Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (1997)

This is a pithy, profound book. In its 130 pages, Halbertal traces the evolving nature of the "rabbinic revolution," which roughly 2000 years ago replaced the priest and prophet with the rabbi and book. In Weberian fashion he distinguishes different species of a common genus - whether canon, meaning, the hermeneutic principle of charity, Kabbalah, esotericism, etc. First came the Bible, of course; but then came the Mishnah and the Talmud, both of which were open-ended, polyphonic, and contentious - the first a collection of legal rulings, the second a discussion of them. The Talmud in particular displaced the Torah as the central text of this text-centered community. In the middle ages, philosophy and Kabbalah (mysticism) each claimed to complement the Talmud. As I was reading about these intense efforts in hermeneutics and legal reasoning, I found myself wondering about the interaction between Jewish and Christian thinking, especially after, say, 1000, when Christian efforts to revive Roman law and to integrate Christianity with Aristotelian philosophy began? Were these Christian and the similar Jewish efforts Halbertal describes merely running in parallel, or was there cross-fertilization between them? My guess would be that any influence there might have been went only one way, from the Christian to the Jewish - simply because I don't believe the dominant Christian thinkers took much interest in the tiny Jewish minority, at least not until the Reformation. But I may be wrong. In any case, this is not a question Halbertal here addresses. The focus is on the evolution of Jewish texts and text-centeredness, but there are all sorts of connections to fundamental questions of interpretation, religious evolution in general, the meeting of cultures (Judaism and Greek philosophy in the middle ages), etc. The second I finished this book, I started Halbertal's intellectual biography of Maimonides, which looks to be superb as well.....