Rabbinic scholarship, conducted in Hebrew and Aramaic in the eastern parts of the Roman-Byzantine Empire, is commonly excluded from the study of “classical” intellectual practices based on Greek paideia. A broader integrative approach that acknowledges both similarities and differences between rabbinic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian scholarship enables a more variegated assessment of late antique intellectual life.
See also: Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism: The Development of the Talmud Yerushalmi (Bloomsbury, 2024).
By Catherine Hezser
SOAS, University of London
November 2024
Handbooks and studies of intellectual life and knowledge production in antiquity usually deal with Greek paideia-based scholarly practices only, the so-called “classical” scholarship on which western intellectual culture is considered to be based (e.g., Markschies 2006; Eshleman 2012; Montanari, Matthaios, and Rengakos, eds. 2015). Even investigations of “unclassical traditions” have only Christianity (and sometimes Islam) in mind (Kelly, Flower, and Williams, eds. 2010). By contrast, rabbinic study in Hebrew and Aramaic, based on the Hebrew Bible, is not acknowledged as “scholarship” in such a narrow-minded definition of intellectual practices. Cabezón’s call for cross-cultural and comparative perspectives enables a more inclusive approach, whose aim is “the reconstruction of the category of scholasticism – achieved by applying it as an interpretive tool to a variety of cultural settings” (1998: 2). Such an approach would acknowledge rabbinic intellectual and knowledge-ordering practices alongside those of Graeco-Roman philosophers, jurists, sophists, church fathers and monks.
Rabbis emerged as a specifically Jewish type of intellectual in Roman Palestine after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. Their intellectual practice focused on the study and teaching of the Torah as the Jewish ancestral tradition. Such study consisted of the interpretation, expansion, and application of Torah law. Studying with a rabbi, that is, belonging to his close disciple circle, was a form of higher education comparable to studying with a Roman jurist or philosopher. Like Graeco-Roman intellectuals, rabbinic scholars were acknowledged as such by their Jewish contemporaries, to whom they offered advice on the basis of their accumulated knowledge. In the streets and marketplaces of Roman Palestine, Jewish and non-Jewish sages would have recognised each other, even if they embodied different types of expertise. The advice they gave to laypeople sometimes overlapped and sometimes varied, based on their respective values and ideology.
Palestinian rabbinic scholarship led to the creation of the major compilations of the Mishnah and Talmud Yerushalmi. The social basis and literary development of these compilations can be understood properly only when viewed within the context of late antique scholastic practices. Especially between the fourth and sixth centuries C.E. various sets of intellectuals created compilations that combined, preserved, and structured the accumulated knowledge of their predecessors, making it available to future generations. The creation of the large rabbinic, juristic, philosophical, and monastic compilations would have led to a fundamental change in scholarship: from student-teacher relationships to book-based learning and from a focus on individual views to the discussion of a plurality of perspectives that were now easily accessible on one and the same page (Stern 2008).
The Talmud Yerushalmi is our main source of evidence about rabbinic Judaism and Jewish daily life in the Land of Israel in late Roman and early Byzantine times. It has the form of a commentary on the Mishnah (ca. 200 C.E.) but introduces many new topics in tannaitic and amoraic traditions that reach far beyond the Mishnah’s scope. Unfortunately, we lack direct information about the creation of the Talmud. Some scholars (Becker 1999) have suggested that the compilation developed gradually, by cumulative accretion of material until the first extant manuscripts appear in the Middle Ages. According to this model, the text would have remained open and flexible for a thousand years or more. Not only the relatively homogeneous transmission of the text but also pragmatic considerations (there is no evidence of a permanent and central rabbinic archive or library, at which the storage and build-up of the Talmud could have taken place) threaten the persuasiveness of this hypothesis. The other extreme is Neusner’s (1991) reluctance to go beyond the (final) literary stage of redaction, which leads to a study of the Talmud’s surface structure and allegedly unanimous ideology. In this approach, earlier stages of the development of traditions are considered irretrievable and a literary-historical study of rabbinic literature becomes impossible.
These approaches indicate the limitations of internal textual approaches, which focus on the text of the Talmud Yerushalmi only. To reach insights into ancient compilation processes other late antique compilations must be studied and compared with the Talmud both from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. A diachronic perspective must look at ancient scholastic practices in which knowledge was generated and transmitted by generations of teachers and their disciple circles. A synchronic perspective compares the literary structure and form of the Talmud, with its division into argumentative units of discourse (sugyot) and use of the dispute form, with other ancient compilations such as Justinian’s Digest of Roman civil law and the Apophthegmata Patrum, sayings and stories about Egyptian desert monks.
The diachronic approach requires the application of social-historical methodology. The ways in which knowledge was generated in antiquity has to start with higher education practices. It is striking that not only rabbinic but also philosophical, juristic, and Christian education was carried out in disciple circles around individual scholars rather than in “schools” or “academies”. The close link between the teacher and his students was crucial for the remembrance and transmission of his views to later generations of scholars. Only the views and practices of sages who had students who became scholars themselves, that is, who were part of chains of transmission that would comprise several generations, could be included in the later compilation.
An important difference between rabbinic and Graeco-Roman study practices was philosophers’, sophists’, jurists’, and church fathers’ much greater reliance on books and various types of written treatises. Since Graeco-Roman scholars almost all stemmed from the upper strata of society, they usually had private libraries available, which included the main writings of their respective groups – whether Plato and Aristotle, Homer, or the New Testament. Origen’s library in second-century Caesarea is an example of this phenomenon. By contrast, few if any rabbis would have had written Torah scrolls available on a daily basis at home. Such scrolls, which were handwritten on parchment, were not only very expensive but also required special precautions when handling them, since they included the divine name. Therefore, rabbis would have relied mostly on memorized Torah portions in their discussions and teaching practices (Wollenberg 2023). What mattered was the ability to make connections across the biblical tradition and to interpret, expand, and apply rather than merely read and state biblical regulations. While the emphasis on oral teaching was shared with philosophers, jurists, and Christians, rabbis’ lack of many books became a matter of distinction (cf. y. Pe’ah 2:6, 17a par. y. Hag. 1:8, 76d). It may have been considered an advantage in earlier times but seems to have bothered the last generation of amoraim, who, in the fourth century, were confronted with the Christian appropriation of the Jewish Bible (now called the “Old Testament”), rejection of “the law”, and colonization of the rabbinically defined Land of Israel that was transformed into the Christian “Holy Land”.
It seems that in early Byzantine times, rabbinic scholars became increasingly interested in the written compilation and conservation of earlier “classical” rabbinic traditions. In the early third century, perhaps shortly after Caracalla’s extension of Roman citizenship – and Roman law defined as the law of Roman citizens – to all inhabitants of the Roman Empire (Constitutio Antoniniana, 212 C.E.), including Palestinian Jews, the patriarch R. Yehudah ha-Nasi seems to have initiated the compilation of the Mishnah as a local alternative body of legal traditions that applied to the Jewish citizens of the Land of Israel and comprised both religious and civil law (Hezser 2023). By the late fourth century C.E. a huge body of additional tannaitic (baraitot) and amoraic knowledge had accumulated that discussed and commented on the earlier traditions but also vastly expanded the scope of rabbinic halakhah, especially as far as civil law was concerned. In the competitive and threatening environment of Byzantine Christian rule (anti-Jewish legislation; church father’s denunciation of Jews and Judaism; end of the patriarchate in the early fifth century) rabbis must have feared that the knowledge accumulated over centuries could easily be forgotten and lost, unless it was preserved in written form. They would therefore have decided to create a new and much larger collection of rabbinic traditions, which could be structured in accordance with the earlier Mishnah that scholars were already familiar with. This corpus would include both tannaitic traditions that circulated outside of the Mishnah (baraitot, eventually compiled in the Tosefta) and the large body of amoraic material from the third and fourth centuries C.E.
To properly understand the late antique compilation process, Jason König and Greg Woolf’s understanding of encyclopaedism (2013) has been useful. Rather than focusing on encyclopaedias as a modern literary genre, König and Woolf view encyclopaedism as a set of scholarly procedures that eventually lead to the creation of compilations that aim at presenting a specific group’s past scholarship in a more or less comprehensive way. When seen as a “phenomenon” rather than a literary genre, encyclopaedism can be identified long before the Enlightenment period and traced back to antiquity. Encyclopaedism should be understood as “the ways in which a series of different authors [or rather: editors] … made use of a range of shared rhetorical and compilatory techniques to create knowledge-ordering works of different kinds, works that often claimed some kind of comprehensive and definitive status” (1). If one uses this definition, many similarities between the scholarly practices and compilatory techniques of rabbis, jurists, philosophers, sophists, church fathers and monks become evident. At some stage individuals (e.g., Diogenes Laertius and Philostratus) and groups of scholars (e.g., Tribonian’s group of legal experts and monastic successors of the desert monks) decided to compile and preserve the accumulated knowledge of their respective scholarly precursors in whose footsteps they walked but to whom they may have considered themselves inferior, a reason why they may decided to remain anonymous.
Shared compilatory techniques included the collection and selection of traditional material, its recombination into new literary units, and the creation of a certain amount of thematic cohesion and argumentative coherence. If prior written collections available in private libraries were lacking or scarce, the first step would have been the establishment of contacts to colleagues through network connections, and the emission of scribal assistants who could take notes of the views and stories. The collection would be selective, since (a) only traditions that survived, i.e. were transmitted for several generations were available; (b) the editors collected traditions from those colleague-friends they themselves had links to. If they were located in Sepphoris (Rosenfeld 2010: 119 identifies Sepphoris as the rabbinic centre with which the most prominent fifth-generation Palestinian amoraim are associated), Sepphorean traditions and traditions of scholars the Sepphorean editors had network ties to would have been prioritized. Similarly, the fifth-century collectors of monastic traditions in Gaza accessed and prioritized the (probably also mostly oral) traditions of those whose successors they considered themselves to be. There, too, the collection and compilation project happened at a time of crisis, when the earlier way of life was threatened and church authorities tried to control monks and monasteries (Michelsen 2023: 53).
Other compilation procedures were the structuring and editing of the received material. Generally speaking, thematic and biographical compilations are distinguishable. The Talmud clearly belonged to the former kind, even if thematic issues are not treated systematically. Just as the Praetorian Edict served as the structural basis for Justinian’s Digest, the Talmud Yerushalmi followed the structure of the Mishnah into orders and tractates (but lacking the last two orders except for the tractate Niddah). These earlier compilations provided a familiar structuring principle, even if the material included under the respective titles (Digest) and tractates (Yerushalmi) surpassed the earlier works quantitatively and thematically. Rather than being mere commentaries on earlier legal collections, the Talmud and Digest presented the accumulated legal knowledge of several centuries in a comprehensive and ordered way.
The editing of the collected traditional material could happen in several different ways. The editors of Justinian’s Digest extracted material from existing written sources and recombined the bids and pieces under the respective titles, largely limiting themselves to adding bridging statements. Those who compiled the alphabetic and systematic collections of the Apophthegmata Patrum listed the received traditions under the names of the monks or under general themes. These lists could easily be supplemented at a later stage, so that versions of different length and comprehensiveness circulated. The Talmud differs from these compilations in the argumentative format of the sugyot. Earlier traditions of variant literary forms are not merely listed and linked but combined into more or less logical argumentative sequences that investigate an issue from various perspectives. Although the stam, that is, the anonymous editorial layer is less developed in the Talmud Yerushalmi than in the Babylonian Talmud, it can be identified. The redactional – and to some extent probably also already pre-redactional – creation of cohesiveness through keyword connections, bridging statements, questions, and comments would have precluded the simple addition of supplementary material at a later stage. Therefore, the text of the extent Yerushalmi manuscripts was relatively stable over centuries, scribal “corrections” on the basis of parallels in the later Babylonian Talmud notwithstanding.
Especially since the late antique compilations seem to have replaced most of the earlier written and oral knowledge of these groups – hardly any of the jurists’ writings excerpted in the Digest exist anymore; no individual collections of amoraic sayings and stories are known – they can be considered monuments to ancient rabbinic, juristic, philosophical, and monastic scholarship. They not only commemorate but also create the very identities of the respective scholarly groups, whether Palestinian rabbis, sophists of the so-called Second Sophistic, “classical” Roman jurists, or Egyptian desert monks. They address the whole range of issues these sages dealt with. The aim of these compilations was not only the preservation of past knowledge but also the creation of a foundation for future study and practice. The very fact that the talmudic discussions are open rather than closed, and that many different viewpoints are presented, indicates that they were meant to be discussed, applied, and further developed by later generations of scholars.
To conclude: Greek paideia-based learning was not the only type of scholarship that should merit the attention of students and scholars of antiquity. Rabbinic scholarship should be recognized as a major body of knowledge developed in the eastern parts of the Roman-Byzantine Empire, outside of the parameters of what is commonly defined as “classical”, which was in many ways similar to and overlapping with but also complementary to Graeco-Roman learning. The comparative approach to ancient scholarly techniques and literary compilation enables us to better understand the development not only of rabbinic documents but also of late antique literary compilation as such. It allows us to view ancient intellectual life from new perspectives and to realize how much rabbis, jurists, philosophers, and monks resembled each other and would have recognized each other as fellow-sages.
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