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Torah in the Mouth, Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE - 400 CE Jaffee, Martin S., Samuel and Althea Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Washington Print publication date: 2001, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-514067-5, doi:10.1093/0195140672.001.0001 that our text may have circulated at least as early as the first third of the second century CE—that the pedagogical model established in end p.4 end p.5 the Sinaitic generation is precisely the basis for rabbinic instruction in the present generation. Sages today teach their disciples precisely as the Blessed Holy One taught Israel through Moses. The content of the tradition given to Moses may no longer have been preserved in its original form—after all, we no longer have the words given to Moses, transmitted to Aaron and, thence, to all the people. The Talmud explains in another place that much was forgotten in the trauma following Moses' death and had to be reconstructed by logical inference, the original words having been lost (B. Temurah 15b–16a). The point, however, is that the tradition surviving among the Sages is transmitted in the original way—by patient repetition, from master to disciple, from mouth to ear, and from ear to memory, without the intervention of a written text. This teaching is thoroughly oral; in the parlance of the Talmud and other early rabbinic writings, it is Oral Torah (twrh šb‘l ph) 3 or, as I prefer to render it—Torah in the Mouth. Now, as it happens, for at least a thousand years the traditions of Torah in the Mouth have been memorized from written texts. 4 Later in this book I will argue that written recensions of Oral Torah existed as early as the third century CE, not much later than the era represented by teachers such as Rabbi Aqiva and Rabbi Eliezer, and certainly well before the historical moment at which the anonymous composers of this section of Babylonian rabbinic tradition chose to adduce the text just cited as a precedent for their own oral pedagogy. I would like, therefore, to call attention to another text, more recent in origin. It is the composition of an esteemed scholar of medieval European literature, Franz Bäuml. He has thought deeply about the processes by which orally composed poetic traditions found their way into written compositions that preserved the traits of orally transmitted traditions out of which they emerged. Of course, the texts upon which Bäuml works, such as the Song of Roland , are in no sense analogous in genre to those produced by ancient rabbis. But something suggested by Bäuml has stuck in my mind for many years. In a way, this book is the result of my effort to explore its implications for my own understanding of rabbinic literature. Bäuml is interested in the formulaic, repetitive style of oral-traditional poetry, its reliance upon sterotypical literary forms. On the one hand, written versions of such oral-traditional poetry betray their dependence upon the oral-performative setting in which the unwritten versions had their social being prior to having been written down. On the other, the act of writing introduces its own changes into the character of the oral text. Not only does it wrest the text from its social matrix of performance, fixing a living and constantly shifting text into a much less malleable form. More important, it changes the nature of the oral tradition that continues to surround and mediate the written text to its audience. This is what Bäuml has to say about the problem. I cite his text extensively, omitting certain parts that are less directly relevant here: The mechanism of oral transmission, which is the basis for stereotypical formulation on the lexical and thematic levels, does not cease to function in the transmission of texts like the Chanson de Roland or the Niebelungenlied merely because they have become written and their formerly oral formulism has become a matter of style. . . . In such instances one must distinguish between the functions of stereotypical devices in the processes of oral and written composition, transmission, and reception [italics added]. In each process these devices can have a mechanical and a referential function. In the processes of oral-epic composition, performance, and reception, they are essential mechanisms for the composition and simultaneous performance of the text, as well as for its reception and retention. They are also culturally essential references to the tradition they formulate and transmit. In the process of oral-formulaic written composition they play no essential mechanical part, but they necessarily have a referential role: they refer to a specific (oral) type of text and thus represent the convention which determines the composition of the written text. Once this written text is formulaically composed, there is no longer any option to the function of its stereotypical devices as mechanisms in its performance and reception. Whether the text is read aloud, recited from memory, or read silently, its formulism mechanically affects its performance; it aids recitation from memory, conditions reading by its repetitiveness, and serves the retention of the text in the memory. . . . But whatever the mechanical role of formulism in performance and reception may be, its referential function is clear: the written formulaic text inescapably refers the receiver to the oral-formulaic tradition, provided only that he is familiar with its attributes. In referring to the oral tradition, the written text fictionalizes it. Since the one is given a role to play within the other, since oral formulae in the garb of writing refer to “orality” within the written tradition, the oral tradition becomes an implicit fictional “character” of literacy [italics added]. 5 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2003 - 2011. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/privacy_policy.html). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 20 September 2011
Torah in the Mouth, Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE - 400 CE Jaffee, Martin S., Samuel and Althea Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Washington Print publication date: 2001, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2003 Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19-514067-5, doi:10.1093/0195140672.001.0001 In my photocopy of this article, the portions here italicized are heavily marked and annotated. What has struck me is not just the obvious end p.6 point—in the first italicized passage—that the compositional methods that enable the oral composer to offer a smooth, spontaneous recitation function somewhat differently for the one who composes from the oral-performative tradition for written transmission. It is, rather, Bäuml's final observation that I have returned to over and over, turning it this way and that, to find what I could within it. The point, as I have understood it, is that the oral-performative tradition, once it is imitated in writing, is in some sense alienated from itself, the written text reconstructing the oral tradition as an objective cultural presence now discernible to its audience in a way never seen so clearly before. Oral tradition exists, that is, as an unperceived reality, calling no particular attention to itself until, because of whatever social factors might have led to the transmission of oral literature in written form, the tradition finds itself reproduced as written text. It discovers its “orality,” as it were, by gazing at its face in the mirror of the written text. Henceforward, even as the oral tradition continues, even as the written version itself pursues its literary career as an orally performed and aurally experienced cultural possession, the oral tradition is never the same. It has become a commodity, an element of exchange, in the shaping of culture, more or less valuable in the shifting constellation of a given society's literary universe. In this book I try to explore Bäuml's insight as a frame of reference for understanding the nature and history of oral-performative literary tradition in ancient Judaism. For a variety of reasons—most of them connected to the limitations of my own scholarly competence and energies—I have circumscribed my frame of reference to Palestinian Judaism from the last centuries of the Second Temple period to the period by which the compilation of the Palestinian Talmud is conventionally said to have been more or less completed. Following my understanding of Bäuml's point, I have conceived the study as a kind of description of Palestinian Jewish oral tradition coming, if one could speak this way, to consciousness of itself. The book begins, in part I, with a study of what I call the “scribal culture” of late Second Temple Judaism, a culture rich in oral traditions that circulated in connection with the transmission of written texts of Scripture, but one that (I argue) was virtually innocent of self-consciousness regarding the orality of tradition. Oral tradition existed, but it wasn't much thought about. Jewish scribes and literary tradents transmitted the substance of tradition by word of mouth as well as in writing. They mined a rich vein of orally mediated themes, stories, and norms without expending much energy thinking about it all as a “tradition” with its own coherent borders and content. Part II is devoted to the evidence of the surviving rabbinic literature, all of which is written. The emergence of oral tradition in Judaism to explicit ideological self-consciousness as Torah in the Mouth is, I argue, embedded in the social matrix of rabbinic discipleship training, the characteristic forms of which were worked out in Palestine. Exported, as it were, to Babylonia in the same centuries, this social matrix continued to nourish Babylonian ideological formulations of oral tradition. We have seen a marvelous example in the text from B. Eruvin 54b, one of the great written fictionalizations, in Bäuml's sense, of oral tradition in all of rabbinic literature. Interesting as the Babylonian material is, however, I am not sure that it does much more than iron out a few details of conceptions first worked out by Palestinian masters in their third- and fourth-century Galilean study groups. I won't argue this point here and will leave it to reviewers to demonstrate why I should have taken the story further. 6 This study will exploit a number of theoretical perspectives and delve into a variety of quite different sorts of written literature in order to make its point. But the thematic coherence of the whole project is, I hope, discernible in two threads of inquiry woven throughout. Everywhere I am concerned with discerning (1) ways in which oral means of performing texts in public gatherings (and the types of public involved in those gatherings) affected the transmission of the written versions of those texts, and (2) ways in which the orally mediated interpretive traditions associated with written texts became perceptible as cultural realities “outside of” the texts themselves and thus required some sort of ideological legitimation in relation to the written texts. 7 I confess disappointment that I cannot point to a specific “cause” that might explain, in sociological or hermeneutical terms, precisely why the cultural phenomenon of oral tradition, essentially invisible to Second Temple scribes as an object of reflection, stood at the very center of the later rabbinic community's self-definition. I think I can, however, explain in a minimal sense why the fictionalization of rabbinic oral tradition as Torah in the Mouth proved so crucial to the developing social systems surrounding the rabbinic masters of the third century and beyond. The answer, I shall argue, has much to do with a larger struggle, within the early Byzantine culture in which later Galilean masters participated, over the relative primacy of the Sacred Book or its Expounder in the spiritual formation of literate intellectuals. But we shall delay that discussion for its moment. Oral-Literary Tradition, Oral-Performative Tradition, and Text-Interpretive Tradition Throughout this study I shall make repeated reference to the three terms enumerated in the heading to this section. For the sake of clarity, PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2003 - 2011. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/privacy_policy.html). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 20 September 2011
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