What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (review)

The title question of Sergey Dogopolsky's ambitious book is disarmingly simple: "What is Talmud?" This, however, is no introduction to Talmud, companion to Rabbinic Literature or Talmud for dummies. The Talmud, that is the historical text finally edited towards the end of late antiquity in the sixth or seventh century, plays a secondary role in this sprawling, densely argued and somewhat opaque volume. The "Talmud" of the title refers to a method of argumentation and thinking which is no less strict, philosophical, or rational than the rationality of Aristotelean thought as mediated by Maimonides (p. 35). When Dogopolsky, in his introduction, says he is going to be analyzing a Talmudic treatise (p. 25), he is not referring to one of the tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, but, rather to a book written centuries later in Spain by Rabbi Isaac Canpanton.

Once the underbrush of misunderstanding is cleared away, one must say that Canpanton's The Ways of the Talmud is an understudied work worthy of an intensive and extensive study. Dogopolsky reviews the contents of The Ways of the Talmud in a very competent and thorough manner in the second to last section of his book. However, Dogopolsky's primary aim is to situate Canpanton in an intellectual discourse with the likes of Spinoza and Deleuze (p. 103), and as an intellectual opponent to Maimonides (pp. 34-35), the great rationalist philosopher. For Dogopolsky's Canpanton, "talmud" holds the relationship to philosophy that (the recently revitalized) sophistry does (p. 34). Talmud is a mode of thinking in which tradition guarantees the parameters of discussion and perhaps its "truth" (p. 25), in which both "sides" of a discussion are not to be embodied and thereby historicized on the persons of historical Sages but rather "as eternal eons different from one another due to a phrase they will never erase and never write anew" (p. 49).

Canpanton's work is impressive in its systemic discussion of a certain method of studying Talmud, beginning with the student's first encounter with any specific Talmudic text (he instructs the student to "read the language with heartfelt joy two or three times out loud" [Darkhei Hatalmud p. 26, my translation]). The parts of Canpanton's method which are central to Dogopolsky's book are diyuk or "exaction," hidush or "invention," and svara mibahutz or "external judgment." These are the tools of classic pilpul finely honed by Canpanton. Exaction is the approach to any talmudic statement which assumes that there is a logically compelling reason for that statement to be made. There are no "rhetorical questions" (in the common understanding of this term) or "straw man" arguments. All statements are necessary and therefore the student must investigate why this statement must have been made. Exaction's companion term is "refutation" or kushya, which is used to refine the exaction and to clarify the understanding of the statement. "Invention" is the new understanding of the original statement arrived at as a result of the exaction and the refutations. The external judgment is, on a certain level, the guarantor of truth. To sum up the method with Dogopolsky, the method of Talmudic speculation (iyyun) is neither logical syllogism nor hermeneutic search for meaning but rather exaction and external judgment about the "orations" (meimrot=statements) of past ("past without any claim to presence," p. 103) Talmudic sages or masters. This results from the fact that the Talmudic masters' orations are "granted an unquestionable validity—something that since it happened it did not happen in vain" (p. 104).

It is these last points which pave the way for Dogopolsky's claims in the final part of the book, which is that the point of disagreements is not to ultimately come to an agreement, but rather Talmud is a method of disagreement within which both sides of the question are "true" since radically past. "Contrary to the view of disagreements as always false, Canpanton promoted a notion of disagreement as not false, but rather true. His...