This article offers an anthropological and theoretical-archeological comparative exploration of agency, responsibility, and alterity in the Late Ancient Iranian Talmud and its reading in contemporary Manhattan. The guiding question is how the classical rabbinic imagery and conceptualization of the “Goy” or “non-Jew” are implicitly recast in the modern framework of subjectivity, in a social context of quasi-traditionalist Talmud study. The specific Talmudic texts examined focus further on the role that the difference and analogy between humans and other animals plays in this reimagination of the “Goy's” persona.
AlterRobert. 2004. The Five Books of Moses. A Translation with Commentary. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co.
2.
BoyarinJonathan. 2014. “Simulated Shiur: Post-It Notes of an ArtScroll Amateur.” In Jewish Rhetoric: History, Culture, Theory, edited by Bernard-DonalsMichaelFernheimerJan, 215-230. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press.
3.
De LiberaAlain. 2008. “When did the Modern Subject Emerge.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly82, no. 2: 181-220.
4.
GaschéRodolphe. 2014. On Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press.
5.
OphirAdiRosen-ZviIshay. 2018. Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
6.
VidasMoulie. 2016. Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
7.
WassermanMira. 2017. Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
8.
ZimmermannReinhard. 2013. The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
