“His heart rose to craziness,” one student began, tracing the Hebrew words with his finger as he read aloud.
“Yesssss,” the professor said, slowly. “Or we could say, ‘He became obsessed with her.’ ”
The seven undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the seminar Judaism and Violence hunkered over photocopies of the Babylonian Talmud as they took turns parsing the rabbinic commentaries in Hebrew and Aramaic. Most of them had taken courses with Charlotte Fonrobert before, but this was their first encounter with a primary text of such magnitude.
Fonrobert, a native of Germany and a specialist in the field of academic Talmud study, came to Stanford as an assistant professor in 2000 after teaching at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Her new course could have been a dry exercise in legal semantics, and her requirements—that students prepare translations of 2nd-century texts and be ready to discuss them in the context of current scholarly literature —could have assumed the weight of centuries of rabbinic discourse. But Fonrobert’s casual asides (“Never mind that Esther saved the Jewish people!”) set a lively tone and encourage sharp analysis. “What’s the logic here?” she will ask. “You’ve got it right, but it doesn’t quite make sense, does it?”
John Mandsager, who is completing a master’s in religious studies, is part of a weekly study group that struggles through the assigned texts, word by word, with dictionaries in hand. “Professor Fonrobert is down the hall to answer any pressing questions about Aramaic prepositions, and to laugh at our extended conversations about what the rabbis were saying about the biblical character Esther,” he says.
Fonrobert cites two acts of violence committed in the name of Judaism but prompting outrage in Israel—the 1994 machine-gun killing of 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron by a member of a fringe settler movement, and the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a student affiliated with right-wing extremist groups—that got her thinking about someday teaching a course on Judaism and violence. “When violence was dealt with in Jewish studies, I think it was mostly in terms of violence against Jews, which has an historical basis from the Crusades to the Holocaust,” Fonrobert says. “But there is now a debate about religion as a source of violence, and we’re asking, ‘How does Judaism fit into that? Is the only story that Jews throughout most of their history were victimized?’ ”
In their deliberations about sentencing Rabin’s killer, Israeli trial judges cited rabbinic law in the Mishnah, a 3rd-century text that forms the basis for all subsequent developments in Jewish law. Fonrobert was familiar with the ambiguities of texts from that era and thought they could serve as a basis for intriguing conversations about the ethical consequences of one’s religious beliefs. “The debate is similar to the response to September 11: what is true Judaism or Islam?” she says. In her course, students use both the Talmud and current scholarly monographs to explore such issues as martyrdom, war, and what Fonrobert calls “verbal” violence and “gender-bound” violence. “There is a long discussion in the Talmud about for what should we be willing to die,” she says. “Are you allowed to kill yourself? What is legitimate violence?” The final exam: a one-hour conversation with the professor.
Brian Decker, a junior majoring in religious studies, didn’t know the Hebrew alphabet when he signed up for the course, and he says he doesn’t consider himself deeply religious. “Questions of God and the universe, good and evil, have always been secondary in my mind to the study of how people have interpreted those issues, how cultures have answered those questions.”
Which is precisely the focus of Fonrobert’s course. “I think in general one can say that rabbinic Judaism values survival at all costs, and there cannot be such a thing as celebration of death,” she says. “I also belong to the school of thought that says we can really only talk about Judaism as we know it with the inception of rabbinic Judaism in the 2nd century. Can we do that in 10 weeks? That’s where the experiment lies.”
