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date: 05 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter first sets out the difficulties in studying the sources for Jewish ethics in classical rabbinic literature. Not only do rabbinic texts lack the very notion of ethics, they also emerge from different terrains and times and perforce bespeak different moral conclusions if not presumptions on how to reach those positions. However, one exception is texts classified as rabbinic “ethical” literature, which include 'Avot or Pirkei 'Avot and its companion text(s), Avot de-Rabbi Natan. The discussion then turns to the relationship between law and ethics in rabbinic literature; ethical limits to halakhah in rabbinic literature; and issues of universality and particularity in rabbinic literature.

Keywords: rabbinic texts, Jewish ethics, ethical theories, ethical literature, law, halakhah

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert (Ph.D., Graduate Theological Union, 1995) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, with a courtesy appointment in Classics, at Stanford University, and Visiting Professor of Talmud at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Having written numerous articles on rabbinic and talmudic literature and culture, she is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Early Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (2000), which was awarded the Baron Prize for a first book in Jewish Studies, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Studies. She is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), as well as of the English edition of Jacob Taubes’s From Cult to Culture (2010). Her current book project, Re-Placing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and Neighborhood, is a study of the politics of the rabbinic eruv.

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