Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories

Chapter 3. A Touch of the Rabbinic Real: Rabbis and Outsiders

Chapter 3 A Touch of the Rabbinic Real: Rabbis and Outsiders The existence of the Babylonian Talmud, a massive anthological work attentive to periodization and scholarly citation, is an incredible boon for historiographers of late antiquity. And yet, scholars sometimes bemoan the absence of other data from the period. The imbalance between the Babylonian Talmud ’s extensive source material on a wide variety of intellectual and social issues and an archaeological field that has produced little beyond magic bowls is striking and presents a unique environment for the symbiosis of literary and historiographic work. In this and the next two chapters I take note of the significance of the genre of talmudic legal narrative within rabbinic historiography and introduce a set of readings that will further the use of such texts for historiographic purposes while slightly tweaking the manner in which such work is conducted. When using the Bavli as a historiographic source, there was once a tendency to gravitate toward extensive rabbinic narratives and to accept, almost entirely, the details of such narratives as historical evidence.1 Such histories, which I will label traditional, build their own historical narratives around those inherited from Bavli stories.2 This traditional historiography is somewhat unsurprising; since rabbinic narratives often present themselves in historiographic form and narrate the lives of named rabbinic protagonists, they lend themselves to adaptation within historical metanarratives. Traditional histories tend to employ rabbinic narratives fairly naively, accepting miraculous fantasy as historical fact and presuming the stories to be eyewitness accounts that simply translate transpired events into historical narrative. The beginnings of Jewish tudies within a rationalist milieu led to the development of what I will call “rationalist histories.”3 Rationalist histories are 64 Chapter 3 still drawn to narrative sources, but discard certain fantastic stories in toto or discount fantastic elements, either eliminating fantastic details or treating them as metaphors for more reasonable referents. At the height of rationalist historiography, biography was in vogue. Scholarly biographers assembled all of the narratives featuring an individual rabbi alongside statements attributed to the same scholar and crafted social and intellectual biographies.4 One of Jacob Neusner’s many paradigm-shifting contributions to rabbinics has been his critique of rationalist historiography and rabbinic biography. Ironically, Neusner knew the rationalist milieu so well since his own initial scholarly work was a rationalist biography of Rabban Yôh .ānān ben Zakkaʾy and a rationalist history of the Jews of Babylonia.5 Through his many writings, Neusner has ushered in a period of skeptical rabbinic historiography in which rabbinic texts are suspect unless they can be corroborated by external data. One of the effects of Neusner’s influence on rabbinic historiography has been a shift in the scholarly perception of the status of the rabbis responsible for producing rabbinic literature. Where traditional histories once presumed the rabbis to speak for all Jews and took rabbinic anecdotes and legal frameworks as descriptive of a world in which the rabbis were the social, religious, and political elite in Jewish society in both Palestine and Babylonia, skeptical histories now presume the rabbis to have been somewhat marginal within their own societies politically, socially and even religiously.6 This new understanding of the rabbis as a marginal social group is particularly well drawn in the context of rabbinic Palestine, where the skeptical turn has been significantly aided by the existence of nonrabbinic, non-Jewish, and archaeological external sources. It is fair to say that Neusner’s critique of rationalist historiography has led to a sea change in the use of rabbinic sources for historiographic purposes; where once nonrabbinic sources were interpreted on the basis of rabbinic ones, the opposite now obtains.7 Because of the paucity of external evidence in Babylonia, the Babylonian context is a bit thornier. While Neusner’s critique of rabbinic narratives as historiographic sources is still largely relevant, the claim of significant gaps in time between narrator and event is not as strong when speaking of stories about amoraic Babylonia. Additionally, because there are few external sources from which to paint historical metanarratives, scholars continue to feel the magnetic pull of the Bavli’s massive archive.8 Even after the skeptical turn within rabbinic historiography, Babylonian rabbinic history is largely written on the basis of passages in the Talmud. For scholars of rabbinic The Rabbinic Real 65 Babylonia there is, necessarily, greater overlap in source material and method among historiographers and literary...