Commandment and Consciousness in Talmudic Thought

Abstract

Legal historians have given considerable attention to the question of intention in rabbinic law. Solomon Zeitlin, in the early years of the present century, published a number of articles touching on this matter, in which his chief purpose was to show that the legal significance of intention was one of the central points of contention between the two great Tannaitic schools, the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. A little later, Michael Higger wrote a doctoral dissertation for Columbia University which he entitledIntention in Talmudic Law. Still more recently, Louis Finkelstein sought to push the dispute over intention back to the days of the Pharisees and Sadducees, attributing to the Sadducees the view that intention by itself has no legal consequence, and as usual explaining this view in terms of the Sadducees' social position.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.