University and its donors for having the wisdom to found the Taubman Chair of Talmudic Culture. To Stephen Greenblatt who has encouraged my cultural studies from their very embryonic beginnings, I owe a special debt of gratitude, particularly now that he has taken this book into his series, "The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics," and to the editors of the Press: Stanley Holwitz, who charmed me, and Doris Kretschmer, who made it happen.
|
I firmly believe that scholarly production, like artistic work, is not the creation of an author but the production of a culture. I want to make explicit in this case my sense of dependence on a contemporary cultural discourse on the body that made this work possible, and particularly on the work of Peter Brown, which appeared six months after I began this project and had an enormous effect on it. The following friends and colleagues have read all or part of the manuscript. Their help has been enormous and in another discipline some of them would be signed on as coauthors: Robert Alter, Mieke Bal, Albert Baumgarten, David Biale, James Boon, Alice Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Sidney Boyarin, Jeremy Cohen, Arnold Davidson, Carolyn Dinshaw, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, Arnold Davidson, Arnold Eisen, Steven Fraade, John Gager, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Stephen Greenblatt, Erich Gruen, David Halperin (MIT), Sarah Hammer, Verna Harrison, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Judith Hauptmann, Christine Hayes, Marc Hirshman, Elliot Horowitz, Moshe Idel, Karen King, Ross Kraemer, Chana Kronfeld, Joshua Levinson, John Miles, Haim Milikovsky, Shlomo Naeh, Ilana Pardes, David Resnick, Amy Richlin, Chana Safrai, Dov Samet, Elissa Sampson, David Satran, Ellen Spolsky, Dina Stein, Ruth Stein, David Stern, Brian Stock, Guy Stroumsa, Deborah Weissman, Shira Wolosky, Eli Yassif, and especially Regina Schwartz and Froma Zeitlin, who read and commented on most of the book in several versions. I also thank the editors of
Critical Inquiry
, the editorial board of
Representations
, an anonymous reader for the
Yale Journal of Criticism
, several anonymous readers for the University of California Press, and the Cultural Critique Collective of Jerusalem.
|
My son, Jesse Boyarin, and his friend Shoham Carmi "discovered" the painting that is reproduced on the dust jacket.
|
Finally, I thank my students at the University of California at Berkeley for intellectual stimulation and fellowship, "from them more than from anyone."
|
|
|
