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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 contextualize the Galilean Amoraic society of learning within the larger nonrabbinic cultural settings in which that learning thrived. Such contextualization is, in fact, the primary contribution of this chapter. We shall explore ways in which the Amoraic controversy over the validity of written versions of learned tradition echoed themes that preoccupied other Gentile learned societies in late Roman and early Byzantine Galilee. We will attend first to ways in which the preparations for oral declamation in the third- to fifth-century rhetorical schools might illumine literary phenomena common in the Yerushalmi. One wide-spread end p.127 preparatory exercise in such schools is particularly illuminating, for it was designed to produce disciplined oral variants of written sayings of famous teachers. If we bear in mind this model of oral transmission—in which a written source underlies a series of memorized variations—it will become possible to isolate within the Yerushalmi hints of a similar mnemonic method among the Galilean Sages. The following discussion lends further support to the view that writing played more than an episodic role in the transmission of Tannaitic traditions within the circles of Amoraic tradents. The use of written sources in Amoraic learning, we shall see, is likely to have been far more widespread than was acknowledged among the Amoraim themselves; it had, in fact, a diverse impact on the presentation of textual material within the Yerushalmi. In illustrating this claim, I offer two studies of textual variation in the Yerushalmi—one within the genre of homiletics, and the other in the genre of halakhic recitation. These suggest that, in each genre, the nature of textual variation is consistent with the use of written texts as the basis of rhetorical discourses in which versions of the memorized texts are cited from memory. 8 These textual studies will prepare us for the second major task of this chapter, which is to move the question of rabbinic oral and written tradition from the pedagogical to the ideological level of inquiry. Precisely as Amoraic teaching method continued to make use of written sources, Amoraic theorists of tradition grew increasingly insistent that the oral nature of the tradition as a whole not be exhausted by the orally delivered, mnemonically managed method of its daily performance before teachers and other students. Drawing upon and elaborating themes we have found already in place in Tannaitic midrashic compilations, they maintained that the torah received from Sages had been unwritten since its earliest disclosure at Sinai. To commit Tannaitic halakhic teachings to writing would be nearly equivalent to destroying them as torah. The primary architect of this viewpoint, Rabbi Yohanan of Tiberias, will figure prominently in the discussion, even as we trace the echoes of his position in later Palestinian compilations beyond the Yerushalmi. This latter inquiry, like the pedagogical one that precedes it, benefits from a contextual approach. We will, therefore, draw parallels between—and distinctions among—the Amoraic communities of third- to fifth-century Galilee and other contemporary philosophical or religious communities grounded in close discipleship to explicators of venerated texts. The Amoraic dispute over the efficacy of writing, I claim, drew upon and contributed to a larger controversy that plagued diverse circles of religious discipleship in antiquity. At issue, for both the Galilean Amoraim and their contemporaries in philosophical schools or monastic circles, was the precise role of face-to-face encounters in the shaping of disciples. Where, after all, was the real text of instruction—in the written word or in the living presence of the teacher? The Galilean Amoraic embellishment of the Tannaitic perspectives on oral tradition were framed to answer this question decisively in favor of the teacher. The Mnemonic Basis of Greco-Roman Declamation Of particular importance for study of the oral and written foundations of rabbinic tradition is the educational setting in which its texts were mediated. While historians have for some time recognized the similarity of rabbinic educational methods end p.128 and institutions to those of the surrounding Greco-Roman environment, 9 the relevance of the Greco-Roman material for interpreting the symbolic roles of writing and oral performance in rabbinic culture has yet to be fully explored. Some aspects of Greco-Roman rhetorical education in particular may help us to think about the role of oral and written texts in the education of rabbinic disciples. 10 The rabbinic movement of Roman Galilee was not equivalent in all respects to a rhetorical or philosophical academy, yet an important body of recent scholarship shows that it bore important functional similarities to such schools. 11 Like the training offered by Sophists, rabbinic training bore a strong scholastic orientation, focused on guiding young men in the mastery of a literary tradition whose values they would personally embody. Like these men, rabbinic students were preparing in many cases for lives of public service in political, judicial, or ecclesiastical institutions. Finally, like the students of the rhetorical schools, many of those who studied in the rabbinic bet midrash would make their professional mark beyond it through skilled, effective public speech. As we shall soon note, such similarities extended beyond the institutional settings themselves; they are apparent as well in traits of literary style and substance. In third- to fourth-century Galilee, non-Jewish political and social elites committed the advanced education of their male children to professional practitioners of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition. This tradition was available in two primary forms. The older of these, just 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 professional practitioners of the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition. This tradition was available in two primary forms. The older of these, just beginning a long, slow decline from the heights of its second- and early third-century dominance of Greek and Latin literary culture, was the tradition of classical literary education fostered by the rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic. 12 The younger, beginning a path that would lead it to dominance in the fourth and fifth centuries, was the tradition of Christian preaching, teaching, and exegetical scholarship fostered by the Church's growing cadre of priest-intellectuals. 13 Sophistic or Christian, rhetorical education was preparation for a life of public service. And such a life—as a lawyer, academic scholar, or other public official (in Christian circles, as a functionary in the Church hierarchy)—demanded skill in elegant, persuasive, oral address. What made an oral presentation elegant was its ability to cite or allude to well-known classical texts in the process of the speaker's development of his own thought. The orator's persuasive power was in part bound up with the weight of classical diction he could support without apparent effort; it was also dependent upon the apparently spontaneous organization of fresh ideas into well-known and easily recognizable patterns of presentation and argument. The psychological pressure of the rhetorical address was, in fact, the subject of some sardonic humor. As Philostratus notes in his Lives of the Sophists: “[The Sophist, Polemo,] . . . on seeing a gladiator dripping with sweat out of sheer terror of the life-and-death struggle before him, . . . remarked: ‘You are in as great an agony as though you were going to declaim.’ ” 14 This rhetorical terror, it seems, proceeded from the insistence that something new be said within forms of speech venerated by centuries of literary tradition—and that it be said in such a way so as to appear to come from the top of one's head. This illusion of effortless public performance was facilitated by an education that stressed the rote memorization and recitation of written texts of diverse kinds. Homeric texts or those of the great dramatists, for example, had to be summoned accurately end p.129 and on cue in order for one to appropriately set off a particular turn of thought. Speeches of the Greek orators, such as Demosthenes, were memorized and performed as a prelude to the analyses of the structural principles that provided them their power. Moreover, teachers of rhetoric would commonly make available to students written copies of their own oral discourses for study. All of this training in memorizing the written word repaid itself in the characteristic posssession of the trained orator—the capacity to deliver, at length and with captivating effectiveness, a memorized composition without resorting to written mnemonic cues. 15 Textbooks on rhetoric, produced between the first and sixth centuries in Greek and Latin, are useful sources for illustrating the relation of written and oral discourse in rhetorical training. These works, called by the generic title of Progymnasmata, amply illustrate the intertwined nature of written texts and oral discourse. In them we can see how memorized written literary sources nourished the education of orators, as well as the ways in which the mobilization of memorized written texts in oratory reconfigured those texts into fresh patterns. 16 The illustrations in this chapter are drawn from the ways in which the authors of Progymnasmata instructed their readers in the nature and use of one of the most common literary forms of Greco-Roman tradition, the chreia. Written collections of chreiae, which circulated widely, constituted the basic store of wisdom and values that public speakers could assume they shared with their audiences. Not uncommonly, a single chreia might be ascribed to more than one authority, as the same text became naturalized in traditions with differing intellectual lineages. This malleability of transmission is part of the testimony that the circulation of a chreia in written form was only one aspect of its textual life. The chreia as a cultural possession was experienced in oral presentations of artistic speech. As described by Theon of Alexandria, a first-century Sophist commonly considered to have composed the first rhetorical textbook, the chreia is “a concise statement or action which is attributed with aptness to some specified character or to something analogous to a character” (201, 17–20). 17 The main business of Theon's introduction is to flesh out this spare definition with the analysis of numerous examples. Among them is the following, ascribed here to Isocrates. Its evaluation of the relative importance of parents and teachers will figure in our discussion at a later point: “Isocrates the rhetor used to advise his students to honor their teachers before their parents, because the latter are the cause only of living, while teachers are the cause of living nobly” (207, 1–5). 18 Much of Theon's discussion is concerned with typological analyses of various chreia-forms. These are distinguishable from each other by, for example, varying emphases on indirect discourse as opposed to direct discourse, privileging of action over discourse, the kinds of situations to which the hero of the chreia responds, and so forth. Of interest from the perspective of understanding the oral life of the written chreia, however, is Theon's careful exposition of various exercises by which orators may appropriate the text of the chreia, working it orally through a series of grammatical and rhetorical transformations. The foundational act of this performance is the mastering of the memorized text itself well enough to “report the assigned chreia very clearly in the same words or in others as well” (210, 8–10). 19 Upon this basis, the budding orator proceeds then to a series of revisions of the text. end p.130 The simplest of these is an exercise in restating the memorized text in terms of number. In the case of the following chreia, “Isocrates the 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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