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My essay on “The Pope, the Jews, and the Vatican Museums,” was just posted online at “The Forward,” and will appear in the next print edition.

I recently watched an inspiring presentation by Professor Dan Cohen, entitled “The Ivory Tower and the Open Web.” For some time I have been wondering if the web could be used to help develop an online a scholarly community that was relatively tightly focused on early Judaism. A website would offer such scholars an opportunity to engage with colleagues in an ongoing way. It would by no means replace conferences, but could help to promote a different kind of dialogue.

A website like this might ideally include:

• An updated list of announcements of interest: Upcoming conferences, calls for paper, funding opportunities, etc;
• An aggregate of current, relevant news, such as IAA find reports. Some of us currently get this from blogs, such as Paleojudaica, whose posts can be aggregated into a single spot on the page;
• An aggregate of the tables of contents of relevant journals as they are released;
• The blog itself, which would be the central focus of the site. Here scholars can post new ideas, texts, images, etc. for which they seek feedback. These would not be full drafts to workshop, but rawer ideas. Others could then develop a conversation around the idea using “Comments”;
• Drafts to workshop. There has been increased interest in (and tools for) online open peer review. These tools can be used in a less evaluative context;
• An archive of visual resources, perhaps linked in through a photo-management site such as flickr;
• Guides to relevant educational materials;
• A chat room. This is more whimsical, but there are times in the day that I just need recharging. It would be fun to have a site to go to in order to chat with colleagues in the field.

It would not take very much to build such a site using “Wordpress”. The key to the site’s success would be collaboration: would anybody actually come to it and participate in the community? I experimented with something like this a few years back using another platform, but it didn’t work out. The primary reason, I think, was simply that people are busy and didn’t feel that it was worth their time to participate. This, of course, is entirely understandable. I wonder, though, if now the passing of several years and a new platform would make a difference.

Of course, if anybody else would like to take this idea and run with it, I’d be delighted. Sign me up!

The following announcement will soon be going out widely. Please feel free to circulate!

Workshop Call for Papers
February 13-14, 2012
Brown University

The Program in Judaic Studies in collaboration with the Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship is pleased to announce plans for a two-day workshop devoted to investigating the ways in which the digital humanities has or can change the study of religion in antiquity. The workshop will take place on February 13-14, 2012, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

We invite proposals for papers and presentations that explore the intersection of ancient religion and the digital humanities. We are particularly interested in presentations of projects that have the potential to open up new questions and avenues of research. Can digital tools not only allow us to do our work faster and more thoroughly but also enable entirely new kinds of research? How might different digital data (e.g., textual, geographic, and material culture) be used together most productively? The workshop will concentrate primarily on research rather than directly on pedagogy or scholarly communication. One session will be devoted to “nuts and bolts” issues of funding and starting a digital project.

The focus of the workshop will be on the religions of West Asia and the Mediterranean basin through the early Islamic period. Proposals relating to other regions, however, will also be considered.

Please submit proposals of up to 300 words by October 31, 2011, to Michael Satlow (Michael_Satlow@Brown.edu).

Workshop Themes

While all areas relating to the intersection of the ancient religion and the digital humanities are open, we anticipate focusing our discussions on four themes and encourage submissions that relate directly to them:

Corpus Development. While this has comprised the bulk of the effort to date, we welcome further discussion and investigation of best practices, challenges, and standards. How should data be structured?

Digital Tools. What resources that might apply to the analysis of our data already exist? Can they be easily configured to work with the data? We will be demonstrating some projects that might have applications to our data. What tools would we like developed?

Interoperability. How might data from different corpora operate together? How might data interoperability advance research?

Visions. In an ideal world, what would we like to see? What do we want to be able to do and what scholarly questions could these new approaches help to solve or open? We welcome presentations of prototypes or even mock-ups.

For updated information, please consult the website: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Judaic_Studies/AncientReligionModernTechnologyWorkshop.html

Of course not.

This, I understand, parachutes me into an area that I readily confess to know nothing about. There must be a scientific literature on this, and I am sure that there are passionate dog owners who are positive that their dogs possess free-will. This also is well outside the areas that I normally blog about, so if you, dear reader, are interested only in areas pertaining to antiquity, Judaism, or the intersection of the two, you can stop reading here. If you are looking for tips to take care of your dog visit https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj9hTWSW0b6xPqkttECfqIA.

I was brought to this musing during a recent hike that I took with my dog, pictured above.

(Incidental proof dogs don’t have free-will:
1. My dog loves to roll in horse dung;
2. No being with free-will could, should, or would roll in horse dung;
3. Ergo, dogs don’t have free-will, QED.)

We arrived at a beautiful lake and a thought experiment occured to me. My dog is very loyal and hates to be alone, but my dog is also very cautious. He is afraid of the water. What if, I thought, I were to swim out in the lake? At that point, my dog would be conflicted: he would be pulled to follow me but would not want to go into the water.

I’m not sure what he would do (it was far too cold for me to actually test this at that moment), but whatever he did it would not really be a “choice.” When faced with such a dilemma, we humans choose one based on all kinds of criteria, conscious and not. For a dog, though, one instinct will win over the other not on the basis of a choice, but on the basis of… well, what exactly?

Yes. Kind of. Maybe.

Thus is the status quaestionis as it emerged from a mini-symposium at Harvard University yesterday. Firmly on one side of the question was Shaye Cohen and Moshe Halbertal. Both pointed to the radical difference between the Mishnah and Jewish literature of the Second Temple period. The extensive and systematic treatment of academic halakhic problems (grabbing on to a halakhic issue “like the proverbial dog with a bone,” in Cohen’s memorable analogy); its conceptualization; and the inclusion of rabbinic disagreements all set it apart from previous literature. Even more so, Halbertal especially emphasized the novelty of the entire halakhic process – halakhah itself was an invention of the Rabbis, he argued.

Not quite on the other side was Aharon Shemesh and Vered Noam. Both acknowledged that the Mishnah was an innovative document, but both also emphasized to different degrees the pre-existence of traditions that either made it into or were implicitly acknowledged in rabbinic literature. Shemesh highlighted striking literary parallels between rabbinic justifications for violating the Sabbath in order to save a life and passages in the New Testament. Noam focused on laws of corpse impurity in which the early Rabbis appear to be responding to laws that are attested at Qumran. Shemesh was more cautious about positing a model of “halakhic development,” but both saw more continuity where Cohen and Halbertal saw rupture.

So which is it? As strange as the Mishnah as a literary document is, its contents, I think all would acknowledge, was not entirely the creation of the Rabbis. They did create halakhah, but they also took existing practices, justified them, conceptualized them, and systematized them. The answer, then, is not either/or. Although the spotty data will always limit our ability to discern where and how the Rabbis innovated, much scholarly work is left to be done. The fundamental question (or at least the one I’m most interested in), though, is not where or how, but why. How do we explain the “Rabbinic project” in a historically sensitive way?