Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Between Mishna and Midrash: The Birth of Rabbinic Literature
(The Open University of Israel, 2020).
An interesting gap is marked between the Hebrew subtitle of Ishay Rosen-Zvi’s magnificent new book – בין משנה למדרש: קריאה בספרות התנאית lit: Between Mishna and Midrash: A reading in the Tannaitic Literature, and its English one: Between Mishna and Midrash: The Birth of Rabbinic Literature. The Hebrew subtitle prepares the reader for a personal “reading,” a reflection of the scholar’s individual preferences, one that follows the convention of writing Hidushei Torah (lit: Torah novelties) – a traditional Jewish writing genre whose raison d'être is to express the innovative voice of the individual writer. The English subtitle declares the contrary – not a framework for innovations but a prefatory text that will focus on guiding the reader through this complicated literature and will help her or him understand the current scholarly overview of its beginning.
Which of the paratextual promises is therefore being fulfilled in this book? I will argue that this book is an attempt to combine both. And I will put my final remark already here – this attempt is a great success, and I’m sure it will remain the standard reference work for many years. The book faithfully represents the current scholarly developments, supplies every student and interested reader with the relevant tools to navigate the texts, to ask the right questions, and to answer them properly. But it also represents an innovative voice of an original scholar, that couldn’t be voiced by anyone else.
Rosen-Zvi splits the literary heritage of the Tannaim into two parts, the first part of the book is dedicated to the Mishna and the latter to Midrash. Both Mishna and Midrash receive rich literary and historical descriptions, a convincing analytical landscape of the main problems and the still-open questions related to them, and a coherent and updated report of the current state of the field.
The main advantage of the book is the exemplary close readings integrated into the descriptive text, each one carefully parsed and explained in detail, supplied with a proper word to word commentary all in the service of the main argument of the chapter. A reader who reads the book from cover to cover will not only gain a fine overview of the main principles of Tannaitic literature, but also a decent familiarity with a significant number of Tannaitic texts. This is a great gift to the modern reader of rabbinics, based on years of teaching courses in Mishna and Midrash at Tel-Aviv university.
Prima faci, this kind of prefatory project is not aimed to present personal readings, individual approaches to the text, or cutting-edge innovations. A proper introduction should be more conservative, offering a widely accepted overview and largely avoiding controversial statements. But Rosen Zvi, as a scholar, will not leave aside an opportunity to write a Hiddush (lit: an innovation). He has specialized in writing brilliant and controversial works, such as his The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple, Gender and Midrash (Brill, 2012; original Hebrew version: Magness, 2008), Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), and his latest Goy: Israel Others and the Birth of the Gentile (Oxford University Press, 2018), written with Adi Ophir, as well as other numerous articles. In this work, too, behind the innocent surface of a handbook-style work, Rosen Zvi created a sophisticated composition, one that contains not a few real interventions and innovations, even as they are in a book aimed, at first sight, primarily at beginners. I will describe three such innovations, to show how Rosen Zvi elegantly and subtly solved some crucial problems in the study of Rabbinic literature.
I’ll start with the way Rosen Zvi deals with an old problem in Mishnah study: the Mishnaic descriptions of Temple ceremonies such as the description of the Bikkurim ceremony – the parade of the first fruits to the temple – the description of the daily sacrifice in tractate Tamid, the holiday ceremonies of Passover in tractate Pesachim and those of Yom Kippur described in Tractate Yoma, the Sotah ceremony, and so on. Naturally, these descriptions attracted scholarly intention not only because of their indisputable literary beauty, but mainly because they purport to describe historical events and reality. Concentrating on the Bikkurim description, Rosen Zvi describes the classic and somewhat romantic conception of David Zvi Hoffmann (1843-1921) and Jacob Nahum Epstein (1878-1952) that saw them as reliable historical documents, based on the appearance of historical figures like Agrippa and few archaic linguistic idioms. Saul Lieberman (1898-1983) developed this approach by identifying the Hellenistic motifs in the parade description. Based on his own innovative method, developed in his research on the Sotah ceremony, and in his brilliant article about the description of the Law court in Yavne (“A Protocol of the Yavnean Academy? Rereading "Tosefta Sanhedrin" Chapter 7”, Tarbiẕ, no.78 (2009) pp. 447-477), Rosen Zvi wisely disassembles this “historical” suggestion. The ceremony description is represented here as a literary and rhetorical composition, created with ideological intention to recreate a picture of an imagined past:
We may generally say that ceremonies’ descriptions in the Mishna are inclined to draw older reality than other legal passages but not necessarily because they were written earlier, but because this is their rhetorical goal. They seek to describe an original whole realm, that stands in contrast to our damaged world (p. 49).
Rosen Zvi further explains the use of the participle in the language of the ceremony descriptions “והשור הולך עימהן... והחליל מכה לפניהם” which is not used for a historical description of what happened in the past but for representing a-historical norms, describing what should happen, similar to the language of the legal components of the Mishnah. This conclusion not only solves the linguistic problems wisely, but it also opens a rare window into the Mishnaic purgatory, where the basic assumptions of this literature were created and shaped. It opens a whole set of sophisticated exegetical opportunities in front of the reader that are far from obvious, especially on the background of 20th century’s scholarship.
My second example is related to one of the most substantial theses of rabbinic scholarship: the distinction between the exegesis of the house of Rabbi Ishmael and those of the house of Rabbi Akiva. The historical hero of this story is the aforementioned David Zvi Hoffmann. Since medieval times, only one Halakhic Midrashic composition was known for each of the Torah’s books (Genesis excluded). Based on careful analysis of the material, Hoffmann suggested that each book originally had two Midrashic compilations dedicated to it, one from each of the two houses of study. He went further and reconstructed the characteristic terminology used by each one of them, identified the names of the sages who belonged to each house, and some of each house’s key hermeneutic assumptions. Hoffmann’s radical and sharp suggestion was dramatically confirmed when heretofore unknown Midrashim were discovered in the Cairo Genizah. The outstanding suitability of Hoffmann’s theory and the findings from the Genizah is one of the most exciting chapters in the history of Jewish studies. This achievement naturally attracted a generation of rabbinic scholars who sharpened the distinctions between the two houses. The hermeneutic and philosophical differences between them were described in detail and the distinction between the houses became a solid fact.
Rosen Zvi dedicates a detailed chapter to the distinction between the houses (section 2 chapter 2). But a close reading of this chapter reveals that it is in fact offering a nuancing of what had become scholarly dogma. Rosen Zvi starts by moving from the “classic” description of the two identified attitudes to Midrash in the legal parts of the Midrashic corpus to the description of the Agaddic parts, where the two houses reveal high levels of similarity. Rosen-Zvi essentially reverses course, offering a unified description of Midrash that has some internal division. This internal division should not blur the uniqueness and unification of the Midrashic corpus as one literary hermeneutic and cultural phenomenon. This attitude is especially highlighted in the transition from the chapter that deals with the two houses to the chapter that deals with the motivations of Midrash. Here Rosen-Zvi states explicitly his new methodological perspective: “In this chapter… we will not focus on the distinctions between the schools, instead we will examine the common Midrashic basis for both” (p. 259). The innovative methodological approach combines a high awareness of the contribution – and burden – of the history of rabbinics scholarship with important correctives to a certain overemphasis that has developed over time.
The fifth chapter in the second section deals with a crucial question that necessarily bothers every open-eyed modern reader of Midrashic literature: how did the sages think about the act of Midrash? Did they mean to read scripture in such a creative way? Did they think about their reading as a creative act? Were they aware of other possible hermeneutical approaches? Despite its importance, this issue was left largely unaddressed in previous scholarship, with few exceptions. For Rosen-Zvi, Joseph Heinemann (1915-1978) represents the approach that sees Midrash as an organic exegetical act, natural for its creators, and therefore unreflective. Moshe Halbertal, on the other hand, examined Midrashim that contain a selection between different exegetical options. According to Halbertal, Midrash is an inorganic act, its creators did not think they presented the only way to understand scripture. Halbertal used this evidence to suggest that it is possible to identify in the Midrash an ethical exegetical choice, or even ethical motivation (Revolutions in the Making: Values as Interpretative Considerations in Midrashei Halakhah, Magnes Press, 1997).
Rosen-Zvi’s approach to this question is totally innovative. He leaves aside Halbertal’s question about the ethical aspects of the exegetical act. Rather he focuses on rabbinic terminology. Rosen-Zvi points to the basic fact that the midrash describes its own exegetical deeds in very clear terminological idioms such as “למה נאמר... להביא...” (“why was it said… to include…”) that suggest explicitly that certain words were mentioned in the verse in order to include additional meaning. The reason this extra meaning is brought here from the verse is worded as follows ״שלא שמענו להן בכל התורה כולה (“because we have not heard/learned it anywhere in the whole Torah”). Here, suggests Rosen-Zvi, we see clear evidence that the midrashist is well aware of the fact that the positive statement he produced cannot be found anywhere in the Torah, a clear sign for reflective thought. Other terminological idioms that use the first person are also “taking responsibility” for the exegetical act, such as “פורט אני”. Or cases where the midrashist makes difference between the exact meaning “שבו דיבר הכתוב” and the legal statement he wishes to extract from it. Here too we see a place where Midrash expresses very well its self-awareness. The chapter concludes with a treatment of the term כשמועו, that differs between the exact way a word is heard, and another suggested meaning attributed to it. Here too the Midrash knows quite well to identify plain meaning and to point out an exegetical action that leads to different results. The second term is אינו צריך which creates a hierarchy between two options of readings of the same verse. The terminology here offers a solution to a fascinating and heretofore little-studied question.
Close reading, suggests Rosen-Zvi, resembles micro-historical study since in both cases a close look at one detail reveals large social and cultural processes that cannot be seen from a wider perspective. Rosen-Zvi’s book Between Mishna and Midrash is a professional introductory book that walks the reader through this process, from a series of close readings to a wide multi-layered cultural picture of one of the greatest literary corpora in the Jewish library, and contains innovative approaches that can and should light the eyes of both beginner and experienced readers.
Yakov Z. Mayer is a Kreitman Fellow and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ERC Project: Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Europe, both at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.