Torah in the Mouth.pdf

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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 seems clearly to have been formulated with this Mishnah's text in clear view (e.g., T. Par. 3:6, T. Par. 3:11–12A–C, T. Par. 3:12–14A–D). Our main conclusion, however, is particularly relevant to our attempt to situate the extant versions of the Mishnah and the Tosefta in relation to a hypothetical oral-performative tradition that preceded and was filtered through the written editions that have survived the Middle Ages. I have argued that Mishnaic and Toseftan narratives regarding the rite of the red cow draw selectively upon a preredactional narrative tradition that provides the foundation of their own narrative renditions. I have carefully isolated materials of each chapter that testify to such an anterior tradition. Divergence of the Toseftan narrative from its Mishnaic counterpart is not a result of Toseftan departure from the Mishnaic text in its redacted form; rather, it is more likely end p.123 to stem from a retrieval of a different performative version of a narrative tradition that circulated in rabbinic communities prior to the redaction of either the Mishnah or the Tosefta. The named authorities who comment on this narrative, in both the Mishnah and Tosefta, are all figures of the mid to late second century. They thus provide evidence that the orally circulated version was known from some point after the destruction of the Temple (at which time alone it would have made sense to compose the narrative at all) into the early second century. 69 Summary The results of these explorations of Mishnaic composition can now be summarized. While the received texts of the Mishnah indeed reflect deep roots in a rabbinic culture of oral performance, that “orality” is thoroughly “literate” and, indeed, “literary.” Thus the textual practices that produced the Mishnah included a crucial role for writing in all aspects of the text's life—composition, editing, and transmission. It is beyond the purview of this discussion to make pronouncements about the circumstances of pre-rabbinic traditions that may have entered rabbinic discourse, but it is likely, despite the well-attested rabbinic perceptions of the basically oral character of the tradition explored in previous chapters, that written versions of rabbinic teaching did exist at the earliest traceable origins of the tradition in the first century or earlier. 70 As a rendering of rabbinic tradition, therefore, the Mishnah is hardly a linear culmination of early oral tradition now breaking into written textuality for the first time. Rather, at any stage of Mishnaic tradition we can presently isolate, we are confronted with an “orality” which is at the same time a reflection and a creation of writing. Surely, if the most compact and memorizable elements of Mishnaic tradition, such as those examined in this chapter, reveal the impact of the scribal pen, we must conclude that the carefully orchestrated constructions represented by most Mishnaic tractates likewise will have been deeply shaped by the written word as well—a written word, however, closely in touch with aural requirements and oral rhythms of diction. Similarly, our study of M-T Parah disclosed precisely how richly the written recording of narrative draws upon anterior contexts associated with performative deliveries of the textual tradition in its living forms. We must conclude, on the basis of the studies here, that, by the opening decades of the third century CE, rabbinic disciples encountered as oral tradition the performative embodiment of memorized rabbinic manuscript. We shall likely never learn precisely how closely the oral recitations conformed to various written versions, but what is clear is that the continuous loop of manuscript and performance had no “ground-zero” at which we can isolate at a distance of many centuries an oral text or tradition as fundamental. On the one hand, memorized texts mastered in oral training and performance provided the substance of what might be inscribed for written preservation. On the other, the literary techniques developed in the composition of written documents came to shape the formation and performance of orally generated tradition. Within such a milieu, written texts enjoyed an essentially oral cultural life, subject to all the vagaries of oral transmission as they were memorized and end p.124 transmitted in face-to-face performance. Similarly, texts of oral exposition and inquiry were imprinted for transmission with the rich stylistic models developed within written tradition. In the next chapter we will continue to explore this interpenetration of written and oral registers of literary discourse, but the focus will shift from the compilers of Tannaitic traditions into coherent compilations to the Galilean Amoraic communities whose work of preserving and transmitting compilations such as the Mishnah and the Tosefta yielded the Palestinian Talmud. There, finally, we will find the oral- performative setting in which the classic definitions of Torah in the Mouth received their inspiration. end p.125 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 7 Torah in the Mouth in Galilean Discipleship Communities Martin S. Jaffee Written Texts and the Ideology of Orality The compilation of Tannaitic tradition into coherent curricula of learning was recognized by the mid-third century as a kind of watershed in the history of rabbinic tradition. The self-consciousness, among the Palestinian and Babylonian heirs of the Tannaitic tradition, of standing at the far end of a yawning gulf of authority, is best exemplified in the way the heirs distinguished themselves from those who had bequeathed them the rich heritage of the Repeated Tradition. The Aramaic term tanna (tn') as a designation for those Sages who “repeated” the oral-performative traditions of rabbinic torah and framed them in such compilations as the Mishnah, is itself of mid-third-century coinage. 1 And those who coined it situated themselves in relation to Tannaitic tradition not as its repeaters, but rather as its expounders. Their task was not the creative one of articulating the Repeated Tradition; rather, it was to master and develop it, to expound rather than to legislate. Thus by the middle of the third century, we find references to specific masters of tradition who are designated 'amora'im, from the Aramaic root 'mr (“explain”). 2 Such Amoraim contributed to the Tannaitic tradition not only their interpretations of its laws, but also the interpretation of its significance as an oral-performative tradition. Indeed, in the Galilean centers of Amoraic learning in the third and fourth centuries, we detect an important debate about the implications of the vague references in the Tannaitic tradition to a torah transmitted solely by word of mouth. At the center of this controversy stood the paradox that the oral traditions of the Tannaim were known to exist not only in the memory but in written recensions. The Galilean Amoraim included influential figures, such as Rabbi Yohanan b. Nappaha (d. 279), who seem to have held that, until recent times, nothing in the oral tradition inherited from the Tannaim had ever been written down. 3 Therefore, as a matter of principle, the Mishnah and other redacted curricula of Tannaitic traditions were themselves to be transmitted solely in the context of a memorized performance. Such written copies as may have existed were to be banned from use. This end p.126 was only one view, however. We will also see that, in at least one fourth-century circle of disciples gathered around Rabbi Yonah, the ban against introducing written texts into the Sages' study circles seems to have been ignored. Thus even among masters who were themselves committed to the discipline of Torah in the Mouth, there was no univocal position on the propriety of preserving that Torah in written form. This chapter probes this Galilean Amoraic preoccupation with the form of preserving Tannaitic tradition. 4 The terms of dispute are clear. Virtually all parties assumed that the recitation of study texts must be from memory in the context of an oral performance. At issue was whether written recensions of such study texts could be produced and consulted by students in the course of preparation. As we shall see, this apparently minor preoccupation with the appropriate media for transmitting rabbinic learning was bound up with a larger, more crucial issue that lurked behind it: the nature of the torah master as a religious authority and the sort of teaching relationships he should cultivate with his disciples. Thus Galilean Amoraic reflection upon the nature of Torah in the Mouth was not merely a disinterested, theoretical exercise in amplifying certain Tannaitic themes about the connection of the Tannaitic Sages' teaching to Sinai. It raised an ideological issue upon which rested the legitimacy of the entire Amoraic pedagogical system and, with it, the larger project of religious discipline promoted by these masters. Perspectives on the oral nature of rabbinic tradition surface in a variety of Palestinian compilations that reached some sort of preliminary shaping between the fourth and sixth centuries. For our purposes, however, pride of place will be given to the Talmud Yerushalmi, which appears to have reached something like its extant form from about 375–400 CE. 5 As a collection of literary texts distinct from Mishnaic tractates but organized around their structure, the Yerushalmi represented a major innovation in fourth-century Galilean rabbinic literary culture. 6 By selecting the Mishnah text attributed to Rabbi Yehudah the Patriarch as its organizing set of textual cues, the Yerushalmi's compilers drew an analogy between this prestigious recension of Tannaitic tradition and that of the paradigmatic subject of commentary in Judaic culture, Scripture. 7 As the textual substratum of an extensive running commentary, the Mishnah was by definition torah, analogous to the Torah of Moses, encased like Moses' text of the Torah in a discursive web of text-intepretive tradition transmitted by Sages. The Yerushalmi's discourses are dotted with literary representations of the Amoraic social and institutional settings in which Tannaitic textual traditions of diverse sorts were mastered, discussed, and transmitted. Such representations yield much information regarding the modes of study pursued among the Amoraic proponents of Oral Torah. They also provide us with abundant materials that can help to 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
Page 1 and 2:
Torah in the Mouth, Writing and Ora
Page 3 and 4:
Page 5 and 6:
Page 7 and 8:
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
Page 19 and 20:
Page 21 and 22:
Page 23 and 24:
Page 25 and 26:
Page 27 and 28: Torah in the Mouth, Writing and Ora
Page 77: Torah in the Mouth, Writing and Ora
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141 and 142:
Page 143 and 144:
Page 145 and 146:
Page 147 and 148:
Page 149 and 150:
Page 151 and 152:
Page 153 and 154:
Page 155 and 156:
Page 157 and 158:
Page 159 and 160:
Page 161 and 162:
Page 163 and 164:
Page 165 and 166:
Page 167 and 168:
Page 169 and 170:
Page 171 and 172:
Page 173:
show all

Torah in the Mouth.pdf

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?