66. Hasidei Ashkenaz | Dr. Talya Fishman

J.J. and Dr. Talya Fishman whip themselves up into a frenzy over the thought and influence of the pietists of the Medieval Rhineland. 

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Talya Fishman is Associate Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Intellectual and
Cultural History in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages
and Cultures. Her research projects attempt to understand riddles of premodern Jewish culture by
exploring them within their broader historical, geographic and religious contexts, both Islamic
and Christian. Along with many articles – some on Hasidei Ashkenaz, Fishman is the author of Shaking the Pillars of Exile: "Voice of a Fool"'s Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture, (Stanford University Press, 1997), and Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition Medieval Jewish Cultures (2011), Winner of 2011 Nahum M. Sarna Award for Scholarship of the National Jewish Book Council. She co-edited Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews, (Littman Library, Oxford, 2018) with Ephraim Kanarfogel. In the soon-to-be published What is Talmud, edited by Jay Harris and Christine Hayes and (Harvard University Press), her article, “Medieval Jewish Subcultures Receive the Talmudic Text: The Impact of Regional Trends and Antecedent Oral Cultures”, further develops the thesis that certain differences in the halakhic cultures of Ashkenaz, Sefarad and Provence are linked to perduring assumptions about composition and authority that were specific to discrete geographic regions in antiquity. Professor Fishman’s current research project concerns the place of materiality in medieval Jewish thought and experience.