is at stake.
Wimpfheimer’s claim is Douglas’s first claim applied to a text. The legal story is not a defective specimen of either genre. It was manufactured as a problem by the act of sorting. Where there is dirt there is a system, and the system here is the halakhah and aggadah division, which he calls a pair of reading practices that has been passing itself off as a pair of corpora. Remove the division and the anomaly stops being anomalous and starts being the richest evidence in the archive, because it is the place where law admits the particular man, his rank, who was watching, and the several moral languages running at once.
He arrived at that argument by way of Bakhtin and Cover. The convergence is what makes it usable. A man trained to notice which readings a community treats as polluting wrote a book about which texts a tradition treats as polluting.
Now the third level.
Douglas did fieldwork among the Lele of the Kasai, and the animal she returns to is the pangolin. The pangolin is an anomaly of the first order. It is covered in scales like a fish and lives on land. It climbs trees. It bears one offspring at a time, as humans do. Faced with a hunter, it curls up and waits.
By the logic of Leviticus the pangolin should be an abomination. Among the Lele it is the center of a cult. A body of initiates eats it ceremonially, and the eating is a source of fertility and of power over game. The same structural feature that would make an animal filth in one scheme makes it holy in another. Anomaly is not a property of the animal. It is a relation between the animal and a scheme, and schemes differ.
Wimpfheimer is the pangolin.
At RIETS in 1999 the combination was pollution. Ordained, fluent, formed inside the system, and reading in a manner that would not resolve into the system’s categories. Six years later at Columbia the identical combination was the credential. His committee was assembled out of five incompatible worlds: Halivni for source criticism, Jeffrey Rubenstein for rabbinic narrative, Elizabeth Castelli for critical theory, Alan Segal for Judaism and Christianity in comparison, Michael Stanislawski for modern Jewish history. The dissertation took the prize for the best Jewish studies dissertation at Columbia over five years. Moshe Simon-Shoshan of Bar Ilan described him to a journalist as one of the few who combine traditional erudition and philological rigor with a command of modern literary theory. Read that sentence as a specification and it describes an animal with scales that climbs trees. The rare hybrid is the prize.
Nothing about the man changed between the two verdicts. What changed was the scheme doing the classifying. Douglas’s argument is that this is always the case, and the case is easier to see when one person crosses between two systems inside a single decade.
It also explains a feature of Wimpfheimer’s public conduct that would otherwise look like restlessness. He speaks at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, at Conservative congregations in Chicago and Washington, at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem, and on camera with SVARA, the queer yeshiva in his own city. A man who has been the polluting object in one room and the prize specimen in another has learned something about the arbitrariness of rooms.
The three registers of The Talmud: A Biography are a proposal to stop treating category-crossing as contamination.
The essential Talmud is the historical object. The enhanced Talmud is what a thousand years of readers built around it. The emblematic Talmud is the sign of Jewishness that does its work on people who never open it, venerated by Jews, burned in Paris in 1240, rejected by maskilim and Zionists and reclaimed by their grandchildren, sold in Korean digests, invoked by a Seinfeld writer describing his room. Three questions, three answers, all of them findable, and the error lies in mixing them and then fighting over which answer is the true one.
Douglas would call this the fifth response completed. The anomalous object gets taken up and made to enrich the scheme it broke. She would also, I think, say the harder thing. Her account of why anomalies get purged is not that people are stupid about categories. It is that a group under pressure, with a boundary it needs to hold, will police its margins hardest, and that the intensity of pollution rules tracks the felt precariousness of the group. The 1999 rejection was not an error of reasoning to be corrected by a better theory of reading. It was a boundary in good working order.
Which means Wimpfheimer’s settlement is available to individuals and not obviously available to communities. A man can hold three registers at once. A yeshiva that holds three registers at once has told its students that the way they are studying is one option among several, and it will lose some of them. The library and the beit midrash remain on separate floors for reasons that are not stupid.
One more thing.
Douglas’s reading of the Levitical dietary laws is the most cited chapter she ever wrote and she came to believe it was wrong. In work from the 1990s onward she abandoned the anomaly explanation of the forbidden animals and argued that the priestly writer’s rules protect creatures, and that the earlier account had imported a contempt the text does not contain. Jacob Milgrom (1923-2010) and others had pushed her there. Her general theory of dirt survived. Her signature application of it did not.
There is a rhyme in that. Halivni revised the introduction to every volume of Meqorot u-Mesorot because each new analysis forced him to reconsider the ones behind it, and the footnotes carry the evidence of the revisions. Wimpfheimer submitted an article called “The Postmodern Mishnah: The Role of the Reader and the Instability of Meaning” and published it four years later as “The Mishnah’s Reader” with the postmodernism and the instability gone from the title.
The pattern holds across the yeshiva and the academy and shows up in Douglas’s own career. A scheme takes in the thing that does not fit, and something has to give. Either the object is expelled or the scheme is rewritten. The interesting people are the ones who rewrite, and they pay for it in citations, in boxes that go missing, and in the slow work of doing over what they already thought they had finished.
Part Two Part Three Part Four
