This is the final essay in a review forum devoted to Vidas, The Rise of Talmud. Access the full forum here.
First, I want to express my gratitude to Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Maren Niehoff, and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, as well as to the other reviewers at the original SBL panel (David Stern and Shai Secunda), for their generous, critical, and insightful comments about my book. This kind of engagement is an author’s dream. I am also grateful to Todd Berzon, who chaired the panel, and to Krista Dalton, Yitz Landes, and James Redfield for organizing it; a double thanks to Dalton for publishing this discussion in Ancient Jew Review.
Towards the end of her comments, Kattan Gribetz perceptively focuses on a theme that is not an obvious central claim of the book, but which nonetheless gets to the very reason it was written: the convergences between scholarship as it was practiced by Amoraic-era sages and modern, even modernist Talmudic scholarship. In Kattan Gribetz’s words, the book is “blurring the boundaries” between two traditions that have often been sharply distinguished. It documents not only substantial similarities in method (alongside considerable differences, of course), but also the way that modern scholars––Epstein, Albeck, Weiss, Halivni, Friedman––used Amoraic scholarly analysis or terminology as an inspiration or legitimizing charter for their own work.
For me, tracing these convergences had two further functions. The first, which is explicit throughout the book, concerns what they allow us to see about Amoraic scholarship. The significance and distinctiveness of Amoraic scholarship on rabbinic teachings were missed in two different ways by different strands of modern scholarship. Scholars working in Talmudic philology paid close attention to Amoraic discussions of attribution, transmission, textual divergence, and composition. But because such discussions were in some ways similar to their own, these scholars did not see them as evidence for culturally or hermeneutically specific approaches, but rather as natural responses to texts; they engaged with them for their utility in the modern philological project rather than as objects of study on their own terms. From the other direction, scholars who emphasized the differences between modern and rabbinic notions of textuality often treated such aspects as Amoraic commentary as marginal, inconsistent, or even an aberration from an otherwise “pre-modern” approach to texts.
The second function of tracing these convergences–which, as Kattan Gribetz points out, is more implicit in the book– is how they can help us think about our own work as scholars. First, by underlining the hermeneutic specificity of ancient Amoraic “philological” practices––distinguishing different sources, comparing variants, emending texts––the book joins other studies that have shown similar modern practices are far from “straightforward,” but are predicated on particular ideas of texts and textual scholarship. Second, and more specifically, by tracing how Amoraic scholars appropriated these practices, the book challenges the assumption that they are inherently tied to a disenchanted, historicist worldview. I do not suggest that we should replicate Amoraic approaches. Rather, their example invites us to imagine a different mode of scholarship on Jewish texts—one that remains rigorously philological while not necessarily destined for the “decent burial” that Wissenschaft once envisioned. To use Kattan Gribetz’s words, it allows us to recognize the “potential vibrancy of enlightened philology as a tool for humanistic inquiry… rather than as narrow-minded antiquarianism that proves the irrelevance of textual study and of the humanities writ large.”
Maren Niehoff’s comments respond to the interrelated issues of the book’s focus and methodological framework. The Rise of Talmud emphasizes less the Yerushalmi’s literary form or its redaction process and more the practices of Amoraic scholars whose work the Yerushalmi purports to transmit. This focus on scholarly practices rather than literary form (to the degree they can be separated) was motivated by what I saw as the lacuna in our understanding of the rise of Talmud: the emphasis in scholarship on the nature and development of the dialectical form of the sugya has left much of the hermeneutics underexplained (and also consigned the Yerushalmi to an “undeveloped” stage, since its sugiyot are generally speaking less elaborate).
As Niehoff notes, this focus departs from dominant trends in American scholarship on rabbinic sources, which in practice, if no longer in theory, is shaped by Neusner’s claims that it is impossible to go beyond the level of the compilation. I want to be clear that I do not deny that the Yerushalmi was shaped through various stages of composition and transmission, and throughout the book, I discuss such processes when they bear on the question at hand. But recognizing these processes does not mean that the text only tells us about its final stage of redaction. On the contrary, tracing adaptation is predicated on our ability to distinguish different voices and stages of development. Furthermore: even though Amoraic scholarship moves towards what might be described as a more “historical” approach to sources (e.g., commenting on earlier teachings rather than adapting them, as explored in the Introduction, or tracing ways in which teachings are revised, as explored in Chapter 8), it is important to separate how the Yerushalmi and its scholars conceived or presented the sources from our own reconstruction of these sources’ history: clearly, unmarked revision and adaptation continued alongside commentary, and were only rarely remarked upon.
Whereas the book emphasizes primarily Amoraic scholars and the hermeneutic principles of their explicit commentary, Niehoff's comments focus on how similar themes inform often unmarked compositional activity. Her brief but rich discussion of Abbahu is especially suggestive. Both the Talmud and Genesis Rabbah, she shows, attest to Abbahu's affinity for Greek learning, but his actual engagement with Greek language and ideas appears much more prominently in the Midrash. Niehoff argues that this difference reflects the distinct perspectives of the compilers of these works. Further, she demonstrates that we can trace how Abbahu's positions were debated, reformulated, and sometimes softened by sages who were uncomfortable with them.
In other words, the fact that Amoraic scholars construed the sages as “authors” does not mean that they provided us with straightforward accounts of these figures; on the contrary, precisely because the figure of the sage became a significant site for meaning, it became the object of sustained interpretive and literary activity. This is one of the important conclusions the Introduction to Part I draws from Foucault: the author function is a construction; it offers us an interpretation, not a report, of the figures of the sages. Like any interpretive construction, it was subject to disagreements and competing visions. The book, with its focus on Amoraic hermeneutics in the Yerushalmi’s commentary, traces how this construction involved active and often contested interpretive choices. Niehoff’s focus on the redaction brings to view how different constructions of the sages reflected cultural tensions that we can only discern by comparing different compilations.
Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s comments address still another large methodological challenge that writing this book presented: how to trace the distinctive features of Amoraic scholarship without flattening the Tannaitic world that preceded it. The challenge was both practical and conceptual. Practically, the question was how to do justice to the Tannaitic corpus without writing a whole book dedicated only to that corpus. Conceptually, the challenge was that the contrasts were often both subtle and foundational and therefore resisted simple formulations.
One way to address this challenge was to focus on large-scale structural changes rather than on absolute statements about the “birth” of a certain concept. With respect to authorship, my conclusion was not that Tannaitic sages had no concept of individual authorship and the Amoraic scholars did. It was that the author function plays a central, structural role in Amoraic scholarship on rabbinic teachings, but it does not play such a role in the Tannaitic engagement with such teachings, and moreover, that some pervasive patterns in the Tannaitic corpus are antithetical to that function.
I should note here that the book in general and the discussion of the Tannaitic corpus in particular benefited enormously from a dialogue with Rosen-Zvi, who returned the first version of the manuscript to me with hundreds of comments. His critique pushed me to present the Tannaitic corpus with more detail, nuance, and precision. There are entire sections–for example, the long treatment of Tannaitic materials in Chapters 1 and 2–that resulted from that dialogue. I am grateful that once again, with his comments on Mishnah Pesahim 1:7, he has provided me with an opportunity for more nuance and, hopefully, more precision.
The Mishnah presents a sequence of three statements: by Hananiah, Aqiva, and Meir. Each of these statements presents a different type of claim to authority. Rosen-Zvi and I are in agreement about the types of authority invoked in the first and third statements. We agree that Hananiah presents a “testimony,” a first-hand account observing the ancient practice in the Temple, which, as Rosen-Zvi says, invokes tradition. We agree that Meir presents an interpretation: he derives his own opinion from “their words,” i.e., the statement of Hananiah and Aqiva–but we also agree that such explicit commentary in the Mishnah is rare (see Rosen-Zvi, Between Mishnah and Midrash, 52).
Where we disagree is with respect to Aqiva’s comment. My analysis of this statement follows E. S. Rosenthal’s. Rosenthal does not deny that the Mishnah presents Aqiva’s position as an innovation (“addition”); that is part of what makes this passage interesting to him. His point, it seems to me, is that from “our” perspective, as modern historians of Halakhah, there is a tension between the Mishnah’s marking of the statement as an innovation and the substance of the statement, which describes a historical reality (the conduct of the priests) without supporting it with testimony or explicit interpretation as Hananiah or Meir do. That the Mishnah is not bothered by this shows, for Rosenthal, that it is not interested in such a history of Halakhah. For my purpose in the Rise of Talmud, what was interesting was that for similar reasons, the logic here differs from the dominant logic of Amoraic scholarship on rabbinic teachings.
Rosen-Zvi writes that “the Mishnah goes out of its way to mark clearly the differences between a sage appearing as transmitter (R. Ḥanania) and as interpreter of tradition (R. Akiva, R. Meir).” But if Meir and Aqiva here are both “interpreters,” they are different kinds of interpreters, in a way that is crucial for the issue at hand. Meir is an interpreter in the sense that he relates explicitly to inherited statements attributed to earlier sages, from which he infers a certain conclusion about normative practice. The structure here is of two discernable stages: the inherited statements, attributed to Hananiah and Aqiva, which serve as the fact to be interpreted; and Meir’s inference, which is the interpretation of that fact that informs a new ruling. Such a distinction is more elusive in the case of Aqiva’s comment. He is not presenting us with a supposed traditional fact, as Hananiah’s testimony does. But unlike Meir, he is not explicitly inferring his teaching from Hanania’s words. The source of Aqiva’s comment is not stated–and that already is part of the point. We can posit (as other scholars have done) that his statement reflects both his general approach to issues of impurity and his analysis of Hananiah’s testimony (see Furstenberg, “Tradition to Controversy”). And yet he presents the results of this analysis not as how the priests should have conducted themselves, or how they would conduct themselves, but rather how they did conduct themselves. This is what I meant when I said that innovation is indistinguishable from tradition: the statement marked as an innovation is also a statement of past conduct.
While I used this example because of the importance of Rosenthal’s discussion of the Tannaitic negotiation with tradition, I admit it is not an ideal example for the purposes of the book, especially since Aqiva’s statement concerns the conduct of the priests rather than the opinion of earlier sages. But the same orientation towards conceptual analysis, and the way it complicates temporal distinctions, is apparent in broader patterns in the Tannaitic engagement with rabbinic teachings. The discussion which follows in the book addresses passages in which Tannaitic sages disagree about the extent of their predecessors’ disputes, using the phrase “they did not dispute about x.” On the one hand, such passages clearly demarcate the sages historically: the later sages dispute the positions of the earlier sages. On the other hand, the later sages do not present their different accounts as different interpretations of words attributed to the earlier sages, nor do they cite alternative versions of such words; rather, their accounts seem to be grounded in different perspectives on the Halakhic principles at play, which result in different ranges of acceptable positions. In the Amoraic period, the dominant mode is how to ground positions in specific formulations: to borrow Seneca’s words, “what was once philosophy has become philology.”
I do not dispute that concepts that become central in Amoraic scholarship may be found in the Tannaitic corpus. Rosen-Zvi’s analysis of Simeon’s statement in Tosefta Sotah 6 shows beautifully how the passage distinguishes between the function of the sage as a transmitter of his teacher’s traditions, an independent interpreter, and arbiter among views. But such distinctions are overall rare in the Tannaitic corpus, and perhaps more important, there are pervasive patterns in which such distinctions are eroded (on the issue of distinguishing transmitters, consider the analysis of citation formulae at the end of the Introduction to Part I). My point, to be clear, is not to dismiss the importance of such passages. The question is of emphasis: this book emphasizes the structural changes apparent in the transition to the Amoraic era; Rosen-Zvi’s comments insist, correctly, on recognizing the richness and complexity of the Tannaitic corpus itself.
In closing, I turn to a question raised at the original SBL panel by the chair, Todd Berzon, on whether AI tools could help projects like this. The answer is certainly yes. I am already working, in collaboration with Menahem Katz and Hillel Gershuni of the Talmud Yerushalmi Digital Edition, on a tagging project that would allow us to trace structural patterns throughout the Yerushalmi, and there are several other exciting projects harnessing computational tools for other areas in the field.
At the same time, thinking about the process of researching and writing this book, I can also see more clearly what we might lose as we move to rely increasingly on machine learning. First, the efficiency of such tools might produce worse results. An experience that, I think, would be very familiar to other scholars, is that the slow processing of information shapes the horizons of inquiry: if you are going through a set of, say, two hundred and fifty passages, by the time you reach passage fifty, you come up with different questions, looking for things you did not know to look for before. If I had simply prompted a digital tool with my initial questions or parameters and got instant responses, I would have ended with a much poorer study.
But even if we were somehow assured that such tools would only improve scholarship in the sense of the end result, I think relying on them might impoverish scholarship in the sense of the activity of scholars. I return to the beginning of Kattan Gribetz’s comments, and to the memories they invoke of the decade it took me to write this book: long hours with the Yerushalmi; late nights with the concordances prepared, perhaps through similar late nights, by Assis and Kossovsky; trips to the library hunting books to follow long lists of references. While of course these activities were aimed to discover and produce evidence, their embodied nature, the time they took, their inherent inefficiencies, meant that the ancient and modern texts with which I was engaging became more than just data to be analyzed; they became part of my world and who I am. Writing this book and engaging with such sources and studies was, as Kattan Gribetz writes, a labor of love, and a tremendous source of meaning for me personally. My hope is that one day, it might play a similar part in someone else’s life. The Rise of Talmud concludes with the argument that Talmud was distinctive because it centered humans reading other humans, as opposed to humans reading God; let this piece conclude with an argument for humans reading other humans as opposed to machines.