‘Talmud Industry’: Daf Yomi and Modern Consumer Culture
Keywords:
Capitalism, Consumer culture, Globalization, the History of reading, Modernity, Talmud, Time, Torah study, Ultra-OrthodoxAbstract
The Daf Yomi (literally ‘page of the day’) program – in which people around the world study the same page of the Babylonian Talmud every day – was founded nearly a century ago as one of the flagship initiatives of the Orthodox Agudath Yisrael movement and has been in continuous use since then. Despite its wide popularity and its long history, Daf Yomi has received almost no research attention. This essay seeks to analyze Daf Yomi’s cultural messages, which facilitated its widespread acceptance in ultra-Orthodox Judaism. The main thesis presented is that Daf Yomi has created a unique practice of regularly reading the Talmud, which designates the Talmudic page as an object suitable for popular consumption. As part of this process – alongside the preservation and adaptation of the ‘classic’ characteristics of Torah study – the study of the Daf Yomi also invokes values and connotations that characterize modern culture, and consumer culture in particular, such as globalization and the positive value implicit in the linear progression of time. As an extension of the modern view of time seen in the Daf Yomi, the essay proposes a link between the ethos of Torah study as reflected in the Daf Yomi and Weber’s ‘spirit of capitalism’.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2019 IYUNIM: Multidisciplinary Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise indicated, all articles published in IYUNIM: Multidisciplinary Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Under the terms of this license, users may read, download, copy, distribute, reproduce, and adapt the published material for non-commercial purposes, provided that appropriate credit is given to the author(s), the journal, and the original source, and that any changes made are clearly indicated.
Copyright is held by Iyunim: Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society.
Third-party materials included in an article are not covered by this license unless otherwise indicated. If your intended use is not permitted by applicable law or exceeds the permissions granted by the license, you must obtain permission directly from the copyright holder(s).
