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Books by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal
Stories portraying heretics (’minim’) in rabbinic literature are a central site of rabbinic engag... more Stories portraying heretics (’minim’) in rabbinic literature are a central site of rabbinic engagement with the ‘other’. These stories typically involve a conflict over the interpretation of a biblical verse in which the rabbinic figure emerges victorious in the face of a challenge presented by the heretic. In this book, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal focuses on heretic narratives of the Babylonian Talmud that share a common literary structure, strong polemical language and the formula, ‘Fool, look to the end of the verse’. She marshals previously untapped Christian materials to arrive at new interpretations of familiar texts and illuminate the complex relationship between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. Bar-Asher Siegal argues that these Talmudic literary creations must be seen as part of a boundary-creating discourse that clearly distinguishes the rabbinic position from that of contemporaneous Christians and adds to a growing understanding of the rabbinic authors' familiarity with Christian traditions.
Edited books by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal
Mohr Siebeck, 2021
The present volume comprises articles by renowned international scholars in academic dialogue wit... more The present volume comprises articles by renowned international scholars in academic dialogue with the work of Albert Baumgarten. They contextualize ancient Jewish texts not only for their own sake, but also as a way of shedding light on antiquity in general. They address texts taken from the elds of Greco-Roman studies, Hellenistic Judaism, Second Temple sectarianism, rabbinic literature, and various facets of early Christianity. Additionally, there are articles discussing comparative religion, sociology of knowledge, anthropology, and economic history. Together, the articles create an in-depth analysis of the social history of Jews in antiquity.
This volume is a festschrift in honor of Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History o... more This volume is a festschrift in honor of Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University. The contributions to the volume, written by colleagues and former students of Professor Fraade, reflect many of his scholarly interests. The scholarly credentials of the contributors are exceedingly high. The volume is divided into three sections, one on Second Temple literature and its afterlife, a second on rabbinic literature and rabbinic history, and a third on prayer and the ancient synagogue.Contributors are Alan Applebaum, Joshua Burns , Elizabeth Shanks Alexander , Chaya Halberstam , John J. Collins, Marc Bregman, Aharon Shemesh, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Vered Noam, Robert Brody, Albert Baumgarten, Marc Hirshman, Moshe Bar-Asher, Aaron Amit, Yose Yahalom, Lee Levine, Jan Joosten, Daniel Boyarin, Charlotte Hempel, David Stern, Beth Berkowitz, Azzan Yadin, Joshua Levinson, Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Tzvi Novick, Devora Diamant, Richard Kalmin, Carol Bakhos, Judith Hauptman, Jeff Rubenstein, Martha Himmelfarb, Stuart Miller, Esther Chazon, James Kugel, Chaim Milikowsky, Maren Niehoff, Peter Schaefer, and Adiel Schremer.
The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ... more The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ways, both positive and negative, do ancient writers interact with and relate to those outside of their ethnicity or religious tradition? This volume devotes itself to the methodological questions surrounding the use of diverse ancient sources for the construction of the other. The goal is to shed new light on ancient interactions between different religious groups in order to describe more accurately these relationships.
Papers by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal
The Second Century CE: Mapping Jewish and Christian Identities, Brill: Leiden , 2024
This study explores the complexities of religious tradition transmission, authority, and identity... more This study explores the complexities of religious tradition transmission, authority, and identity through an analysis of a second-century rabbinic text, Tosefta Eduyot, and its contextualization within late antique Jewish, Christian, and Manichaean literature. It underscores the shared anxieties over preserving authentic traditions amidst changing historical circumstances, highlighting the methods used to maintain continuity and authenticity. By comparing these traditions with those of Papias, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, Ephrem, and Manichaean texts, the paper reveals a broader discourse on the preservation and authority of religious traditions, contributing to our understanding of early Jewish and Christian identity formation.
Jewish Quarterly Review, 2023
Ifra Hormiz is mentioned in five short stories in the Babylonian Talmud, each time accompanied by... more Ifra Hormiz is mentioned in five short stories in the Babylonian Talmud, each time accompanied by a description: “the mother of Shapur Malka,” Shapur the King. In this paper, I wish to examine the stories about Ifra Hormiz from a literary angle. I will suggest that an intra-talmudic, comparative literary analysis of these stories can offer a new perspective on their creation, and that we can better reveal and highlight the differing agendas and motifs of stories that have similar literary nuclei when we examine them as part of a broader corpus of similar stories. This examination will shed light on the stories’ anonymous authors, their intended audiences, and the ways they chose to address gender issues and their attitude towards the Persian rulers of their times.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 27:1, pp. 5-8, 2023
Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature) , 2023
The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Wherea... more The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are known as separate religions, in fact, these two religions developed side by side. While earlier researchers conceptualized a "parting-of-the-ways," after which the two religions evolved independently, new studies reveal a multi-layered set of interactions throughout the first several centuries CE. Until recently, this question was explored with the limited source material and limited tools to analyze it. While working on a limited set of data, from a specific corpus, this project offers a new set of methodological tools, borrowed from computer sciences, that could ultimately serve for understanding the connections between Jews and Christians in late antiquity. We generated models of interreligious Christian-Jewish networks that demonstrate the scope, nature, and advantages of network analysis for revealing the complex intertwined evolution of the two religions. The Jewish corpora chosen for this research are rabbinic writings from late antique Babylonia and Palestine. Christian texts range from the first through sixth centuries CE. Instead of representing interactions between people or places, as is typically done with social networks, we model literary interactions that, in our view, indicate historical connections between religious communities. This novel approach allows us to visually represent sets of temporal-spatial-contextual relationships, which evolved over hundreds of years, in single snapshots. It also reveals new insights about the relationships between the two communities. For example, we find that rabbinic sources exhibit a largely polemical approach towards earlier Christian traditions but a non-polemical attitude towards later ones. Moreover, network analysis suggests a temporal-spatial familiarity correlation. Namely, Jewish sources are familiar with early, eastern Christian sources and with both Eastern and Western Christian sources in later periods. The application of network analysis makes it possible to identify the most influential texts-that is, the key "nodes"-testifying to the importance of certain traditions for both religious communities. Finally, the network approach is a tool for pointing scholarly research in new directions, which only reveals itself as a result of this type of mapping. In other words, the network not only describes the known data, but it is itself a way to enlarge the network and lead us down new and exciting paths that are currently unknown.
Negotiating Identities: Conflict, Conversion, and Consolidation in Early Judaism and Christianity (200 BCE–600 CE), 2022
The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning (Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum (CRINT) 16), 2022
This chapter explores connections between late antique Christian traditions and rabbinic literatu... more This chapter explores connections between late antique Christian traditions
and rabbinic literature, with special emphasis on the Babylonian Talmud
Land and Spirituality in Rabbinic Literature, 2022
The Rabbinic corpus is notoriously lacking in reflexive descriptions of the rabbinic period and i... more The Rabbinic corpus is notoriously lacking in reflexive descriptions of the rabbinic period and its literary products. The rabbinic sources rarely explain what the rabbis were trying to do, and why; what the rabbinic corpora was meant to present. But a few sources do give us a glimpse into several reflexive depictions of the rabbinic project. One of the most well-known of these is the first tosefta in tractate Eduyot. The text is set, unusually, in a time and place: “when the rabbis entered Yavne,” and it contains three parts: a problem, biblical textual proof for the problem, and a solution enacted by the rabbis at Yavne. In other words, the text is explicitly set as describing a conscious change, a moment in time in which the rabbis had to deal with a problem, and decided to start some kind of a process. This was thus rightly seen as a uniquely self-reflexive text, describing the beginning of the rabbinic project itself. I offer a philological examination of the two versions of the tosefta, and identifying their respective difficulties, alongside a higher criticism approach to the content of the different parts of the tosefta, might contribute to more nuanced understanding of this rabbinic source. According to my reconstruction, the tosefta is using two different tannaitic sources to discuss the fear of future loss of the Torah, due to both blending of all teaching without markers of their origin, and due to lack of organizing and grouping of similar things in a way that facilitate their use.
Social History of the Jews within the Ancient World: Studies in Dialogue with Al Baumgarten, Mohr Siebeck, 2021
Social History of the Jews within the Ancient World: Studies in Dialogue with Al Baumgarten,, 2021
Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, 2020
![Research paper thumbnail of "B. Ḥullin 87a and its Christian background," Sidra 33 (2021), pp. 37-64 [Hebrew]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/67875841/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 96, 2020
Stories portraying heretics (’minim’) in rabbinic literature are a central site of rabbinic engag... more Stories portraying heretics (’minim’) in rabbinic literature are a central site of rabbinic engagement with the ‘other’. These stories typically involve a conflict over the interpretation of a biblical verse in which the rabbinic figure emerges victorious in the face of a challenge presented by the heretic. In this book, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal focuses on heretic narratives of the Babylonian Talmud that share a common literary structure, strong polemical language and the formula, ‘Fool, look to the end of the verse’. She marshals previously untapped Christian materials to arrive at new interpretations of familiar texts and illuminate the complex relationship between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity. Bar-Asher Siegal argues that these Talmudic literary creations must be seen as part of a boundary-creating discourse that clearly distinguishes the rabbinic position from that of contemporaneous Christians and adds to a growing understanding of the rabbinic authors' familiarity with Christian traditions.
Mohr Siebeck, 2021
The present volume comprises articles by renowned international scholars in academic dialogue wit... more The present volume comprises articles by renowned international scholars in academic dialogue with the work of Albert Baumgarten. They contextualize ancient Jewish texts not only for their own sake, but also as a way of shedding light on antiquity in general. They address texts taken from the elds of Greco-Roman studies, Hellenistic Judaism, Second Temple sectarianism, rabbinic literature, and various facets of early Christianity. Additionally, there are articles discussing comparative religion, sociology of knowledge, anthropology, and economic history. Together, the articles create an in-depth analysis of the social history of Jews in antiquity.
This volume is a festschrift in honor of Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History o... more This volume is a festschrift in honor of Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University. The contributions to the volume, written by colleagues and former students of Professor Fraade, reflect many of his scholarly interests. The scholarly credentials of the contributors are exceedingly high. The volume is divided into three sections, one on Second Temple literature and its afterlife, a second on rabbinic literature and rabbinic history, and a third on prayer and the ancient synagogue.Contributors are Alan Applebaum, Joshua Burns , Elizabeth Shanks Alexander , Chaya Halberstam , John J. Collins, Marc Bregman, Aharon Shemesh, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Vered Noam, Robert Brody, Albert Baumgarten, Marc Hirshman, Moshe Bar-Asher, Aaron Amit, Yose Yahalom, Lee Levine, Jan Joosten, Daniel Boyarin, Charlotte Hempel, David Stern, Beth Berkowitz, Azzan Yadin, Joshua Levinson, Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Tzvi Novick, Devora Diamant, Richard Kalmin, Carol Bakhos, Judith Hauptman, Jeff Rubenstein, Martha Himmelfarb, Stuart Miller, Esther Chazon, James Kugel, Chaim Milikowsky, Maren Niehoff, Peter Schaefer, and Adiel Schremer.
The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ... more The present volume reexamines both ancient Christian and Jewish portrayals of outsiders. In what ways, both positive and negative, do ancient writers interact with and relate to those outside of their ethnicity or religious tradition? This volume devotes itself to the methodological questions surrounding the use of diverse ancient sources for the construction of the other. The goal is to shed new light on ancient interactions between different religious groups in order to describe more accurately these relationships.
The Second Century CE: Mapping Jewish and Christian Identities, Brill: Leiden , 2024
This study explores the complexities of religious tradition transmission, authority, and identity... more This study explores the complexities of religious tradition transmission, authority, and identity through an analysis of a second-century rabbinic text, Tosefta Eduyot, and its contextualization within late antique Jewish, Christian, and Manichaean literature. It underscores the shared anxieties over preserving authentic traditions amidst changing historical circumstances, highlighting the methods used to maintain continuity and authenticity. By comparing these traditions with those of Papias, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, Ephrem, and Manichaean texts, the paper reveals a broader discourse on the preservation and authority of religious traditions, contributing to our understanding of early Jewish and Christian identity formation.
Jewish Quarterly Review, 2023
Ifra Hormiz is mentioned in five short stories in the Babylonian Talmud, each time accompanied by... more Ifra Hormiz is mentioned in five short stories in the Babylonian Talmud, each time accompanied by a description: “the mother of Shapur Malka,” Shapur the King. In this paper, I wish to examine the stories about Ifra Hormiz from a literary angle. I will suggest that an intra-talmudic, comparative literary analysis of these stories can offer a new perspective on their creation, and that we can better reveal and highlight the differing agendas and motifs of stories that have similar literary nuclei when we examine them as part of a broader corpus of similar stories. This examination will shed light on the stories’ anonymous authors, their intended audiences, and the ways they chose to address gender issues and their attitude towards the Persian rulers of their times.
Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 27:1, pp. 5-8, 2023
Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature) , 2023
The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Wherea... more The development of the two religions: Christianity and Judaism, is a topic of much debate. Whereas Judaism and Christianity are known as separate religions, in fact, these two religions developed side by side. While earlier researchers conceptualized a "parting-of-the-ways," after which the two religions evolved independently, new studies reveal a multi-layered set of interactions throughout the first several centuries CE. Until recently, this question was explored with the limited source material and limited tools to analyze it. While working on a limited set of data, from a specific corpus, this project offers a new set of methodological tools, borrowed from computer sciences, that could ultimately serve for understanding the connections between Jews and Christians in late antiquity. We generated models of interreligious Christian-Jewish networks that demonstrate the scope, nature, and advantages of network analysis for revealing the complex intertwined evolution of the two religions. The Jewish corpora chosen for this research are rabbinic writings from late antique Babylonia and Palestine. Christian texts range from the first through sixth centuries CE. Instead of representing interactions between people or places, as is typically done with social networks, we model literary interactions that, in our view, indicate historical connections between religious communities. This novel approach allows us to visually represent sets of temporal-spatial-contextual relationships, which evolved over hundreds of years, in single snapshots. It also reveals new insights about the relationships between the two communities. For example, we find that rabbinic sources exhibit a largely polemical approach towards earlier Christian traditions but a non-polemical attitude towards later ones. Moreover, network analysis suggests a temporal-spatial familiarity correlation. Namely, Jewish sources are familiar with early, eastern Christian sources and with both Eastern and Western Christian sources in later periods. The application of network analysis makes it possible to identify the most influential texts-that is, the key "nodes"-testifying to the importance of certain traditions for both religious communities. Finally, the network approach is a tool for pointing scholarly research in new directions, which only reveals itself as a result of this type of mapping. In other words, the network not only describes the known data, but it is itself a way to enlarge the network and lead us down new and exciting paths that are currently unknown.
Negotiating Identities: Conflict, Conversion, and Consolidation in Early Judaism and Christianity (200 BCE–600 CE), 2022
The Literature of the Sages: A Re-visioning (Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum (CRINT) 16), 2022
This chapter explores connections between late antique Christian traditions and rabbinic literatu... more This chapter explores connections between late antique Christian traditions
and rabbinic literature, with special emphasis on the Babylonian Talmud
Land and Spirituality in Rabbinic Literature, 2022
The Rabbinic corpus is notoriously lacking in reflexive descriptions of the rabbinic period and i... more The Rabbinic corpus is notoriously lacking in reflexive descriptions of the rabbinic period and its literary products. The rabbinic sources rarely explain what the rabbis were trying to do, and why; what the rabbinic corpora was meant to present. But a few sources do give us a glimpse into several reflexive depictions of the rabbinic project. One of the most well-known of these is the first tosefta in tractate Eduyot. The text is set, unusually, in a time and place: “when the rabbis entered Yavne,” and it contains three parts: a problem, biblical textual proof for the problem, and a solution enacted by the rabbis at Yavne. In other words, the text is explicitly set as describing a conscious change, a moment in time in which the rabbis had to deal with a problem, and decided to start some kind of a process. This was thus rightly seen as a uniquely self-reflexive text, describing the beginning of the rabbinic project itself. I offer a philological examination of the two versions of the tosefta, and identifying their respective difficulties, alongside a higher criticism approach to the content of the different parts of the tosefta, might contribute to more nuanced understanding of this rabbinic source. According to my reconstruction, the tosefta is using two different tannaitic sources to discuss the fear of future loss of the Torah, due to both blending of all teaching without markers of their origin, and due to lack of organizing and grouping of similar things in a way that facilitate their use.
Social History of the Jews within the Ancient World: Studies in Dialogue with Al Baumgarten, Mohr Siebeck, 2021
Social History of the Jews within the Ancient World: Studies in Dialogue with Al Baumgarten,, 2021
Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, 2020
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 96, 2020
How we should translate the term min(im) in the Babylonian Talmud? The current scholarly trend is... more How we should translate the term min(im) in the Babylonian Talmud? The current scholarly trend is to avoid translating it altogether, using the transliteration instead. This article demonstrate that this practice hinders our ability to understand the stories’ intended uses within Late Antique heresy-making discourses. The article surveys the scholarly debate concerning the correct way to understand stories involving minim in rabbinic literature; and it claims, that at least with regard to several of the minim stories in the Babylonian Talmud, it is necessary to translate the Hebrew term into English as “heretics.”
This article addresses Paul’s words in Galatians 4:21–31 proposing to focus on Isaiah 54:1 as the... more This article addresses Paul’s words in Galatians 4:21–31 proposing to focus on Isaiah 54:1 as the basis for the passage's overall argument. It proposes that Paul's argument is made clearer if we assume that the word בעולה in the verse was interpreted in its Late-Hebrew meaning, “non-virgin,” and not its ordinary Biblical meaning, which is also reflected in the Septuagint’s τῆς ἐχούσης τὸν ἄνδρα “one who has a man.” This reading solves several interpretive problems pointed out by past readers of the Galatians passage and more specifically it explains the function of the Isaiah verse in Paul's words. It also accords with other uses of midrashic and Semitic-based traditions elsewhere in Galatians 4. Our reading finds support, in a parallel tradition, in the roughly contemporary writings of Philo of Alexandria. And it might shed light on the existence of Hebrew traditions in the Jewish Hellenistic world.
The Tannaitic legal Midrashim did not all survive and are not all known to us in a complete indep... more The Tannaitic legal Midrashim did not all survive and are not all known to us in a complete independent form. David Zvi Hoffman was one of the first scholars to recognize the 13th century Yemenite Midrash, Midrash haGadol, written by R. David of Aden, as a major source of the lost legal Midarshim. He published the Midrash Tannaim, containing all of the Tannaitic-looking paragraphs from Midrash haGadol on the book of Deuteronomy. However, the author of Midrash haGadol often introduced changes into the material he borrowed from rabbinic and medieval sources. The resulting passages often seem to be unparalleled tannaitic sources, when in fact they are not. This article proposes a re-examination of the Mekhilta material as found in the Midrash haGadol, in order to more accurately reconstruct the tannaitic text. We propose a methodology for contending with this challenge, via a new approximate-matching algorithm designed to identify modified sources of this sort. Using this algorithm, we first compared Hoffman’s Midrash Tannaim on Deuteronomy to the Sifre, filtering out all parts of the text that are simply reworkings of the Sifre, despite many interpolations, omissions, and modified words. Having removed the Sifre passages from within the Midrash Tannaim text, we then proceeded to the next stage, in which we investigated the presence of reworked Maimonidean excerpts within the remaining text. The Maimonidean excerpts pose a particular challenge, because their reuse in the Midrash haGadol involves not only modifications and interpolations, but also changes of order. We describe the modifications that were necessary to the algorithm in order to handle these out-of-order cases of reuse as well. We have thus far succeeded in identifying and remove the reworked material appropriated from the Sifre and from Maimonidies, and in the future we plan to tweak the algorithm such that it can successfully identify additional rabbinic passages as well, including the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudic material, and other midrashic compilations. This will ultimately allow us to produce a final text approximating the original Mekhilta, to the greatest extent possible.
Bar-Ilan University, 27 March 2017
סוד: סודיות והסתרה בהיסטוריה ובתרבות היהודית | הסוד, הסודיות וההסתרה היו תמיד חלק מן הטבע האנושי,... more סוד: סודיות והסתרה בהיסטוריה ובתרבות היהודית | הסוד, הסודיות וההסתרה היו תמיד חלק מן הטבע האנושי, כמצב קיומי וכרעיון. אנו מוצאים לכך ביטויים רבים בספרות, ביצירה ובתיאולוגיה היהודית. הביטויים הגלויים והנראים לעין משקפים אך מעט מן המציאות. מסכת שלמה ומפתיעה נגלית עם הסרת המסווה ועם חשיפת כפל הפנים של ההוויה.| בקורס המקורי והמרתק המוגש לכם נסקור את דברי ימי הסוד מתקופת המקרא ומתקופת חז”ל, דרך הפילוסופיה היהודית והקבלה בימי הביניים ועד לתיאולוגיה, לאומנות ולספרות של העת החדשה. נעסוק בסודם של הספרים החיצוניים ובנסתרות בכתביהם של ש”י עגנון וס’ יזהר; במאגיה בבבל התלמודית ובארץ ישראל הביזנטית ובמאגיה להגנה על החתן והכלה. נבחן את ההסתרה בתרבות החסידית ובספרות ברסלב וכן את חייהם של יהודים נסתרים, אנוסים ושבתאים. | התמונה שתיחשף בקורס תצביע על אספקטים רבים ומגוונים המדגימים כולם את נושא הסוד, הסודיות וההסתרה, מוטיב המלווה כל העת את ההיסטוריה היהודית ואת התרבות היהודית. |
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