the Sefer as a challenge to Reception Theories
(2018) The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy — (2018)
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- Abstract
- The Talmudic sages granted the legal status of "book", sefer, to six texts: the Torah (Pentateuch), the tefillin (phylacteries), the get (ritual divorce bill), the mezuzah (doorpost parchment), the Scroll of Esther, and the scroll of the sotah (a woman suspected of adultery), a text pertaining to a pre-Talmudic era but which the Sages show to incarnate as a surprisingly present corpus. What these texts have in common is a ritualistic format, material and use: They are required, for example, to be written upon parchment scroll only. Moreover, these books are the only sacred texts which comprise mise en abyme – the trait of literary self-containing. Combined together, these two traits turn the rabbinic book into a "hybrid": The sefer consists of both textual signs and the actual body and actions of an empirical reader; its pragmatic level is not bracketed out in favour of the semiotic one, even during the act of reading. I shall contend that the adequate theoretical framework to account for the rabbinic book is thus Deleuze’s rather than Gadamer’s.
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Dickmann, I. M. (2018). the Sefer as a challenge to Reception Theories. The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy. Accepted/in-press. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/45706 (Original work published 2018)