Search for Meaning with Professor Michal Bar-Asher Siegal

In this episode of Search for Meaning, Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback sits down with Professor Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, one of today’s leading scholars of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Their conversation ranges from the ancient world to our own moment, exploring how religious traditions take shape through encounter, disagreement, and relationship.

Rabbi Yoshi first encountered Michal’s work in Israel during the World Zionist Congress, where her lecture left a lasting impression. In this episode, she shares her personal and intellectual journey—from growing up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish world, at a time when it was still rare for women to pursue advanced Talmudic study, to becoming a major voice in the academic study of Jewish–Christian interactions in Late Antiquity.

Michal discusses her groundbreaking research comparing rabbinic texts and early Christian and monastic literature, including insights from her award-winning books Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud and Jewish–Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity. She explains how ancient texts reveal moments of dialogue and shared interpretation where we often assume only separation—and why those discoveries still matter today.

The conversation also turns to the present: living and teaching in Israel during painful and uncertain years, what ancient texts can teach us about resilience and endurance, and how scholarship can help us hold complexity without losing hope.

This episode is an invitation to think more deeply about boundaries and belonging, inter-religious dialogue, and the enduring power of learning to illuminate both the past and the present.

https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/humsos/goldstein-goren/pages/staff/Michal-Bar-Asher-Siegal.aspx

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's an entire segment of the population who decided that they will study Torah instead. And uh and the excuse of studying Torah and and not send their kids to war and danger and protect. And the excuse of Torah is supposed to make this okay. We are studying Torah, you go and die for us in the war. Uh and honestly, this is the exact opposite of what Rabbinic Liter says to us, literally.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

Welcome to Search for Meaning. I'm Yoshi Zwyback. Thanks for joining me. My guest today is Professor Michal Bar-Asher Siegel, a scholar of rabbinic Judaism whose work helps us understand Jewish-Christian relationships in the ancient world and why those relationships still matter today. I first encountered Michal when I was in Israel for the World Zionist Congress this past November. She was on a panel that I attended, and I was completely blown away by her scholarship and also her rare ability to open up the ancient world in a way that speaks directly to contemporary questions about identity, difference, and encounter. Her first book, which was an award winner called Early Christian Monastic Literature and the Babylonian Talmud, revealed the shared cultural and religious world of rabbis and monks. Her second book, Jewish Christian Dialogues in Scripture and Late Antiquity, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, and it reframes the heretic narratives of the Babylonian Talmud as complex engagements with Christian interpretation. In this conversation, we talk about her scholarship, but we also talk about what it means to live and teach in Israel during these difficult, uncertain days. I'm grateful to Michal for her time, her wisdom, her clarity, and the generosity with which she invites us into both the ancient world and our own moment. Stay tuned and be inspired. Professor Michal Bar Asher Siegel, thank you so much for making time for me. I had the opportunity to hear you speak and teach when I was in Israel recently for the World Zionist Congress, and I was so engaged in the conversation, I thought, boy, if I could get her to uh appear on my podcast, that would be wonderful. And you were gracious enough to say yes. And then I just found out as we were getting ready that you're coming on a West Coast tour, so maybe I can even uh have you come up to the congregation. But I I loved the opportunity to learn a little bit with you. And my own background in college, when I studied comparative religions, I had a focus on early Christianity and how it emerged from Judaism and then also uh the medieval dialogue and debate between Judaism and Christianity. So I wanted to touch on some of that, also your work at Bengran University. But you just mentioned, right as we started, that your family had had American roots. So I was interested also in just your own personal journey. Tell me a little bit about that, your your America experience, and and then ultimately how you got to Israel.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

So, first of all, I am honored to have been invited. So thank you so much for inviting me to speak about my research and my work. I'm I'm really honored uh and thrilled. Uh so uh you asked about my last name, Sigal, uh, and uh my family actually, my father's family came from Romania, and there were seven brothers. Uh, and the my great-grandfather um took each one of his boys and brought into America for to be an apprentice, sold them pretty much to different kinds of like um as apprentice in the 1910, 1911. I found their records in Ellis Island, and uh and this is where we were moved from Segal originally to Siegel. I'm guessing like Bugsy and Stephen Siegel, same same route. Uh and but my my grandfather, who was the smallest, was kept to take care of his mother, his ailing mother, in very, very poor and rural Romania, uh where um he stayed and met my grandmother. And in the 50s they came to Israel because they couldn't um um come to the States at this point. So this is how my branch of the family did not end up in the US, even though we have a large section of the family who ended in the US. And they became Zionists, I think, uh not by choice, but by lack of choice. Uh and this is how my father came to Israel in the 50s uh after surviving the Second World War in Romania, which was not a fun thing to go through.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

When did your interest really begin in looking at early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism and how how those connect and relate? Tell me a little bit about the the personal journey to your scholarship.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

So let's start with the fact that I'm a female and I grew up Orthodox uh and studying Talmud is not was not a natural choice. I was actually brought up uh very religious, and I was taught that Talmud is not fit for my soul. I was not taught that at school. I mean that my religious school girls uh got to study Mishnah, but not Talmud. Um but when I was 19, I decided, uh, after two years of civil service, I decided that I wanted to try out that Talmud thing that I was not allowed to study. Uh and fortunately for me, the feminist movement has already begun to teach uh uh women Talmud uh in Israel in the 80s. I got to it in the late 90s, and um and it was the toughest thing I had to do. I was always a very, very good student and everything came very easy for me. But then this Aramaic thing and the very complex argumentative style. I remember myself actually crying at some point from the frustration of how hard it was. But I had very, very good teachers, and I have to say, while um I was struggling after two months, I was completely in love, head over heels, with this, uh, to the chagrin of my father, who really wanted me to be a doctor like him. Uh and uh I really um got into it and and I love doing it. Um so I studied with BA and an MA uh in the Tamil department at Hebrew University. Uh and then I went to the US and I studied at Yale. Uh and the reason I decided to write my PhD at Yale is that I kind of I was about to begin my PhD in in Israel and I looked right and left and I said, I'm about to start doing a third degree in Talmud, and I have no clue. I have seriously, I went through the entire course workload and all my obligation, didn't know anything about the non-Jewish world of the time of the rabbis. Literally, that my education was extremely, you know, meticulous and and and philological, and I knew how to do manuscript, and I knew how to read, you know, commentaries in the 12th and 13th century, and and I and I could do all of that, but I didn't know almost anything about early Christianity and monasticism and zero. And I was really frustrated. So I decided to step out and go to Yale. Um I had the fortune to choose Harvard over Yale, which I keep pushing down Harvard's throat and say, you know, I chose Yale. It was a very good choice. Uh and I basically what I did is I opened the syllabi. Then we actually I'm showing you with my hands. I I opened a book. Back then we had a book of classes, the syllabi was on paper. And I looked and I looked for all the stuff that happened between the second and the sixth century in the non-Jewish world. So I did architecture in Rome, and I did um Gnosticism, and I did, you know, monks, and everything that was happening, and Zoroastrians and Persians, and uh Manichaeism, and everything that was happening in that Jewish world, I was thirsty and eager to learn. But I remember the hardest thing was Christianity. So I come to a school that has a divinity school with the best teachers in early Christianity, and I wasn't a beginner's, you know, I had to study a New Testament from scratch. Never read it before as a religious woman growing up in Israel. Even non-religious, you know, uh men and women don't study uh early Christianity. I'll stop here for a second and say none of Israeli university have a department of Christianity. We have a department of Jewish studies and we have departments of Islamic studies, but we don't have Christianity at all in Israel, which is insane if you think about it. It has historical roots. Christianity was um that was like a political decision not to study Christianity, but uh when you think about it, Israelis do not know anything about early Christianity. We ignore, you know, churches here, we've never taken in you know field trips, etc. And not to speak of the text that is like the formative text of the Western civilization. Israelis don't read it like myself. So I had to start from really from scratch. I remember this was also extremely frustrating and very hard work, and I remember one of my professors here in Israel telling me, why are you even bothering? There's no way you'll be able to be good enough to actually do research on it. You have so much to catch up. And I said, I've been told this about the Talmud too, because I was a woman and never studied it, so I'm good with trying something new. So I did, and I never regretted it, and I studied it a lot. And honestly, by the end of the first semester of my studies, I already had ideas for five dissertations. There was so much to do in the comparative angle as a someone coming from rabbinics reading monasticism and reading Gnosticism. I had so many ideas for parallel study that no one has done because no one usually, at least in my time, no one used to put those texts side by side and actually look at them and compare. And uh I chose one of them, which is um the this the literature of the monks of the uh of monasticism and the parallels between them and and the Talmud. Uh, and this is what I wrote my dissertation about, and I actually found parallels. Um, never, you know, this was new. Uh very brave of me, I have to say, now in retrospect, to go out with this first book and say the Talmud was actually very familiar with literature of the monks of the time who were like the celebrities and the people that everyone wanted to read what they were saying, and everyone came to see them, and the rabbis knew about them and knew what they were saying, and contended with this and polemicized or adopted ideas, and they were in conversation with this literature. And that was so much fun to find an entire literature that was available to the rabbis, and we didn't know about this. So that was my first book and dissertation. Uh I was I I kind of was fortunate enough to be reviewed by many uh journals, and now um 10, 14 years after its publication, it's uh it's actually I'm very fortunate that now it's a consensus that indeed the Babylonian Talmud interacted with rabbinic literature. I since then published two more books and and and showed this more at length, and there's others who followed uh uh my my footsteps and and and other scholars as well. And we've now realized that the Talmud in fact knew much more about the Christians of their time than we gave them credit for, which means that Judaism and Christianity were in conversation at the very formative stage of both early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, and that's like a big deal. So that was fun.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

It's so fascinating. I was just I mentioned the the two trips I took to Israel in November, the one I met you at at the World Zionist Congress, and then a week and a half later I came back. It would have been great to just stay, but it wasn't possible with other responsibilities I had, so I went back and forth. But the second trip was with 18 black Christian leaders and two black Jewish leaders, and a lot of what we talked about was that conversation between early Christianity and Judaism. And we when we visited some of these sites, especially when we went up to Kvarnachum, Capernaum, there's this beautiful physical representation of that where you have a synagogue from the rabbinic period, from the time of Jesus, and not too far away from I think the Byzantine period, a church that was built. But the idea that even when the church was built, there was still a conversation, even though that was several hundred years later, there was a conversation happening. And understanding my own learning in college and then a little bit in rabbinical school as well, I I had the chance to study with Elaine Pagles and John Gager, who both have backgrounds in in that era, and to learn about that and realize that there was not just a conversation, but also a competition of ideas was very good teachers you had. They were pretty good, I'll tell you. But competing uh for the souls of the pagans of that day and trying to really make that sort of argument and then medieval Jewish Christian dialogue. But it is so fascinating that in this place, the birthplace of Christianity, and obviously the place where Judaism was formed in so many ways, along with other parts of the diaspora, including Babylon for the Babylonian Talmud. But in this place that is so formative there for all sorts of historical and political reasons, the idea that it was not studied and is is under-understood, understudied, is uh is interesting. Is your work do you think helping to change that? Do you see a little bit of a shift and maybe a more open openness to learning that?

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Definitely. I have to tell you the department that told me, my advisor who told me don't go study Talmud in, you know, in in 2004 when I left to the US, uh, now has an ERC project that involves Christian law and they um require their students to study. So even the most conservative of conservative departments now uh realize the importance of comparing and and studying Christianity. We're still far off having enough scholars studying this, but at least you know there is a recognition that this is important, this is part of uh what made the Talmud what it is. Uh and the Talmud has such a great significance on the development of Judaism for centuries to come until the modern state of Israel. Um we have to understand how it was formed and in in what conversation and with whom. Uh, and uh and and on a personal note, also as a conclusion for for social realities of interreligious dialogue from ancient time to medieval time to modern time. So I I see my work as being extremely important. We still have a long way to go in terms of educating our students and our faculty in early Christianity and early literature. Uh, this is definitely something that we still have to work on. I have a class at Bengal University called Jesus, that's how I call it. And I divide the class into three areas. We do New Testament, then we do rabbinic interaction with, and the last part is Jesus in satire and humor and in media. So we do from Mel Gibson's Passion to Monty Python Life of Brian and modern sketches of Israel. And it was really hard for me to find uh Israeli sketches about early Christianity or uh Jesus because no one here has.