Books by Daniel Boyarin

Makes the bold argument that the very concept of a religion of "Judaism" is an invention of the Christian church. The intellectual journey of world-renowned Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin, this book will change the study of ""Judaism"" - an essential key word in Jewish Studies - as we understand it today.

In A Traveling Homeland, Daniel Boyarin makes the case that the Babylonian Talmud is a diasporist manifesto producing and defining the practices that constitute Jewish diasporic identity in the form of textual, interpretive communities built around talmudic study.

Proceeding by means of intensive readings of passages from the early midrash on Exodus The Mekilta, Boyarin proposes a new theory of midrash that rests in part on an understanding of the heterogeneity of the biblical text and the constraining force of rabbinic ideology on the production of midrash. In a forceful combination of theory and reading, Boyarin raises profound questions concerning the interplay between history, ideology, and interpretation.

Offers an alternative to the Euro-American warrior/patriarch model of masculinity and recovers the Jewish ideal of the gentle, receptive male. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, this book reveals early rabbis - studious, family-oriented - as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society.

Scholars have come to realize that we can and need to speak of a twin birth of Christianity and Judaism, not a genealogy in which one is parent to the other. In this book, the author develops a revised understanding of the interactions between nascent Christianity and nascent Judaism in late antiquity.

Using Michael Bakhtin's notion of represented dialogue and real dialogism, this title demonstrates, through multiple close readings, that the give-and-take in these texts is actually monologic in spirit as well as shows that there are other elements that manifest genuine dialogicality.

Beginning with a startling endorsement of the patristic view of Judaism - that it was a 'carnal' religion, in contrast to the spiritual vision of the Church, the author argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity.

"Encourages us to see historic Christianity as but one expression of a universalistic potential in Jewish monotheism. . . . In a fruitful career not yet nearly over, Border Lines, the culmination of many years of work, may well remain Daniel Boyarin's masterpiece."-Jack Miles, Commonweal

Jewishness disrupts categories of identity because it is not genealogical, or even religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with one another. An exploration of these tensions in the Pauline corpus, argues the author lead us to an appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Jew and Palestinian.