Massekhet Keritot: Text, Translation, and Commentary

ISBN-13: 9783161526619 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 487 str.

Federico Dal Bo

Opis

The tractate Keritot of the Babylonian Talmud belongs to the Order of Qodashim in the Mishnah. It discusses the Temple and its rituals, especially sacrifices, but deals mostly with laws of incest, sexual transgressions, childbirth, and miscarriages. In this commentary, Federico Dal Bo provides a historical, philological and philosophical investigation on these gender issues. He discusses almost the entire tractate, referring to many other sources, Jewish (the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Sifra, and other rabbinic texts) as well as non-Jewish (Akkadian, Hittite, and Ugaritic). The author also provides accurate philological observations both on the Mishnah and the Gemara. Finally, he addresses gender issues by combining a reductionistic approach to Talmudic study (the so called "Brisker method") with philosophical deconstruction. Dal Bo shows that in nearly the entire tractate Keritot the rabbis discuss human sexuality in a tendentious and restrictive way, claiming that heterosexuality is the only proper sexual contact and progressively stigmatizing any other kind of sexual behavior.

O autorze

Born 1973; 2005 PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Bologna; 2009 PhD in Jewish Studies from the Free University of Berlin; worked as Teaching Assistant in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bologna and as Research Assistant at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Free University of Berlin.