Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, a towering scholar of the bedrock Jewish texts who spent four and a half decades writing a 45-volume translation of and commentary on the Babylonian Talmud and made it accessible to hundreds of thousands of readers, died on Friday in Jerusalem. Shaarei Zedek Medical Center confirmed his death. A publicist for the Steinsaltz Center for Jewish Knowledge said he had acute pneumonia. For centuries, the study of Talmud — the record in 2,711 double-sided pages of rabbinical debates on the laws and ethics of Judaism heard in the academies of Babylonia (modern-day Iraq) between A.D. 200 and 500 — was confined mostly to yeshivas. There students, young and old, hunched over dog-eared volumes of Talmud, sometimes without teachers, taught one another the meanings of what they were reading and argued the implications.

Source: New York Times August 09, 2020 16:07 UTC