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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, "The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Description: Early Judaism is often described as the religion of the book par excellence—a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text. But in The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg argues that Jews didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized. She tells the story of the intervening centuries during which even rabbis seldom opened...