The Rabbinic Legal Imagination

Sarah Wolf, “The Rabbinic Legal Imagination: Scholasticism and Narrativity in the Babylonian Talmud” (Ph.D Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2018).

Scholars and laypeople often take for granted some of the quirkier aspects of the Babylonian Talmud’s legal discussions: its indulgence in an extended consideration of unlikely scenarios; its insertion of snippets of study hall dialogue into moments of highly technical analysis; and its anonymous narrator that often can’t seem to make up its mind about what it is narrating. These moments, while certainly a large part of the joy of studying the Talmud, do not directly contribute towards the process of legal decision-making. What, then, is their purpose?

My dissertation makes two connected arguments about these phenomena. First, I show the extent of literary sophistication in the Talmud’s later legal passages, revealing that many of the features that scholars have found in late rabbinic narrative texts are in fact also present in contemporaneous legal texts. Secondly, I argue that this literariness is directly connected to the development of scholastic rabbinic culture, in which legal texts serve as loci for ritualized engagement with the law rather than practical legal guides or records. Towards the end of the period of the Talmud’s redaction, the Late Antique rabbinic community established growing institutionalized centers of communal study.[1] At the same time, its legal texts grew more and more literarily complex. By creating a world of legal ideas that was imaginatively rich and engaging, the rabbis of the late Talmudic period both responded to and encouraged the Jewish ritual practice now often tritely referred to as “study for its own sake.”

I use a combination of text critical methods and close reading to analyze the development of three specific literary elements: plot, characterization, and narration. I focus on plot through a historical-critical look at the development of a particular interpretive technique. This technique is a complicated version of what is traditionally called an oqimta in Aramaic, and might be referred to by English-speaking lawyers as “cabining”: the method of correctively reinterpreting an apparently problematic law by restricting the subjects or cases to which it applies. In passages that show little redactorial influence, the Talmud often lists several such suggested restrictions in a row, each of which is a disparate new idea voiced by a separate, named rabbi. In later, more redactor-heavy passages, however, these disparate suggestions are linked by the narrator to form one new, highly detailed scenario, which comes to take on a narrative life of its own. These later passages emphasize plot in two ways: first, by generating restrictive interpretations of cases that have their own narrative logic (e.g., “This law only applies in a case where someone does A and then B, but gets caught, and can’t do C…”), and second, by generating this scenario within a problem-solving plot in which partial solutions are proposed and rejected, creating a sense of build-up towards the final, accepted answer. At the same time, the legal relevance of the new restricted scenario decreases in passages with more redactorial activity, showing that the reinterpreted cases’ literariness comes to take precedence over their practical legal value.

The next chapter demonstrates the Talmud’s use of characterization across legal sugyot, focusing on the portrayal of a rabbinic figure named R. Yirmiyah. I show that the Talmud uses repetition of themes and explicitly self-referential language to establish this rabbi as a distinctive character across different tractates. R. Yirmiyah is portrayed in multiple moments as a kind of caricature of a rabbinic scholastic, someone who asks hypothetical questions that are so meta-analytical as to garner harsh rebukes from his colleagues. The dispersal of these passages across multiple tractates demonstrates that the Talmud functions as a more unified literary work than has previously been understood. The use of this character as an internal critique of the Talmud’s scholastic practices also shows that the rabbis are self-aware about their intellectual habits and that they use literary techniques to probe the limits of this facet of their approach to law.[2]

Finally, I analyze the narrative style of the Talmud’s anonymous voice, paying particular attention to moments when the narration is self-undermining. I show that the anonymous voice uses techniques of unreliable narration that are similar in certain ways to those in modern novels, casting doubt on its own statements in order to suggest broader uncertainty about the possibility of ever attaining objective legal truth. In sowing doubt about the possibility of determining legal fact, the anonymous voice builds a more complex narrative world while also lending support to the Talmud’s own shift towards law as a scholastic practice over and above a practical one.

My analysis of literary elements in the Talmud’s legal passages connects to several different strands of scholarly inquiry. Scholars address many of the social and cultural elements that typified Late Antique Sassanian Christian and rabbinic scholasticism, but less attention has been paid to the textual features that characterize rabbinic scholastic thought.[3] By connecting rabbinic scholasticism with literariness, my dissertation both widens the basis for cross-cultural comparison of scholasticism and elucidates distinctively rabbinic features within a broader Sassanian scholastic context. The prevalence of literary elements in legal passages also further complicates ideas about the relationship between law and narrative in rabbinic literature. Late rabbinic “law” is revealed to possess many of the elements that scholars have ascribed to the Talmud’s “narrative” voice, such as the use of the absurd or grotesque, self-undermining tendencies, and even antinomianism.[4] What seemed like disparate genres of the Talmud are in fact much more unified, at least by the period of the Talmud’s redaction. Finally, from a source-critical perspective, the extent of literary creativity that can be found in the Talmud’s late legal passages is further evidence of a strong and late redactorial hand.

My dissertation offers a new lens into rabbinic legal activity by using close literary analysis of legal passages to show how late rabbinic thought uniquely partakes of broader Sassanian scholastic cultural trends. While contemporary readers of the Talmud may take for granted the idea that many of its discussions are “study for its own sake,”[5] I show both that the historical development of this propensity can be traced within the text, and that it manifested in a distinctly literary, narrativized approach to thinking about legal questions. In fact, the idea of “study for its own sake” is likely now taken for granted in certain circles thanks to the success of late rabbinic literature in establishing it as a central and compelling way to engage with inherited tradition. By tracing the roots of ritualized text study, we can thus better understand the rabbinic intellectual world itself as well as the parts of the Jewish intellectual world that followed it.

Dr. Sarah Wolf is an Assistant Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

[1]  Isaiah Gafni, “Nestorian Literature as a Source for the History of the Babylonian Yeshivot,” Tarbiz 51:4 (1982): 567–576; David Goodblatt, “The History of the Babylonian Academies,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism IV: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. S. T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 821-839; Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, “The Rise of the Babylonian Rabbinic Academy: A Reexamination of the Talmudic Evidence,” Jewish Studies: an Internet Journal, 1 (2002): 55-68.

[2]  This claim builds on the work of Chris Hayes and Richard Kalmin, who have written about the literary displacement of rabbinic self-criticism onto non-Jewish characters in rabbinic literature: Hayes, “Displaced Self-Perceptions: The Deployment of Minim and Romans in Bavli Sanhedrin 90b-91a,” in Religious and Ethnic Communities in Later Roman Palestine, ed. Hayim Lapin (Potomac: University Press of Maryland, 1998), and Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia Between Persia and Roman Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87-102.

[3] In addition to the above works, see Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative, Art, Composition and Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 1-33. For a fairly comprehensive list of similarities between late antique rabbinic and Christian scholasticism, see Adam H. Becker, “The Comparative Study of ‘Scholasticism’ in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians,” AJS Review 34 (2010): 91-113. For an analysis of the applicability of the category to Rabbinic Judaism more generally, see Michael D. Swartz, “Scholasticism as a Comparative Category and the Study of Judaism,” in Scholasticism, 91–114.

[4]  Barry Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

[5]  See b. Sukkah 49b.