Catherine Hezser. Rabbinic Body Language: Non-Verbal Communication in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017.Excerpt:
There is something counterintuitive in a study of body language and non-verbal communication in Palestinian rabbinic literature. For one thing, non-verbal communication is instinctively associated with living, visible, bodies. Such a study, therefore, may appear relevant to ethnographers who immerse themselves in fieldwork but not to scholars whose primary sources are silent and unmoving texts. Moreover, assuming an inquiry of literary portrayals of non-verbal communication is possible, rabbinic discourse may be problematic due to the fact that the voices of the rabbinic documents are generally perceived as coming out of, literally, talking heads. At first glance, then, the data seems resistant to a meaningful analysis of rabbinic body language.But ...
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