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Acknowledgments Since its earliest foundations, rabbinic culture has nurtured the concept that learning and scholarship are not individual but social practices. In particular the notion of the study pair, the havruta, has been central to rabbinic study. Generous and critical study partners for me throughout this project have been Carlin Barton, Charlotte Fonrobert, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Karen King, and Dina Stein. Much of this book would simply not have happened were it not for my constant havruta with Virginia Burrus throughout the last decade. She read two complete and countless incomplete drafts of this manuscript, helping me get closer and closer to my aspirations for the book. Ivan Marcus and Ishay Rosen-Zvi provided searching readings of a near-final draft that were unusually helpful. Adi Schremer's sharp (in both senses) critique enabled me finally to drop three chapters that needed to go. I would also like to thank Gil Anidjar, Carol Bakhos, Chava Boyarin, Almut Bruckstein, Sheila Delany, Paula Fredriksen , Erich Gruen, Christine Hayes, Ronald Hendel, Oded Irshai, Menahem Kahana ' Catherine Keller, Chana Kronfeld, Lisa Lampert, Jack Levison, Evonne Levy, Rebecca Lyman, Harry O. Maier, Sharon Marcus, Jack Miles, Stephen D. Moore, Maren Niehoff, Elaine Pagels, Jeffrey Purvis, Seth Schwartz, Aharon Shemesh, and Azzan Yadin for reading early versions of several or all of these chapters and very helpfully commenting on them. I thank all of these and formally absolve them of responsibility for the failings of the book. During the drafting of the chapters on the Logos, I had the privilege and pleasure to be a Gastprofessor of New Testament and Judaic Origins at the Harvard Divinity School, where I taught much of the material in this book. My students during that semester (spring 2000) were of enormous help in clarifying many of the issues treated here. My colleagues on that faculty, and especially Karen King, made the semester an intellectual and personal joy. I wish, in particular , to thank Elizabeth Busky, who made my visit at Harvard smooth and fun. Special thanks to Carlin Barton for her help with my thinking, writing, and morale in moments of adversity during the making of this book. Vincent P. (Bud) Bynack helped enormously in the process of transforming a draft into a book, and I am grateful to him. 374 Acknowledgments Gratitude is due as well to Ana Niedermaier of East View Cartographic for her vital help in securing the cover art. As ever, I am thankful to the funders of the Hermann P.and Sophia Taubman Chair of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley,which makes my scholarly productivity possible. A Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in the fall of 2001 made it possible to finish the book. I wish to thank the director, Professor Gary Smith, and all of his wonderful staff for their hospitality and help. I feel deeply privileged that the last stages of writing were completed in Rome at the Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, amid the abundant material memories of the times, places, and peoples treated in this work. Finally, I would like to thank Helen Tartar, the veritable Maxwell Perkins of scholarly editors. I am deeply indebted to her for all the effort she has shared with me over several years of working together and for the pleasure and profit I have derived. It was my hope and intention to publish this book with Helen at the Stanford University Press. With the unfortunate separation of individual from institution, my coeditors and I chose to move this book and the Divinations series ofwhich it is part elsewhere. We are fortunate to have found a happy new home at the University of Pennsylvania Press, and I would like to thank Jerome Singerman, our new editor at Penn, for all of his exertions on behalf of the series and the book. ...

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