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Reviewed by:
  • Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and Their Historical Context by Richard Kalmin
  • Laura S. Lieber
Richard Kalmin
Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and Their Historical Context
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014
Pp. 312. $65.00.

Recent decades have witnessed significant scholarly exploration of the Persian-ness of the Babylonian Talmud (also known as “the Bavli”). Isaiah Gafni, Yaakov Elman, and Shai Secunda (among others) have sought to embed the primary cultural product of Babylonian Jewry within the broader cultural context of the Persian Empire. Persian language, texts, and traditions have all proven fruitful sources of insight, enabling readers to discern nuances of the Talmudic text that had previously been unappreciated. As preliminary as these studies have been, they delineate an essential agenda for the study of late antiquity in all its dynamism and complexity.

Richard Kalmin’s Migrating Tales considers the issue of context at the extremes of scale: from empires to literary motifs. In specific, Kalmin explores select narratives occuring in the Bavli as a means of discerning cultural connections among diverse communities in the eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Armenia, and Persia. Kalmin offers a series of case studies that support his contention that non-rabbinic and non-Jewish literary traditions moved from west to east, either directly or mediated by other communities, notably Syriac-speaking Christians. He treats eight specific Talmudic tales: Manasseh’s execution of Isaiah by sawing him in half; Simon bar Yochai’s exorcism of a demon named Bar Thalamion (that is, Bartholomew) from the emperor’s daughter; the miraculous translation of the Torah into Greek; the role of the demon Asmodeus in building Solomon’s Temple; Zechariah’s incessantly bubbling blood; depictions of “the Pharisees”; a debate over astrology; and a version of the Romance of Alexander. Each chapter explores a single—and usually singular—passage from the Talmud in detail. Kalmin highlights “seams” in the text (often elements that are difficult to discern upon a casual reading, let alone an encounter mediated by translation) that indicate redaction history, and he pays particular attention to issues of composition and language. In the course of his analysis of his primary textual source, Kalmin adduces a range of comparative materials from external sources, Jewish and non-Jewish, and offers hypotheses for possible points of contact, routes and agents of transmission, and implications for various cultural models of Jewish/non-Jewish relations more broadly speaking.

Each chapter of the volume offers a revised version of a previously published study, with an added framework that highlights the overarching themes. The previous life of each chapter remains evident, however, and the result is that the chapters can read unevenly. While every chapter engages thoughtfully with nonrabbinic sources, the contextualizing can be quite thorough in some instances (such as the treatment of the Alexander Romance) and more evocative in others (such as the possible influence of the New Testament on attitudes towards Pharisees). Although each chapter generally begins with a careful presentation of a specific Talmudic text, Kalmin at times assumes his readers are more familiar [End Page 323] with primary sources than is likely to be the case; the footnotes, in particular, can be less helpful than might be wished. Perhaps more problematically, in his treatment of rabbinic sources, Kalmin makes frequent use of attributions as a tentative method for dating texts; while he is careful to delineate his caution in doing so (12), the deployment of this shorthand throughout the volume could mislead readers less careful to discern Kalmin’s methods and less familiar with rabbinic literature. Finally, Kalmin’s ambitions—for example, his desire to “make the leap from the printed page to social reality, with the help of the rich archaeological record of the Babylonian magic bowls from approximately the same time and place as the Talmudic rabbis” (96)—fall short in the execution. In the instance just cited, the magic bowls are relegated to an appendix and never fully discussed, and in other cases the parallels that are adduced are presented in comparably cursory fashion. To some extent, these challenges reflect the difficult nature of the sources with which Kalmin works, although they may also reflect his relative comfort...

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