Becoming the People of the Talmud

Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures

Talya Fishman

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812204988
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Teologia ebraica

In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud's preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud—which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later—precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life.What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietism's emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena—the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud—were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.

1

The Place of Oral Matters
in Geonic Culture

By the eighth century, when the entire Babylonian Talmud was written out—from memory—at the request of Jews living far from the rabbinic academies of Iraq,¹ some Jewish communities had come into possession of an oxymoron: an inscribed corpus of oral matters. The distinction between written matters, i.e., Scripture, and oral matters, extra-scriptural tradition, had been made by tannaitic sages of late antiquity. One of their several dicta regulating the transmission and use of these disparate categories of Jewish knowledge explicitly stated: “Words/matters that are oral—you are not permitted to say them in writing.”² It is clear from ancient rabbinic literature that there were instances of non-compliance, but, at a rhetorical level, even these accounts served to reinforce the strictures themselves.³ The geonim [literally “Eminences”]⁴ who led the post-talmudic academies around Baghdad from the seventh through eleventh centuries were thus engaged in a sensitive balancing act: while attempting to disseminate teachings of the Babylonian Talmud to Jewish communities throughout the world, they strove to uphold the ancient prohibition against the inscription of oral matters. The discipline exhibited by the geonim in preserving the orality of Talmud was all the more remarkable in that the broader culture of Baghdad, from at least the ninth century, was highly “textualized,” having come to privilege written texts more highly than orally transmitted traditions.⁵

The two topics that comprise the focal themes of this chapter—pedagogic encounters with Talmud in the Babylonian yeshivot and the place of Talmud in geonic legislation and governance—offer ample evidence of this tension at the core of the geonic enterprise. As will be seen, rabbinic Jews outside of the academies were the first to capitulate by studying from inscriptions of oral matters, but with the passage of time, the geonim made concessions too, responding to geographic, cultural, and economic exigencies. Examples discussed in this chapter illuminate the larger claim that modes of transmission—in this case, encountering Talmud as a written text and not as an orally relayed tradition—have considerable bearing on the ways that tradition is understood.

Rabbinic Regulations Concerning the Transmission
and Use of Oral Matters

Third-century rabbis who claimed that Oral Torah, extra-scriptural tradition, had been revealed at Sinai, along with Scripture itself,⁶ promulgated rules to regulate the production, handling, transmission, and use of written matters, on the one hand, and of oral matters, on the other. Their prescriptions for each corpus are mirror images of one another; regulations stipulated for one type of knowledge are proscribed for the other. “R. Judah ben Na

mani, the interpreter of Resh Laqish, discoursed as follows: It is written: [Ex. 34:27], ‘Write you these words/matters,’ and it is written [ibid.], ‘for according to the mouth of these words/matters.’⁷ What are we to make of this? It means: The words/matters that are written you are not at liberty to say by heart, and the words/matters that are oral you are not permitted to say them in writing.”⁸

The peculiar locution of the final phrase, “i atta rashai le-omran bekhtav” (“you are not permitted to say them in writing”), was taken to mean something quite specific: It did not prohibit the inscription of oral matters per se, but the public declamation or recitation of these matters from a written text. As was the case in other Hellenistic period societies that distinguished between a syngrama, an authorized inscription accorded official status, and a hypomnema, written notes for private use, Jews distinguished between texts that were intended for public reading and those that were mere jottings, aides de memoire.⁹ From the perspective of rabbinic culture, inscriptions in the latter category were “phantom texts”; these could be seen and silently read, but they merited no particular cultural attention and could not be adduced as sources of authority. Sages of the classical rabbinic period, geonim and medieval scholars, designated inscriptions in this latter category as “megilot setarim,” “scrolls to be sequestered”—a term misunderstood by some later researchers.¹⁰ Unlike official writings, which were often posted on walls, the cultural status of megilot setarim was made evident in the fact that they were kept out of the public view and hidden in private recesses [setarim].¹¹

Rabbinic culture’s designation of its own extra-biblical traditions as “Oral Torah” (a subset of oral matters)¹² and its assignment of certain inscriptions to the category of “megilot setarim” have given rise to a number of erroneous assumptions. One is the radical hypothesis that rabbinic culture’s pointed distinction between written matters and oral matters was articulated as a response to Christianity;¹³ another is the claim that rabbinic sources harbored a “hostility toward writing.”¹⁴ While it is indeed the case that “Oral Torah” was brandished as a sign of pedigree within a particular polemical context,¹⁵ both of the above-mentioned claims overlook the fact that the rabbinic regulations pertaining to written matters and to oral matters were formulated within the context of sectarian debates over the definition of the biblical canon. Following the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, Jews of disparate theological orientations produced writings that were said to have been divinely inspired, and some sought to integrate them into the corpus of Scripture. It was this expansive impulse that prompted rabbinic Jews to formulate the first of the mirror-image dicta. By asserting that only certain ancient Jewish writings could be “read,” which is to say, liturgically chanted, the rabbis made the boundaries of the biblical canon knowable in performative terms. Thus, when the second-century tanna R. ‘Aqiva condemned [M. San. 10:1] one who “qoreh [ “reads”] in ‘the external books,’ ” he did not censure the simple act of reading books of the Apocrypha¹⁶ (those excluded from the scriptural canon by rabbinic Jews), but the act of reading aloud from them with melodic chanting in a liturgical setting.¹⁷ R. ‘Aqiva’s censure of this public gesture was designed to obviate any lingering confusion about the scriptural canon: the texts in question were distinctly out-of-bounds.

Rabbinic Jews did not deny that Jewish knowledge was produced even after prophetic inspiration had ceased, but they wished to make the noncanonical status of this knowledge dramatically evident. For this reason, they formulated a diametrically opposed rule for the treatment of extra-prophetic knowledge. The observance of these regulations in public practice made the map of Jewish knowledge something other than a purely academic construct, for disparate corpora of tradition were encountered and experienced in different ways. The parallel formulations of these rabbinic dicta also fulfilled another cultural function: by granting oral matters equal billing with written matters, the dicta themselves accorded considerable authority to the bearers of Oral Torah, the rabbis themselves.

Rabbinic rules not only circumscribed the manner in which oral matters were to be transmitted, but also the way in which they could be used: “A tanna of the school of R. Ishmael taught: It is written [Ex. 34:27], ‘for according to (the mouth of ) these words I have established a covenant with you.’ These [scriptural words] you write, but you do not write halakhot [legal traditions]. And one who learns from them [ve-ha-lomed mehem] receives no reward.”¹⁸

The somewhat opaque terms in this passage, “halakhot” and “learns from them,” are illuminated by a related tannaitic dictum: “The sages taught: We do not learn halakhah—not from mishnah, nor from talmud [a lesson derived from mishnah], nor from ma’aseh [a practical case] unless they [one’s masters] tell him, ‘this is an applied law [halakhah le-ma’aseh].’ If he asked and they told him, ‘it is an applied law,’ he should go and perform it in practice.”¹⁹

As is clear from this passage, the term “halakhah” was used by ancient rabbis to designate all received legal teachings, and not exclusively (or necessarily) applied law; indeed, the rabbis knew of a variety of halakhot that were not to be implemented in practice.²⁰ Yet even halakhot that are devoid of prescriptive import were deemed worthy of investigation, for from antiquity onward, the enterprise of talmud torah, the study of tradition, was conceived as a sacred activity, something quite separate from the search for legal guidelines or the adjudication of applied law.²¹ On the other hand, only legal traditions designated “halakhah le-ma’aseh” prescribe actual practice. As its compound name suggests, a teaching bearing this distinction has been vetted by complementary sources of authority: it is not only a legal tradition (“halakhah”), but one whose implementation in practice (le-ma’aseh) has been witnessed by a living master.

Sherira Gaon’s Epistle on the Orality of Oral Matters:
A View from the Millennium

In the late tenth century, R. Ya’aqov ben Nisim of Qayrawan (today’s Tunisia) wrote to the head of the rabbinic academy of Pumbeditha (in Baghdad) asking a series of questions about the origins of Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmud, foundational corpora of rabbinic Judaism—which the Jews of Qayrawan possessed as written texts.²² Both the questions they posed (on this occasion and others) and the answer they received reveal that members of their community made assumptions about oral matters that the geonim of Babylonia did not share. The reply to their questions, Sherira Gaon’s Epistle of 987, shaped all subsequent rabbinic notions about the formation and transmission of early extra-scriptural tradition. The Epistle circulated in two recensions, designated respectively as “

orfati” (or French) and “Sefardi” (or Spanish), referring to the lands in which each version predominated. Contemporary geonic scholars regard the “French” recension as the version that most accurately reflects geonic perspectives.²³

As Sherira makes clear to his questioner, the consolidation of the rabbinic corpora in question—Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmud—had nothing to do with their inscription. Echoing a tradition that Sa’adya Gaon had voiced a century earlier,²⁴ Sherira writes that the ancient sages responsible for the creation of these corpora had scrupulously adhered to the rabbinic injunction regulating the treatment of oral matters: “And that you wrote: ‘How was Mishnah written, and how Talmud?’ Talmud and Mishnah were not written, but they were arranged. And the sages were careful to recite them by heart, but not from written versions.”²⁵

Offering documentary evidence for his claim, Sherira refers his questioners to a talmudic passage which demonstrates that the second-century crafter of the Mishnah, Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, had learned tradition not from any inscribed text, but only through oral instruction. According to the Talmud, after reciting a memorized question pertaining to the extension of Sabbath boundaries,²⁶ Rabbi Judah had wondered aloud about the spelling of one of its key words. The word me’abberin, “extend,” he noted, was a hom...