Keywords
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Talmud, Pedagogy, Magical Realism, Disagreement
Abstract
The Talmud is a hermeneutical text—legalistic and mythological—that positions its anecdotes, characters, and arguments in an ahistorical landscape. Using it as a tool, I have taught, for decades, Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), generally known as the Bible of Latin America, delving into its mythopoeia, e.g., its narrative structure, its syntax and style, and its political, psychological, and biographical scaffolding. This essay chronicles my own discovery of the novel as a young man in my native Mexico, the subsequent wrestling I underwent with its content, and the trajectory I have undergone as a teacher of it in a popular advanced undergraduate seminar mostly in an elite small Liberal Arts college. It explores the famous segment in Bava Metzia 59a-b, known as “The Oven of Akhnai” as an introduction to Talmudic hermeneutics, and, specifically, to disagreement. Anecdotes about specific interpretative instances in the novel are offered as well as revelatory comparisons between a handful of its characters and scenes and their equivalents in the Bible, the Talmud itself, and other works.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Stavans, Ilan (2026) "Teaching One Hundred Years of Solitude through Talmudic Eyes," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 50: Iss. 1, Article 10.
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