Shamma Friedman

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Shamma Friedman (Hebrew: שמא פרידמן; born March 8, 1937) is a renowned scholar of rabbinic literature and Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). He was born in Philadelphia and started studying Hebrew at age ten. Summers at Camp Ramah helped shape his early Jewish education, and his first exposure to Talmud came when Nahum Sarna taught a Beitza course to a group of students one summer.

Friedman earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania ( Phi Beta Kappa, 1958) and studied at Gratz College. He then continued his training at JTS, where he was ordained as a rabbi in 1964 and earned the first PhD in Talmud from the school in 1966. His doctoral thesis was “The Commentary of R. Jonathan haKohen of Lunel on Bava Kamma,” supervised by Haim Zalman Dimitrovsky. Saul Lieberman, a leading twentieth-century Talmudist, was a major influence on him.

He began teaching at JTS in 1964 and joined the official faculty in 1967, a relationship that lasted until his retirement in 2020. In 1973, he moved with his wife Rachel and their four children to Israel, where he served as the dean of JTS’s Jerusalem campus (now the Schechter Institute) and as the director of the Schocken Institute.

In 1985, Friedman founded the Saul Lieberman Institute of Talmudic Research at JTS in memory of his mentor, focusing on computerizing Talmud manuscripts and building scholarly bibliographies. He started the Society for the Interpretation of the Talmud in 1993, which publishes commentaries on Babylonian Talmud chapters for both scholars and general readers. He also established Bar-Ilan University’s site Primary Textual Witnesses to Tannaitic Literature and founded the online rabbinics journal Oqimta.

Friedman has published more than 150 articles and seven books. His work uses a careful, internal comparative approach to Talmudic texts, examining language, form, and ideas across the Talmud. He argues that some early Tosefta traditions preserve material that later became the Mishnah, and that baraitot were transformed as texts moved from tannaitic to amoraic and post-amoraic contexts. He has also written about the literature of the Rishonim, especially Rashi and Rambam, and how their interpretations relate to the Talmud.

Awards include the Mifal Hapayis Prize in Rabbinic Literature (2010) and the Israel Prize in Talmud (2014). Friedman and his wife have four children, ten grandchildren, and a great-grandson. His brother is Mordechai Akiva Friedman, a Cairo Geniza scholar.

Selected works include Commentary of R. Jonathan of Lunel on Bava Kamma (1969), Tosefta Atiqta (2002), Talmud Arukh editions (1990s–1996), Talmudic Studies (2010), Studies in Tannaitic Literature (2013), and Studies in Language and Terminology of Talmudic Literature (2014).