Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (review)

Abstract

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 176–177 YAAKOV ELMAN and ISRAEL GERSHONI, eds. Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion. Studies in Jewish Culture and Society. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xi Ⳮ 353. This book is a collection of essays derived from a year-long group on the theme of the transmission of knowledge in Jewish culture that was held at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania during the academic year 1995–96. The group comprised scholars working in virtually every period and area of Jewish studies, from the Hebrew Bible and rabbinics through medieval and early modern Jewish culture into the modern period and in fields as diverse as German and Yiddish literature, Jewish musicology, and Zionism. The ten essays in this volume reflect this wide historical span as well as the group’s disciplinary and thematic variety, with essays ranging from Martin Jaffee’s comparative study of rhetoric and paideia in the Talmud Yerushalmi and in Greco-Roman literature, to Jeffrey Grossman’s engrossing study of translation technique in early twentieth-century German translations of Y. L. Peretz, to Israel Bartal’s essay on the Kinnus Project as a tool of cultural fashioning in early Zionism. Beyond the excellence of nearly all its individual components, however , this collection is a remarkably coherent volume with a contribution of its own. It is especially important for the ways that it develops its main theme, namely, as its editors write in their introduction, how ‘‘the transmission of various cultural elements is affected by the mode of transmission .’’ Whether that ‘‘mode of transmission’’ is oral or literary, or in the form of translation, or in the anthologizing of earlier sources, the importance of foregrounding and highlighting this all too often neglected dimension of textual study cannot be overestimated. Indeed, the import of this volume’s diversity is to show how the question of the mode of transmission should be a subject of vital concern to all scholars in Jewish studies regardless of field or period. It is hardly a topic that begins with the age of print. Without disparaging the important contributions of the essays dealing with the modern period, like those of Bartal and Grossman, it is fair to say that the most exciting essays in the book are those devoted to ancient and medieval texts. Let me just cite a few of the more original and innovative contributions. Paul Mandel’s study of the different recensions of Lamentations Rabbah expertly moves beyond philology to use its evidence ELMAN AND GERSHONI, JEWISH TRADITIONS—STERN 177 as source material for speculations upon modes of teaching and the role of books in Palestine and geonic Babylonia respectively. Daphna Ephrat and Yaakov Elman’s joint contribution is an exemplary model of innovative comparative work, in this case of the use of orality in the geonic yeshiva and the Islamic madrasa; Malachi Beit-Arie’s paper on medieval scribality focuses upon the highly creative role of scribes in copying texts and the implications of their interventions in how we conceive of a text. Similarly, Mark Saperstein’s study of the sermon as an oral performance also works to blur the lines between orality and written transmission, as does Elliot Wolfson’s masterly study of the intercalation of oral tradition and written communication in the transmission of esoteric literature. The essays in this volume reflect the influence on Jewish studies of what has come to be called the ‘‘new materialist philology,’’ to use Stephen Nichols’s term—that is, the methodologically self-conscious and rigorous extension of traditional philological study from purely textual matters to larger questions of literary and cultural significance. The text, as we know, is not only a conveyor of knowledge but also a medium of cultural exchange. Jewish studies has of course been a text-centered discipline from its inception. But as this volume demonstrates, we still are in the process of learning how much a text—in its full material sense— can actually teach us. University of Pennsylvania DAVID STERN ...