Virtues and Dispositions of Rabbinic Judges: A View from Talmudic Texts and their Reception in the Medieval and Modern Periods

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The panel examines how rabbinic authors in the late antique, medieval, and modern periods have conceived, and attempted to produce ideal judges of rabbinic law. One criterion for becoming a rabbinic judge was sufficient knowledge of sacred texts and oral traditions. Yet since late antiquity, rabbinic texts have also developed and debated just judicial administrative procedures. In addition to these guidelines for judging, there are stories, admonitions, and other clues, which indicate the types of dispositions that make a judge more successful in rendering just decisions. This panel convenes a scholarly discussion of materials from 1500 years of rabbinic history, drawing upon scholarship of talmudic and rabbinic literatures from late antiquity to the modern period (with three specific case studies: case stories of the Babylonian Talmud, and two corpora that are part of the reception history of the Bavli: late monographs of the geonim, and J.B. Soloveitchik’s philosophical and halakhic writings, in order to advance our understanding of how diverse authors in the reception of rabbinic traditions have drawn upon talmudic texts to argue for the formation of an ideal rabbinic judge.

Sub Unit

• Modern Jewish Thought and Theology

Chair

• Alyssa Gray, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion

Individual Presentations

• “Learning to Listen: Functions of Formally-Exceptional Adjudication Narratives in the Bavli” - Lynn Kaye, Brandeis University

• Judicial Equity in the Legal Order: Insights from Geonic 'Duties of Judges' - Neri Ariel, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Bar Ilan University

• Halakhic Virtue Jurisprudence: Thinking with and against Joseph Soloveitchik’s view of Da‘as Torah - Yonatan Brafman, Tufts University

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 03