This is an experimental project that maps various relationships between rabbis. It is part of an ongoing research project that explores how techniques in the digital humanities might contribute to our understanding of the classic rabbis (ca. 70 CE – 500 CE) and their literature, such as the Babylonian Talmud.
The heart of this site are the interactive citation networks. They are found, with explanations, here.
At present, this site houses the data and visualizations for the citation network in the Babylonian Talmud. That is, our goal was to map which rabbis cite which other rabbis; the Talmud contains thousands of cases in which a rabbi says something in the name of another rabbi (who might himself say it in the name of another rabbi, and so on). The Talmud sometimes uses different language to note these citations, but we are confident that we have identified the vast majority. More information about the underlying data, its limitations, and how we treat it can be found here.
We used the base text from Sefaria.org, through their API. In broad terms, we extracted the relevant links between rabbis using automated processes; exported those into a network analysis program, GEPHI; and then exported those networks into the format displayed on this site.
For more information, see our forthcoming article in AJS Review, “The Rabbinic Citation Network.” The code can be found on our Github site. Some of our datasets are available at ResearchGate.
We are interested in your opinions. We hope that you feel free to comment, particularly on the Publications and Other Research page.
Principal Investigators
Michael L. Satlow, Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies, Brown University
Michael Sperling, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Copyright and Citation
Everything in this site falls under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. The project can be cited as:
Michael L. Satlow and Michael Sperling, “The Rabbinic Citation Network Project.”
