ABSTRACT
This chapter is divided into five sections. The first section reviews attempts in the twentieth century, at conferences, workshops, and in print, to define “Jewish rhetoric,” especially in relation to the Greco-Roman tradition, at the same time touching on the work of some primary scholars in contemporary fields of rhetorics and Jewish studies. The second section cautiously overviews the author’s own attempt to define “Jewish rhetoric” by an examination over 25 years of the philosophy of the Hebrew alphabet itself, which figures prominently in esoteric and mystical theories of creation - not only in the Hebrew Bible but also in Midrash and Kabbalah - and his proposal that the rhetoric of the alefbet can be understood as an alternate, Jewish sophistic in which language is “Reality” and letters its “divine atoms,” so to speak; so deconstructed, G/d becomes the unknowable master rhetorician, and the ultimate sophist. The third section comprehensively delineates the various issues, questions, and problems hinted at in the title of the chapter that arise in the author’s analysis of Jewish rhetoric overviewed in the second section. The fourth section tries to redress at least some of the questions raised by locating Jewish rhetoric in the Torah - the Five Books of Moses - which is central to Judaism, especially since the destruction of the Second Temple, and that is found in every Jewish denomination and community. The fifth section concludes with a short list of basic concerns that may be of value in any attempt to compare global rhetorics.
