I have acquired knowledge from all my teachers. So wrote the author of Psalm 119, who people say was King David. I owe a debt of gratitude to all my teachers, the sages who lived in ages past, the scholars and academics whom I have never met but whose works I have encountered and of course those whose words I heard from their own mouths. (I would like to have said, as a student of earlier generations might, ‘at whose feet I sat’ but of course we don’t sit at our teachers’ feet these days.) The knowledge is theirs, any errors only mine.
More particularly I would like to thank my agent, Sheila Ableman, for her unbounded enthusiasm for the book and for her ongoing support. To Robin Baird-Smith for his positivity, energy and for believing in the idea, to Joel Simons for his adept managing of the project, and his patience even when I was at my most trying, and to Anya Rosenberg, Helen Flood and the rest of the team at Bloomsbury. Grateful thanks too to Kim Storry for project managing the prepress, and to Sue Cope for her diligent copy editing and for being prepared to work all hours to meet the deadline.
Thanks also to Professor Jerry Gotel for reading the manuscript, to Dayan Ivan Binstock for the conversations which taught me so much, to Paul Summer for solving the Jacob Landau riddle, to Ivor Jacobs for helping me lay my hands on vital out-of-print texts and to my brother Jeremy Freedman for explaining how Henry VIII’s Talmudic investigations influenced English divorce law. Particular thanks must go to my parents Joan and Louis Freedman who made sure that I received an education which enabled me to read and understand the Talmud, to my children Josh and Mollie whose continual interest and probing questions obliged me to sharpen my wits and to my wife Karen for her unflagging support and encouragement. Finally, words can never adequately acknowledge just how much I owe to the greatest of all my Talmud teachers, Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs, whose scholarship, wit, breadth of knowledge and profound humanity turned the Talmud from a dusty tome to a source of inspiration for so many people. May his memory be for a blessing.