Draft:Execution of Haninah ben Teradion

The execution of Haninah ben Teradion is a sugya in the Talmud (Avoda Zara 17b-18b) that tells the story of his martyrdom under Roman rule. The story has been examined as a Talmudic narrative, as an exemplar of matryrology, and for its implications in Jewish ethics for suicide and physician-assisted suicide.

Academic responses

Fischel, H. A. "Martyr and Prophet (A Study in Jewish Literature)(Continued)." The Jewish Quarterly Review 37, no. 4 (1947): 363-386.

Furstenberg, Yair. "2 The Changing Worlds of the Ten Rabbinic Martyrs." Martyrdom: Canonisation, Contestation and Afterlives (2020): 55-78.

Neusner, Jacob. "Biography: Exemplary Pattern in Place of Lives of Sages." In The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism, pp. 167-190. Brill, 2004.

Kalmin, Richard. "Rabbinic traditions about Roman persecutions of the Jews: a reconsideration." Journal of Jewish Studies 54, no. 1 (2003): 21-50.

Novick, Tzvi. "Liturgy and the first person in narratives of the Second Temple period." Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 32, no. 3 (2012): 269-291.

Rothenberg, Naftali. "Rabbi Akiva, Other Martyrs, and Socrates: On Life, Death, and Life After Life." In olam ha’zeh v’olam ha-ba: This World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice, Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Symposium of the klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization. 2016.

Weiss, Haim. "The Martyrdom of Ben-Teradion: Between Body and Text." In The Tenth Annual CISMOR Conference on Jewish Studies: The Place of Christianity in Modern Hebrew Literature. Kyoto: Doshisha University, pp. 92-99. 2020.

Friedrich Avemarie, Jan Willem van Henten, and Yair Furstenberg. "The Development of Rabbinic Martyr Traditions." (2023). 10.1163/9789004538269_007

Rothenberg, Naftali, and Naftali Rothenberg. "Love to the Last Breath." Rabbi Akiva's Philosophy of Love (2017): 67-88.

On saying the tetragrammaton: Vasileiadis, Pavlos D. "Jesus, the New Testament, and the Sacred Tetragrammaton." Synthesis 8, no. 1 (2019): 27-87.

Medical ethics

Baeke, Goedele, Jean-Pierre Wils, and Bert Broeckaert. "‘There is a time to be born and a time to die’(Ecclesiastes 3: 2a): Jewish perspectives on euthanasia." Journal of religion and health 50 (2011): 778-795.

Barilan, Y. Michael. "Revisiting the problem of Jewish bioethics: the case of terminal care." Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 13, no. 2 (2003): 141-168.

Federbush, Simon. "The problem of euthanasia in Jewish tradition." Judaism 1, no. 1 (1952): 64.

Kaplan, Kalman J. "Biblical versus Greek narratives for suicide prevention and life promotion: Releasing hope from Pandora’s urn." Religions 12, no. 4 (2021): 238.

Jacob, Walter, and Moshe Zemer, eds. Death and euthanasia in Jewish law: essays and responsa. Vol. 4. Berghahn Books, 1995.

Resnicoff, Steven H. "Jewish law perspectives on suicide and physician-assisted dying." Journal of Law and Religion 13, no. 2 (1998): 289-349.

Rosner, Fred. "Suicide in biblical, talmudic and rabbinic writings." Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 11, no. 2 (1970): 25-40.

Stark, Irit Offer, and William Friedman. "Quality of Life versus Sanctity of Life: Euthanasia in Modern Halakhic Discourse and in Israeli Law." In Jews and Health, pp. 231-257. Brill, 2023.

Weisbard, Alan J. "On the bioethics of Jewish law: The case of Karen Quinlan." Israel Law Review 14, no. 3 (1979): 337-368.

Zohar, Noam J. Alternatives in Jewish bioethics. State University of New York Press, 1997.