Pilpul

The Hebrew term pilpul (Hebrew: , from "pepper," loosely meaning "sharp analysis") refers to a method of studying the Talmud through intense textual analysis in attempts to either explain conceptual differences between various halakhic rulings or to reconcile any apparent contradictions presented from various readings of different texts.Pilpul has entered English as a colloquialism used by some to indicate extreme disputation or casuistic hairsplitting.

The requirement for close derivation of the conceptual structures underlying various Jewish laws, as a regular part of one's Torah study, is described by Maimonides (Yad HaChazakah, Sefer Madda, Laws of Torah Study, 1:11) as follows:

Other sources include Avot (6:6), the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 31a), and Rashi commenting on Tractate Kiddushin of the Babylonian Talmud, 30a, s.v. "Talmud".

In the narrower sense, pilpul refers to a method of conceptual extrapolation from texts in efforts to reconcile various texts or to explain fundamental differences of approach between various earlier authorities, which became popular in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: its founders are generally considered to be Jacob Pollak and Shalom Shachna. Pilpul was defined by Heinrich Graetz as "the astonishing facility of ingenious disquisition on the basis of the Talmud."

Many leading rabbinic authorities harshly criticized this method as being unreliable and a waste of time, and it is regarded by some as having been discredited by the time of the Vilna Gaon. A frequently heard accusation is that those who used this method were often motivated by the prospect of impressing others with the sophistication of their analysis, rather than by a disinterested love of truth. These students typically did not apply appropriate standards of proof in obtaining their conclusions (if any), and frequently presupposed conclusions that necessitated unlikely readings of "proof-texts". As such, pilpul has sometimes been derogatorily called bilbul, Hebrew for "confusion".

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