The Medieval Rabbis Who Wrote a Sequel to the Talmud

One of the many things that make the Talmud such an unusual text is its multitude of voices: rather than tell a story or make an argument, it presents a meandering conversation—or, more often, an dispute—among various rabbis living over the course of many centuries. While a few works produced by the same rabbinic circles around the same time share something of this conversational quality, it was one that fell out of style later on. Subsequent generations of rabbis wrote treatises, commentaries, poems, and even Platonic-style dialogues, but didn’t seek to anthologize the sayings of predecessors into a vast conversation.