Talmud as a New Intellectual Project (Sarit Kattan Gribetz)
What Vidas suggests in his book is that the ancient rabbis were philologists, and among the earliest philologists and critical scholars at that, who sought to mine earlier rabbinic traditions in order to construct the best versions of them, clarify attributions, draw connections between individuals and texts, discuss textual differences, figure out methods of emendation, and so on. Vidas argues, then, that philology is not (exclusively) a modern, critical, etic tool that we can apply to the study of the Talmud, but rather that it is also an emic approach – and a thoroughly Jewish one – developed as part and parcel of the Talmudic enterprise itself.
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