During the third week of October, Dr. Aaron Amit, principal researcher and advisor to the BabMed partner project on the Babylonian Talmud, visited the Berlin BabMed team and the “Talmudic Medicine” project of SFB 980 “Episteme in Motion”, both headed by M. J. Geller of Freie Universität Berlin.
Aaron Amit’s stay in Berlin created multiple occasions for academic exchange with colleagues from the Institute of Jewish Studies/Judaistik at Freie Universität Berlin (Prof. Tal Ilan), as well as internal project meetings in order to discuss questions on particular Talmudic passages, methodological and theoretical issues or prospects for future collaboration with both the BabMed Project (M.J. Geller, Tanja Hidde) and the Talmudic Medicine project of SFB 980/A03 (M.J. Geller, L. Lehmhaus).
Medical issues in the Babylonian Talmud were the focus of the two seminars held by Amit, attended by scholars and students of Jewish Studies as well as Assyriology, Ancient Mesopotamian Studies and neighboring fields, thus providing an interdisciplinary background to the lively discussions. On Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014, Aaron Amit discussed philological questions related to strange expressions in passages referring to infertility or impotence caused by extensive readings of a Talmudic scholar (Bavli Yeb 64b). His second session on the following day focused on redaction criticism while reading a passage about foetal formation and the medical experiments attributed to the Egyptians (Bavli Nid 30b).
Lennart Lehmhaus
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