ISBL Amsterdam, 22-26 July 2012
Call for Papers
Tanhuma is a wide and diverse corpus of literature created by rabbinic culture in the Land of Israel roughly at the same period as the Babylonian Talmud. Although the Tanhuma was a wide spread and dominant literary corpus, it fell into oblivion at some point during the following centuries, ‘losing’ the place to the Talmud in Medieval Europe, and to other more ‘classical’ midrashim in modern scholarship.
The aim of these series of session of the SBL is to call attention again to the Tanhuma corpus, and to the culture that it represents.
At the first stage we would like to keep the scope of presentations as wide as possible, tackling all the aspects that can be studied about the Tanhuma; here are some possible topics:
* A definition or description of the Tanhuma corpus
* The poetics of the Tanhuma
* The Tanhuma and the Babylonian Talmud
* Tanhuma’s journey into Europe
* The representation of the Tanhuma in the Geniza
* The culture which is represented in the Tanhuma
* Non-rabbinic influences on the Tanhuma
* Halacha and custom in Tanhuma
* Sources of the Tanhuma
* The place of the Tanhuma on the Jewish-rabbinic cultural continuum.
The idea is to invite the scholars that are working on the Tanhuma to participate regularly and discuss and learn this particular corpus, and hopefully come up with good quality publications, or even a common project.
Please send suggestions to the chair, Ronit Nikolsky (r.nikolsky@rug.nl)
