Writing the Talmud Anew: Shlomo Sirilio's Renaissance Edition of the Jerusalem Talmud

Abstract:Shlomo Sirilio, a resident of sixteenth-century Safed, created a radical adaptation of the Jerusalem Talmud based on its 1523 editio princeps. He sweepingly adapted the talmudic text, expanded it with medieval materials, and added novel material, based on his creative scholarly intuition. This essay describes Sirilio's scholarly conception and distinguishes between the medieval motifs and the innovative Renaissance ideas that shaped his work. It argues that such a creative approach could not have been created in the centers of humanistic culture, but only in the peripheral locale of Safed, where humanistic ideas could be developed without polemical undertones.