Kiperwasser, Reuven. Going West: Migrating Personae and Construction of the Self in Rabbinic Culture. Vol. 369. SBL Press, 2021.
I will begin by explaining the title of my book. Going West was inspired by the Aramaic term used by Babylonian sages for the Land of Israel, ma’arava (west). From the perspective of Babylonia, the Land of Israel is in the West. Translating this expression for the first time in English, I was amused that my new title recalls the bracing nineteenth-century American exhortation: “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” This coincidence may be a fortuitous one. American “westerns” often feature a young man who heads westward and receives a rough reception, forging a new identity in the process. Palestinian rabbinic literature preserves numerous stories in which young Babylonians go west, confronting the Land of Israel’s unwelcoming inhabitants, and recreating themselves, so to speak. In both contexts, a new persona is forged in the crucible of masculine combat.
The idea for this book came to me while reading and rereading Saul Lieberman's small paper, titled "As It Was, So It Will Be."[1] This made me think of his model on the relations between Babylonians and Palestinians in the Holy Land of Late antiquity in terms of xenophobia and philoxenia. I concluded that I share with Lieberman some of his insights regarding these two, while disagreeing in general with his explanatory model. Even in the title of Lieberman's article, we catch a glimpse of Lieberman's own difficult relationship with the Land of Israel in his own time, that is the nascent State of Israel. For Lieberman, Israel's "Babylonians" were former European Jews, urban literati who found themselves surrounded by their more rural Israeli brethren ("Palestinians"), whose role models were far removed from the images of the typical European intellectuals. Lieberman's insights, expressed in some of his hints and sometimes enigmatic notes, were from the perspective of an Eastern European emigree researching rabbinic literature in the contemporary State of Israel; a situation which I fully understand, based on my own experience. Experiencing being the "other' in in the Land of my ancestors, and being a scholar of rabbinic literature, I find myself particularly interested in how otherness was accepted and treated in rabbinic culture.
I wrote the first chapters of my book in Ann Arbor in 2014–2015, as a fellow of Fraenkel Institute. My experience as a migrating person in the United States, where I had never spent any substantial period previously, provided additional inspiration for the concept of this book. I continued working on it as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow in Berlin (2015–2017), the ultimate metropolis of migrating people who set out to find themselves and receive shelter in a city that is no less diligently looking to find itself. This is where the major body of the book was written. I finished its first draft shortly before returning to my home in Jerusalem, the city of dreamers and strangers. Thus, my route has come full circle, corelating with some semiotic formulae. The book, however, continued its journey overseas, experiencing adventures typical of the migration of texts and encountering various locals before finally arriving at the Braun Judaic Serie’s welcoming port. Thus, the route of the book ended where it began to take on its written form, in the United States, and I am happy to introduce it to the readers of AJR.
My book examines narratives of Late Antiquity in which rabbinic figures travel either westward from Babylonia to Palestine or eastward from Palestine to Babylonia. They encounter local rabbis, local laypeople, and the practices and customs of these new settings. My study is the first in-depth research of the social, cultural, and religious aspects of the encounters between Babylonians and their Palestinian brethren from narratives dating between the third- to sixth-centuries. I draw on migration and mobility studies, comparative literature, humor studies, as well as social history to reveal how border-crossing rabbis were seen as exporting features of their previous eastern context into their new western homes and vice versa. I believe that through their writing, rabbinic authors articulated the nature and legitimacy of their own scholastic practices, knowledge, and authority in relationship to their internal others.
This book belongs to the academic genre of the history of mentalities, as applied to Talmudic studies. It aims to describe and analyze how Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis thought about and represented their interactions with one another, with special attention to their beliefs, feelings, values, and mental attitudes of the Palestinian rabbis towards their Babylonian brethren. I argue that these narratives reflect the ongoing interaction between the rabbinic elites of Palestine and Babylonia throughout late antiquity, that rabbinic figures from the "other" rabbinic centers served as the "internal others," and that through these "others," rabbinic authors articulated the nature and legitimacy of their scholastic practices, knowledge, and authority. The selection and juxtaposition of this particular set of texts aim to sketch a richer and more nuanced portrait of the discursive relationship between these two intellectual centers.
One significant claim is that Palestinian sources about Babylonian rabbinic visitors or migrants provide evidence of a sense of inferiority (inflected by fear) on the part of the Palestinian rabbinic community. In contrast, Babylonian sources suggest a particular self-confidence and even indulgence when confronted with the insecure hostilities of Palestinian rabbis. I tried to bolster this argument with the help of some theories, of which I will mention here only a few, such as Derrida's model of the host and the guest, according to which the host (in this case, the Palestinian rabbinic community) is ever conscious of the danger of erasure or displacement by the guest (migrating Babylonian rabbis), inherent in the act of hospitality,[2] and Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital and symbolic violence.[3] Both are employed to unearth the complexity of the mentalities that emerge from the sources. Due to the two-fold nature of rabbinic culture, I divided the first part of my study to the Yerushalmi and related literature and anthologies of Amoraic Midrash (ch. 1- 6), and the second is on readings from the Babylonian Talmud (7-8). I begin with spatial and symbolic relations between the Land of Israel and Babylonia, by analyzing meaningful metaphors shared by both cultures and explores the tendency of Palestinian rabbis to see Babylonia as a dystopic place. This ongoing discourse underscores two essential loci in the symbolical geography of the Palestinian narrator. The lion share of the book is concerned with the reception of Babylonian immigrants in the domain of the Palestinian rabbis. Using the helpful Derrida paradigm of Host and Guest, I discuss the Palestinian rabbis' use of the figure of the Babylonian Other in shaping their collective Self. This brings me to deal with the mockery of the Babylonian newcomers by their Palestinian Hosts. The objects of the ridicule are not only Babylonian simpletons and unlearned outcasts, but Babylonian literati as well. I discuss the narrative strategies of the Palestinian authors, who meditate on how to be a host for a Babylonian, that is, how to accept/reject/accommodate the Other.
With the helpful tools acquired from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, I analyze a story about the life and death of Shmuel bar Itzhak, a Babylonian sage, and explores the local appropriation of the cultural values of the Other; in other words, how the Other becomes a part of the Self.
Consequently, I read the story about the rabbinic appointment of Hanina bar Hama, a Babylonian student in Palestine, in the context of a search in Palestinian rabbinic culture for alternative leadership. The image of the Babylonian Other helps understand the concepts of leadership and the structure of rabbinic hierarchy. Finally, my readings explore how the narrator's Self, wavers between empathy and sympathy, trying to decide whether to embrace the Other or separate from him.
The tendency to shape Palestinian identity by distancing oneself from the figure of the Other is discussed in Chapter Six. Unlike the previous empathetic or sympathetic treatments of the Other, this distancing sometimes brings the Palestinian narrator to express antipathy for the Other and leads him to marginalize him eternally for the "historical crime" committed by his ancestors. Shimon ben Laqish, a very influential anti-Babylonian rabbi, is the focus of the discussion. Discussing stories about Palestinian rabbis who migrated to Babylonia, I focus on the ensuing conflicts through which Babylonians reshaped their own identity.
The book targets students and scholars of Rabbinic Literature, History, Culture, and Narratology in the Late Antiquity, Migration and Mobility Studies, Comparative Literature, Humor Studies, and Social History of Late Antiquity. The selection of rabbinic narratives discussed in the book should make it a readable handbook in the Rabbinic literature for college students of all levels. The book also addresses the lay readers interested in general Jewish history and culture.
[1] Saul Lieberman, “As It Was, So It Will Be” [Hebrew]. Studies in Palestinian Talmudic Literature. Edited by D. Rosenthal. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991, 331–38
[2] See Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
[3] See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.