Rabbinic Sages Research Articles

Three generations of post-war study of Judaism in Germany: Goldberg, Schaefer, Houtman and Becker and the demolition of historical Judaism

German academic anti-Judaism—theological contempt for the religion set forth out of Scripture by the Rabbinic sages of antiquity—begins with Martin Luther and survives the Third Reich. That is shown by the nihilistic representation of Rabbinic Judaism in post World-War II German scholarship, which denies to Judaism a determinate textual corpus, a synchronic venue, a diachronic context. Three generations—Arnold M. Goldberg, his disciple, Peter Schaefer, and Schaefer's disciples, Alberdina Houtman and Hans-Juergen Becker—have systematically denied to Judaism the possibility of historical study as a culture in dialogue with a particular social order. The outcome of the German academic tradition is a religion without determinate texts, religious texts out of all context—and texts without contents: the nullification of Judaism as a fact of history and culture.

The Fate of Jewish Historiography after the Bible: A New Interpretation

AbstractWhat caused the eventual decline in later Jewish history of the vibrant historiographical tradition of the biblical period? In contrast to the plethora of historical writings composed during the biblical period, the rabbis of the early common era apparently were not interested in writing history, and when they did relate to historical events they often introduced mythical and unrealistic elements into their writings. Scholars have offered various explanations for this phenomenon; a central goal of this article is to locate these explanations within both the immediate historical setting of Roman Palestine and the overarching cultural atmosphere of the Greco‐Roman Near East. In particular, I suggest that the largely ahistorical approach of the rabbis functioned as a local Jewish counterpart to the widespread classicizing tendencies of a contemporary Greek intellectual movement, the Second Sophistic. In both cases, eastern communities, whose political aspirations were stifled under Roman rule, sought to express their cognitive and spiritual identities by focusing on a glorious and idealized past rather than on contemporary history.Interestingly, the apparent lack of rabbinic interest in historiography is not limited to the early rabbinic period. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, Jews essentially did not write their political, diplomatic, or military history. Instead, Jews composed “traditional historiography” which included various types of literary genres among which the rabbinic “chain of transmission” was the most important. The chain of transmission reconstructs (or fabricates) the links that connect later rabbinic sages with their predecessors. Robert Bonfil has noted the similarity between this rabbinic project and contemporary church histories. Adding a diachronic dimension to Bonfil's comparison, I suggest that rabbinic chains of transmission and church histories are not similar though entirely independent phenomena, but rather their shared project actually derives from a common origin, the Hellenistic succession list. The succession list literary genre, which sketches the history of an intellectual discipline, apparently thrived during the Second Sophistic and diffused then into both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity. Thus, even though historiography was not terribly important to the early rabbis or to most Second Sophistic intellectuals, the succession list schematic, or the history of an intellectual discipline, was evaluated differently. Rabbis and early Christians absorbed the succession list from Second Sophistic culture and then continued to employ this historiographical genre for many centuries to come.

Bolsters to their Husbands: Women as Wives in Rabbinic Literature

Rabbinic literature was written and shaped by men and the idealized human society the rabbinic sages constructed in their legal formulations was decidedly oriented towards their own sex. Few aspects of women’s lives and experiences are retrievable from this body of highly redacted texts that became the foundation of over a millennia of Jewish social, religious, and intellectual life. While most rabbinic voices agreed that women were beings quite separate from men, with lesser intellectual, spiritual, and moral capacities, and very different, often undesirable, roles to play in human society, rabbinic traditions are unanimous in praising and honouring the mothers and wives who were so crucial to Jewish survival and the smooth functioning of everyday life. In this essay I focus on rabbinic portrayals of women as wives in a variety of aggadic (non-legal) texts.

Oral Tradition and Rabbinic Studies

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

Kol Nidre: Studies in the Development of Rabbinic Votive Institutions (review)

THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, XCII,Nos. 1-2 (July-October, 2001)219-221 MOSHE BENOVITZ.Kol Nidre: Studies in the Development of Rabbinic Votive Institutions. Brown Judaic Series 315. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998. Pp. 203. Moshe Benovitz provides a careful and detailed account of the history of votive institutions in ancient Israel that is as impressive as it is clear. The double-entendreof the title is apparentat the very outset. In the Introduction , Benovitz cites the Kol Nidre prayer,a popularcomponent of the High Holy Day liturgy, andnotes the general obscuritysurroundingthe list of seven ancient votive institutionsmentionedin the prayer(nidrei, esarei, haramei, kinnuyei, qinnusei, and shevu'ot). Successive chapters examine each of these institutions as they appearin biblical, Second Temple and rabbinicsources. A concluding chapterbrings this informationto bearin a final discussion of the Kol Nidre prayeritself. Benovitz studiously and consciously avoids the methodological errorof previous studies, which tend to interpretobscure referencesto votive institutionsin Second Templesources in light of laterrabbinicconceptions. For Benovitz, Second Temple sources representan interim stage in the transition between biblical and rabbinic votive institutions and should not be read anachronistically.On more than one occasion he argues convincingly thatpre-rabbinicsources are a critical missing link, the key to understanding the evolution of votive institutionsfound in rabbinicliterature.For example , the connection between the biblical herem offering andthe rabbinic use of the term herem to refer to excommunication has not hithertobeen satisfactorily explained. In chapter3, Benovitz shows that Second Temple sources attest to a previously unidentifiedform of herem, which he terms "conspiracy herem,"according to which conspiratorsvow to ritually immolate (as herem) anyone in the group who does not follow throughwith the group'scriminalplan. Texts from Qumranindicate thatthe "deathsentence " under a conspiracy herem was commuted to excommunication, a safeguard against the contagion imparted by the herem victim until his death. In rabbinic sources this excommunication would become a punishment in its own right. Likewise, the connection between the biblical neder and the rabbinic neder has never been adequately explained and is obscure to the rabbis themselves. While the biblical neder is always dedicatory of persons and propertyto God and never prohibitive, the rabbinicneder can be either a dedicatoryvow (a promise to devote something or someone to the Temple) or a prohibitive vow (a ban placed on specific propertybarringits use by 220 THEJEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW the votary or some other person). The rabbinicexplanation of prohibitive vows as likening an object to a sacrifice (which is forbidden for general use) has been adoptedratheruncritically by scholars and applied anachronistically to prohibitivevows attestedin Second Temple sources. Benovitz argues that the rabbinic explanation should be rejected; close analysis of the formulaeemployed in prohibitivevows suggests thatthey too are dedicatory ,but thatthe consecration of the object occurs simultaneouslywith the violation of the consecration.For example, a vow to the effect thatthe wine I will drinkis qorban (a sacrifice), dedicates wine only at the moment that I drink it. But the act that consecrates (drinking)is also the act that violates. The practical effect of such a dedicatory vow is that it creates a personalprohibition. Benovitz'understandingof therabbinicprohibitiveneder,set outin chapter 1, illuminates a numberof otherconfusing or obscuretexts. Mark7:11 andCDC XVI:13-15 may be understoodas protestingthe use of dedicatory vows to create a personalprohibition.These texts indicate thatthe practice was viewed by some as an abuseor mockeryof the dedicatoryvow since no consecrationwas ever intended. For their part,the Pharisees would surely have objectedto unscrupuloususes of the prohibitivevow, butconsideredit technically valid, beyond theirpower to annuland, in any event, preferable to the takingof oathsin God'sname. Chapter4 examines the substituteformulaeqonam ,qonahandqonas (insteadof qorban)usedin prohibitivevows of thistype.Benovitzrejectsthecurrenttheoryof a Phoenicianderivationfor the term qonam and proposes instead a Greekderivation.The firstcentury Greekprohibitiveformulaemployed the declined forms koinon, koine, and koinos meaning "common"or "shared"and referringto items donated to charity.These terms were adoptedby the rabbisand the vowels of qorban were then superimposedon these basic terms, giving rise to qonam,qonah and qonas. Understandingthe rabbinicprohibitiveneder as an originally dedicatory vow providesnew insight into the origin andtheoreticalbasis for the dissolution of vows by the rabbinic sages (chapter 6). The Bible contains no provisionfor the dissolution of vows andoaths andyet rabbinicsources indicate thatrabbinicalcourts were empoweredto declare vows not binding. Benovitz argues that...

Rabbinic Universalism in the Second and Third Centuries

In the eye of a protracted political storm, the rabbinic sages of the first centuries of the common era preserved and nurtured their Jewish heritage. This was not a univocal heritage, but one of significant diversity. Although these rabbis were fully aware of the divisiveness that had plagued Jewish religious attitudes over the centuries, they turned debate and dissent into their very trademark. Whether in matters legal, ethical, or theological, differing and even contradictory opinions were the norm. A natural result of this rabbinic posture is that the entire rabbinic corpus is anthological. We do not possess individual works of the rabbis, great as they might have been. We have instead catenae or collections of statements. Sometimes they represent real conversations between sages, but other times they reflect an editorial juxtaposition of opposing views. These characteristics of rabbinic literature create a formidable challenge for those who wish to treat rabbinic thought systematically.

Worship of the Heart: A Study in Maimonides' Philosophy of Religion (review)

298 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL 199 7 Ehud Benor. Worship of the Heart: A Study in Maimonides'Philosophyof Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Pp. ix + 262. Paper, $16.95. Prayer is not often presented as having much to do with philosophy. The latter is an autonomous human activity, while prayer depends upon a divine being for its efficacy. Benor, however, wants to place prayer at center stage and to understand dialogic prayer with God as the linchpin in Maimonides' philosophical program, specifically, as the link between theoretical contemplation (the summum bonum for Maimonides) and practical, political activity. In arguing for this position, Benor opposes Guttmann and Fox, who held an incommensurability thesis concerning traditional modes of prayer and Maimonides' intellectualist-contemplative ideal. Benor's position coheres with holistic ones, such as Twersky's, which attempt to bridge the gap between Maimonides' halakhic (legal) writings, especially the Mishneh Torah, and his philosophical magnum opus, The Guide of the Perplexed. Benor's commensurability thesis is also directed against those he sees as evincing little awareness of the specific problematic that confronts Maimonides. For Benor, Maimonides must be seen as responding directly to Plato and Aristotle, for whom a real conundrum exists concerning the grounds for motivating the philosopher to return to the practical realm (the cave). Thus, any interpretation that does not take seriously the problems that arise from trying to bridge the gap between theory and practice, metaphysics and morals, is insufficiently attentive to the particular philosophical context in which Maimonides worked. Interpretations that present the Maimonidean prophet as moving directly, easily, and seemingly without effort, from the contemplative mode to a practical one, and, further, that ground such transformation upon the specific nature of the object of contemplation and theoretical insight, must be subject to criticism. For Benor, the just-mentioned view of the practical turn in Maimonides' theorizing is too facile, and in response he takes issue with some recent interpretations. Leaman has argued that for Maimonides the very contemplation of God entails imitation of divine (moral) attributes, while Altmann argued that imitation of God is but the practical side of the intellectual love of God, and follows from such theoretical insight. For both Leaman and Altmann, thus, there simply is no problem about the commensurability . For them, practice follows straightaway, especially given that the insight of the contemplative, the would-be prophet, is an insight into the moral nature of God. But for Benor, this theoretical insight cannot ground imitatio, for the simple reason, Humean in its way, that (theoretical) reason is inert and cannot motivate action. For Benor, even though the object of contemplation is the source of all value, the grounds for action must be located elsewhere. Benor locates the seat of action in the heart, the desiderative element (the will?). This, however, should not lead one to think that Maimonides is an arationalist in ethics and politics. The passage from Guide 3.51 that undergirds the title of the book makes this very clear. The "worship of the heart" referred to there, which for the rabbinic sages indicates prayer, is Maimonides' description of his own contemplative ideal. But the crucial point here is that in identifying and understanding divine contemplation as BOOK REVIEWS 299 prayer Maimonides radically transforms the theoretical interpretation of the former, and does so in such a way as to provide a means whereby the philosopher in going about his characteristic activity is perforce motivated to undertake practical, political activity. How precisely is this transformation from contemplative to practical activity supposed to work? For Benor, "the philosopher must already have achieved practical excellence if his or her supreme theoretical achievement is to have the practical consequences of the Maimonidean ideal of imitatiodei" (56). In brief, for Maimonides moral perfection--perfection of character and rectification of desire--is a prerequisite to intellectual perfection, and never absent from it; and given this, "the practical turn [i.e., imitatio]... [must] be understood not as a result of intellectual apprehension but as its completion" (194 n.93 ). Indeed, for Benor, the very theory/practice dichotomy is attenuated. Since intellectual apprehension entails, and is entailed by, love of...

Jewish Education in Transition — A Layman's View

In the Talmud “Sanhedrin,” we are told that when the great elders of the Sanhedrin met it was mandatory that the youngest and least experienced speak first. At first blush, this sage precept seems to be misplaced, as we would think that those with the most knowledge ought to be the first to establish policy and position. However, our sages tell us that if the youngest and least experienced were not allowed to speak first, their ideas and perceptions would never be available to the elders as a basis for ultimate decision making. This evening, I feel somewhat like the youngest at the Sanhedrin as I look out at those of you who have vast experience in the areas of Jewish education and I am therefore going to rely upon the wisdom of our rabbinic sages and plunge into my thoughts on the question of Jewish education and its future. If I might begin with a quote which I believe has relevancy to the issue at hand, it is as follows: