Emotions in the Margins: Reading Toledot Yeshu after the Affective Turn

In 826 C.E., Agobard, bishop of Lyon, published a treatise entitled De Judaicis superstitionibus, detailing and ridiculing the ‘superstitions’ of the Jews. The details Agobard recounts make clear that the bishop is referring to a medieval Jewish parody of the story of Jesus’ life, known as Toledot Yeshu (Life of Jesus), composed in Aramaic sometime before the second half of the eighth century and later translated into Hebrew. Toledot Yeshu tells the story of Jesus’ life in a biting, vulgar tone. It was a text composed and used by Jews as an anti-Christian polemic, and as an internal document to bolster the faith of fellow Jews, oftentimes those who found themselves drawn in some way to Christianity and who needed encouragement not to stray from Judaism. There is no single uniform text; each manuscript tells a different version of the story – some with slight variations, others with drastic differences in tone, style, and plot. Included here is a very preliminary transcription and translation of the opening passages of a Judaeo-Arabic manuscript of Toledot Yeshu currently owned by Princeton University Library [Princeton Hebrew MS. 18, fol. 1r-9v / C0932]. The selected passage recounts the story of Yeshu’s conception and birth as well as the discovery of his father’s identity by the sages. The manuscript is written in eastern script that dates to the 16th century. It belongs to the Group II manuscripts according to the Schäfer/Meerson manuscript groupings

Conceptions of Time and Rhythms of Daily Life in Rabbinic Literature, 200-600 C.E.

This dissertation centers on the ways in which rabbinic texts from the first five centuries C.E. constructed daily and monthly rhythms of time and examines the intersections of those times at the outer boundaries of the rabbinic community as well as among those inhabiting various roles within the community. Part I explores the synchronization and differentiation of rabbinic and Roman time, and focuses in particular on the incorporation of the Roman calendar into rabbinic texts and on the integration of the Jewish seven-day week into the Roman calendar. Ironically, by trying so deliberately to separate from observing the Roman calendar and formulating laws intended to limit interactions between Romans and Jews on certain calendar days, the rabbis effectively integrated the rhythms of the Roman calendar into their own daily lives. Rabbinic sources, however, also present the origin and history of these Roman festivals as Jewish or biblical at their core, thus filling the Roman calendar with days that had Jewish stories - and indeed a long Jewish past - attached to them. Romans, too, adopted aspects of the Jewish calendar, especially the seven-day week and a day of rest, despite Roman arguments that resting every seventh day epitomized idleness and was an ill use of one's time. Part II confronts the question of gender in rabbinic time and the emergence of a gendered temporality in rabbinic law through the development of distinct rituals for men and women. In a shift from the way in which commandments had previously been conceptualized, rabbinic texts construct the category of "positive time-bound commandments," from which rabbinic law excludes women. There is, however, an entire set of time-related laws - the cycles of purity and impurity related to menstruation - that applied only to women and structured their time around different rituals. Women's bodies were also invoked rhetorically to articulate ideas about time through the use of metaphors of pregnancy, labor, birth and menstruation. Even as the rabbis--all men--define women out of what they consider to be time-boundedness, through both rituals and rhetoric women are effectively no less, though surely differently, time-bound than their male counterparts

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me this Far: Future Avenues of Feminist Scholarship

Scholars employing a feminist hermeneutic have advanced the fields of Jewish Studies and Early Christianity while pioneering the new field of Late Antiquity. This session hopes to foster a conversation about the various ways that the feminist lens has been applied to Jewish and Christian texts of Late Antiquity while keeping an eye to what future avenues lie still unexplored. What questions have not been answered? What challenges remain for female scholars in these fields? How can our scholarship speak to Feminist political causes today and in the future? It is our hope that this panel can provide graduate students and young scholars with an opportunity to engage established scholars from a variety of backgrounds to engage these pressing concerns