Golden Doves With Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Jewish Literature and Culture)

Faur’s study addresses a major difficulty faced by scholars who use rab- binic and other ancient texts and interpretations. Because the ancient world view and interpretative matrix is unhistorical, uncritical, and unscientific (in the modern sense), the pre-modem traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and other religions are often ignored, disdained, or treated with condescension by the unfriendly, and given only confused and embarrassed recognition by the sympathetic. The arrogance of science, “Western realism,” and comfort- able humanism has been challenged by structuralists and deconstructionists who relativize the “objective” world, culture, and the knowing subject much more thoroughly than Kant and his nineteenth-century successors. Faur taps this stream of criticism very selectively to affirm the worth of the Jewish hermeneutic tradition against modem historical exegesis, to argue that the Jewish tradition anticipates post-Nietzschean linguistic and semiotic studies and to protect the worth of the Jewish tradition against historical attack.