PhD Dissertation

I have been reading doctorates for a very long time…... This might even be the best one that I have read and/or judged… This dissertation made for fascinating reading. My guess is that the non-expert would also understand…. To put it bluntly, I think that Mr. Shadmi has invented a new field.…. Mr. Shadmi has made an important contribution to a half dozen fields of the study of the ancient world.

Shadmi situates himself in a sub-field of cultural studies that turns to the study of ‘spatiality’ as a fundamental aspect of the making of collective identities and is often referred to as cultural geography. Shadmi’s dissertation assembles a selection of textual units from the Babylonian Talmud, from across the corpus, that constitutes the basis for his analysis of various forms of rabbinic placemaking…

While recent talmudic scholarship has indeed sought to situate the Bavli in the cultural context of the Sasanian Empire, Shadmi makes the place and emplacement of the Bavli in Mesopotamia come to life much more viscerally. And while much of talmudic scholarship, including more recently diaspora studies scholars of the Bavli have mostly stayed, in a manner of speaking, ‘within the imaginary Beit Midrash’ that is the Bavli much as it is framed by it, Shadmi asks us to follow the rabbis to their dwelling in Sasanian Mesopotamia beyond the walls of that Beit Midrash. He importantly and convincingly demonstrates that the Babylonian Talmud both dwells in Mesopotamia, is of Mesopotamia that is, and shapes and recreates it as the Bavel of the rabbis. I find this to be an important contribution to the study of talmudic, and more generally Jewish culture.

First, Shadmi analyzes the rabbinic conceptualization of Bavel, the imaginary ‘homeland’ of the Bavli and its makers. The first part of the dissertation is devoted to this, and provides geographical and historical details of the landscape, of urban and agriculture of Sasanian Mesopotomia, that the rabbis of the Talmud orient themselves towards and transform into their Bavel. Shadmi shows that imaginary Bavel lives somewhere between the Mesopotamian landscape and between the halachic imaginings of the rabbis superimposed on that landscape. Second, the dissertation describes a spatio-intellectual talmudic practice that Shadmi calls “landscape midrashim”…… a specifically rabbinic practice of mapping Scripture onto the Mesopotamian landscape, and vice versa, letting landscape appear in midrashic practice…

Scholarship on the Talmud tends to get stuck within that imaginary space. And here is Shadmi who argues that beyond the imaginary Beit Midrash it is imaginary Bavel that is turned into a project of belonging and home-making.