Richard Kalmin, "Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context" (U California Press, 2014)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · Mar 5, 2021 · 46m

Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context (University of California Press, 2014) situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work, Richard Kalmin argues that non-Jewish literature deriving from the eastern Roman provinces is a crucially important key to interpreting Babylonian rabbinic literature, to a degree unimagined by…