I am posting this on behalf of /u/gingerkid1234 who is travelling and wanted this to be posted in primetime to have it reach as many interested eyes as possible.

So last week I realized that most readers here don't really know much about Jewish texts. Like, when I say "it says in the Talmud", I'm not sure if people know what the Talmud is besides "a Jewish book". So I decided to do a bit of a write-up of Jewish rabbinic texts that you may not know about. Hopefully it'll provide some useful context for my future answers.

In the realm of rabbinic texts, it all starts with the Mishnah. The Mishnah is a compilation of sources made in the mid-2nd century, around the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. In order to preserve religious knowledge, Rabbis in the Galilee made a standard set of Rabbinic texts they could disseminate. The Mishnah, written in Hebrew, contains short versions of Rabbinic discussions from the Late Second Temple era to roughly the time it was written. It contains discussions of rituals and laws of all sorts.

However, not all the contemporary texts made the cut into the Mishnah. Some were compiled in another collection, called the Tosefta. Others are in neither, and are only know by being quoted in the Talmud. Texts of both sorts are called Beraitot (singular Beraita). These sources, Mishnayot and Beraitot, are the Tannaitic texts, the earliest period of Rabbinic scholarship that left a decent amount of written material. Ascertaining the historical use of these texts can be tricky, since they are often only known much later than when they're ostensibly from. This is partly because many of these texts were traditionally memorized, or are simply short texts taught orally (like my teacher did X once, etc). The basic concept of it is that it contains knowledge of Jewish tradition and oral law, which is the body of Judaism believed to have been given by God to Moses at Sinai, apart from the written text of the Torah.

Of course, Rabbinic scholarship continued. Scholars in Palestine and Babylonia each wrote a set of texts called the Talmud. This consists of two parts. First, the Talmud incorporates the text of the Mishnah. Then, it has the Gemara. The Gemara is later Rabbinic discussion of the Mishnah. It includes later conversations, as well as referencing other Tannaitic texts. The usual format is for a sentence (though the definition of sentence can be rather long) of the Mishnah, followed by a bunch of discussion in the Gemara. This means while it keeps the same general topical layout of the Mishnah, it can veer wildly off-topic. As mentioned at the beginning, two versions were compiled, the Palestinian and the Babylonian (Yerushalmi and Bavli). Because of upheaval in Palestine, most scholars ended up in Babylonia. As a consequence, their version of the Talmud was compiled later and more deliberately. It's the standard version of the Talmud that Jews generally use as an authoritative text, it's much more common, and the manuscripts are generally better. Jews traditionally use this as the authoritative text for what the oral law and tradition say, supplemented by other traditions and later texts. In terms of content, you can think of it as a set of discussions involving older Rabbinic source texts, which are used as a decisive set of rules in Jewish law. The logic employed is (somewhat famously) complex and nitpicky.

I'm going to skip forward several centuries to the Middle Ages. There are a few genres of text I'd like to mention. First, the law code. A number of texts were intended as an authoritative set of rules for Jewish law. Unlike the Talmud, they're organized in a topical way, since they're lists of rules and practices, not discussions of Jewish law. While writing these was controversial at first, they've become major sources of Jewish law. There are two best-known ones, the Mishneh Torah by Maimonides (late 12th century) and the Shulchan Arukh (mid 15th century). The former really pioneered the genre, but the latter is considered generally more authoritative. There are, of course, more such texts. The Shulchan Arukh is itself based on an earlier work, the Arba'ah Turim. The Shulchan Arukh itself inspired a great deal of later works based on it. The first was the Mappah, a companion text discussing the practice of European Jews (the Shulchan Arukh was written with the custom of Sefardic Jews in mind). There have been many many more, such the Arukh haShulchan, the Mishnah Brurah, and the Chayei Adam. There's even one being published now, the Yalkut Yosef. Some of these follow the Shulchan Arukh closely, discussing its text. Others are independent texts that follow along with it law by law. Others follow only the general layout of it.

The next genre is the commentary. These follow along with another text and discuss particular words. The format of these is that the commentary picks an interesting word or phrase to talk about, and then has a comment on it that is between a sentence and a paragraph long. These have been written for the Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, and the legal texts above (I'm distinguishing the legal code based on the Shulchan Arukh, which are closely related texts that are readable but out-of-context on their own, and true commentaries, which are incomprehensible without seeing the text being discussed). The best known is Rashi, who wrote commentaries on the Torah and Talmud (note that a commentary on the Talmud necessarily discusses both the Mishnah and the Talmud). There are loads of Torah commentaries, such as ibn Ezra, Nachmanides, Sforno, etc. These tend to heavily incorporate earlier texts such as the Talmud. Rashi, for instance, often functions as an easy way to find Talmudic references and statements on verses; his main achievement was collecting and organizing huge amounts of material, not producing original views (not to take away from his intellectual prowess--there is original commentating too). The main Talmud commentaries are Rashi and Tosafot. There is generally a great deal of interplay between these commentaries and the law codes, since they're both attempting to understand the same text, just organizing those thoughts in different ways. There are also commentaries only on the Mishnah, which synthesize the Talmud's discussion on it. These include Maimonides and the Bartenura, but there are more, including a relatively recent one by Kehati (to illustrate that these genres are still active).

Yet another genre is the responsum. This genre actually preceedes the previous two in age. The basic format is simple--someone asked a question of a Rabbi, they wrote down their answer, we have it today. Many Rabbis have some body of responsum literature. Sometimes they or their students organize it into an actual volume, which can end up being a law code. Other times they come to us independently. They tend to address a very particular question, not a swath of textual or legal issues. Sometimes they were lost long-term, and many responsa only were cited centuries after their authorship, or had a very long gap where no one had them (this is true of other texts occasionally too, but to a lesser extent. The one-off nature of responsum literature makes them easy to lose).

The final genre is the theological text. This is really the one which is probably least unfamiliar to readers here, and thus requires less explanation. It's just an author writing about theology. Prominent examples include Emunot ve-Deot (Saadia Gaon), Guide to the Perplexed (Maimonides), and Kuzari (R' Yehudah haLevi).

I hope this has helped put some of my primary sources on Jewish law in a bit of a literary and religious context.

/u/gingerkid1234

I just wanted to note the passing of a great individual who does not receive enough love. This week Vincent Harding passed on. Harding does not receive enough love. He worked tirelessly with Martin Luther King Jr and co-wrote "Beyond Vietnam" with King. I was lucky enough to have Harding guest lecture in a few of my classes in my masters program. It was surprising to me that the man who lectured in my courses also wrote "Beyond Vietnam." Gone from his lecture was the stern tone that King used in his speech. Rather, Harding took on this subversive, gentle tone. He would always begin a lecture by asking students to tell him their name and their mother's mother's name. What Harding was having you do was narrate a subversive history that valued the stories of those who are often untold, the work of women. He did so with a smile and a gentle, hushed tone. He also did so while always wearing his "War is Terrorism" button. I will miss him dearly, but I take comfort that he dedicated so much of his life to teaching others, from PhDs to elementary students. A beautiful man.

Edit: Harding started the Veterans of Hope project. He and others interviewed various civil rights leaders to document their struggles. It is an oral history of the various civil rights projects. I highly recommend their work.

I've been working a lot and saying home to take care of my son, and have had very little time for history posts. To all the people who have asked questions about food and diet in Britain, I'm sorry. I've seen the questions with my ITTT recipe, but just have't had time to post substantial responses. Try again in a few weeks.

The good news is that I have a job interview today, for a small, part-time spot but it would be teaching a class I'm dying to teach, global environmental history.

History department booksale! I managed to pick up King Leopold's Ghost, Nature's Metropolis, A History of Thailand and two Chinese lit/history sourcebooks for a soul crushing five dollars. Of course, now I need to find some place that sells time.

On a more serious note, the recent election in India has been pretty fascinating in the degree to which it has involved a contestation of Indian history. One of the major BNP lines, for example, has been the claim that they are reviving India after 300 years--whether this represent a willingness to integrate the Mughals, and thus India's Muslims, fully into Indian history is debatable, but it is certainly a way to implicitly cast Congress as a continuation of the Raj. And I think there is no question that Modi's determination to forge stronger ties with East and Southeast Asia also carries a statement of identity. India has always been a pretty powerful case study in identity, and that doesn't look like it will change.

I wrote a blog post this morning on "one of the most-cited and least-interpreted quotations" of the atomic age, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds." I was happy with how it came out!

I am not a historian, I'm a dumb amateur with a dumb idea: I'd like to take the United States Constitution and put it into a software revision control repository called "git".

This requires not only that I have the actual document, but also rough drafts, the names of authors (and which portion they authored, if multiple authors wrote this), dates for drafts, and though it seems non-obvious, the order in which the rough drafts appeared (not thinking the draft B came before draft A).

Is it possible for me to get ahold of these in some digital format? I've tried searching before through the internet, and I only found a few low resolution scans (and it's damned hard to read the flowery writing, period, let alone on the low-res stuff). Do these even exist?

This gets a little easier with the more recent amendments, but only slightly so.

Also, a slightly-related question: are any historians out there considering revision control software as a method of documenting the history of legal documents?

I've been reading an introduction to International Relations book lately, as a few people know. And it's bad. The history is sparse, and if I wasn't just reading it for the theory/perspectives analysis it provides me with for future classes, I'd have stopped already.

On the upside, I've now got a reading list some 30+ books long, and at a rate of a book every 3 days I'm gonna be reading all summer!

Best part about it is I'll be touring the Middle East to talk to officials involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict's peace process this summer, and I can see how the history has played into their personal opinions/beliefs (and how it's played into memorials we'll be visiting) throughout!

I also read a strange anecdote in that intro book, but seems rather interesting, about a senator who gave a speech a day about ratifying the international genocide convention for nearly 20 years on the Senate floor. He gave 10,000+ consecutive role call votes (the record), and every day the Senate was in session he gave a speech. That was over 3,211 times. Impressive dedication!

I was doing an essay for my "Women in the Chinese Revolution" class this week, and while doing the research needed to make my argument, I came across a book that I figured people here would be interested in.

Book: Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s by Emily Honig & Gail Hershatter (Stanford University Press, 1988)

(I'm not sure if they ever published an updated version; this is the edition that is listed on my university's servers.)

The book discusses how femininity was redefined during the post-Mao period, shortly after the economic reforms that would help to revitalize the Chinese economy after the Cultural Revolution. It contains translations of primary source documents highlighting the discussion on how women were to compose themselves in this new society, many which are rather intriguing to read (one in particular was an advertisement for a breast enhancement pump, which I found particularly interesting). In addition, it goes over how Chinese women were expected to behave, from expectations of filial duty towards mothers-in-law to considerations of dress to sexual education and sexual morality. It also includes a discussion on discrimination against women in Chinese society and why this came to be, even when women have equal rights alongside men.

For people who might be interested in gender studies in non-Western countries, this is a good read.

(I'm sorry if my post isn't up to standard for a book review.)

I asked a question here that did not get an answer. That's fine -- it's not an incredibly sexy question, to be sure, but I'm still curious.

If someone could give me a shorter less formal answer here I'd still be happy!

Basically my question is "why did people flip the hell out over Chisholm v. Georgia such that it became this huge national priority to create the 11th Amendment and quickly ratify it?" Sovereign immunity seems like an offensive concept to us today, but ABROGATING it was apparently offensive back then.

I'm not sure whether this would have been allowed as a post by itself, but maybe it would be allowed as part of Friday Free for all.

Can any historians recommend any works of "alternate history" that are either good because 1) they are realistic or 2) because they reveal a lot about the author or the time and place that the work was written?

For an example of a work that falls into the second category, Churchill had written a short story titled "If Lee Had Not Won The Battle of Gettysburg" in 1930. It's written from a point of view where the author muses about Lee's defeat, but then describes how Lee's victory in their universe shaped their present. You can see some of Churchill's beliefs pop up in the alternate history - Britain plays a decisive role possibly as part of the author's conceit, but there are themes of the special relationship enjoyed between the Americas and Britain, and towards the end the idea of a "United States of Europe" surfaces just like how Churchill would again support it in 1946.

I'm really just looking for more books for my reading list since I enjoy this genre, so I'm hoping to get recommendations.

if people posted passive aggressive, preachy, poorly-researched political propoganda on Facebook in Ancient (or at least pre-1800s) times, what would some of the best ones have been? Things detractors would have made up about otherwise good leaders, or things that might have been true, but stated passive aggressively about shitty ones.

I want to make some in dramatic image form, but I can't even think where to start.

Are there any other podcasts out there that are same general level as Mike Duncan's and Dan Carlin's podcasts in regards to both level of detail and accuracy?

Who invented applesauce?

Any thoughts on Coates' Case for Reparations?