The Talmud & The Internet

October 10, 2005 9:27 AM

The Talmud & The Internet: It occurred to me the other day that collaborative web spaces - blogs with commentary, wiki pages, etc. - might have a distant forebear in the Jewish Talmud (it should be noted, however, that I am not a Jew, nor have I a very good understanding of Jewish scripture). After asking around, I found a link to an article by David Porush and a few mentions of the book linked above (the reviews of which are less than stellar). Are there other scholarly articles or books that might prove helpful in exploring this topic?
posted by aladfar to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Tangentially related: Douglas Rushkoff connected Judaism with open source software at Open Source Judaism.
posted by goethean at 10:10 AM on October 10, 2005

Naomi Chana of the blog Baraita (lots of neat Jewishy scholarly stuff mixed with daily life observations) picked up on that too, and it even influenced the naming of her blog:

"At any rate, I liked the idea of creating a series of baraitot, external or non-authoritative commentaries on texts I thought important. It appealed to me as an analogy for what people generally do in journals or weblogs: provide not-especially-authoritative opinions on subjects ranging from the crucial to the trivial. The analogy actually works well in terms of layout: the Talmud itself was continually commented on by successive generations, until a printed page of Talmud today features a central block of Mishnah + Gemara (in slightly different typefaces) with various key commentaries surrounding it on the page...

If you think in terms of content, the Talmud/Internet comparison is even easier to make (most recently by Jonathan Rosen): both are made up of layers upon layers of commentary in which any given page or site is incomplete but laden with references to other pages. Incidentally, it helps that the Hebrew word for a tractate of the Mishnah or Talmud, masekhet, literally means "web."

(She references Jonathan Rosen's book, too.)
posted by Asparagirl at 10:13 AM on October 10, 2005

And FYI, Naomi Chana can't stand Douglas Rushkoff. (It's a fun read.)
posted by Asparagirl at 10:15 AM on October 10, 2005

Some blog posts: Web, Code, and Talmud. Reading Code is Like Reading the Talmud. A discussion of aggada, halacha, and the web in a review of David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined.
posted by fuzz at 10:40 AM on October 10, 2005

Another vote for Baraita, one of the smartest, most consistently interesting and amusing Jewish-related blogs around.
posted by languagehat at 5:44 PM on October 10, 2005

I would actually suggest contacting Rabbi Jeremy Rosen about this subject. He's a Conservative (?) rabbi who is very involved with technology, very funny and tapped into this sort of thing. His website is www.jeremyrosen.com.

*Found him doing a search for myself as we share the same name. I've interacted with him quite a bit and he's great.
posted by Captaintripps at 8:31 PM on October 10, 2005

Hi, it's David Porush. I first wrote about connecting hypertext and talmud in 1988, when hypertext was hot and mindblowing. Over the years the idea seemed to develop itself as the web emerged. The similarities to wikis and open source, as some of the comments in your thread say, are also striking and compelling.

You can find some elaborations - though now dated - to an old homepage of mine at http://home.nycap.rr.com/porush/
But you'd have to poke around to find it.

I'd be glad to discuss this with you further. A kinda wild exposition of the idea is in this article:

"Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson's Snow Crash," which may be freely available on the web somewhere.

Anyway, thanks for including reference to my thought in your inquiry.

David
posted by dporu at 12:06 PM on March 14, 2006