‘The Rise of Talmud’: A Conversation with Moulie Vidas and Alyssa Gray

This year, Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies brings programs touching on a theme of disagreement in Jewish History. Join us for a discussion of The Rise of Talmud (Oxford University Press, 2025), Moulie Vidas’s new book on the emergence of commentary on rabbinic teachings in the third and fourth centuries CE. In conversation with Alyssa Gray, Vidas will explore how “The Rise of Talmud” reframes the Palestinian Talmud or Yerushalmi Talmud, as it is called in Hebrew, as a dynamic site of innovation and disagreement, where tradition is reimagined as a human project and interpretation centers on textual criticism, attribution, and the intellectual agency of the reader.

Speakers:

Moulie Vidas is an Associate Professor of Religion and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on classical Jewish texts, especially the Talmuds, in the context of late antiquity. He is the author of Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud (Princeton University Press, 2014) and the recently published The Rise of Talmud (Oxford University Press, 2025), which explores the emergence of commentary as a defining mode of rabbinic scholarship. Vidas also co-edited Late Ancient Knowing: Explorations in Intellectual History (University of California Press, 2015) and is a faculty member in Princeton’s Program in the Ancient World.

Alyssa Gray is the Emily S. and Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman Chair in Rabbinics and Professor of Codes and Responsa Literature at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. Her scholarship examines the development of Talmudic literature, the history of Jewish law, and literary studies of post-talmudic legal writings. Gray is the author of Charity in Rabbinic Judaism: Atonement, Rewards, and Righteousness (Routledge, 2019; paperback ed., 2020) and A Talmud in Exile: The Influence of Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah on the Formation of Bavli Avodah Zarah (Brown, 2005; 2nd digital edition, 2020).