Christians and fasts in the Talmud

THIS WEEK'S DAF YOMI COLUMN BY ADAM KIRSCH IN TABLET: Why Early Jews Didn’t Care at All About Christians. In a struggle against the idea of history, Jewish life strives to change as little as possible, even when new religions take over. Excerpt:

In Western culture, we tend to see Christian history as absolute history, and we learn about Jewish history largely in terms of its interactions with Christianity—whether that means persecution in the Crusades, or emancipation at the time of the French Revolution, or the failure of European assimilation in the 20th century. One reason I find it so illuminating to read the Talmud is that it presents an autonomously Jewish understanding of the world, in which Jews act rather than react. Indeed, the Talmud might even be said to struggle against the whole idea of history. Seder Mo’ed seems to inhabit a timeless time of ritual repetition, during which Jewish life strives to change as little as possible, keeping itself ready for the arrival of redemption.

The reference to Christianity in Ta’anit 27b comes during a discussion of fasting, which is this tractate’s main subject. In earlier chapters, we have heard about the procedures for fasting in response to drought and other calamities. Yet there are also certain fast days that are fixtures on the Jewish calendar, and the last chapter of Ta’anit explains their rationale. Some of these fasts remain central to Jewish practice—the 9th of Av, and to a lesser extent the 17th of Tammuz, which falls today, in a rare coincidence of the Daf Yomi calendar with the Jewish calendar. But the Talmud begins by talking about a whole category of fasts that disappeared from post-Temple Judaism: the fast of the “non-priestly watches.”

Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.