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Reviewed by:
  • Rabbinic Texts and History of Late-roman Palestine
  • Joel Gereboff
Rabbinic Texts and History of Late-roman Palestine. Edited by Martin Goodman and Philip Alexander. Pp xv + 410. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Cloth. $115.00.

Scholars working on the late Roman Empire of the second through the seventh centuries, especially those who focus on the Roman East and Palestine in particular, have not generally made use of the rich corpus of rabbinic writings. When they do draw on this literature, they often are not up to date with current specialized research discussing the dating, provenance, and genres of these sources. The present volume, along with an accompanying collection, Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity (135-700 C.E.): A Handbook, edited by Ben-Eliyahu, Cohn, and Millar, contains revised [End Page 450] versions of papers presented at a conference held in March 2007 at the British Academy. Collectively these papers provide rich guidance to non-specialists regarding key developments in the scholarship on rabbinic sources, their authors, and their social-cultural contexts that should result in their greater employment in studies of the late Roman Empire.

The volume consists of three sections. Part 1, "The Issues," contains five essays on several basic topics. Philip Alexander offers an overview on, "Using Rabbinic Literature as a Source for the History of Late-Roman Palestine: Problems and Issues." The Roman historian, Fergus Millar discusses "The Palestinian Context of Rabbinic Judaism." The section ends with reprints of an exchange between Peter Schafer and Chaim Milikowsky from the mid 1980s on the character of rabbinic texts—whether one can speak in all cases of these "documents" as ever having achieved a fixed "edited" version or whether in many cases the texts remain fluid, largely transmitted orally, resulting in multiple recensions. The section ends with an update of the debate by Schafer and Milikowsky which explains the former's advocacy of synoptic presentations of the multiple manuscripts of a given "document" while Milikowsky continues to argue that he "sees no evidence of any significant recensional variation in any of the classic works of midrash, neither those included in the corpus of midrash halakhah nor those included in the corpus of midrash aggadah" (p. 86). The respective positions give rise to alternative views on how historians ought to use these texts. The issue of the character, formulation and redactional history of rabbinic "documents" is taken up in more detailed manner in the essays of part 2 of this volume.

Current scholarship on ten different rabbinic texts or genres of texts, for example, Targum, Piyyut, forms the content of part 2. Chapters begin with brief summaries of the contents, manuscripts, dating, language, printed editions, and translations of key works that are generally seen as rabbinic, though some of these texts may come from marginal elements of the emerging rabbinic "movement." All of the chapters underscore the importance of attending to the literary nature of the documents. Most of the chapters then go on to illustrate the type of historical data one might glean from a careful use of the particular document. For example, Ronen Reichman argues briefly for the value of case stories in Tosefta for historical research. Gunter Stemberger notes the limitations of halakic midrashim for historians of the Roman Empire—these texts are largely inner focused and are best suitable for commenting on the relationships between rabbis and their special interests and views, for understanding early rabbinic approaches to Scripture and its interpretation. While they offer much less regarding "the political, economic and social history of Palestine in the tannaitic and early amoraic periods" (p. 133), some information on aspects of Roman administration [End Page 451] and daily life may be gleaned from them. Other documents covered in part 2 include the Mishnah, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the use of the Babylonian Talmud for Late-Roman Palestine, literary structures and historical reconstruction using the Amoraic Midrash, Leviticus Rabbah, Piyyutim, Targum, the Epistle of Sherira Gaon, and Hekhalot literature. Together these chapters provide non-specialists, including beginning students in rabbinic studies, with critical information on the literary character, transmissional and redactional history of these texts, and valuable insights into the types of historical information one can...

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