The Talmud and the Internet.

The Talmud and the Internet.
Jonathan Rosen.
London: Continuum 2000
ISBN 0826455344

The Talmud and the Internet by novelist Jonathan Rosen, at first seems to be a curious title for a book. What possible virtue could there be in an attempt to draw connections between the ancient Jewish commentarial traditions and the Internet?

Rosen, however, makes a good case for considering the Talmud one of the earliest uses of hypertext – text that does not follow a straight line, but rather is linked by endless pathways. The Talmud arose out of oral traditions of commentary, sub-commentary and sub-sub commentary and appears on the page more like a discussion forum on an internet site than a single line of thought. The commentaries literally surround the text as the learned commentators assert now this, now that, as they debate.

Rosen’s book, then, looks as if it might have a lot to say and it is beautifully and artfully written to boot. Unfortunately, the book seems to lose momentum a little way through as Rosen becomes more and more involved in reflections upon his own family history, and forgets both the Talmud and the Internet. As a subject, this family history is not without entirely without interest, but I cannot help but wonder whether Rosen, at some stage in the writing of his book, took fright before the sheer multiplicity of both the Talmud and the Internet, and so returned to those things with which he was more familiar. Or perhaps within the format of a single book and a single narrative, it is not possible to do justice to the subject matter that Rosen has taken up. Would a hypertext exploration of the connections have worked better?

In the end, then, this book raises a flurry of fascinating questions without delivering any substantial insights. Perhaps it could not be otherwise. The world of which Rosen writes is broken apart, it is multiple, it proliferates endlessly. It cannot be held within a single mind (even God, some Talmudic scholars insisted, spent his days studying the Talmud, so perhaps – Rosen doesn’t suggest this – even God surfs the internet these days…) This, then is our situation: ‘Finding a home inside exile, finding unity inside infinity, finding the self inside a sea of competing voices was an ancient challenge and is a modern one too.’ Perhaps The Talmud and the Internet is best seen as Jonathan Rosen’s personal home page. And where else, as he so ably puts it, but in the middle of Diaspora, do you need a home page?