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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 At the close of this first section of this study, a single point should be emphasized. Wherever we look in the scribal communities of Second Temple Judaism in Palestine, we find a busy engagement with sophisticated written works of epic scope, and a richly developed heritage of interpretive insight and orally mediated tradition. We find reading practices linked closely to public ceremony and instruction in which oral communication was the primary medium of textual knowledge. But we find virtually no shred of interest in the orality of the oral- performative literary tradition as such. As we saw in chapter 1, the human voice was linked ideologically to the prophetic or divine origins of great books, establishing the authority of the contemporaries who mediated that primordial, authorizing voice in their performative recitations. But where tradition was perceived at all, its oral character went unregistered. For such Jews, Torah was orally delivered and aurally received, communicated from mouth to ear in syllables laid forth in written works. But there was as yet no “Torah in the Mouth.” end p.61 end p.62 This page intentionally left blank. 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 Part Two Oral Tradition and Early Rabbinism The Spoken Word in an Ideology of Tradition end p.63 end p.64 4 Tannaitic Tradition as an Object of Rabbinic Reflection Martin S. Jaffee The End of Scribalism and the Emergence of Tradition A century and a half elapsed between the Roman defeat of Palestinian Jewry in 73 and the compilation of the earliest rabbinic literary texts in the early third century. Two major wars—the rebellion of 66–73 and the bid for renewed independence in 132–135—along with their attendant economic and demographic dislocations had radically changed the face of Palestinian Jewry. First-century Palestinian Jewish society had been centered in Judea, its climate of opinion shaped by such contending groups as priestly and scribal elites, cultic societies of the sort represented by the Yahad and Pharisees, and politicized followers of one or another messianic claimant. But the third century offered a different picture. The depopulation of Judea encouraged richer Jewish settlement in the Galilean hills, expanding urban life in what had once been a cultural backwater. 1 The later efflorescence of Palestinian Jewish culture reflected in rabbinic literature and other archeological evidence was, however, still in its nascent period. Intellectual and cultural elites had yet to fill the vacuum left by the departure of traditional shapers of thought. Priestly families seem to have retained influential social positions for a time, despite the loss of their primary cultic function. 2 But High Priests and Sadducees were by now the stuff of garbled historical memory. Similarly, Pharisees survived as hazy figures in narratives of antiquity, while the Yahad had all but vanished in the collective recollection of the past. Most influential followers of the Messiah, Jesus, had come to define themselves as a community beyond Judaism. Scribes, however, remained as copiers of scriptural texts and the necessary documents of public life. They served large settlements of Jews centrally located in the Galilee of the Land of Israel and throughout Mesopotamia. And among them were small circles of wisdom teachers and their disciples, whose titular use of a common form of respectful address, rabbi (rby, “my Master”), would ultimately distinguish them from other sectors of Jewish society. 3 Precisely the way in which the rabbinic movement formed within the power vacuum of post-70 Jewish Palestine, the social composition of the groups who collectively end p.65 came to call themselves Sages, the identities of the figures who played a central role in the formation of the rabbinic community—all these are subjects of continual speculation among historians of early Judaism. 4 I shall not contribute to this speculation here, but there is one small point that we must observe, since it has a central bearing upon the particular way in which the earliest rabbinic literary sources portray the oral-performative tradition cultivated among the Sages. The destruction of Jerusalem meant, among other things, the end of the central focus of scribal literary culture in Jewish Palestine. The scribal profession, of course, had long been pursued beyond the framework of the Temple economy and education, as the scribal activity in the Yahad attests. Nevertheless, as long as the Temple stood, it remained a fundamental hub of scribal culture, in terms of which dissident groups marked their ideological differences through articulate scribal productions. The destruction of the Temple did not put an end to scribal culture: the social functions of scribes beyond the copying of books, such as notarial services, ensured their continued usefulness and thus the continuity of a professional identity. But the close association of scribal skills with priestly birth or service to priestly communities and their ideologies seems to have been sundered. The Second Temple period's common literary representation of the scribe—as the effective voice of the ancient prophets recorded in the texts of ancient revealed books—fell into decline. It was replaced by a more mundane appreciation of the scribe as a technician performing an essential, but ultimately mundane service. 5 Scholars have long observed in the earliest rabbinic literature a marked decline in the religious status accorded the priesthood. 6 That this fate befell the scribe as well seems to have been overlooked. Rabbinic traditions compiled by the early third century know of some Sages who are scribes, 7 and on rare occasion even refer to the Sages collectively as scribes. 8 But whatever role professional scribes might have played in the formative decades of the rabbinic community, by the early third century they seem to stand at the outskirts of the rabbinic group rather than at the institutional or ideological center. This marginality is captured in the trenchant observation of M. Sotah 9:15: “Since the day of the destruction of the Sanctified House the Sages declined to the level of scribes and the scribes to the level of 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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