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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 other initiates (T. Demai 2:10–12). It is taken for granted, moreover, that Associates may live in households with undisciplined Jews, either blood relatives or apprentices (T. Demai 2:15–19, 3:5, 3:9). And most surprisingly, it is even understood that Associates and undisciplined Jews might, under the proper circumstances, join together at times of rejoicing over food and drink (T. Demai 3:6–8), as long as proper precautions have been taken to ensure the ritual fitness of the refreshment. There are many obvious similarities between the Mishnaic and Toseftan descriptions of the Association and the early Christian description of Pharisaism. It is tempting, following Chaim Rabin, to suppose that the term “Association” was used by Pharisees among themselves to describe initiates into their own inner circle. 67 Yet even if we grant the possiblity that the Association is nothing other than a Pharisaic fellowship, some cautionary points must be made. First, the Toseftan and Mishnaic materials are ambiguous about the relationship between members of the Association and the group known as Sages. Among the composers and transmitters of this material, the groups were seen as overlapping but not identical. In the Mishnah, for example, the mid-second-century authority Rabbi Yehudah includes among his own requirements for membership in the Association the proviso that the applicant “has served [the Sages] in the House of Study” (M. Demai 2:3). From his point of view, then, participation in the collective life of learning among the Sages should be part of the training for Association membership. But at this point not all Associates have come under the umbrella of the Sages. He would like to remedy that situation. Significantly, the Mishnah represents the anonymous disputants of Rabbi Yehudah as disagreeing with him regarding this criterion: “They said to him: These [additional criteria, including service in the House of Study] are not part of the procedure [for membership]” (M. Demai 2:3). While Rabbi Yehudah would knit the Association more tightly to the group of Sages, his colleagues argue for a greater distinction between the two groups. The Tosefta, for its part, seems closer to the position staked out in the Mishnah by Rabbi Yehudah, even though he is not cited in its discussion (T. Dem. 2:13): 1. One who comes to accept upon himself the discipline of an Associate—even if he is a disciple of a Sage [tlmyd km], 68 he must end p.58 state his acceptance [through a verbal formula]. 2. But a Sage [ km] 69 who holds a place in the learning community (yšybh) need not state his acceptance, for he already did so when he took his place. 3. Abba Shaul says: Also: a disciple of a Sage needn't state his acceptance. Furthermore, others can declare their acceptance before him! 70 The three rulings explore the contrast between the situation of the disciple of the Sage and the Sage himself regarding membership in the Association. The assumption is that the Association is a group which Sages and their disciples may join. Rulings 1 and 2 point out that the Sage, by virtue of his teaching role, is granted automatic entry into the Association, while disciples are required to make a formal declaration of intent to abide by the Association's discipline. Abba Shaul (3), a late first- to early second-century figure, dissents from the first ruling, granting the disciple equal status with the Sage regarding membership. The Mishnaic and Toseftan passages indicate that the relationship between the Association and the Sages was a live issue from about the turn of the second century (Abba Shaul) into its second half (Rabbi Yehudah), a generation or so after Pharisaism had ceased to exist as a distinct political and religious community in Jewish Palestine. Surely this is not a stretch of time so vast as to totally confuse memories of late Second Temple sectarian fellowships. Yet if the Association of the Mishnah and the Tosefta ultimately had its roots in Second Temple Pharisaism, neither the Mishnah nor the Tosefta assumes that Pharisaic Associates were by virtue of that fact also Sages. Indeed, if anything, we detect a tendency to conceptually disinguish the Association from the Sages as the second century continues. 71 Finally, and most germane to the larger purpose of this chapter, is the utter absence from these descriptions of the Association's discipline of any mention of the source of its rules or the nature of their authority. The foundation of the Association's tithing and purity rulings are never linked to any specific biblical source or ascribed to the authority of an orally preserved legal tradition. Moreover, the texts are vague on so crucial a matter as whether the Associate's discipline stems from the traditions cultivated by the Sages or stands substantially independent of that tradition. If the Sages are a society distinct from the Associates, it is at least plausible to suppose that they linked themselves to divergent lines of tradition. The very capacity of our texts to imagine a distinction between the Sages and the Associates suggests, in fact, that the sources of the Association's discipline were conceived to be independent of the larger tradition cultivated among the Sages. The Sages of the Mishnah, in short, did not imagine their intellectual or communitarian ancestors to have been Pharisaic participants in the Association. This negative result regarding the primary focus of this study has further implications as well. Neusner's studies of the history of Mishnaic law showed, long ago, the root of many rabbinic legal ideas in prerabbinic and conceivably Pharisaic milieus. 72 It is futile to argue against 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 some degree of continuity between the substance of Pharisaic legal and text-interpretive tradition and the substance of rabbinic halakhic thought in its earliest periods. But the continuities of substance, however suggestive they might be, are not evidence for continuities of social identity between the two communities. On the basis of rabbinic sources, it is impossible to show that the Sages had a long-standing historical understanding of their own roots in ancient Pharisaic communities. Indeed, were such an understanding current in the second and third centuries, we might have expected it to be cultivated by Palestinian Sages under Roman hegemony as yet further evidence of their connection to a prestigious pre-70 community discussed in the widely read works of Josephus. The absence of such memories in end p.59 the Mishnah and the Tosefta suggests that it was simply not a significant element in the larger rabbinic image of the past—or at least that such memories were deemed unworthy of preservation. We have noted, however, that such connections begin to be cultivated in the Tannaitic and Amoraic traditions preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, bypassing the earlier Palestinian Talmud. It is indeed likely that the editors of the latter, working as they did under Christian political domination in late fourth-century Palestine, would have had little incentive to develop or cultivate memories of Pharisaic connections that had slender basis in the received traditions of the Mishnah and its associated texts. But Babylonian Sages living among Christians in a society governed by Zoroastrians may well have found some value in exploiting Christian perceptions that the Sages were heirs of the Pharisees, just as they enjoyed circulating unflattering stories about Jesus. 73 In any case, the Talmud Bavli's interest in either Jesus or the Pharisees is so slim that anti-Christian polemic hardly serves as the sole explanation for their circulation. Ultimately the Babylonian traditions linking Sages to Pharisees do not yield to a simplistic ideological explanation. And these traditions have little bearing at all on the historical question of rabbinic origins. Summary This chapter has examined a variety of sources often cited as evidence for a Pharisaic ideological commitment to the transmission of an orally preserved and transmitted text-interpretive tradition. In each case, the sources have proven to be far more ambiguous than many historians have commonly represented them. Clearly, Pharisees preserved customary practices, including a ritualized concern for preservation of purity, that they conceived to be mandated in the Torah of Moses. 74 Such may be said of the Yahad as well, who, as we saw in the previous chapter, grounded the authority of communal disciplinary rules in prophecy rather than in ancestral oral tradition. 75 In contrast to the Yahad, there is little doubt that such customary practices were transmitted in Pharisaism with the understanding that their authority was grounded neither in the exegetical brilliance of living teachers nor in the inspired utterings of contemporary prophets. Rather, their authority was vested in the venerable traditions of ancient teachers received from the past and transmitted with accuracy into the future. Here the Pharisees may indeed have had some disputes with the prophetic self-understandings of their Qumranian contemporaries. We may surmise, moreover, given what seems to be virtually universal practice among other scribal communities of Second Temple times, that Pharisaic scribes and their students had a memorized fluency in the scriptural text as well as an extensive mastery of the orally mediated text-interpretive traditions in which it was carried. Presumably, they expounded the scriptural text in oral settings of instruction as did all other Jewish groups. So, like any scribal community of the Second Temple period, the Pharisees would have borne their scriptural texts within a rich tapestry of oral-performative interpretive tradition. But did the Pharisees—in contradistinction to every other scribal community of Second Temple Jewish Palestine—hesitate to write down the results of such instruction or otherwise insist that the results had always been transmitted orally end p.60 since Mosaic times and must so remain? Our only surviving reporters with a plausible claim to personal knowledge of first-century Pharisaism—the apostle Paul and the historian Josephus—say nothing about this. And none of the sources before us has suggested that anyone held this view of the Pharisaic conception of tradition earlier than the third or fourth century CE, when rabbinic masters of the Oral Torah began to find their own institution mirrored in images of the ancient past. The most we can say is that the Pharisees, like other Second Temple communities invested in scribal practices, are likely to have enjoyed a richly oral and aural experience of written texts, particularly those of Scripture. But unlike the case of the Yahad, whose own writings have revealed clues about the actual study practices that mediated textual knowledge, there is nothing produced within Pharisaism that might guide us to a richer knowledge of this crucial community's experience of its own text-interpretive tradition—and, I must add, nothing produced by interested bystanders. 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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