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Ausgabe: | April/2024 |
Spalte: | 285-287 |
Kategorie: | Judaistik |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Amsler, Monika |
Titel/Untertitel: | The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture. |
Verlag: | Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2023. 243 S. Geb. US$ 110,00. ISBN 9781009297332. |
Rezensent: | Catherine Hezser |
This book by Monika Amsler, which is based on her doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Zurich in 2018, attempts to reconstruct the literary processes that led to the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud. Since the Talmud does not provide any explicit evidence about its creation, a variety of theories have been offered by other scholars in the past that are usually based on internal literary and structural features of the text. Important aspects of these theories are the distinction between amoraic and stammaitic (anonymous editorial) layers and the dating of the latter to the late fifth to eighth centuries C. E., that is, significantly later than the Palestinian Talmud.
A.’s approach is distinctive in its comparative approach that tries to understand the development of the Talmud within the context of classical and late antique compilatory techniques. She argues that the Babylonian Talmud is a »symposiac miscellany with the basic structure of a commentary on the Mishnah« (210), which was composed like a mosaic from huge numbers of more or less small written excerpts, stored in private libraries and archives in a variety of materials, whose wording was generally left intact. By examining the Babylonian Talmud in a Graeco-Roman rather than Sasanian Persian intellectual context, by refusing to distinguish between amoraim and compilers, by denying the impact of orality, assuming that the compilers used only written source material, and by dating the Babylonian Talmud almost contemporaneous with the Palestinian Talmud the author goes against most prior scholarship on the Bavli, represented by David Weiss Halivni, Yaakov Elman, and Jeffrey L. Rubenstein. While her attempt to integrate the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud into late antique intellectual culture is to be appreciated as an important and path-breaking new approach, the conclusions seem simplistic and are not persuasive from a literary-historical point of view.
The focus of the study is on the surface structure of the Babylonian Talmud, from which A. works backwards, trying to identify »original« written excerpts, which she then recombines into the longer sources that the compilers allegedly used and dissected to create their textual units. Her main textual example is a talmudic discourse that integrates medical recipes (b. Git. 68a–70a). It seems as if the entire book emerged from the study of this particular text, whose »original source«, an »Aramaic Treatise of Simple Remedies«, the author reconstructs and presents in an appendix (219–236). Even if the talmudic editors used one or more written collections of medical recipes here, an assumption already expressed by other scholars (Veltri, Geller, Freeman), how do we know that »the composers altered their excerpts as little as possible« (177) and that exclusively written source material was used? Even if notebooks with Greek and Akkadian medical recipes were available to the editors of this particular text, this does not mean that tens or even hundreds of thousands of small scraps of written pieces were stored at par-ticular places (Synagogues of which we know little as far as Sasanian Persia is concerned? Rabbis’ private libraries?) and used by the compilers like bricks to build the Talmud as a whole. The text of the Talmud suggests a much more complex compilation process, based on both orally transmitted and written material, which was transmitted, reformulated and adapted at various stages. Rather than merely assembling the text out of the raw material available to them, the editors created complex discursive units whose internal logic cannot be reduced to mere keyword connections organ-ised around mishnaic lemmata.
In recent years, scholarship on the Babylonian Talmud has emphasized the significance of the Sasanian Persian and Zoroastrian context for properly understanding the text. Therefore, it seems strange that A. uses only Graeco-Roman comparative literature to reconstruct the Bavli’s composition techniques. She assumes that Babylonian rabbis, both amoraim and compilers, were educated and participated in the literate culture of late antiquity, which is presented as rather homogeneous, based on the paideia-based education of the Greek and Roman upper strata of society to which authors such as Pliny the Elder belonged. The possibility of alternative Middle Eastern scholastic cultures in Aramaic, Syriac, Avestan and Pahlavi, which relied on oral transmission more than on writing, emphasized memorization, and created works whose structure and logic differed from those of the paideia-based wes-tern models is thereby denied or at least not taken into consideration. The Zoroastrian Avesta, which was composed and transmitted orally for centuries, would have constituted an excellent comparative model that is never investigated. Instead, A. assumes that Babylonian rabbis were well versed in the »Greek-based rhetorical curriculum«, familiar with the rhetorical exercises of the progymnasmata, and used to keeping notebooks like upper-class Greek and Roman authors. The Talmud’s scarce references to the use of tablets and writing, our lack of knowledge of Babylonian rabbis’ education, and Graeco-Roman upper-class writers’ ample use of (usually servile) scribes and secretaries are not given sufficient consideration. These factors would threaten a simple equation between Babylonian rabbis and Graeco-Roman authors, acknowledge educational and social variations amongst Babylonian rabbis and historical and cultural differences between amoraic rabbis and talmudic editors (stammaim).
Amongst Graeco-Roman comparative compilations Pliny’s Natural History, Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, and Macrobius’ Saturnalia stand out, whereas not only the Avesta but also Justinian’s Digest and the Apophthegmata Patrum are absent. The focus is on works composed by individual authors rather than on compilations created by sets of editors who chose to remain anonymous. Whereas the form of the chreia, known from the progymnasmata, is seen as the main building material of the Babylonian Talmud (a very broad definition of chreia is used by the author), the Talmud’s legal, halakhic nature is not acknowledged. Rather than being a »symposiac miscellany« of tales, narratives, and medical recipes, »a Jewish oeconomica, intended to guide the paterfamilias in his daily business« (40), the Babylonian Talmud’s halakhic discussions served future generations of rabbinic scholars as a basis to solve the halakhic problems they were confronted with. None of the comparative works discussed by A. shares this legal focus that would have determined the use of sources and overall composition. Some of the material which the editors used, such as collections of medical recipes with analogies in Graeco-Roman and Akkadian texts, are made subservient to this halakhic focus. What applies to them – their possibly written transmission with parallels elsewhere – cannot be generalized and applied to the Talmud as a whole. The study is an interesting but flawed attempt to explain the composition of the Babylonian Talmud through a comparison with other, non-Jewish literary works. It indicates how much work still needs to be done in this regard by scholars of rabbinic, Zoroastrian, Syriac, and Graeco-Roman literature.