Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition (review)

Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 357 Reviews over many other biblical traditions, even when, as in the story of the new moon feast (1 Samuel 20), he isn’t there. Frederick E. Greenspahn Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL 33431 greenspa@fau.edu TRANSMITTING MISHNAH: THE SHAPING INFLUENCE OF ORAL TRADITION. By Elizabeth Shanks Alexander. Pp. xvi + 246. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Cloth, $75.00. In recent decades, the study of early rabbinic literature has been informed by a significant body of research focused on identifying and understanding the oral and literary dynamics that comprised early rabbinic textuality. As a critical mass, this research constitutes the foundation of early rabbinic Orality Studies—an emerging, interdisciplinary trajectory aimed at clarifying how such dynamics affected the ongoing formation, transmission, preservation , and scholarly conceptualization of the early rabbinic textual tradition. Transmitting Mishnah is an important addition to this body of research , noteworthy for its well-grounded, innovative interpretation of rabbinic texts, as well as for constructing and contributing a theoretically sophisticated, interdisciplinary approach to the study of early rabbinic textuality. The book is centered on Alexander’s detailed analyses of a selection of texts from tractate Shevuot (“Oaths”) in the Mishnah, Tosefta, and both Talmuds, which she adduces as exemplifications of “how attention to the oral conceptual lens provides insight into the nature of mishnaic textuality and transmission” (p. 29). In the Introduction, Alexander surveys the origins and development of various approaches to the study of oral tradition, highlighting those aspects that form the basis of the oral conceptual lens: oral transmission need not presume a fixed, authoritative text, but rather, active mastery of subject matter (p. 14); texts are indicative of both the oral and literary influences that affected the cultures that produced them (p. 16); and, the overlapping, mutual interaction between oral and literary cultural influences affects the ways people think, and, ultimately, informs the structural formation of human consciousness (p. 17). She concludes the Introduction with a presentation and assessment of a representative survey of prior scholarship on talmudic literature in light of recent, Orality-based scholarship, and proposes that the “value of the oral conceptual lens … is that it attunes us to the multiplicity of factors that influenced later interpretations of the Hebrew Studies 49 (2008) 358 Reviews mishnaic text to take the form and pursue the line of interpretation that they did … [revealing] how the active work of transmission contributes to the emerging construction of mishnaic meaning” (p. 29). The study consists of four chapters. In chapter 1, Alexander examines the similarities and differences between parallel mishnaic and toseftan excerpts from tractate Shevuot, and argues that they are indicative of how tannaitic rabbis conceived of mishnaic tradition primarily in a non-fixed, non-linear, and fluid literary fashion. That is, without denying that the tannaim preserved mishnaic tradition in writing, she proposes that the earliest rabbis’ employed and transmitted this tradition by following “a strategy for reproducing tradition that did not rely exclusively on memorizing and reproducing lengthy sequences of words in a verbatim fashion” (p. 74). Rather, the transmission of mishnaic tradition was guided by a conceptualization of textuality that privileged non-linear and non-literal textual correspondence, in which “continuity” of textual transmission was determined in accordance with three, primary forms: overarching structural frameworks, fixed phrases, and underlying conceptual concerns. Alexander argues that these forms served as tannaitic, oral-formulaic “compositional building blocks” of mishnaic tradition, in that they embedded forms of continuity congruent with tannaitic non-linear/literal expectations within the spontaneous declamation of mishnaic tradition. Thus, in spite of the fact that the tannaim possessed a written mishnaic tradition, tannaitic sensibility as to what constituted its legitimate reproduction or stable transmission was attuned to the presence of these building blocks, as opposed to precise correspondence with any particular written version. Whereas tannaitic rabbis possessed a fluid concept of mishnaic tradition, in chapter 2, Alexander analyzes Shevuot traditions in both the Yerushalmi and Bavli and concludes that subsequent rabbinic generations developed over time a mishnaic textuality characterized by heightened expectations and privileging of fixed-literary continuity. Ultimately, these expectations caused amoraic rabbis not only to bestow authoritative status on a single, stable written version of...