A Text in Search of a Method: Where is the Talmud in the Scholarship on Jewish Antiquity?

• In Event: Assessing the "Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research": Ancient and Medieval

Abstract

The Babylonian Talmud is the culminating masterwork of rabbinic Judaism and the central and defining text of the traditional Jewish curriculum. Yet a survey of 7 decades of the Proceedings of the AAJR, turns up only a handful of articles devoted to the Talmud, highlighting its precarious status within, and fraught relationship to, the enterprise of academic Jewish Studies. Natalie Dohrmann has already observed the same pattern in a century’s worth of issues of the Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR 100:2 (2010) 193-6). Echoing Dohrmann, we may ask why scholars of Jewish antiquity publishing in the PAAJR, most of whom possessed traditional training in Talmud, chose to channel their scholarly efforts into the text of the Hebrew Bible, the social and political history of the Second Temple period, Hellenistic Jewish literature, liturgy, targums, and philological and historical researches into rabbinic literature that pointedly did not engage the substance of talmudic discussion and debate. Certainly, the lack of critical editions of rabbinic texts and the poor prospects for producing the same posed an impediment, but this paper focuses on two additional factors: the scholarly valorization of what were perceived to be original, and therefore culturally authentic, moments of text creation (the biblical period) over commentary (post-biblical literature), and the difficulty of applying analytical tools whetted on classical texts to a sui generis work like the Talmud. Unlike the Bible, which had found a place in academic studies some decades earlier, and Hellenistic Jewish historiographic and philosophical writings that yielded more readily to existing canons of analysis, the Talmud was a text in search of a method. A sea change was presaged in the 1957 issue of the PAAJR, with the publication of Simon Rawidowicz’s "On Interpretation." This unusual and stirring call to abandon the prejudicial distinction between text and commentary in favor of a paradigm that viewed all textual production as creative “interpretatio” invited a deeper engagement with Talmudic content, an invitation answered in fits and starts over the next several decades.

Author

• Christine Hayes, Yale University