Reinventing Yavneh in Sherira’s Epistle: From Pluralism to Monism in the Light of Islamicate Legal Culture

• In Event: Methods and History in the Redaction of the Bavli

Abstract

Rabbinic law is often presented in the literature as a jurisprudential alternative to centralistic and monistic theories of the law, echoing instead a pluralistic and decentralized legal model couched in the founding myth of Yavneh. Whether the pluralistic ethos of rabbinic law emerges already in tannaitic literature or only in the Babylonian Talmud—a matter hotly debated in recent years—by the time of the closure of the classical rabbinic corpus, rabbinic law was undoubtedly perceived as a touchstone of pluralism, multivocality, and polysemy, an image bequeathed by the rabbis to posterity.
In my lecture, I seek to problematize, stratify, and complicate the pluralistic legacy attached to rabbinic law, by focusing on a very different account of Yavneh from the Abbasid period, which was permeated by a theory of legal monism and a rhetoric of consensus, unanimity, and centralized authority. I will center on a close textual examination of the Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon in the light of contemporaneous Islamicate rhetoric concerning consensus and unanimity (Arabic ijmāʽ; Middle Persian ham-dādestānīh) of the jurists and the nation at large. Using Cover's theory of the reciprocity of nomos and narrative in general and the interplay of jurisprudential theory and constitutional myths in particular, I argue that Sherira’s theoretical adherence to legal monism, a position carefully crafted against the backdrop of the pluralistic ethos of the classical rabbis, was couched in an innovative retelling of the founding mythical moments that constituted rabbinic Judaism: the rabbinic gathering at Yavneh and the codification of the Mishnah some one hundred and thirty years later. Not unlike some of his Muslim and Zoroastrian contemporaries, Sherira sought to project his monistic jurisprudence onto a reconstructed myth of origins.

Author

• Yishai Kiel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem