How Much "Orality" in Oral Torah?: New Perspectives on the Composition and Transmission of Early Rabbinic Tradition

VoLume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 53 HOW MUCH "ORALITY" IN ORAL TORAH? NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE COMPOSITION AND . TRANSMISSION OF EARLY RABBINIC TRADITION by Martin S. Jaffee Martin Jaffee is chair of the University of Washington's program of Comparative Religion and holds appointments in Jewish Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Literature. He has published widely on the interpretation of rabbinic literature, the nature of rabbinic hermeneutics, and, more recently, the implications of rabbinic hermeneutics for contemporary Jewish religious thought. Introduction Was there an oral tradition in early rabbinic Judaism prior to the publication of the Mishnah at the turn of the third century C.E.? How was this tradition transmitted? What was its content? These questions have formed the substance of much research in the history of rabbinic Judaism since the nineteenth century,1 and continue to be discussed today. In general, contemporary scholarship is divided between two divergent points ofview. One view, , 1See the excellent bibliographies in E. Schuerer, The History ofthe Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, Vol. II, rev. and ed. G. Vermes, F. Millar, M. Black (Edinburgh: Clark, 1979), pp. 337-338, and H. Strack & G. Stemberger, Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch, 7th edition (Munich: C. H. Back, 1982), p. 41. Sternberger's discussion of rabbinic oral tradition (Strack and Stemberger, pp. 51-54) is by far the most nuanced of the recent contributions but has, unfortunately, been ignored by subsequent research. The present essay in many ways attempts to pick up the conversation at the stage reached by Stemberger. 54 SHOFAR very common among scholars of the Hebrew Bible2 and the New Testament ,3 and championed recently by S. Safrai in a state-of-the-field survey of rabbinic literature,4 carries forward a position which dominated nineteenthcentury scholarship. Such scholars hold that rabbinic oral tradition extends far back into the Second Temple period and represents a coherent, self-consciously preserved body of knowledge which can be reconstructed to a significant degree from extant rabbinic texts. The other view, most vigorously proposed by J. Neusner in a variety of settings,5 argues that while early rabbinic society must certainly have had oral traditions, it is no longer possible to reconstruct these on the basis of surviving literature. At issue in this debate, ultimately, is not wh'ether or not there was an ancient Oral Torah, for nearly everyone recognizes that the term itself is probably no earlier than the first century c.E. and probably later than this (see n. 6 below). Rather, the question is the degree to which extant rabbinic literature can be used to reconstruct the history of Judaism and the Jews priorthe destruction of the Temple in 70. For scholars who hold that the content of what talmudic rabbis came to call "Oral Torah" is identical to some degree with the ancient oral tradition of Palestinian Jewry, the historical task is to recover this tradition from extant written records, e.g., the early third-century Mishnah and the even later Tosefta, midrashic compilations, and the Tal2A nuanced and cautious conception of the antiquity of traditions of scriptural interpretation which surface ultimately in rabbinic literature may be found in M. Fishbane's distinction between traditio (the substance of tradition) and traditum (its transmissional process) in Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 1-19 and, with reference to legal tradition in particular, pp. 231-277. 3The most important study, deeply informed by scholarship in rabbinics from the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, is that of B. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Tradition in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Lund/Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1964), pp. 71-189. 4See his article, "Oral Tora" in S. Safrai, ed., The Literature of the Sages. First Part: Oral Tora, Halakhah, Mishna, Tosefta, Talmud, Extemal Tractates (Assen/Maasrecht: Van Gorcum and Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), pp. 35-119. 5See "Oral Torah and Oral Tradition: Defining the Problematic," Journal for the Study ofJudaism 3 (1972), reprinted in J. Neusner, Method and Meaning in Ancient Judaism (Chico: Scholars Press, 1979). Compare, most recently, J. Neusner, Oral Tradition in Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah (New York and London: Garland...