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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Guentilla, and today we're talking with Muli vidas about the rise of Talmud. There's a story that often gets thrown around to explain rabbinic readings of Torah. There's a group of rabbis, and they're debating the meaning of a passage, the debates about if an oven is okay to use, if it's gonna be kosher. And three of them kind of think one thing, and one thinks the. The other and the outlier. He's trying to be persuasive, and he starts doing these miracles to show the others that he's right. So he has a tree fly, and he says, like, see the end of the tree flew? I'm right. He has a building shake. And again he's like, clearly, yeah, I'm right. A stream flows backwards, and eventually a voice from heaven comes down and agrees with our outlier. And when that voice comes down from heaven, the other three rabbis say to God, more or less, back off. It's not up to you. Torah is not in heaven. It's a human reading practice. It's one of those great stories. I suspect many people use it in class. But it can also be misleading. It can sound like the interpretations of the rabbis are on the same level as the Scriptures. By late antiquity, the two Torahs, the written and the oral Torah, have been well established. But just calling them the two Torahs can make it seem like they worked in the same way, with the same authority and with the same interpretive practices. Midrash, or the interpolation of Scripture, it started to apply to the teachings of the rabbis themselves, as if the authors of the Talmud kind of read the words of Genesis the same way they read the words of Rabbi Judah. Dr. Vita shows us, though, how misleading that can be. The Scriptures they ran as having a singular divine voice. The sages, though, however enlightened and worthy of study they were, they were individuated. They. They needed to be read as finite, disparate, unreconciled authors. They were, by and large, wise and good, but they were human. And the authors of the Jerusalem Talmud, they treated them as human. They treated their writings as texts, as bits of writing that could be misread or miscopied or something that even a great scholar had just never seen before. And they thought about citation. They thought about the kind of immortality that gets achieved in citation. They thought about the ethics of who gets cited and when to cite whom and they thought about the limits of knowledge, about how traditions actually get passed down and by whom and in what setting and why. Jews weren't the only ones thinking about attribution at this time. For Jews and Christians, reading scriptures did involve a process of harmonization, a process of what Dr. Vedas calls getting to one or making the whole text a kind of singular, coherent message. But like with human authors, with human authors, it's different. The Christian authors and the translators, like people like Jerome and Rufinus, they fought about, like, how best to translate a third century Christian named Origen. Should they make him seem more coherent? Like, should they edit their 3rd century author to fit 4th century orthodoxy? Or is the point to give readers a sense of what Origen would have said or what he's inspired the translator to say? Should translators make authors cohere with the present, or is the idea to allow differences to remain? Now Origen gets condemned twice, but he was still widely read in late antiquity. And so this emphasis on individuality and textuality on the way, you know, a bunch of individual people's opinions and lots of fragmentary writings make up the Yerushalami. It's a challenge to both the ways that many people have read the Torah. And there might still be an oral and written Torah, and of course, both serve serious sustained study. But Dr. Vitas shows us that they were read and interpreted in quite different ways. And once we see these differences, we'll start to understand both modes of reading better. Mooly Vitis is Associate professor of Religion and the Program of Judaic Studies at Princeton University. And we're lucky to have him with us today. So, Mooly, hi. Thanks for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you? How'd you come to write the book?
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Hi, thanks for having me. Michael. So, yeah, I'm a scholar of Talmudic literature, as you said. I teach religion and genetic studies at Princeton. I think the part of my interest that's most relevant for our discussion today is in the ideas and practices around textuality. So I ask how the ancient sages conceive of texts, how they read texts, how they compose texts. And I think the Talmuds or Talmudic literature or rabbinic literature broadly offers us an illuminating perspective on contextuality. First, because the sages themselves thought a lot about these questions, but also because the Rabbin corpus attests to a textual culture that both overlaps with and differs from our Western modern expectations of how texts work and what texts mean. So you asked about my, you know, how I come to Read this book. So my first book addressed the question. It was about the Babylonian Talmud, which is the. The more popular Talmud, the more canonical Talmud, we might have a chance to relate to it later. And I was asking there, what are the principles that govern the Bavli as a text? Why does it look the way that it does? But the Bavli is a Talmud, that is, it's an instance of the genre we call Talmud. And the genre itself derives from an intellectual tradition or intellectual activity, a discipline that was called already in antiquity, it seems, Talmud. So I was curious about the origins and nature of that intellectual tradition. What is it that makes Talmud as a discipline, a tradition, distinct? What was the significance of its development? And I knew that in order to answer this question, I had to go back to the Urushalmi, since the Rushami, at least as we understand it, traditionally, presents the earliest form of that tradition. So that's what brought me to this book, the project of getting what made Talmud distinct, how did it develop, and understanding that that has to be done by reading the Yerushalmi in comparison with the sources that came before it.
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Yeah, that's really helpful, thanks. At least the kind of traditional way of breaking down Rabbinic literature is that the Teneic period concludes with the completion of the Mishnah, and then the emeritic period involves kind of commentary on the Mishnah. I'm sure it's more complicated than that. It's not like everybody just agreed on what the MN Mishnah was, that it was like the authoritative book. But you argue that seeing the authority of the Mishnah as about the content of the book kind of misses the point that it has more to do with the kind of institutions promoting it and the kinds of the modes of study that it prompted. So can you tell us briefly, at least, like, you know, what was the Mishnah in late antiquity? And how did it go from being like a collection of teachings to something, you know, that called for commentary?
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Yeah, I mean, this is a process we know remarkably little about. And. And if you look at the medieval historians, for example, Rabbinic literature, they also struggle to explain it. So first they imagine that it's kind of like the Mishnah gets published, and then everybody comments on it. But the question is, why? So. So you have some scholars in the medieval period saying, oh, it's because the Mishnah is just so wonderful, everybody just becomes obsessed with it. But that doesn't quite work because they also comment on other texts and. And also it sounds so clear what made it so wonderful? And then you have this other idea that, oh, maybe when the author of the Mishnah died, then Rabbi Judah, the patriarch, died, there was a sudden decrease in intellectual capacity. All the sages became kind of dumb suddenly, and they had to. They didn't know what the Mishnah means, even though their immediate predecessors wrote it. So they had to come up with these commanders. And so I'm, of course, ridiculing these theories a little bit, but there's a problem here. And the part of the issue has been in defining the process itself. So we know that something happens, but what is it that happens? And a lot of the earlier emphasis, as you mentioned, was about legal authority. The idea was the Mishnah was accepted as an authoritative text. Right? And therefore it had to be commented on. But that also doesn't work because actually, when many scholars have pointed it out, when you look at the earliest generations of Amharic scholars in the Amharic period, they don't all accept the Mishnah as a legal text. Right? So as a legal authority. So what. The first thing we need to do is explain the process, and I will do it as briefly as possible. I think the process is a process that we can call textualization. So the culture in the Tenedi period is asking, what are the opinions of the rabbis about the law? What are the opinions of the rabbis about the Bible? What are the opinions of the rabbis? And about the world broadly in the Amoraic period? The question becomes, what does this specific verbal sequence? What does this specific text? What does these specific words mean about the world, the law, the Scripture? Right? So it becomes that there's. There's a turn to text, to rabbinic texts in order to understand the issue at hand that wasn't as prominent as before. And now the question is, okay, what led to this process? And part of the issue of understanding it is part of the problem in understanding it is orality. So the Mishv has become a fixed text, and other teachings seem to become fixed text, but they still are transmitted. It seems to be primarily in oral form. And one difference that it makes is that fixity and orality can go together. That's true. Like an oral text is not necessarily a flexible text, but at oral text, in order to become fixed, it's a matter of approach rather than fact. So if a book is written, if there's a book published that's written, its fixity is a fact of that object. Right? There is a book that you can. I don't Know, whatever, buy in a store or get in a library, and it's fixed. But when you have an oral text, right? In order for an oral text to become fixed, it's the decision of whoever is studying it to treat it as fixed, right? Because they could have changed it at any given moment. So that issue of orality is part of, for our purposes, one of lead scholars. So, for example, very prominently, Elizabeth Shanks Alexander suggested, wait a second, it's not that amore commentary is a result of the Mishnah being published as a fixed text. It's almost the opposite. A more commentary is what produces the Mishnah as a fixed text. Because if the amore commentators choose to say, oh, this is what this word in the Mishnah means, right, Instead of simply changing that word, right, or, or, or simply saying what they think, they are producing it as a, as a fixed sex. And I think that that idea really captures a lot, but it leaves us very. It lives, it is very poorly able to understand how everything of this comes about, because it's basically a cycle, right? There's a Mishnah, it produces a mori commentary, a mori commentary produces the Mishnah. And again, I think that there is something right about it, but it doesn't tell us how, how this cycle kind of emerges, how that whole framework comes about. So what I suggest in the book, in the introduction of this book, which follows other scholars such as Chaim Lapin and Yitz Landis, is that this process of textualization is part of an effort of centralization and institutionalization of the community of sages in the early century ce. And this process is led by one particular powerful family, the dynasty that would become the patriarchate, which is a. A dynasty with some resources, some connections in the Roman government. And they're using their influences, their money, their political power to promote a particular version of Judaism, of the rabbinic tradition. And one of the ways that they do that is by standardizing the curriculum around this text. And that creates this new framework where everybody has that text as a frame of reference. And now the question is, what does that text mean? How does that text relate to other text? It opens this whole new range of question, which are textual in nature as opposed to what we had before. And so that is what I think comes about.
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That's a really helpful kind of just set up there. And so part of this process of textualization that you get us into, it's not just the kind of cycle of projection and reinforced authority that comes with getting a Talmud that you've got a Mishnah, people comment on it, and then it becomes more authoritative because people are commenting on it. And when we zoom in on that, you give us these kind of two things to think about. One is individuation, and the second is fragmentation. Right. So individuation about kind of all of a sudden, the people in these texts, it starts to matter, did this person say it or did that person say it? So maybe we can kind of start with that. There's names in earlier rabbinic literature, but then the names, like, they. They mean something different in the Mishnah. So, like, what, What. What's the difference?
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Yeah, so this is one of the big claims of the. Of the. Or it is the big claim of the first part of the book, which is that there is a shift in what attribution means between the toic period and the Amoric period. So one way that I can sort of try to make this concrete rather than abstract. Right. Is to talk about. About citation formula. So we have the most common rabbinic citation formula, both in the Tanadic and a Moraic period, is Rabbi X said in the name of Rabbi Y. Right. So, you know, let's give the name. Let's say Rabbi Muli said in the name of Rabbi Mike. Right. What I found is that in the tenetic corpus, whenever we see this formula, the Rabbi X and Rabbi Rabbi Y, much like the real Muley and Mike, they could have known each other usually. Actually, Mike was the teacher of Muli. That is, the sighted rabbi was the teacher of the citing rabbi. And what that allows us to say is that this formula is basically saying that it's a way to establish the reliability of the teaching. It's a way to say, I actually heard this from this teacher in the Amhoraic period. Actually, when we find this citation formula, there could be a great distance temporarily, between the citing rabbi and a cited rabbi. So it wouldn't be Muli citing Mike. It would be Muli citing, I don't know, Momsen or somebody, you know, long in the past. Right. And obviously there the claim is not, I actually heard it from Momsen because I couldn't have. I heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody. But what I do by that is that the citation comes to identify a particular idea with a particular person to say that this idea originated with. When I say Momsen said X. Right. In modern literacy, I say, okay. I mean, this idea comes from Momsen. Right. And this means that there is a shift in the significance of what attribution means. Now, again, of course, it gets much more complicated and I address various complications in the book. But. But what I want to say is that essentially, I think Tanaitic literature is not so much interested in the history of who said what when. It is interested either in authority, as I mentioned earlier, I heard it from somebody, or which is something different. It can use the names as basically labels that for different degrees of stringency or different halachic methods. Right. So Hillel is always more lenient or almost always more lenient than Shammai. Right. But the Toic sages themselves are not so much interested in the history of how it developed. And we can see that, for example, when tonitic texts debate, what did Hillel and Shammai dispute? What was their dispute? Did they dispute about this detail or that detail? They don't cite any texts to support their opinion. They don't claim they have heard this or that. They don't argue about the interpretation of their words. What they do is they say analytically, it doesn't make sense that they would have disputed this. It doesn't make sense that it would have disputed that. Because that dispute, we don't agree with that. Right. So the approach is to some degree, much more philosophical jurisprudential than historical. A moraic text, on the other hand, are much more interested in this idea of who said what when and why. Right. And how does that relate to who they are, what their viewpoints were. Right. And so that is one of the big claims of this book, is that the rise of this individual as a key to understanding the content of what they're saying. And that is, I think, the shift.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's because in the earlier period, so I have it right, like the earlier period, it kind of doesn't matter who's debating what, because it's all going to funnel back into the same answer. They're still trying to get to one in the Henrietic period, whereas with the Mishnah, like, I don't know if you say today. Well, Jacques, like someone who just doesn't care about psychoanalysis just kind of like they put that in a certain camp and be like, okay, yeah, yeah, this is coming from this tradition. I know what to think about this tradition, which is different than if it comes out of, I don't know, some kind of different tradition. Tell me what's wrong with the analogy there. Maybe that's a way to clarify.
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So let me. I think that on the one hand, so there is a possibility which, like, say, Martin Jaffe, for example, thinks something like that is that basically it all comes. The rabbis thing. It all comes up to Sinai anyway. It all is just like kind of echoes of this divine revelation. We might have a chance to talk about it later because of a text I know that you like from the book. So. Yeah, and because of that, right? I mean, does it matter who said the rabbis are basically these conduits of this Sinaitic revelation? I think that that is true of some Tanaitic texts. It doesn't seem to be true of other Tanaitic texts because the toic texts do acknowledge innovation. They do acknowledge that the rabbis have arguments. Right. But I think that they conceive of these. The part about these arguments for the Teraim is not so much to trace it to an individual person. What's important is the substance of the argument itself. Right. What is important is how does that argument maps out in the different. How does it compare to another argument. Right. Whereas I think for the Amoric scholars, much more. There was some significance in the fact that it is Rabbi Akiva who said what Rabbi Akiva said. Right. That is the difference of orientation that I see. Yeah.
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Okay, thank you. Okay. So it's pretty common eventually to start talking about rabbinic opinions. Like that can mean like, in the Bible, it means like knowledge, right? Like the tree of knowledge of good and evil is that. But it comes to mean something like opinion. But it's like also a word you could use to talk about, like, the kind of food you like. Like, we're talking about like, preferences and tastes, right. It's not like facts or traditions so much, but like, as a reader, like, how do you. How do you suss out a disposition or a taste? Can you give us an example of how they're doing this?
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Yeah, if I can give a brief intro before the example. So, yeah, exactly. What you say is right, is that the word da' at transforms a couple of times in the period that is important for our discussion here. First, there is the biblical knowledge which you mentioned. Then already in the Tanaitic corpus, it comes to mean a range of personal, intellectual or mental properties, including taste, disposition, consent, opinion. Right. Like. Like, yeah. What kind of. What do you do with your food? What do you do when you're. If your wife cheats on you? Right. Like what. What kind of a. Of. Of an approach you have as a person of. As an individual to something. Right. And it's almost always individuals, but in never ever Internetic literature, it never applies to the opinion of the rabbis. The Tanadic text would never say this rabbi has this daat, right? Has this dia. But in the Talmud it says that hundreds of times. That is the common way of talking about rabbinic positions is to speak about the da or da' at of the rabbi, the atay in Aramaic. So my point in the book is that that shows us a different approach to what these positions are, right? They are not just words as they are talked about in the Tanadic period, but rather they express something of the da', at, that kind of like mental property, that kind of individual constellation, the self of the rabbi who says them. Now, most often this has to do with types of positions or preferences that we can say are like, you know, part of the intellectual realm. Are you more lenient or stringent when it comes to rabbinic law versus scripturally grounded law? Do you believe that prayer is the most important thing a religious person can do? That is often what this, that means, but sometimes it stretches beyond that. I get here to one of my favorite examples in this chapter, which is the question is, are you allowed to drink to fulfill the 4 cup drinking requirement at the night of Passover with wine that is cooked? Now, wine that is cooked is weaker wine, right? And so the question is, it's a legal question, right? There is an obligation from Tanitic literature to drink four cups of wine in Passover night. Are you allowed to fulfill this with cooked wine? And a rabbi by the name of Rabbi Jonah says you are, on which the Talmud comments, this Rabbi Jonah taught according to his Da' at or Da', a, right? It was right, because he once drank the four cups of wine Passover and had a seven week hangover. And basically, right, where the Talmud is not even implying, but actually saying explicitly is this guy can't hold his liquor, he's a lightweight. So that is why he ruled, right, that you can drink it with a weaker wine. That doesn't rule out the opinion, I should be clear, right? That doesn't come to, because this is part of the point of this book is that the human teachings with all their humanity become part of Torah, right? So because this guy had this body, right? And, and this reaction and this taste, right? He ruled a certain way. We acknowledged that humanity. But that doesn't mean that this doesn't apply for the law, right? And, and so, so, and, and the word of dot here is, is it's opinion, sure, but it is opinion that is much broader than our word word. What our word for opinion usually signifies, which, so it can mean here taste or inclination or nature, personal nature or something like that. Right. And that's what I think it means.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, that way of, like, bringing a kind of personal biography into a legal ruling. And it's not just that, like, you know, this guy couldn't hold his liquor. It becomes like a way of thinking about how to read these passages. Yeah, that's a great example. Okay, so, like, if kind of tends to show us like a through line in the midst of these contradictions. Right. Like, you say that sometimes the rabbis, like, they switch lanes. And you put this in a bigger context of the rise of these kind of textual tables and comparative readings that are going on in late antiquity. Some listeners might be able to picture the tables that Eusebius makes up that kind of lines up the stories of Jesus. So lying here isn't just like a metaphor, or if it's a metaphor, it's a metaphor like people really work with. And that leads you to another word that you focus on, the word chita. Can you tell us about this word and what commentators wanted with it?
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Yeah. So this is another one of these words that really changes meaning with the Talmud. And actually, this change of meaning is so influential that I think for modern Hebrew speakers, the Amoraic sense of shitta is a much more immediate one than the one than its original sense in the Tanitic text. So shita in modern Hebrew now would mean something like approach or system. Right. Like you can talk about the shitav of a certain philosopher. Right. Or shitati would be systematic. Right. But it means something like kind of a whole in which you can put various details in an intellectual organization. But in Tanaitic literature, before this Talmudic turn we're talking about, it means something like line, literally line on the page. Right. Like in a writ of divorce, the witness's signature should be two lines below the. Right. That is what it means. Right. I think the way that to connect them is. Yes, indeed, through the table metaphor that you mentioned. I think basically they are imagining these lines of ruling where you can kind of like put the columns or the rabbis. Right. I'm making movements with my hands that the podcast listeners sadly, cannot see. But imagine podcast listener, right? Like columns where the names of the rabbis are, and then the lines might be the different cases. Right. Or something like that. Right. Maybe it's also the other way around, depending on how you see it. And then sometimes if a rabbi doesn't rule consistently according to what you would expect from this comparison between him and the other rabbis, then he switches line. He rules like the other rabbi would in this case. Right. Not as he did. Right. So what we have here is a system that allows the Amharic scholars, change the meaning of this or use this term in a new way, to talk about consistencies and inconsistencies in the ruling of a particular sage, which is one of the things that expresses that individuality or individuation that I'm talking about in this book. But what was really interesting to me when I looked further into these passages of the switch line, the passages that talk about inconsistency, was to see the enormous effort that the Talmud spends to find inconsistencies when it actually doesn't need to. It objects to contradictions that aren't really contradictions. And sometimes it admits so. So, like, for example, to give very brief example, there's a place where Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish might say that the only reason that a vow is valid is because a certain term has been said, the term Nazarite ship, right? Or he might say that because he believes that aliases and aliases of things that you might abstain for, right? From. From make valid vows, right? And the Talmud at first says, wait, but here he rules this and there he rules from that thing, right? And that is the normal way of expressing these type of contradictions. And in that particular case, the Talmud admits, wait, actually he can do both. Why can't he rule it from one reason here and another reason there? And what I end up concluding in that chapter is that this whole effort of trying to find these inconsistencies is because of the general attempt to find consistencies, meaning the frustrated attempt to find consistency is what leads to this idea that, well, wait, here we don't find that consistency, even though it's not actually a contradiction, even though one could actually just rule for different reasons here and there in various cases. So. So the chapter ends with this idea that basically these passages which repeatedly say, oh, this rabbi is inconsistent here, there's this contradiction. Here they come to reinforce this idea that rabbis on the whole have these consistent distinctive profiles that you can identify by reading them. And it's part of this project of reading the sages as this diverse library of ideas that you can trace. And they are distinct from each other. They are mutually. There's like this rabbi's line and this rabbi's line and this rabbi's line, right? These schools, as it were. And so that's where that sheet hat term figures.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like the goal with the kind of that comparative stuff, one way to see it is that it's this, like, kind of reluctant defense of like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe they're contradicting themselves like this. But, like, you're showing. It's actually kind of. It's like the opposite almost. Right. There's a certain kind of value in grappling with these switch lines. I don't know if you want to
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A
add to that, but, yeah, basically, I think that if it was the former, you would have expected much more for the text to deal with actual contradictions. But it doesn't. Right. It doesn't actually. And it doesn't deal with places that you would think, oh, this is an embarrassing contradiction. It must be addressed. No, it's like, it. It really. It invents contradictions where they don't exist. Right. And. And you could have just, like, read that this rabbi's teachings and just, like, never thought, oh, there's a problem here. So I don't. And they also don't mind saying things like, oh, this rabbi just acted inconsistently with his own teaching. Right. Which you wouldn't expect if the issue was defense. But I think they are defending. Is not the honor of the rabbis and their consistency what I think they are defending? And is this project of reading, comparatively, because that's the project that's at stake.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like, a really helpful example of, like, what textuality really means there. Like, if what you're looking for is, like, the big idea, like, you can make the big idea work, but if what you're looking for is, like, the details of the text, then, you know, finding these, like, little things, like, that's. That's the magic. Yeah, that's. That's great. So if there's. What, like, there's no one way then to do citation, but there's probably, like, an ethics to it or like a decorum at least, like a. I don't know, like an expected way. Like, should you cite your own teacher? You know, what. What were rabbis, like, hoping to signal when they cite someone? Like, you know, like, we still do this, right? Like, and, like, across the Roman world and probably beyond, like, you know, being quoted was a kind of glory, or there was, like, a kind of immortality that comes with, like, being cited somewhere. And I, you know, But I don't know, maybe unlike today, I don't think there was a lot of hate quoting going on. Just quoting to show how stupid somebody was to post up against somebody. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but was there. I don't know, norms or expected behavior around citation.
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A
So it's really interesting that it actually doesn't come up so much. And one of the interesting parts of the book has been to see where it does come up. Right? And so we do have that one. I analyze one big passage about this ethics of citation and a couple of related passages in which we do find, for example, this idea of immortality quotation giving you immortality. It is unique both in the sense that nothing in Jewish literature before that quite has that, right? So you do find this idea in Greek and Roman texts, you find it in Egyptian texts, but you don't find it so much in Jewish literature before the Jerusalemi, and it's not so common even after, right? And what I think happens is that this idea does come up when there is this change in the sense of what attribution means, when it becomes. When attribution becomes part of what the teacher said, that is connected intimately with who he is as a person. Right? That's when this idea of citation as immortality comes up. And we find it very, very clearly there in the Rushalmi text. Right? But it's one of the interesting points of that text and just shows us how, because I think for most of us, we take that idea maybe not in its full sort of like, you know, mythological terms. We don't necessarily believe that teaching, that sedation gives us immortality, but we all understand why it's great to be cited. We all understand that we all, like, kind of maybe have an intuition that it gives us a certain kind of glory, or at least honor. And the Talmudic text is really struggling with that. So. So, for example, after it presents this idea, oh, why? It says, why would this firstly ask, why would this rabbi even want to be cited? Which from our perspective is a very funny question. Of course he wanted to be cited. And then it gives this answer, oh, he wanted to be cited because that gives him an everlasting life. And then the Talmud asks, well, what's the benefit of that? Which from our perspective is a hilarious question. What do you mean, what's the benefit of everlasting fame? Right. That the benefit is everlasting fame. And it comes up with this, like, very weird answer that, like, but. But a beautiful one, that it actually gives you not just everlasting fame, but physical continuity in the grave. So it says that whenever I cite somebody who is dead, a dead teacher, his lips are moving in the grave as I cite him, right? So there is this kind of like actual physical benefit to this, to this thing. So. So All I'm trying to say, right, is that, is that what this and that and similar passages show us is that ideas that we really take for granted, right? It's not that they don't appear in the Talmud. They do appear there, and they do signal this, like, change towards individuation that I trace throughout the book. But they also show us how much we can't take them for granted and how much. And how much work it took to sort of consider them and integrate them into a rabbinic tradition that didn't originally have them.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No. So can we just talk about beautiful texts? Can we talk about my favorite passage in the book? It's this passage where Rabbi Yahshua, he's at a bath and he realizes that his grandchild is about to read from the Torah, and he just, like, gets up and he runs to the reading. And someone's like, what do you do? Like, why are you running? There's not even a rule against, like, missing an afternoon prayer. Like, what's going on here? And he says, anyone who hears the Torah portion from his grandson, it's as if he heard it from Mount Sinai. I just. I don't know. I love that passage. And, but, but, like, you know, aside from me loving it, like, what do we actually learn from. From that passage?
- [35:47]
A
So I love that passage too. So in the context of the chapter, right, that bit is cited in contrast with the passage we just talked about of the rabbi wanting everlasting fame. And I argue that we have that there, right? If we have there a sense of individual innovation that allows a sage to be recognized forever as a person with whom the teaching originates, right? In this passage that you just now talked about, there is a different view. So the individuals are not recognized for their own contribution, but rather as chains in a long or links in a long chain that echoes divine revelation that begins with Sinai. So there's no place here for divine individual innovation. Rather, the grandchild is simply reading the Torah. He's reading the text of the Torah. He learned how to read the Torah from his father, who learned it from his father, who is the bathing rabbi. And the pleasure of the grandfather is in successfully carrying over this divine revelation. It's not in his own innovation, right? So there's a pleasure here, the continuity. And you do become, in some sense, immortal. You're participating in this big axis of mythological time. You're becoming a part of this living, never dying tradition, but not because you innovated and you're recognized by name because he's not going to be recognized by name, not because of your recognition of individuality, but because of the way you contributed to this large project of continuity. And how we see that, we see very much that it differs from that previous passage that I mentioned, because immediately after that passage, we have another teaching where one of the sages says, actually, you don't even need to cite necessarily the. Say, like, just cite either the first one, you know, or the last one, you know, whatever. It doesn't matter, because it all goes back to Sinai anyway. Right. And so. So the idea of that teaching is that there isn't really importance for that contribution that comes at the foot of the teaching that you just cited. Right. I mean, so we have your two different approaches to what citation means.
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like, we still have, like, I don't know, like, rabbi as transmitter of tradition, even at the same time as we're starting to get kind of increasingly like rabbi as individual opinion. Haver. Yeah. You know, so maybe we can get to the second part of the book, too. So the first part was about kind of individual voices, and the second part is about fragmentation. So it's not like with rabbinic literature. So let's see. Like rabbinic literature, it does care about individual voices, which is kind of different than scripture, where scripture kind of has these, you know, scattered. You know, like, modern scholars talk about it as a library, but rabbis will read it having one voice. But another way that rabbis kind of aren't like Scripture is that, like, basically every sage is presented as, like, having all of scripture ready to hand, but they're also, like, constantly learning about education and teaching from other rabbis. And, like, in a text, that's fine. You know, like in the first part of the book, you know, individuals are fragmentary, and in the second part, texts are fragmentary. But the way that Yer Shalomi presents it, everybody knows all of scripture. Yes. And everyone kind of just knows, like, what they know about rabbinic teachings. We talked with Catherine Hesser a few months ago, if listeners remember that, and she made this point that, you know, like, this process of, like, learning about new passages and new teachings from different rabbis, that would have been happening all the time still. Right. That people, you know, no matter how much you. You knew, you probably didn't know everything because new stuff was constantly coming in and different people had different stuff memorized and. And stuff like that. And that's not totally your point here, but you're interested in the kind of various collections of sayings that different people had kind of bouncing around in their heads. Like there wasn't one one Talmud. There were lots of little ones. So can you tell us about this idea of the scattered Talmud and maybe give us an example of that?
- [40:00]
A
Yeah, so maybe I'll start with the example or with a story and move from there. So this chapter opens with a story that I think is very beautiful of this rabbi by the name of Rabbi Abahu. He's usually based in Caesarea, in Caesarean and the coast. And he's coming to Tiberius, which is actually which really the center of Amorite scholarly activity. It's, you know, no shade on Caesarea, but it's not quite Tiberius. And the students of Rabbi Yohanan, who is like kind of the main teacher there, see that his face shine. The face of Rabbi Aba is shining. And they say, oh, he must have found a treasure, because that's usually that, or it seems excessive drinking or raising pigs are things that the Talmud thinks make your face shine. And so they're like, okay, he must have found a treasure. And Rabbi Yohanan says, no, no, no, he probably heard a new piece of Torah. And he comes to Rabbi Ba' U and he says, what new piece of Torah have you heard? And Rabbi Ba' U says, actually, it was an ancient Tosefta. Right. So one of the things that's interesting is that it's not just that the students are wrong, that he found not a treasure, but, you know, a piece of Torah. But also Rabbi Yochanan is wrong because what he's hearing is not necessarily something new, but actually it's new to him, but it's ancient. Right. And what's remarkable about that is that that kind of discourse we never find with the Bible and rabbinic literature. Right. The Bible is already known. There's no sense that are parts of the Bible that we might discover there. Isn't that because there is something very disconcerting about that. Right. What do you mean? We don't have the full divine revelation, but they are very comfortable actually with saying this about rabbinic tradition and saying that even the greatest teachers might not know very important stuff. It's interesting to compare that story. There's a very similar story in Epiphanius about Joseph, who's a convert to Christianity from Judaism. Andrew Jacobs wrote a lot about this, and it also takes place in Tiberius. And it's also about. At first we think, oh, he found a treasure or he's going to find a treasure, but actually what he finds is ancient versions of the Gospel, including the Hebrew Matthew. Right. So there are these similar stories that are told, except in the Talmud. It's about rabbinic teachings and it's a oral, which is interesting. What I argue in the chapter is that even though this idea is disconcerting, this idea that, okay, knowledge is fragmentary, it's random, we might have a very, very partial sense of the rabbinic tradition. Even though that idea is disconcerting, the Talmud actually thrives on it in various ways. It thrives in a sense that it celebrates a drama of discovery very regularly. Right. So there would be a. A question, a doubt. Right. It would be like, are we allowed to talk about Torah in the bathroom? And there's a debate and we don't know, and then suddenly a tradition is discovered. We are allowed to talk about Torah in the bathroom. Right. Or it would use it for various kinds of interpretations. Like, wait, why did this rabbi make that argument? That does a sound work. Oh, we can analyze what are the sources that he had available. And according to that, understand that question or that comment. Right. So my point is that there is this projection of the scattered Torah and like fragmentary knowledge, not everybody knows everything. Even the greatest people might be ignorant of very important teachings. But instead of that being source only of worry, it actually becomes a motivator of scholarly energy and literary energy in the text.
- [43:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you talked too about emendations, like, about revisions, corrections. Can you tell us kind of like what that practically that means. And then what kind of, like, rabbinic discussions help them talk about this? Kind of like, I don't know, broader reading practice.
- [44:11]
A
Yeah. So amendations is another thing that, like, the rabbis don't do with the Bible. They don't amend the biblical text. Right. But they do amend the Mishnah quite a lot. Right. And in many ways, their amendations are similar to what we know from classical literature and from our own practice of imitation. So, for example, they are paratextual, meaning they are transmitted with a text rather than correcting the text itself, which is how we know about them, because if they just corrected the text, we wouldn't know it's an emendation. And that's a very interesting middle position because on the one hand, it corrects the text, it says the text is wrong, but on the other hand, it keeps transmitting the wrong text. And that allows for discussion of the text. It allows for discussion of the emendations. So in that sense, imitation is something. Actually, it's a really interesting phenomenon. It's not a natural phenomenon. It's not like, oh, it doesn't emerge naturally from. From the fact that Text exists. So it's one of the ways that we can see that the rabbis are. Are at least in some sense, participating in the broader philological culture of their time. But there are also some really interesting differences, and one of them is in the form of this paratextuality. So, for example, it. We are used to footnotes, right? Or the scholarly apparatus. And in antiquity, you had the signs, the sigila, like the obelis, or those kind of signs that people would use to correct copies. This is a culture that's primarily oral, so the emendations are marked as these kind of comments. So, for example, we have a story about a rabbi saying, yeah, recite it this way, but say that this doesn't actually belong here, right? So, so you recite the text, and yet you. But you also comment orally that it is wrong. But a more fundamental difference, I think from the modern period, which is interesting, is that modern scholars tend to amend text from a historical perspective. That is my goal. If I'm amending whatever, I have the text of the Iliad, right? And I want to say this line is wrong. What I mean to say by that is that that line, it doesn't belong to the original form of the text or whatever version of the text that I'm trying to restore, right? I'm trying to restore a particular version of the text in a particular historical moment. But the rabbis, they do not amend the text for this reason. We know that in part because they never support amendations with extant versions. Rather, they amend the text in order to have a more precise version of the text, one that actually fits their very exacting reading of methods. So if there is a redundant part of the text, they're going to pluck it out in that sense. Actually, they're not so different from some ancient scholars who amended Homer because they wanted it to be more beautiful. But they do that as part of their own hermeneutic strategies of reading the mission, for example, in this very exacting way.
- [47:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, okay, so we've got some sense of kind of individuation. We got some sense of kind of what fragmentation looks like. And, you know, 48 minutes into the podcast, I think we're ready for, like, the big claim of the book, right, that. That the rabbis really do read. Kind of reading rabbis is different than reading Scripture, right? So can. Can you give us, like, the other side of that, though, just to make sure we. We really understand the force of the claim? Like. Like, how. How are these reading practices similar? Like, how are they reading Scripture, similarly to reading the rabbis.
- [47:42]
A
Yeah. So if I may, I can speak up. The eighth chapter of the book really addresses this question. That is, there are these grand big similarities, very important similarities between the way that the rabbis read the Bible and the way that the rabbis read rabbinic teachings. And one of the interesting things about these similarities, which I'm not in any way taking away from, is that I think that at least sometimes, even though we see the same practice, it actually means something very, very different. And one example of that is the example of recontextualization. So what I mean by recontextualization is that the rabbis famously read the Bible very atomistically. That is, they read it on the level of the verse, sometimes on the level of the word, not necessarily considering what the context of this verse is. Right. The idea here being that you can read divine language in a way that isn't necessarily limited by the particular sequencing of the text as you. As we have it now. And we don't know exactly what premises this biblical method is based on because the rabbis don't really tell us their principles, either in Midrash or in Talmud. We don't really, really know what their principles are. But scholars have suggested that it's about the kind of multiplicity of meanings of divine language, the potency of divine language, something like that. If it rests on a premise. Right. In the rabbinic teaching realm, what I show is that actually it can sometimes be premised, predicated on a very different notion of the text. Not that the text is perfect, as is the case with the Bible, or with the Bible rather, or that the text is very well designed, as is the case with the Bible, but rather because actually the text is faulty. So, for example, we have cases where the sages suggest, no, no, no, this teaching was not said about the context in which it is currently transmitted, but about another. And what they seem to be saying is that the teaching has been misplaced, that somebody put us the teaching or that the teaching was. We have examples. Teaching is truncated. It wasn't transmitted with its full context. Right. So we have here a similar practice, meaning to read, to suggest that the context of the text is different than the context that we had until now thought it was, either with a Bible biblical verse or with the rabbinic teaching. But even though it is the same practice, it actually derives from a very different notion or predicated on very different notion of the text.
- [50:25]
B
Yeah, yeah. So like, like, I don't know, with. With like Genesis. Rabbi, like, you can talk about, like, why does the Torah begin with a bet. And like, and, and like you can get into like really fine grained details of this and different rabbis will say different things about it. But from here you write like, like what you're not going to do is say, oh, that was just a mistake, right? Like that's, that's like, that would be cheating in a way that like, like you could say like, well, no, there was actually like an emendation process in a kind of Talmudic passage. Is that like, that's part of the idea there?
- [50:57]
A
Yes, exactly. Like when the rabbis interpret scripture out of context, they would not say, oh, this verse was misplaced here. Right? That's not the idea. The idea is, on the contrary, the Bible is so well designed that you can make interesting connections and transcend the original context of the teaching, but there's never the sense of a mistake. Right. Whereas with rabbinic teachings we definitely find that idea.
- [51:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, sometimes modern readers will argue that the rabbis tried to read the written and oral Torah the same way, but it was just like, just like the contradictions were just too much. Like the weight of the multiplicity and the fragmentation just like made it impossible to do what they actually wanted to do, which was that kind of harmonizing principle. And so like the idea would be that the kind of harmonizing principle works for scripture. And they tried really hard, but it just doesn't work with Talmud mood. And, and that's like the thing you just really think is wrong. So, so why is that wrong? And what does it, what does it miss?
- [51:51]
C
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- [52:21]
A
I, I think what it, I think it misses two things. First, I don't, I mean, I think as we know from, you know, many, many decades of biblical criticism, there are pretty substantial contradictions in the Bible. And so, you know, and, and it took quite a bit of effort to harmonize them. I don't know that necessarily. There's a big difference here in the degree of Contradiction. But also I think what it misses is that in those parts where the Talmud talks about such things, right? So, for example, in that part of the argument in the book that you're referring to, I talk about an argument that Talmud makes that is marked with the phrase two reciters. And the idea is that what seems at first to be to belong to one literary source or attribute it to one sage actually is two alternative formulations. Maybe like, you know, you can say two versions, right? Contradictory versions of the same teaching, or they come from different individuals. So, for example, if you have one teaching in the Mishnah, and there's contradiction within that teaching, right? You can say, oh, it's two different reciters, right? You have to, like, separate the teaching. Like, almost like source criticism, right? To say. To say, like, okay, these are two different. And when the Talmud does these things, right, there's very often an alternative way of interpreting the text that the Talmud itself cites. Right? And it never seems to mind that method on its own terms, right? It might say, okay, well, there's a better way to interpret it. Right? But that method itself is not a problem for it. Right? And so to me, it seems to suggest that when these approaches were applied to rabbinic teachings, they were not applied because they had no other choice.
- [53:59]
B
They were.
- [53:59]
A
They had other choices, and they sometimes chose to do this and sometimes not. But there wasn't something necessarily nefarious or problematic about applying these approaches on their own, and they've, in fact, become, like, integral to Talmudic interpretation. Then one last thing I would say is that many of these methods are very much connected to some of the other major methods of interpretation that are explored in this book. So, for example, the idea of fragmentation and individuation is very much close to this, like, source criticism sort of thing, right? So the idea is that it seems to be an integral part of Ptolemaic hermeneutics, rather than a failure of it or something that it does so reluctantly.
- [54:41]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. Okay. So, you know, we're getting to the end, so maybe we can back up a little bit and see kind of big picture. I mean, the book is pretty focused on the Yerushami, which is often, you know, like you said, like second fiddle to the Bovli. And the Bavli is like. It's like, full of uncertainty and dialogue in a way that Jerusalem Talmud, it can read as more interested in certainty, or at least it's like, I don't know, it's like, more practical. But the Babli it's full of stories of people reasoning together. And the Ushalmi is kind of, I don't know, it's like interested in what the tradition says. But I don't know, how does your reading kind of shape the way you think about both Talmuds?
- [55:18]
A
Yeah. So I think that what you're saying here is a fair characterization of the, the reputation the Yerushalmi has, and I think that that reputation is based on some fair and correct observations about the difference between it and the Bavli. Right? So, for example, the Bavli tends to have these very elaborate long discussions that don't actually arrive at a conclusion because it is interested in justifying every position in the text. So you would have two contradictory positions and then it examines them from every exhaustively from various different angles, and doesn't like coming up with one is right, one is wrong. On the contrary, for the. The Bavli likes to come up with. Both have been, both have been defended, right? That is, it's not everywhere in the B. But that's the tendency. The Rushami tends to be a shorter, like, less elaborate, and B. It likes conclusions, right? It does like. It, it likes, it likes actually even conclusions that, that are expressed in, in a way that might seem even jarring to us because it likes to have objections without an answer in the end, which is basically, oh, so the other position is right, if you have an objection to that. Right? So, so now. But what I don't end up agreeing with and what I think emerges from this book is the idea that all this means that the Rush army is practical, because what the, the type of scholarship we find in the Rushami is so elaborate and interested in questions about what texts mean and how do texts relate to each other and who said what. Right. And how does this relate to this? What this other rabbi said, how does this relate to other teaching? And all of that is not a practical thing. It doesn't actually necessarily give you the law. Right? We see, for example, the law is sometimes expressed through emendation when actually you could just say, no, this is the law, not that. Right? So the point here is that we have a scholarly apparatus that is actually substantive on its own and shows intellectual interest on its own, rather than the kind of bottom line of the law, even though it does. But. And so it's, it's not so practical, but it's impractical in the way that the Bavli. That, that and the Bavli is impractical in the way that the Bavli Is the Bavli, Sorry, the Bavli is impractical in a way that the is and. But the Rushami is impractical in the way that the Bavli is and is not sometimes.
- [57:40]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They both have their kind of impractical moments, even if they're slightly different in how they do it. Yeah, that's great. Did the book, I don't know, like, even more big picture, did it change the way you thought about how rabbis related to other intellectuals in late antiquity? Like we talked about, like Jerome and Finest and Origen in the intro. But kind of stepping even further back, did it change the way you thought about how rabbis were like those other figures that we know about?
- [58:10]
A
Yeah, definitely. So. So I think. I mean, one thing, you know, that I can say very immediately is that a lot of the oppositions that have been drawn between rabbinic scholarly culture on the one hand, and Greco Roman scholarly culture, including these Christian figures on the other hand, of course, there are differences there, too. We're just talking very. In broad generalizations for a moment. Right. One, some of the main differences that have been drawn between them are really. Should be really reconsidered when we also include rabbinic teach, the study of rabbinic teachings. So one, you know, easy example we already talked about is emendations, right? The rabbis don't amend the Bible at all. Christian scholars do it all the time. Classical scholars amend their own texts all the time. So if you just focused on Midrash, which is what has happened until now, you would say, oh, the rabbis just like, don't practice emendations. Whereas amendations were common in other scholarly calls, cultures. Once you include this culture that I'm talking about, the study culture of forbidden teachings, which is just as elaborate, right. And just as prominent, then you come to think of it in a different way. So that's about the similarities. And they might lead us to say that the rabbis were more participating in the broader intellectual culture of the time than we had realized. I'm not sure that I'm quite there yet. I think that there's, like, more research to be done for us to establish it, because there are also a lot of differences. But I think the other thing in building on these differences, another thing that it allows us to do is to consider what are some of the conceptual distinctive features of each of these scholarly cultures and how they approach these practices. And I think one of the better, but actually more difficult examples in the book is in the discussion of textual variants. So what happens when you have two variants of the same texts. And this is a problem that Christian scholars deal with, for example, when they deal with the Gospels, but also manuscripts of the Gospels. And one of the things that I show is that, you know, say, in modern philology, modern scholarship, we tend to separate what is called a higher criticism from lower criticism or source criticism from text criticism. Right. And the idea is that there are certain differences that we are willing to see is kind of like differences of composition. So how does Matthew and Luke each transmit different versions of Jesus's teachings or deeds? And when we find these differences, we don't amend one according to the other.
- [60:39]
B
Right.
- [60:39]
A
We don't say, like, oh, let's amend Matthew because Luke has a different version, but if we have different manuscripts of Luke because our goal, at least in standard text criticism, which has been replaced for some good reasons, but at least in standard textual criticism, if you have different manuscripts of Luke, you might say, oh, this manuscript is right. Let's amend the other manuscripts. Right? What I try to show through the comparison between Origen's ideas that are basically what I just said now to the rabbinic ideas of textual variance is that the rabbis don't think of it this way. They don't have that distinction between faulty copies and the original differences, the higher criticism kind of thing. For them, it's all versions, and all of them can be justified. And Lear, they don't like to say that a version is erroneous. They really hesitate to do that. Right. They like this kind of abundance of textuality. And every version is fair game to ask, well, what did the person who shaped this version think and what were their opinions? How do they see this teaching? Right. So the comparison between the Greco Roman intellectuals and specifically also the Christian intellectuals allows us to see sort of the assumptions of both of them much more clearly.
- [61:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. What about the way, like, rabbinic scholarship and modern scholarship relate? Sometimes the way rabbis read seems, I don't know, like a million miles away from contemporary philologists or historians or even rabbinicists. But the book concludes by suggesting there actually might be more in common than we think. So, like, I don't know, how's your time like with this kind of emeritus scholarship? How does it help you understand the humanities more broadly?
- [62:22]
A
So maybe I'll take it as two separate questions, if you don't mind. Right. First talking about the similarities and then about the. So one of the things I found is that much like those similarities we talked about with Greco Roman literature, actually a great deal of the distinctive features of modern Talmudic scholarship, which is Derived largely from, or in many ways from European philological traditions, modern historicist European traditions. Actually, many of the ideas come from the Talmud, right? Or, or, or, or at least have counterparts in the Talmud. So, for example, identifying anonymous positions in the Mishnah, right. That is something that Talmud is obsessed with because of this move towards individuation that we talked about earlier. And it's something that is major part of modern Talmudic source criticism when Epstein, for example, practices it. Right. Another thing is the emendations or comparison of variant text. So all of these are hallmark methods of philology, but we actually find them in the Talmud practice, of course, with various differences and different goals, but practice nonetheless. And one of the things that I suggest in this book is that it allows us to consider, you know, both the opportunities and limitations of what this philological methods allows us to do. But then when you, you know, when you talk about what, what it made me think about the humanities, I mean, there were, there were a lot. There's a lot there. This was actually one of the major motivations for this book is to understand different humanistic culture in a way that is, is similar but different than ours. And, and maybe just to conclude, I can go back to one of the ideas we started with of textualization. And I think that one of the things that the humanities mean for me is when we address an issue, if it's the law or life or climate change or relationships, humanists, unlike other fields of knowledge, we tend to comment it through what other people in the past commented on it, what, how other in how other human beings who formulated their, you know, text or material culture or however you want, how they perceived it. And much like those that textual turn of the Amoric period. And what I think it allows us to do is by listening carefully to what those others said, and not necessarily by accepting what they said is authoritative, but on the contrary, realizing how it presents struggles and limitations and the very specific individuality of these people. Right. We end up extending our community beyond time and not just listening to what, how we think of things and how we are approaching things, but actually what earlier generations have thought of these things. And that allows us to recognize our limitations, their limitations, our fragmentary nature, their fragmentary nature. But from that fragmentary, something else comes up, right? And that I find very gratifying and beautiful. And that is one of the conclusions I've had in the book about this sort of more humane letters as the Talmud presents them.
- [65:50]
B
Yeah. Yeah, it's beautiful. Thank you. Okay, last question. What are you working on? Next,
- [65:57]
A
my hope is I'm trying to understand. This book allowed me to see some of the features of the rabbinic study of rabbinic teachings that were very distinctive in its earliest stages. I think that something big changes in the Abbasid period, early Islamic period, that informs how we still read these texts today in a very different way from the Talmud. So one example, for example, is we think of rabbinic literature as a series of texts, eventually written texts by text. I mean, here in this case now, works these kind of compilations. The Mishnah, the Sifra, the Josefta. The Talmud doesn't. The Palestinian Talmud, at least, doesn't think of them this way. And the question is, how does this view emerges? Right. And there are other differences. Is the very distinction between the Tanaitic and Amoric period as we know it, it's not quite formulated this way in the Talmud. When does it emerge? So I'm trying to understand how these major organizational principles of the rabbinic corpus as we know it emerge either in the Bavli or slightly later in the Abbasid period and writings that we call the Geonic texts.
- [67:17]
B
Great. Oh, that sounds great. Yeah. Come back on and talk to us about that when you're there. All right, Mooli, thank you so much.
- [67:23]
A
Thank you, Magin. This has been great. Thank you.