The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud

Abstract

The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, by Jeffrey L. Rubenstein. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. 248. $42.00 (cloth). ISBN 080187388-6. In his latest book, Jeffrey Rubenstein describes an academic institution in which colleagues engage in turbulent verbal battles. The goal of these battles is not always a pure search for truth and illumination, but a pursuit of the participating scholars for personal advancement in the institutional hierarchy. Each colleagues' greatest fear is the shame which might be brought on by his inability to respond correctly; hence such violent discourse is both typical and yet institutionally discouraged. Although academic ability is essential toward promotion, genealogical descent from other scholars is not a negligible consideration. The male scholars of such institutions find it burdensome to conduct family lives while being totally dedicated to their academic pursuits. Their superior intellectual abilities lead them to disdain the simple, uneducated folk. Rubenstein is not describing a modern university; these scholars are not young assistant professors seeking tenure nor are they tenured professors sitting in the ivoiy towers of elite universities. Rather Rubenstein is describing the elusive cultural world of the academy of the redactors of the Babylonian Talmud, coined Stammaim by David Weiss Halivni, after the fact that they do not identify themselves by name. According to Rubenstein, at some time in the late fifth to early sixth century, Babylonian Torah study was formally institutionalized, leading to transformations in the structures in which their oral Torahs were preserved and significant editorial changes in the very literary style of these traditions. The establishment of a formal academy (or perhaps academies) is reflected in many of the Babylonian aggadot, and especially in those which purport to portray earlier Palestinian sages. The emphasis placed in these stories on dialectical ability is a reflection of an academic setting in which sages debate each other in public, each attempting to conquer the other, and thus rise through the hierarchy, which inevitably accompanies a more established academy. Sages who fail are shamed, and hence these stories frequently warn of the consequences of shaming others. These qualities are featured prominently in later Babylonian aggadot and are much less prominent in Palestinian literature and in earlier strata of the Babylonian Talmud. Hence, although they purport to portray life in Palestine in the second and third centuries, in reality they are pseudepigraphic. According to Rubenstein, they are cultural artifacts of the Stammaitic period, the period that fell between the end of the Amoraic period and the beginning of the Geonic period. The late dating of these stories, established through philological tools and source criticism, allows us to correlate them to historical changes that occurred between the Amoraic and Stammaitic periods. We should appreciate that Rubenstein is attempting to solve one of the greatest mysteries in talmudic scholarship, and perhaps one of the great conundrums of all of Jewish history: who edited the Babylonian Talmud, why was it completed (as opposed to continuing to grow in a more amorphous form), and why don't we know their names? Since the beginning of Wissenschaft des judentums, entire books have been dedicated to this issue and multiple theories have been offered. For several generations, these theories typically attributed the redaction/completion of the Talmud to various political/ religious persecutions, although such persecutions have never been convincingly identified. I once heard a teacher suggest that a great comet which landed in Babylonia around this time may have contributed to a depression in Torah learning, and that the accompanying loss of authority caused rabbis to withhold their names from their talmudic traditions! In my opinion, Rubenstein's suggestion that formal academies rose during this period is the most compelling suggestion that has been offered to solve this puzzle. …