Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures

Introduction

Introduction Transmission will never replace creation in the historian’s romantic heart . . . but it does provide us with a set of hard, unromantic and revealing questions to ask about many received truths and tenets. —Anthony Grafton The importance of the Babylonian Talmud in the lives of observant Jews is taken for granted. Yet when considered from certain vantage points, the Talmud ’s role as a guide to Jewish life is bewildering. Though construed as a legal reference work, a significant proportion of the Talmud’s content does not pertain to law, and the legal traditions themselves are presented in the form of pending disputes. (Critical scholars have determined that the resolved disputes are actually late interpolations into the talmudic text.)1 In other words, there is no evidence that the sages whose teachings are preserved in the Talmud, Babylonian amoraim of the third through sixth centuries ce, intended to produce a prescriptive guide to applied Jewish law. In the case of the Talmud, the ever-thorny problem of discerning authorial intent applies even at the level of genre. Does this voluminous repository of conflicting legal perspectives, legends, tall tales, and accounts of the sages’ behavior (some quite unflattering) correspond to any known cultural or literary form that flourished in the Hellenistic or Persian societies with which rabbinic Jews had contact?2 The cultural roles that the Babylonian Talmud came to play in the lives of medieval Jews are far better understood, but it would be anachronistic to retroject these onto rabbinic Jews of earlier generations, whether amoraim, saboraim, i.e., anonymous redactors, or geonim, the leaders of the post-talmudic rabbinic academies around Baghdad in the seventh through eleventh centuries.3 The disconnect between the contents of the Talmud and the roles that it came to play in medieval Jewish culture (and beyond) is puzzling. 2 Introduction It is also difficult to understand why the Babylonian Talmud (unmediated by the commentaries and codes that transposed it into a reference work) has, for many centuries, enjoyed such prominence in Jewish education. As will be seen below, a range of medieval Jewish scholars plaintively argued that other textual products of Jewish culture were far better suited than the Talmud to assist students in their religious training and spiritual growth. Another question about the Talmud’s role in Jewish culture is best framed from the sociologist’s perspective: As a rule, individuals learn proper comportment from living models—parents, teachers, and community members . It is unnatural to regard a (non-revealed) written text as the definitive guide to all socially and culturally desirable behaviors, for mimesis, rather than reading, is the primary guide to life. If anything, living life ‘‘by the book’’ is anomalous. The strangeness of regarding the Talmud as a guide to Jewish life comes into sharper focus when the scope of its teachings is compared with that of other legal systems. In most societies, huge swaths of life are left ungoverned by legal prescription; for example neither the spatial orientation of one’s bed, nor the order in which shoes are to be donned is considered a matter to be monitored. Yet because the Babylonian Talmud— which came to be regarded as a prescriptive work—preserves advice about these matters, some rabbinic Jews have construed these arenas of life as ones that are subject to regulation.4 Each of these observations underscores the fact that students of Jewish history have little sense of what the Talmud was within its amoraic Sitz-imLeben , before medieval Jews assigned it particular cultural meanings. Robert Brody, a scholar of rabbinics, affirmed this point: ‘‘We have no way of knowing to what extent, if at all, the ‘editors’ of the Talmud—as distinct from the authors of the legal dicta embedded within it—intended to create a normative legal work, rather than an academic or literary corpus.’’5 Why has scholarly ignorance about the Talmud’s raison d’être gone largely unacknowledged? The most obvious answer is that there has been little room to even think about this question. The retrojective shadow cast by the medieval fashioning of the Talmud is enormous, and so generations of Jews who lived even earlier are presumed to have embraced the assumptions of their successors. The intellectual and compositional contributions of Rashi (1040–1105), the towering commentator on the Babylonian Talmud, and of the tosafists, its twelfth- and thirteenth-century glossators, have defined what are seen as ‘‘canonical’’ uses of this corpus in the arenas of education and...