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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 let me explain them briefly here. By oral-literary tradition I mean nothing more theoretically profound than the end p.7 end p.8 handy definition proposed by O. Anderson for “oral literature” in general: “those verbal products of a culture which have pretensions beyond everyday speech.” 8 An “oral-literary tradition” exists wherever such verbal products with pretensions beyond ordinary speech are cultivated for preservation and sharing in public settings. The existence of an oral-literary tradition does not require an absence of literacy or writing. Distinct cultures can and do preserve a written literary tradition that is quite distinct from its oral-literary tradition. The traditions function at different registers of the overall culture and need not intersect, although it is quite common for written literary tradition to have an enhanced prestige over the oral, the latter defined as “folk culture.” 9 An oral-literary tradition exists in and through its public performances. Thus the oral-performative tradition is the sum of performative strategies through which oral-literary tradition is summoned from memory and delivered in diverse public settings. 10 In cultures without a written literature, the oral-performative tradition is, of course, the only setting for the sharing and embellishment of literary tradition. But there is more to oral-performative tradition than what is embodied in nonliterate societies. That is, cultures that preserve their texts in hand-copied manuscripts also transmit such texts primarily in and through an oral-performative tradition. Prior to the introduction of the printing press, as we shall see, texts in manuscript were routinely shared in oral-performative settings. “Reading” was primarily a social activity in which a declaimer delivered the written text to its audience. In such settings, the oral- performative tradition included not only the recitation of the written text, but also the inflections of voice, gesture, and interpretive amplification through which the performer gave audible life to the script. In the culture of Second Temple Jewish scribal groups, oral- performative tradition was a common medium for sharing written texts. This was true as well in later rabbinic circles, surely as far as the reading of canonical scriptures is concerned. At issue in much of this book is the degree to which this practice applied to the textual traditions designated as Torah in the Mouth. Was the oral-performative tradition of mšnh grounded in the performative presentation of texts that had been set down in written form? I will argue that in all likelihood it was. Finally, by the term text-interpretive tradition I mean a body of interpretive understandings that arise from multiple performances of a text (written or oral). They come to be so closely associated with public renderings of a text as to constitute its self-evident meaning. As a tradition, the text-interpretive material exists in the memories of both the textual performers and their auditors. The public readers deploy the text selectively in light of their judgment of their audiences’ capacities, while audiences supply it in their reception of the reading. 11 No text-interpretive tradition will ever be thoroughly exhausted in a single textual performance; rather, more or less of it will be rendered explicit according to circumstances. When (and if) text-interpretive traditions reach written compositions, however, they often tend to be exhaustive in their scope. Also they may generate further text-interpretive tradition to clarify their own obscurities. The rabbinic literature in general is one of the great monuments of text-interpretive tradition that continually folds back upon itself in an indefinitely sustained process of textual amplification that reaches no natural closure as long as the interpretive communities that transmit the texts remain intact. The Theoretical Program of This Study If these key terms are clear, I can now explain in greater detail the aim of this study. First, I hope to contribute a bit more discipline to the academic discussion of the nature and antiquity of rabbinic Oral Torah. This matter has long suffered from confusion, which is generated in part by lack of clarity regarding the distinct elements of oral tradition just identified. Let me now reconfigure these three elements in a slightly different conceptual structure. Fundamental to all that follows is the theoretical commitment to distinguish within Palestinian Judaism three distinct, albeit interrelated, dimensions of oral-literary tradition as they would apply cross-culturally. These are (1) the textual substance of the tradition (i.e., the oral- literary tradition per se, or the heritage of oral texts); (2) the social settings in which the texts are composed, stored, and transmitted (i.e., the institutional settings of the oral-performative and text-interpretive traditions); and (3) the ideological system by which the texts and their social settings are represented within the culture. 12 The key reason for drawing these distinctions is that doing so permits the possibility of distinguishing the praxis of oral tradition (i.e., its compositional, transmissional, and performative elements) from the ideological constructions that frame the cultural meaning of that praxis. That is, in Bäuml's terms: the way in which oral tradition is “fictionalized,” or represented to its audience as a cultural possession, has a social history of its own, distinct from that of the verbal substance transmitted within the tradition or that of the social institutions 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 within which the tradition is performed. The literary substance and performative dimensions of an oral-literary tradition have one sort of life; end p.9 the theoretical legitimations of the tradition as a distinctive cultural possession have quite another. These distinctions are often blurred by students of rabbinic oral tradition in particular who seek to puzzle out the connections between Second Temple Jewish oral tradition and the rabbinic tradition of Torah in the Mouth. 13 Many scholars, in my judgment, have tended to confuse the general contents of oral-literary tradition in Judaism (surely a phenomenon as old, in some cases, as ancient Israelite culture) with the rabbinic representation of this material as Torah in the Mouth (which, even on the most generous reading of the sources, may have emerged as a technical term no earlier than the turn of the Common Era). 14 We will see later in this study, for example, that rabbinic literature preserves many echoes of literary themes preserved in writings from the Second Temple period; but it does not follow that the perpetuation of some Second Temple text-interpretive traditions in rabbinic literature implies a similar antiquity for either the specific oral- performative tradition of the Sages or the substance of their oral-literary tradition. Simply put, Second Temple scribal communities certainly had their oral-literary traditions and text-interpretive traditions, and they mediated them in oral-performative traditions of various kinds. But all of this does not add up to the essential continuity of rabbinic Torah in the Mouth with all that went before it. Lacking is the crucial element of ideological self-consciousness. Let us restate this point by clarifying the relationships that link these three analytically distinct aspects of tradition of orally transmitted literature. The sine qua non of any oral-literary tradition is, obviously, the substance and form of the texts preserved by a given society and selected for continued transmission. With the exception of orally transmitted folktales, which seem to obey rather consistent thematic and structural principles across many cultures, 15 other orally transmitted literary genres are rather more idiosyncratic in their themes and degree of linguistic fixity. 16 The second necessary condition for an oral-literary tradition is the complex of social practices—the oral-performative tradition—that governs production and transmission of the texts. Distinct from textual substance, this aspect of oral tradition comprises the institutionalized, conventional settings for sharing the traditional texts or reiterating them in various sorts of performance. 17 Any oral- literary tradition must have both of these aspects to survive, since the tradition is by definition the sum of its texts and the processes that transmit them. Without a transmitting community the texts would die, and without the texts the community would have no collective memory. In contrast, the third aspect of oral tradition—the ideological—is not necessary to its existence. It emerges only in settings in which the distinction between written and oral-literary tradition has become crucial to some sort of social undertaking that distinguishes the bearers of the oral tradition from those who do not bear it. This needn't always be the case. But in historical societies as diverse as those that produced the Indian Vedas and modern Balkan oral epic, bearers of the oral tradition will develop a set of ideological formulations through which they conceive its relationship to other, especially written, elements of their literary culture. In doing so, they will also be thinking about the relationship of their own community to others with whom they share some common elements of literary tradition. The resultant ideological formations will constitute part of the rationale for sustaining the particular life of the community, even as they explain and defend the distinctive orality of the tradition. 18 In the literary culture of classical Rabbinic Judaism, the concept of Torah in the Mouth corresponds to this third, ideological, aspect of oral tradition. It emerged as the dominant ideological trope through which rabbinic Sages grasped the social meaning of the performative and interpretive dimensions of their oral-literary tradition. Conceived as Torah in the Mouth, the actual texts transmitted as oral tradition—the oral-literary tradition mentioned earlier—were correlated for theological, hermeneutical, and jurisprudential purposes with the written Scriptures inherited by the Sages from earlier Judaism and shared with other Jews (and, increasingly, Christians) beyond the rabbinic social orbit. As Torah in the Mouth, the second aspect of rabbinic oral-literary tradition—its text-creating and text-performative process —was constructed as the embodiment of a generations-long series of transmissions that linked contemporary tradents and performers to ancient founders. By establishing a link to past generations, however, the ideological construction of Torah in the Mouth also enforced a separation in the present—from other Jews and Christians who shared Scripture but who were ignorant of, or denied, the legitimacy of the rabbinic text-interpretive tradition that claimed to provide Scripture's exhaustive explanation. The Structure of Argument This study is, accordingly, an extended reflection upon the relationship of ideologies of orality to the material and social foundations of textual practices in Palestinian Judaism during the centuries in question. Part I, focusing entirely on the Second Temple period, unfolds in three chapters. end p.10 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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