Rabbinic Study Circles

Born 1987; PhD candidate; currently writing her PhD dissertation at The Department of Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Born 1951; Mandel Professor of Jewish Education emeritus at The Melton Centre for Jewish Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Born 1952; (retired) Professor at The Department of Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Taking account of a wide range of literary evidence and the most recent scholarship on the nature of education in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, these studies examine new and varied aspects of the scriptural and intellectual infrastructure of the educational ethos, the tension between oral tradition and literary practice, and the central role of the rabbinic sage as pedagogical innovator and model. They also study the underlying influence of social and economic factors, the evolution of teaching techniques and frameworks, and the formative role of both midrashic mentality and mythopoetic currents. With an eye on the broader contexts of Greco-Roman culture and emergent Christianity, these essays follow the development of rabbinic ideas and institutions from the first centuries of the Common Era in Palestine through the flowering of centers of learning centuries later in Babylonia.