Torah in the Mouth.pdf

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
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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
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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
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