Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (review)

164 SHOFAR Fa111998 Vol. 17, No.1 community had the soler, or scribe, who prepared both communal and private legal documents in Hebrew and Aramaic. It was not uncommon for a Jew to have his testament or sales contract or debt drawn up by both authorities and in both languages, especially in legal and commercial transactions between Jews and non-Jews. The Jewish Latinate wills which Bums discusses are unified by their notarial formalities and tone, but are otherwise higWy idiosyncratic. Bums emphasizes that none ofthe dispositions addresses the bulk of the estate; instead he believes that the lack of mention of extended family members and of small mementos to friends or philanthropies argues that the testators followed common Jewish custom in transferring most oftheir goods in advance of death. While patterns ofpiety are also visible in some bequests, Bums's general impression is that these wills were especially concerned with family obligations while formal charity was handled by other means. In his extensively documented book, which includes an appendix of 45 Latin transcriptions of previously unpublished Jewish wills, Bums suggests directions for future scholarship, urging the desirability of detailed comparisons of Jewish and Christian Latinate wills in order to discover points of contrast, of assimilation, and of common culture. He also believes that further analysis of these documents could yield significant information about the extent and the limits ofJewish recourse to an alternate legal system and the assumptions it represented. As he writes, the willing use of Roman notarial concepts to supplement the elements of Jewish inheritance law raises intriguing questions about cultural diffusion and degrees of Jewish acculturation in medieval Spain. Judith R. Baskin Department of Judaic Studies University at Albany, State University ofNew York Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture, by Menachem Fisch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 203 pp. $35.00. A mathematician, physicist, historian, and philosopher ofscience at Tel Aviv University and at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem, Fisch claims to wish to address to the Talmud, broadly construed, the ontological and epistemic questions of philosophy. Rational Rabbis sets forth a theological argument about traditionalism and antitraditionalis ~ in the documents ofthe Oral Torah as these trends are revealed in various talmudic stories and sayings. The work is in two unequal parts, about a fifth on philosophy of science, and the rest on Rabbinic Judaism. First comes Science as an exemplar of rational inquiry and, second, the Jewish covenant of learning. Book Reviews 165 In the rust part Fisch responds to two essays. The rust is Harold Fisch's Poetry with a Purpose, where Qohelet ("Ecclesiastes") is read as irony, and the second is this writer's lecture at Tulane University, "Why No Science in Judaism?" (published in The Making of the Mind ofJudaism [Atlanta: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies, 1987]). Professor Harold Fisch, Professor Menachem Fisch's father, reads Qohelet "as an ironic reductio ad absurdum of the very possibility of an anthropocentric, selfsufficient notion of rationality." I maintained that the modes of thought that produce coherent discourse in the Talmud make scientific learning improbable. Fisch proposes the following argument: Contrary to the claim attributed by my father to Qohelet, science ... provides a living example of a self-sufficient, humanly attainable, rational undertaking that is well aware of its own shortcomings. And, contrary to Neusner, the Talmud's manner of halakhic reasoning seemed to me to resemble quite closely the type of discourse I had learnt to associate with the scientific method of trial and error. Here Fisch deals with scientific rationality, with a reconstruction of talmudic epistemology along those lines. The latter section, the bulk ofthe book, is in these parts and topics: Chapter I. The great Tannaitic dispute: the Jabne Legends and their context: traditionalism and its discontents; the Jabne reforms; the testimony of Eduyot; "It is Not in Heaven"; Jabne's anti-traditionalist manifesto; a traditionalist response: Hillel and b'nai Beteira; Chapter II. The changing of the guard: Amoraic texts and.Tannaitic legacies: discerning the Bavli's point of view; a schematic· overview; introducing the Bavli's paradigm; berakhot 19b; the logic and rhetoric of transgenerational negotiation; Yerushalmi and Bavli compared; anti-traditionalism for the advanced; and giving away the...