Oral Tradition and Rabbinic Studies

Abstract

The literature of classical rabbinic Judaism is usually said to have been “redacted” from around 300 CE until about 700 CE in the Palestinian and Mesopotamian centers of rabbinic settlement. Rabbinic literature itself assumes that the traditions that stand behind the written texts were transmitted orally for at least several generations (and in some views, centuries) prior to the compilation of the written manuscripts that are known from the Middle Ages. The formulaic and stylistic traits of the rabbinic writings also suggest a firm basis in orally transmitted material in at least two senses. First, the strong mnemonic traits of the medieval manuscripts suggest that the documents preserved by them were formulated by people for whom oral textual performance was a common experience. Secondly, the written texts as we have them seem to have emerged in a milieu in which written versions of texts were shaped by prior orally-managed material, even as written texts then shaped the outlines of further oral performances based upon them as mnemonic aids. To sum up, oral tradition in the context of rabbinic studies is the complex of legal, theological, and exegetical material transmitted by rabbinic sages of antiquity in the context of oral-performative instruction and preserved in a host of manuscript exemplars that reflect in varying degrees the presence of oral-traditional stylistic traits. The most important recent work in rabbinic oral traditional studies concerns the relationship of the surviving manuscript materials to their primary oral-traditional milieu, either in the original formation of the earliest rabbinic oral traditions in the first centuries CE or in the consolidation of the extant texts in the transition from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages. A comprehensive discussion of the history of ancient rabbinic oral tradition, and particularly, the ideological formulation of oral tradition as part of an oral revelation to Moses parallel to the Torah, has recently been offered by Martin S. Jaffee (2001). Important studies of the ways in which rabbinic compilations of biblical exegesis reflect and, in some senses, create an oral traditional milieu include Fraade (1991) and Nelson (1999). A fresh look at ways in which the oral transmission of the Mishnah, regarded as the