The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature

This volume guides beginning students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical-interpretive and culture-critical issues that contemporary scholars use when studying the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors, themselves well-known interpreters of rabbinic literature, have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus. Unlike other introductions to rabbinic writings, the present volume includes approaches shaped by anthropology, gender studies, oral-traditional studies, classics, and folklore studies.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (2000) which won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year, and was a finalist (one of three) for the National Jewish Book Award.

Martin S. Jaffee is the author of Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE-400 CE (2001), Early Judaism: Religious Worlds of the First Judaic Milennium, 2nd edition (2006), and several volumes of rabbinic translation and commentary. He is currently co-editor of the AJS Review.