Judith Hauptman
E. Billi Ivry Professor of Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (emerita)
Jewish Theological Seminary

Judith Hauptman is the E. Billi Ivry Professor of Talmud and Rabbinic Culture (emerita) at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She is the author of three books and numerous articles. Her first volume concludes that the phrase tanya nami hakhi in the Babylonian Talmud does not indicate that an amora has plagiarized a tanna, but rather that an amoraic comment on a tannaitic text has been inadvertently interpolated into the tannaitic text, making it appear that the amora is merely repeating an earlier teaching when he is, in fact, innovating. Her book on the Tosefta argues that rather than view the collection as a commentary on the Mishnah, it is more likely a source of many Mishnaic teachings. Hauptman claims, in her volume on women in Jewish practice, that women’s status in the Talmudic period changed from being chattel, as they were in the Bible, to being second class citizen. She is currently working on a book about halakhic anecdotes in the Babylonian Talmud, i.e., the short episodes that describe how an amora carried out a law that was stated earlier in the text. She shows in case after case that the amora tweaked the law as he carried it out. The Babylonian Talmud is thereby suggesting that a law may be altered many years after it was first promulgated.

Selected Publications

Development of the Talmudic Sugya: Relationship Between Tannaitic and Amoraic Sources, Studies in Judaism, University Press of America, 1988

Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice, Westview/Perseus Books, 1998

Rereading the Mishnah, A New Approach to Ancient Jewish Texts, Mohr Siebeck, 2005

“,הדבר מסור לנשים: נשים וטקסי דת ביתיים” Sidra 24-25, (Bar Ilan, 2010), 83-111

“שלשת המרכיבים היסודיים של הסוגיה: הסתם, המימרה, והברייתא” in מלאכת מחשבת, eds. Aharon Amit and Aharon Shemesh (Bar Ilan 2011), 27-38.

“A New Interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Forbidden Sabbath Labors,” in The Faces of Torah, Studies in the Texts and Contexts of Ancient Judaism in Honor of Steven Fraade (V&R Academic 2017), 323-339.