ABSTRACT
Rabbinic literature has not always had a good press. As a by-product of the Protestant crusade against ‘Justification by Works’, Jewish ‘legalism’ was constructed in the nineteenth century as an amalgam of literalism and rule fetishism. Even those distant from religious polemics have used the adjective ‘talmudic’ to denote a peculiar form of convoluted argument, which in some undefined manner fails to match up to the standards of Western logic. Even the great orientalist, Joseph Schacht, categorized Jewish and Islamic legal thinking as ‘analogical’, by comparison with the (modern) Western ‘analytic’ mode. One of the great contributions which modern semiotics is making to the study of culture is the provision of a set of concepts through the use of which crosscultural comparisons may be made, without any innuendo of cultural superiority. One reason lies in the fact that semiotics, while it still often accords to linguistics the status of a privileged paradigm, looks also to a host of non-linguistic semiotic systems-many of them in areas where the claims of Western cultural dominance have a much lesser initial plausibility. Another reason lies in the approach to logic itself: logic, when manifest in discourse, has to be treated as a form of discourse, with all the rhetorical implications that flow.
