Exiled to the Academy: Scholastic Refuge in Talmudic Stories

• In Event: Potpourri: Mysticism and Rabbinic Literature

Abstract

The Babylonian Talmud refers to Jewish settlement in Mesopotamia as the exile. Aware of standing at a temporal and geographical remove from both Biblical Judea and the Roman Palestinian birthplace of Rabbinism, they display noticeable anxiety about the inferiority their location implies. While many Babylonian Rabbis responded to this anxiety by articulating their superiority over their Palestinian peers, their sense of exile remains, at times channeled into the ideology of the large scholastic centers which defined their religious lives.
That the academy was seen as place of exile is especially evident in late Babylonian retellings of earlier Palestinian stories of Rabbis fleeing from persecution. Two in particular, the story of Shimon Bar Yochai's 13 year sojourn in a cave and Rav Kahana's escape from Persia to Palestine are each retold and expanded in the Bavli. Unlike in earlier versions of the tales, the later versions rework the stories as exiles to settings which are decidedly scholastic in nature. Additionally, they provide insight into how these scholars saw the relationship between their places of study and the rest of the world.
This paper will also address the all important issues of cultural mingling, borrowing and influence, angles through which these stories have long been analyzed by scholars. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal has analyzed Bar Yochai in the cave in light of parallels from the Egyptian Monastic tradition, whereas Daniel Sperber and Geoffrey Herman have shown how Pahlavi tropes permeate every stage of the Rav Kahana story. Connections between scholastic practice in the Talmudic academies and East Syrian schools like that of Nisibis abound as well, especially in Adam Becker's work. The lens of exile and banishment through which these stories will be read will highlight the ways in which the authors of these Talmudic narratives adapted both their own cultural patrimony as well as shared cultural material to their own ends to help make sense of their own place in the world, choosing to see their own academies as places of exile.

Author

• Noah Benjamin Bickart, John Carroll University