The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (review)

This important collection of fifteen essays by an international array of major scholars demonstrates the range of approaches that characterize contemporary academic study of the Talmud and related texts. In their introduction, Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee detail the numerous challenges that accompany the modern study of a polyglot body of ancient writings that was produced in different locations over at least six centuries. These include the multivocality of rabbinic texts and the difficulty of assigning any one component or strand of these many layered, highly redacted traditions to a particular time or place; further complications stem from the unreliability of attributed teachings in the rabbinic corpus and a dearth of concrete information about named rabbis and sages. Added to these perplexities is limited scholarly knowledge about the complex interactions between the two centers of rabbinic production in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Iraq and the impacts of these two very different political, religious, social, and linguistic environments on Jewish communities and rabbinic endeavors. Moreover, the authors and editors of talmudic literature were a small and highly self-conscious elite; it is impossible to know to what extent their legal formulations, social constructs, and spiritual convictions reflected or affected the great majority of contemporaneous Jews.

The editors of The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature provide a useful timeline and a glossary, but this volume is not a handbook. As Fonrobert and Jaffee point out, helpful guides to rabbinic texts already exist. Rather, these studies are intended to further the integration of rabbinic studies into general humanistic studies by contextualizing and to some extent decoding an immense and often daunting literary tradition. By presenting these writings as one particular intellectual and religious cultural phenomenon among a variety of others in Late Antiquity, the essays in this anthology aspire to make rabbinic literature more accessible to academics in a range of fields.

The first of this volume’s three sections is entitled “The Conditions of Rabbinic Literary Activity”; three of its four essays establish the ideological, social, political, and geographical realities that shaped the production of rabbinic writings. Thus, Jaffee addresses rabbinic authorship as a collective enterprise; Jeffrey L. Rubenstein describes the social and institutional settings of rabbinic literature; and Seth Schwartz outlines the political geography of rabbinic texts. The fourth chapter, “The Orality of Rabbinic Writings,” by Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, addresses the privileging of oral transmission that is characteristic of the rabbinic endeavor. As she notes, even when rabbinic traditions were recorded in writing, there was an assumption that their oral nature would continue through ongoing cycles of textual study that would engender “the social enactment of the words on the page” (p. 55).

The various genres of rabbinic literature and their larger cultural settings are delineated in this anthology’s next six chapters; as Catherine Hezser points out, rabbinic writings must be understood “intertextually,” in relation “to the entire surrounding culture in its literary, legal, religious, socioeconomic, and political manifestations” (p. 162). Essays by Stephen D. Fraade, Shaye J. D. Cohen, and Hezser address, respectively, rabbinic midrash in the larger context of ancient Jewish biblical exegesis; the prehistory of the Jewish legal traditions that are preserved in the Mishnah; and points of comparison between rabbinic legal composition and contemporaneous Roman legal theory. In a significant chapter, Yaakov Elman discusses the impact of Middle Persian culture and religion on the law, theology, and general attitudes of Babylonian Jewry and Babylonian Talmud. Michael D. Schwartz demonstrates the degree to which rabbinic Judaism, like the other religions of the Greco-Roman world, also encompassed “esoteric tendencies in which magical and visionary practices were put to use for the needs of individuals” (p. 198), while Galit Hasan-Rokem uses insights from linguistics and folklore studies to reveal the significant degree of rabbinic engagement with the larger popular cultures within which Jews lived.

Five chapters that take thematic approaches conclude this volume. These “Hermeneutical Frames for Interpreting...