Professor Barry Wimpfheimer, "Myth, Ritual, and the Invention of the Passover Seder"

Name: Professor Barry Wimpfheimer, "Myth, Ritual, and the Invention of the Passover Seder"
Start: 2025-03-06T12:30:00-06:00
End: 2025-03-06T14:00:00-06:00
Location: Kresge Hall, Trienens Forum (Kresge 1515)

Thursday, March 6, 2025 | 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM CT

Kresge Hall, Trienens Forum (Kresge 1515), 1880 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

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Recent scholarship has intervened against established scholarship to assert that the Mishnah, the foundational second century rabbinic code of law, both originated the Passover Seder and contains the earliest germ of the Haggadah, the liturgical textbook that has grounded the Seder in Jewish practice for over a millennium. This paper draws on both an Eliadean understanding of ritual and the recently highlighted ritual narrative subgenre of Mishnah to highlight the mechanisms through which the Mishnah's editors created one of the central and most lasting Jewish rituals.