Forgetting the Torah and Rabbinic Nostalgia for the Present by Mira Balberg (UC San Diego)

Department: Religious Studies

Date and Time: November 6, 2019 | 4:30 PM-6:30 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway 1010

Event Details


The idea that the Torah was collectively forgotten in the past, or is destined to be forgotten in the future, is a recurring trope in the rabbinic literature of late antiquity. The talk explores the origins of this idea as well as its development and various uses in rabbinic literature. It proposes that the rabbis' engagement with the notion that the Torah is not eternal, but rather bound to be lost, offers a prism though which we can learn both of  the rabbis' perception of history, and of their changing perceptions of their own role in history.

Mira Balberg is Professor of Ancient Jewish Civilization at the University of California, San Diego. She is a scholar of ancient Mediterranean religious history, with a focus on the emergence and development of Judaism in antiquity (200 BCE–500 CE). She is especially interested in the cultural contacts of Jews with their surrounding communities and with the imperial forces that shaped the Middle East in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Balberg’s first book, Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2014) examines how ancient Near Eastern ideas and practices of bodily purity were reconfigured by Palestinian rabbis of the 2nd and 3rd centuries through the influence of Greek and Roman medical and philosophical doctrines. Her second book, Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (University of California Press, 2017), engages with the process known as “the end of sacrifice” – that is, the rapid decline and ultimately demise of sacrificial modes of worship in the Mediterranean region in the first half of the first Millennium C.E.