Tag Archives: Talmud

Classical rabbinic literature was never intended as historiography

That “classical rabbinic literature was never intended as historiography” goes without saying, as evidenced not only by the fact that the sages refrain from a detailed presentation of contemporary events, but also in the decidedly a-historical license they granted themselves when taking up biblical history. Attempts to categorize Talmudic works such as Seder Olam as “Jewish historiographic literature” have justifiably been rejected, with that work more accurately defined as a “chronographical midrash”, an attempt at the synchronization of Biblical events, with almost no interest in what transpired in the post-Biblical period.

Isaiah Gafni, “Concepts of Periodization and Causality in Talmudic Literature”, Jewish History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), 22.

The Surprising After-Life of the First English Translation of the Talmud

After all of the criticism, the minor renewed interest notwithstanding, Rodkinson remained generally neglected. Where recalled, it was more often negatively, and, concerning his translation, in a disparaging manner. Rodkinson is not mentioned in Jewish Publishing in America, nor in The Jews in America: A History. In the latter case, Albert Mordell, reviewing the book for the Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society, wrote, “Another woeful lack is that of mention of translations from Hebrew classics in whole or part, even though some of these translations were, like M. L. Rodkinson’s Talmud, not of a high order.” He is also neglected in Meyer Waxman’s A History of Jewish Literature, where mention is made of several translations in various languages. Where the New Talmud is remembered it is negatively, as in Yehuda Slutsky’s comment, “In his later years he devoted himself to translating the Talmud. The value of this translation, printed in two editions, lies only in the fact that it is a pioneering effort.” A biographer of Wise writes that “In 1898 he gave his name to Michael Rodkinson’s quack translation of the Talmud. . . .” More diplomatically, Jacob Rader Marcus, writes, that Rodkinson’s translations “were anything but felicitous and did little to enhance the understanding of the Talmud by non-Hebraists.” Most recently, R. Adam Mintz concludes that “Rodkinson’s work was rejected because of its poor quality, and not because of an objection on principle to this type of abridged translation.”

Rodkinson took great pride in his translation of the Talmud. Indeed, his tombstone has an inscription stating that he was the translator of the Babylonian Talmud, certainly an attribution of questionable accuracy. It is ironic that Rodkinson, who did have other earlier accomplishments, is credited with and remembered for, and negatively at that, a work for which he was responsible and did oversee, but was, in truth, performed, either in its entirety or in part, by others.

There is an epilogue to the New Talmud story. After all of the above it would seem evident that the New Talmud has been forgotten, only remembered by students of Jewish literary history. However, that is not entirely the case, for the New Talmud has been revived, particularly in non-Jewish circles, on the Internet. The Internet Sacred Text Archive has posted the entire text of the “The Babylonian Talmud Translated by M.L. Rodkinson [1918].” Their website is cited by a number of other Internet sites, including at least one for Jewish studies. The New Talmud is available on CD from both the Sacred Text Archive, as one of 500 religious texts ($49.95), and from B & R Samizdat Express, in the latter instance together with several other Jewish texts ($29.95). A number of used and rare book sites offer individual volumes and entire sets of the New Talmud at a wide range of prices.

Internet Sacred Text Archive and Samizdat Express simply reproduce the text and are neutral in outlook. Unfortunately, other Internet sites, more often than not anti-Semitic, reference and quote from the New Talmud. This is also the case with a number of anti-Semitic books. Most surprisingly, to conclude on a relatively positive note, the New Talmud reappears on the reading list for college courses, for example, a lecture on “The Tractate Avot and Rabbinic Judaism,” in Reed College. It seems that Michael Levi Rodkinson’s New Talmud has in fact not been forgotten. Whatever its shortcomings, it has found an audience and is alive today in new and unanticipated formats.

Marvin J. Heller, “Deciphering the Talmud: The First English Edition of the Talmud Revisited. Michael Levi Rodkinson: His Translation of the Talmud, and the Ensuing Controversy”, Seforim Blog (19 May 2013).

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The Phrase “Standing on One Foot” in Parallel Literature to the Talmud

As has been called to my attention, the phrase “standing on one foot” may be found, for example, in the Satires of Horace, which include a criticism of Lucilius, whose copiousness Horace resolved to avoid: “In hora saepe ducentos ut magnum versus dictabat stans pede in uno” (“Often in an hour, as though a great exploit, he would dictate two hundred lines while standing on one foot”). Cf. Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, edited and translated into English by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA, 1942), Book I, Satire 4:9-10, pp. 48-49, dated ca. 35 BCE. Fairclough notes that “standing on one foot” is proverbial for “doing without effort.” The parallel of the phrase is striking, and yet it need not surprise us that people of different cultural backgrounds find similar expressions, common themes, or other parallels. The question is whether in a given instance a historical influence of one on the other can be documented, or in the absence of historical evidence, whether an understanding of the one clarifies and helps us to understand the other better. The issue is thus not merely to find parallels in Latin or other non-Jewish literature to the phrase “standing on one foot.” In the case of Hillel’s statement in Avot 2.4, the Greek σχολή and σχολαστικός may give us an insight into a possible word-play in the Hebrew, and all the more so regarding the ambiguous passages about the ten batlanim: are the batlanim idlers who in any event have nothing better to do (as implied by the ordinary usage of the term), or do the passages refer with approbation to ten men who out of their concern for the community’s welfare avoid other remunerative occupations? Similarly, in the case of regel-regula, the Latin opens up a range of literary and perhaps even historical perspectives, which the literal Hebrew understanding of regel would never suggest.

Raphael Jospe, “Hillel’s Rule,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 81, No. 1/2 (July-October, 1990), 50, n8.

The Misleadingness of Descriptors such as “Rabbinic Theology” and “Rabbinic Mind”

While generalizations about “rabbinic theology” and the “rabbinic mind” can be useful as gross characterizations and for heuristic purposes, they can also be misleading precisely because they are unrefined.  It is far too common to speak of the “sea of Talmud” (and, by extension, Midrash) and, since the same exegetical and aggadic traditions appear in many documents, to glean illustrations and prooftexts from a variety of documents across the board without regard to their chronology or peculiar literary characteristics and integrity.  The anthological character of this literature as a whole may easily cause us to overlook evidences of redactional-editorial activity in shaping, recasting, or restyling materials to fit their literary context in a particular document.  But once we recognize such activity and take into account the distinct literary characteristics of individual documents, we simply cannot treat this complex literature as a single fabric.

Richard S. Sarason, “Toward a New Agendum for the Study of Rabbinic Midrashic Literature” in Studies in Aggadah, Targum and Jewish Literature in Memory of Joseph Heinemann, eds. Jakob J. Petuchowski and Ezra Fleischer (Jerusalem & Cincinnati: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University and Hebrew Union College Press, 1981), 58.

The study of different literary elements in rabbinic literature must be sensitive to the different philological strata of this great corpus

The study of different literary elements in rabbinic literature must be sensitive to the different philological strata of this great corpus. It is not that the rhetorical excludes the historical, or vice versa, but rather that rhetoric, including rabbinic rhetoric, always has its own history.

Azzan Yadin, “The Hammer on the Rock: Polysemy and the School of Rabbi Ishmael,” Jewish Quarterly Review 10:1 (2003), 17.

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Rabbis thinking of the Gendering of the Body

Rabbinic legal thinking, which provides much of the structural framework of subsequent Jewish cultures, aims first and foremost at instituting a rather pronounced dual gender grid, imposed on the social organization of Jewish society as the rabbis envisioned it. Most of the individual laws of rabbinic halakhah apply to either men or women. Differently put, in rabbinic legal thinking it is almost always important whether the halakhic agent is a man or a woman.
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Representations of the body are an important means for grounding gender, and for justifying the distribution of legal privileges and disadvantages. As theorists of gender have come to recognize, representations of the body often serve the aim of naturalizing and therefore legitimizing legal privilege. Hence, so the theory goes, almost everyone may agree now that gender differences are cultural constructs. Gender is variable, and gender differences are scripted differently in different social and cultural contexts. But the fact that gender differences exist to begin with is traditionally considered to be based in biological fact. Nature – or biology – has made bodies different, male and female, and different cultures only inscribe this reality with their specific ways of differentiating between genders. In the rabbinic case, this translates, for instance, into the prohibition of cross-dressing, inherited from biblical law (Deuteronomy 22:5), in order to uphold the clear distinction between the sexes. Or it famously translates into the general positioning of men as always “obligated” by Jewish law, while women are only sometimes obligated and mostly “exempt” (M. Kiddushin 1:7), a legal rhetoric that already early feminists have recognized as a way of privileging the male position in Jewish law.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “Regulating the Human Body: Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (Cambridge & New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 271.

Differing Roles of the Stam in the Sugya versus the Amoraim

…an appreciation of the role played by the stam in the sugya, which is distinguishable from that typically played by amoraim. The stam often takes upon itself tasks that affect the sugya or sugyot as a whole…. The tasks of the amoraim, in contrast, are localized, consisting of the interpretation of a particular tradition, stating the law, resolving or posing an objection, or answering or raising a question. … It is the way of the stam to offer artificial responses, sometimes to teach us why a particular argument was chosen over another, sometimes to increase the complexity of the argument, and sometimes to weave together independent traditions or discussions.

Richard Kalmin, “The Function and Dating of the Stam and the Writing of History”, in Melekhet Mahshevet: Studies in the Redaction and Development of Talmudic Literature, ed. Aaron Amit and Aharon Shemesh (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2011), 40-41 (English section).

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The Talmud remains for most classicists and for most non-Jews in all disciplines virtually a closed book

One document of paramount importance in the history of ancient medicine, the Talmud, remains for most classicists and, indeed, for most non-Jews in all disciplines, virtually a closed book. Yet it has a strong claim on the attention of the student of Greek medicine, for the medical researches of the Talmudic rabbis in some respects far surpass the extent of knowledge demonstrated in even the best of Greek medicine….
The medical achievement of the Talmudic rabbis is all the more remarkable because it was incidental to the main interests of the authors of the Talmud. Medical matters are covered only when they help to shed light on religious concerns, in particular on ceremonial and legal points.

Stephen Newmyer, “Talmudic Medicine: A Classicist’s Perspective,” Judaism 29, Issue 3 (Summer 1980), 360-361.

Scholars of Jewish law must incorporate the findings of modern Talmud scholarship in order to present a clearer picture of the development of law as found in the Talmuds. It is not sufficient to vaguely identify the origins of a certain law, institution, or term, as simply “Talmudic.” It is incumbent upon the researcher to be specific when describing material found in the Talmuds and to apply modern standards of redactional criteria. Is the source Tannaitic, Amoraic, or anonymous? If it is Amoraic, from what generation and from where? If a parallel source exists, what is the relationship between these parallel sources?

Michael Pitkowsky, ”Mipenei Darkhei Shalom (Because of the Paths of Peace) and Related Terms: A Case Study of How Early Concepts and Terminology Developed From Tannaitic to Talmudic Literature” (PhD. diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, 2011), 12.