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The OPENING PASSAGE of tractate Avot is undoubtedly one of the most, if not the most, famous rabbinic texts in the entire classical rabbinic corpus. "Moses received Torah from Sinai," claims mAvot 1.1, a Torah that he handed on to Joshua, "and Joshua [handed it on] to the Elders, and the Elders [handed it on] to the prophets and the prophets [handed it on] to the people of the Great Assembly," the last "remnant" of whom was Simeon the Righteous, who handed on that Torah to his "successors." According to the following passages in that famous mishnah, An tigonos of Sokho "received" from Simeon the Righteous, Yosse ben Yoezer and Yosse ben Yohanan "received" from "him,"* 1 Joshua ben Perahiah and Mattai2 the Arbelite "received" from "them," Judah ben Tabbai and Simeon ben Shatah "received" from "them," Shemaiah and Abtalion "received" from "them," and Hillel and Shammai "received" from "them."3 As noted by Martin Jaffee, this unit is "the best-known example of the claim that all rabbinic teaching stems from a Mosaic source."4So pivotal are these lines for our thinking about rabbinic Judaism that when Jacob Neusner, for example, attempted a "Definition of Rabbinic Judaism," his starting point was basically a recapitulation of that passage:The central conception of rabbinic Judaism is the belief that the ancient Scriptures constituted divine revelation, but only a part of it. At Sinai, God had handed down a dual revelation: the written part known to one and all, but also the oral part preserved by the great scriptural heroes, passed on by prophets to various ancestors in the obscure past, finally and most openly handed down to the rabbis who created the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds.5Although Neusner did not furnish any reference to support this view, it is clear from the vocabulary he used that his major source was the famous beginning of tractate Avot in the Mishnah, which he views as encapsulating "the central conception of rabbinic Judaism."David Weiss-Halivni, too, views "the oldest layer" of Avot, the "chain of tradition from Moses to the five disciples of R. Yochanan ben Zakkai," as a text of crucial importance for the emerging rabbinic tradition that shifted its main course of study from "midrash" to "mishnah."6 According to Halivni, the text was "composed by these five disciples (or by their disciples) around the first quarter of the second century for the purpose of strengthening their authority, showing themselves to be direct successors of Moses, who received the Torah from Sinai."7 Or, as Jaffee puts it, this "chain of tradition" is an "effective apologia defending the continuity of rabbinic teachings with the teaching of Israel's greatest prophet."8These and similar statements all place much weight on tractate Avot as the manifesto of rabbinic Judaism. In this essay I seek to challenge this widespread view. My point of departure is mAvot 2.8f£, which I propose reading as a locus of political polemic among Palestinian rabbis over the question of relationship to Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai and hence to halakhic authority.9 This suggestion will lead me to argue that tractate Avot stems from one circle of rabbinic Judaism, and it reflects the ideology of that group, an ideology that was, in fact, rejected by "mainstream" rabbinic circles-the rabbinic circles that produced the Mishnah.10THE VOICE OF THE MARGINALIZEDMishnah Avot 2.8 is the last passage in the chain of tradition with which tractate Avot begins (mAvot 1.1-15). It uses the same terminology of that chain, claiming that Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (RYBZ) "received" (bip) from Hillel sind Shammai, who are the last pair mentioned in chapter 1 .n At the same time it presents a novel development and a point of transition in the rabbinic world, in that RYBZ is said to have had students, unlike any of his predecessors. After claiming that RYBZ "received" from Hillel and Shammai, and quoting his own aphorism, the mishnah records RYBZ's praise for each of his students and adds a concluding comment of evaluation:[A] Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai received from Hillel and Shammai. …

"What's the Talmud? Is it your Gospel?""The Talmud is like a soup, with all things a man can eat in it. But there's wheat and chaff, fruit and pits, and meat and bones. It isn't very good, but it's nourishing. It's full of mistakes and contradictions, but for that very reason it teaches you how to use your mind."Primo Levi1Barry Scott Wimpfheimer. Narrating the Law: A Poetice of Talmudoe Legal Stories. Divinations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 239.Talya Fishman. Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah a? Written Tradition in Medieval JewLfh Culture*». Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.We READ BOOKS from beginning to end. Not so the Bavli. My own rather typical experience with the Babylonian Talmud began, as an elementary school student, with the first tractate, Berakhot, but with the fourth chapter, not the first. From there I ventured into isolated chapters from the fourth order, thence to parts of the second and third orders, and much later, to the forbidding tractates of the final two orders. But change is afoot. I write these words a few days after the internationally heralded end of a cycle oi daf y orni, the practice of studying one folio page (daf, or in Yiddish, blatt) of the Talmud each day (yam) . Daf y orni, insofar as it progresses through the Bavli from cover to cover, reframes the Bavli as a book. The deep if implicit textualism of dafyomi manifests itself, indeed, in the very demarcation of the page as the basic unit of study. The meaning-bearing unit of the Bavli is not the page but the ?ugya, which inevitably stops short of the bottom of the page, or continues on to the next. Daf y orni thus represents the elevation of the page, a printer's innovation, over the ?ugya. Daf y orni innovates in a third, related way by flattening the Bavli's content. Readers of the Bavli have traditionally privileged its legal dialectics over its nonlegal material, or halakhah over aggadah. In the terms supplied by Primo Levi's metaphor of the talmudic soup (a deflationary echo of the sublime "sea of Talmud"), the halakhic meat must be picked off the aggadic bones. The preeminence of halakhah is nowhere so staunchly presumed than in the very rightward-leaning circles that have fueled daf y omi, even though this practice by its nature effaces distinctions between parts of the Bavli.The continuing and arguably unprecedented prominence of the Bavli in contemporary Judaism compels us to reflect critically, and with historical awareness, on this most canonical of Jewish texts. Is there a better or worse way to read the Bavli? How did such a curious text come about, and how did it achieve the authority that it enjoys? Are the innovations in reading practice effected by daf yorni changes in degree or kind, and what might they portend for the future of the Bavli, and of those who look to it for guidance? Two important new books by Barry Wimpfheimer and Talya Fishman offer some answers to these questions and shed light especially on the issues of textualism and the law/narrative divide that I have highlighted above.Wimpfheimer's book offers a poetics of the Bavli's "legal stories," in which he finds a density of meaning that complicates dichotomies and ultimately reveals the law's true character. Law is not (only) code, but cultural discourse, a semiotic matrix that converses and competes with other matrices, like psychology and sociology. Wimpfheimer frames his book as a "deconstructive act" (p. 4) that challenges the dominant Jewish tendency to identify law, as halakhah, with practice, and to set it off against aggadah, imagined as the exclusive locus of meaning. The book thus speaks not only to scholars of rabbinic literature but also, and more urgently, and even sometimes explicitly, to contemporary Jews, who are invited to consider, in its light, "ways in which contemporary halakhic thinkers could reimagine the relationship between Halakhah and evolving contemporary mores" (p. …

Torah min Hashamayim Ba-aspaklaria shel Hadorot (Theology of Ancient Judaism) [Hebrew], by Abraham Joshua Heschel. 3 vols. Vols. 1-2, London: Soncino Press, 1962-65; vol. 3, New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1995. English Translation: Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, edited and translated by Gordon Tucker with Leonard Levin. New York: Continuum, 2005. I am unaware of any other scholar of the twentieth century besides Abraham Joshua Heschel who contributed to the theological understanding of the four pivotal periods of pre-modern Jewish existence: Biblical, Rabbinic, Medieval-Philosophic, and Kabbalistic-Hasidic. The first two warranted major books. For the Biblical period, The Prophets articulates the Divine pathos of the Most Moved Mover's involvement in the affairs of man. For the Rabbinic period, Torah Min HaShamayim BeAsplaqariah Shel HaDorot, traces the internal dialectic of Jewish theology throughout its history. This is Heschels magnum opus, for it presents the understanding of the woof and warp of Judaism which informs his writings on contemporary theology. Heschel not only had an overarching thesis about Rabbinic Judaism, but adopted the strategy of exegeting it from within by writing it in Hebrew in native categories. Many of the subsections are titled with Rabbinic quotations. This reflects his understanding of the intersect between language and thought, for as words and language inform thinking so do categories structure thought. The distinctiveness of Heschels contribution can be gauged by comparing his chapter headings with three other major works on Rabbinic thought. Solomon Schechter, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology. 1. Introductory 2. God and the World 3. God and Israel 4. The Election of Israel 5. The Kingdom of God (Invisible) 6. The Visible Kingdom (Universal) 7. The Kingdom of God (National) 8. The "Law" 9. The Law as Personified in the Literature 10. The Torah in its Aspect of Law (Mizwoth) 11. The Joy of the Law 12. The Zacuth of the Fathers. Imputed Righteousness and Imputed Sin 13. The Law of Holiness and Law of Goodness 14. Sin as Rebellion 15. The Evil Yezer: The Source of Rebellion 16. Man's Victory by the Grace of God, over the Evil Yezer Created by God 17. Forgiveness and Reconciliation with God 18. Repentance: Means of Reconciliation George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: Introduction 1. Historical 2. The Sources Part I: Revealed Religion 1. Nationality and Universality 2. The Scriptures 3. The Unwritten Law 4. The Perpetuity of the Law 5. The Synagogue 6. The Schools 7. The Conversion of Gentiles Part II: The Idea of God 1. God and the World 2. The Character of God 3. Ministers of God 4. The Word of God. The Spirit 5. Majesty and Accessibility of God Part III: Man, Sin, Atonement 1. The Nature of Man 2. Sin and its Consequences 3. The Origin of Sin 4. Ritual Atonement 5. Repentance 6. The Efficacy of Repentance 7. Motives of Forgiveness 8. Expiatory Suffering Part IV: Observances Part V: Morals Part VI: Piety Part VII: The Hereafter Ephraim Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs [Hebrew], ET: The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbis of the Talmud, 1. The Study of the History of the Beliefs and Concepts of the Sages. 2. The Belief in One God 3. The Shekhina-The Presence of God in the world 4. Nearness and Distance-Omnipresent and Heaven 5. The Epithet Gevura [Might] and the Power of God 6. Magic and Miracle 7. The Power of the Divine Name 8. …

Scholars of medieval Hebrew codicology have noted that Sefer Haoidim (hereafter SH) devotes extraordinary attention to the book as material object.1 SH Parma (SHP) includes a subheading entitled 'inyan oefarim, i.e., "the subject of books,"2 but there are hundreds of passages outside that section that refer to the stages of book production, to scribes, copyists, and manufacturers, and to the implements used in pricking, ruling, inking, erasing, binding, covering, and fastening books. SHs nar ratives discuss the book as commodity, describing which bound manu scripts are best suited to the rental market and the conditions under which a purloined book may be ransomed for more than its fair price (SHP 868; 603; 1748). They also illuminate the densely intertwined econ omies and societies of medieval Christians and Jews: Christians pledged Latin books when they borrowed from Jewish moneylenders, and Jews left Hebrew books as collateral when they procured loans from Chris

In a fascinating chapter dealing with the “nature of eating” inShulhan shel Arba, a short thirteenth-century manual on rabbinic eating rituals, R. Bahya b. Asher suggests that Torah scholars alone are fit to eat meat, based on the following passage from the Talmud: “it is forbidden for an ignoramus [am ha-aretz] to eat meat, as it is written, ‘This is the torah of beast and fowl’ (Lev 11:46); for all who engage in Torah, it is permitted to eat the flesh of beast and fowl. This passage raises many questions, especially for a vegetarian! First, why would an intellectual or spiritual elite use meat-eating as a way to distinguish itself from the masses? The field of comparative religions offers many counter-examples to this tendency: the vegetarian diet of the Hindu Brahmin caste, of Buddhist priests and nuns, the ancient Pythagoreans, the Neoplatonist regimen advocated by Porphyry inOn Abstinence, or even contemporary eco-theologians, animal rights activists, and feminist vegetarians like Carol Adams.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 242 pp. $49.95. Jaffee's detailed and richly-textured study provides a fascinating account of the rabbinic doctrine of Oral Torah, placed firmly within the broader context of orality and literacy in the Mediterranean world of Greco-Roman antiquity. Part I deals with the role of oral tradition in Second Temple scribalism, looking first at the social settings in which scribal orality functioned (Ch. 1), then in turn at patterns of performative reading and text interpretation among two Jewish groups from the Second Temple period, the Qumran sectaries (Ch. 2) and the Pharisees (Ch. 3). Here Jaffee professes his debt to classic studies of orality and literacy like those of Walter Ong and Werner Kelber: yet, interestingly, his careful examination of the interplay of written and oral modes of composition and performance in Second Temple Judaism actually militates against the radical disjunction of oral and written media often presupposed by proponents of that school. Though orality was highly valued in the performance and interpretation of traditional material, this was consistent with the patterns found in Greco-Roman society at large. There was no blanket ban on writing: in fact, it was the written text that formed the basis and raw material for the ongoing task of interpretation. It would be interesting to supplement Jaffee's analysis here with a parallel study of the early Christians as a third group arising within the matrix of Second Temple Judaism. Like the Qumran sect, the early Christians were committed to the "study of authoritative texts under the guidance of an illuminated teacher" (p. 35); and, as at Qumran, this cumulative text-interpretive tradition "was received...as ongoing revelation continuing into the present" (p. 37). The two groups in this respect form an interesting contrast with the Pharisaic communities, for whom "authoritative `rulings' were presented as derived from past tradition" (p. 60). But in neither case was there a hard and fast distinction between oral and written forms of this interpretive tradition: for both, the distinctive authority of orality was linked with the moment of delivery of the ancient texts, not with the ongoing activity of interpretation (Ch. 1). The examination of the Tannaitic tradition in Part II (Ch. 4) confirms this pattern: it is not until the Amoraic period, Jaffee argues, that we find the doctrine of Oral Torah emerging as an "ideological construction" (Ch. 5), the result of a conscious and deliberate process of reflection on the Tannaitic oral-literary tradition. In the Mishnah itself, orality and literacy are interwoven at every stage of composition (Ch. 6). Thus it becomes clear that the full-blown commitment of the Amoraic authorities to Oral Torah as a solely oral tradition was not (as is often supposed by both Jewish and Christian scholars) a natural development of pre-70 norms, but an "extremely unprecedented" innovation (p. …

Feminist Jewish studies scholars have frequently focused on images of women in rabbinic literature. Miriam Peskowitz's essay raises provocative questions about this approach. Although I appreciate efforts to render the "marginalization and/or invisibilization of women and gender intellectually impossible" in Jewish studies scholarship, I believe that such efforts cannot fully overcome literary constructions of gender embedded within ancient Jewish texts. It is sometimes possible to read canonical Jewish texts in new ways and "against the grain" to tease out evidence of women 44 struggling within and against patriarchal culture." However, finding evidence of struggle should not obscure the evidence of patriarchy. I will argue that scholarship that explores " images of" women in classical Jewish texts also tells us important things about the marginalization of women in much of rabbinic thinking. Rabbinic discourse is far from monolithic in the views and attitudes it expresses. It includes a variety of competing interpretations and opinions. Given this multivocality it is not surprising that rabbinic literature expresses a diversity of attitudes towards women. What unites these views, however, is the conviction that "women are a separate

Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual and Intertextual StudiesThe papers collected in this volume came out of a conference on Tosefta held at the University of Toronto in April 1993. Although the Conference was held on the tenth anniversary of the death of Saul Lieberman, whose Tosefta Kifshuta is a landmark in the study of this document, virtually no mention of this scholar or his work appears in the volume. Instead, the volume is dedicated to the memory of Menachem Rotman, a local Toronto personality, an excerpt of whose memoir opens the volume.The Tosefta has always been something of a puzzle to scholars of classical Rabbinic literature. On the one hand it is very similar to the Mishnah in style, language and overall theme, while on the other hand, it is clearly not Mishnah but a different and distinct compilation. Again, on the one hand, it and its materials are cited often in both Talmuds, the Jerusalem and the Babylonian, while on the other, the citations are often different from what appears in our Tosefta. And so arguments have swirled around the nature of this document, its relation to Mishnah, the date and reason for its publication, its connection to the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, and beyond these questions, to the broader issue of the very nature of the Tannaitic world and the Oral Torah it produced.The essays collected here are written by some of the most prominent names in the field: Harry Fox, Jacob Neusner, Reena Zeidman, Shamma Friedman, Yaakov Elman, Tirzah Meacham, Judith Hauptman, Herbert Basser, and Paul Heger. Given the subtitle of the volume, one would have hoped that a common theme or approach would emerge from the symposium to illuminate a new, perhaps post-modern, direction for answering questions about the origin, nature, and purpose of the Tosefta. This hope is frustrated. What we find instead is that each essay approaches the document with its own questions and with its own method. No common discourse, or even set of assumptions, is apparent. The result is that the collection says pretty much everything and its opposite about the document. For those readers looking for an overview of what it is possible to say about the Tosefta, this is the perfect book.The collection opens with a long and rambling essay by Harry Fox. Despite its farreaching argumentation and massive footnoting, it comes to surprisingly tame conclusions: the Mishnah and Tosefta do not have to be approached as oral texts (p. 21) or that these are related texts but the details of that relationship are still not known (p. 23). The essay ends on the rather strange metaphor, picked up only somewhat near the end of the collection, that the Mishnah and other documents are like buckets of water pulled from the sea of Torah and then frozen in one form or the other.Neusner's essay follows, arguing that the Tosefta is in fact the first attempt at creating a Gemara. Using a set of exemplary texts, Neusner demonstrates that like the later gemaras, the Tosefta cites the mishnaic text and then comments upon and develops it. The presentation of the Neusnerian model is followed immediately by Zeidman's essay, which argues strenuously, with its own set of examples, that the Tosefta is not just a commentary on the Mishnah at all, but an independent work that interacts vigorously with the Mishnah, the two documents having come into being in conversation with each other. …

Lawrence H. Schiffman is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University's Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. He is also a member of the University's Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the Skirball Department. In 1992/3 he will be a Fellow at the Annenberg Institute in Philadelphia where he will be part of a research team working on the unpublished scrolls. His most recent book is From Text to Tradition, A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism (Ktav, 1991).