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The 1980s saw the introduction of postmodern literary theory into the field of rabbinic literature, in particular into the study of midrash, which began to be explored as anticipating or aligning with many of the claims of modern literary theorists. This new interest intersected oddly at times with the prevailing historicist mode of inquiry. For many scholars, the notion of textual indeterminacy supported the idea of the interpreter of the text as essentially an “eisegete,” who reads the text from his or her own historically embedded perspective, rather than as an exegete, who at least attempts to find out what the text “really means.” Thus, scholars who embraced this new perspective often rejected an inquiry into midrash as biblical interpretation in the classic sense of the word. “No one believes anymore,” someone pointed out to me after a session on midrash in a conference during the mid-1980’s, “that texts have meaning.”
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