ABSTRACT

Isaac Bashevis Singer was referring mainly to the fate of the Yiddish language, but he might have said the same of the study of Talmud. European "enlightenment" terminated in a new dark age, compared with which the era of Talmudic ascendancy among the Jews had indeed been an age of light. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has written that the Talmud is "the only sacred book in all of world culture that permits and even encourages the student to question it". A commentary on the Talmud as a whole was an impressive achievement in the ages of faith; it will be an extraordinary one in the age of doubt, in which one's reputation for intelligence usually increases in direct proportion to the degree of one's disbelief. The belief in the Talmud as the distinguishing mark of Jewish existence is very old, among Christians as well as among Jews.