Textuality and Subsurface Traditions

Abstract

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 3–5 Textuality and Subsurface Traditions MICHAEL F ISHBANE MY LIFE IN SCHOLARSHIP has been marked by an intellectual and personal obsession with the textuality of cultures—beginning with their foundational expressions, as articulated both within and against alien forms; their new creation of textual habitats, so that diverse cultural identities could be shaped and re-formed; and their ongoing renaissance or self-revolution, whereby these textual cultures were often radically revised or transformed. My path has taken me from the philologies and documents of the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible through the varieties of rabbinic cultures of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and into types of modern Jewish thought and theology. Commentary or text interpretation is a quintessential element of the historical Jewish text cultures , at once sustaining primary texts themselves and producing new patterns of primacy that must be interpreted in order to be transcended, used, or even evaded. I have therefore devoted my attention to the textual details and logics of commentaries, and how they mark the formative and transformative mentalities of culture—Jewish biblical culture, in particular . The histories of commentaries thus trace the interior structures of culture, thought, and thinking. A task of scholarship is to find and mark these traces, accessing and assessing them as best one can. As I have matured and come to understand my task and service to culture, this has been my self-appointed task. Texts and commentaries ostensibly bring life forms of the imagination into view, though in many cases the residues and patterns of this evidence have left various kinds of obscurities. These require not only recognition but reconstruction. I would like to mention three topics in this regard, which have variously engaged my attention over the years—separately and simultaneously. One topic demanding recognition and reconstruction is the need to locate and retrieve the mentalities of thought and logic found in scriptural exegesis in its many forms. In my work, this has included the materials The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 4 JQR 94:1 (2004) within the Hebrew Bible itself, as well as the vast library of interpretation of Scripture from antiquity to the present. Thus hermeneutics is a window into modalities of the cultural mind and its forms of reason. One must always reconstruct the mental structures and reasoning from the cited comments, intuiting just what was perceived by and of concern to the interpreter who made this or that interpretative intervention. In this way, one might gain some sense of the modes of textual perception and thinking at different cultural moments, as well as some of the remarkable ways that prior theologies or values were insinuated into the text so that the text might appear to warrant and support certain perspectives. In those cases where the type of interpretation may be intuited from the text itself, we gain some understanding of the ways that the biblical text was read, and of the presumed aspects of its coherence or incoherence; and in those cases whereby the teachings are not directly derived from the text, we may intuit patterns of ideas that were projected upon the texts, so that they might be justified or valorized. Either way, we gain some access to modes of the cultural mind, as it unfolded in history, through the prism of scriptural interpretation. This is precious evidence and must be treated with respect and integrity. Another matter involving strategies of retrieval and reconstruction has also preoccupied me since my earliest studies, and that is the matter of subsurface culture and continuities. This topic made its first impression upon me when I became aware of certain legal terms and mythic themes that occurred in the texts of the ancient Near East, sometimes wholly skipped the Hebrew Bible, and then resurfaced with vigor in early or later rabbinic sources. I became engrossed in the problem of survivals and hidden traditions, and thus the methodology of their retrieval. Early work in magic yielded much...