On the status of the Tannaitic Midrashim.

AuthorBoyarin, Daniel
PositionCritique of Jacob Neusner's latest contribution to Midrashic studies

The present work by Jacob Neusner is part of a gigantic project of redescription of the history of Judaism in Late Antiquity. Since each volume of this project essentially recapitulates the claims of the whole with different emphases, any volume can serve as an introduction to the whole project, and a review of any part is, in effect, an evaluation of the whole. Neusner makes very dramatic and impressive claims for his research on the history of rabbinic thought. He believes that he has shown that

there are two distinct Judaic systems, each comprising a theory of the social order made up of a worldview, way of life, and doctrine of the social entity ("Israel"); each system, or Judaism, is internally coherent, responding with an answer deemed self-evidently true to a question regarded as urgent and critical. We can easily differentiate one system from the other. And we also know in what ways they are connected, both in form (the later documents present themselves as exegeses of the earlier ones), and in mode of thought or method. The points of connection validate the claim that we deal with a single unfolding Judaism in process. The points of differentiation vindicate the claim that the two systems, though connected, are autonomous of one another, each identifying its urgent question and setting forth its self-evidently true answer. pp. 8-9)

The first of these "Judaisms" is that attested to by the Mishna and the Tosefta, while the second is that attested to by the Palestinian Talmud, and the major Palestinian midrashim, that is Genesis and Leviticus Rabbah and Pesikta derav Kahana. The first of these two systems is called a "philosophical system," while the second is a "religious theory." The project of the present work is to determine where the tannaitic midrashim fit into this system. Or to put it bluntly, the question is whether the tannaitic midrashim are relevant for describing the Judaism of the tannaim.

  1. Method and the History of Judaism

    Neusner's method is not in any sense an adequate response to the challenges of modern critical thought for the history of Judaism, except to the extent that it does clear away some of the underbrush of uncritical work that has been done (and in some quarters is still being done, but not nearly as widely as Neusner claims).' He claims that his method involves no a priori assumptions, that it is scientific on the model of the natural sciences; he repeatedly refers to this book as an experiment with definitive results, which can be repeated by others. However, as we shall see, in fact his work is animated by a series of very strong assumptions:

    I maintain that it is by reference to the time and circumstances of the closure of the document, that is to say, the conventional assignment of a piece of writing to a particular time and place that we proceed outward from context to matrix. (p. 22) Documents reveal the system and structure of their authorships, and, in the case of religious writing, out of a document without named authors we may compose an account of the authorship's religion: a way of life, a worldview, a social entity meant to realize both. Read one by one, documents reveal the interiority of intellect of an authorship, and that inner-facing quality of mind inheres even when an authorship imagines it speaks outward, toward and about the world beyond. (p. 23) ... what we have to do is simply ask the principal documents, one by one, to tell us their picture of the topic at hand, hence, Rome and Israel's relationship to Rome.... Each document, it is clear, demands description, analysis, and interpretation, all by itself. Each must be viewed as autonomous of all others. (p. 185, emphasis added)

    What are the assumptions that these very central quotations reveal? First of all, they assume that texts are autonomous, transparent reflections of the intentions of their authors. Even more pointedly, they assume that a collective can have a single mind, an "interiority of intellect," which can produce a coherent, single worldview. And more extravagantly, the first quotation explicitly claims that the final editors (the authorship") of a work built up over centuries of accretion have such complete control over the material that it can only be referred to the time and place of that authorship for its social-historical context or matrix, and that, indeed such reference is possible.

    I submit that not one of these assumptions holds water, following contemporary paradigms of critical thinking. Most theorists now hold that texts do not "tell" us their meanings unaided by a reading process that is partly governed by assumptions from outside of the text.2 The notion of a reading without presuppositions is simply, therefore, a self-delusion. More importantly, many thinkers about texuality would now claim that texts (even single-authored texts) are not created by their authors but produced within a heteroglottic socio-linguistic matrix that is necessarily heterogeneous, inasmuch as it is the product of social conflict and cultural contention. By definition, then, a text could not reflect its "author's" interiority. All discourse is constrained, at least in part, by the past of the language and the other texts that are being produced in the language. This is the notion of intertextuality, a notion which Neusner either ignores or consistently and conveniently mischaracterizes in his writing as an analogue of his straw-men scholars who hold that all of rabbinic literature is a unity. This is, of course, only more to the point when the texts are not the product of a single author but of whole communities working over generations, a point even Neusner surely does not deny. This is neither equivalent to accepting the attributions as "inerrant" nor the quotations as verbatim transcriptions of what was said but only to recognize that the text very often is citing and contesting, or interpreting, or distorting other texts it has received and is constrained to treat. The best way to do cultural history, then, is to investigate such moments within and between the texts of rabbinic literature, not to gloss them over by the assumption of a wholly coherent, self-consistent "authorship" identical with the final editors of the document at hand. In short, intertextuality produces more difference, not less, within and between texts.

    Finally, the assignment of all citations to the date of the putative closure of the document (as if that were not a matter of scholarly conjecture as well) involves assumptions no less than the contrary method of critically assessing the likelihood that they are earlier than the final redaction. We just do not know for sure whether a given citation is contemporary with the closure of the document or not, and the likelihood that it is older than that is at least as great as the likelihood that it was made up of whole cloth by the "authorship" of the final text. A truly "objective" method, then, would have to give up on the idea of writing history of ideas at all from these texts, even were we to assume that the dates and orders of the closures were certain. But Neusner, in fact, does the opposite. He draws very strong conclusions indeed from his assumption that a given text is to be dated by the date of the closure of the document. In fact, his entire notion of epistemic breaks and successor Judaisms is crucially dependent on this very strong and highly implausible assumption. The fact is that we just cannot know for certain whether a given attribution is absolutely true, i.e., that the particular tanna actually said something like he is supposed to have said; or partly true, i.e., that the idea in question was at least roughly contemporaneous with the cited authority; or entirely made up at a later time and thus pseudepigraphic. Drawing conclusions from lateness, as Neusner does all the time, is just as precarious as drawing conclusions from earliness. The relevant matrix for a given statement may indeed be another time and place than the one of the document in which it appears, and documents have history themselves, history retained on their surface in the bumps and inconsistencies of the final text. These, which are called intertextuality, are finally what make cultural historiography possible.

    There is, moreover, with regard to the tannaitic midrashim that are the main subject of the current effort, very good evidence that they are indeed what they claim to be, edited collections of tannaitic interpretations of the Torah. Paradoxically the very discontinuities of form, ideology, and program between the various tannaitic midrashim, discontinuities noticed at least as far back as Maimonides, provide the evidence. There is no reason to assume that these very different texts were dependent on each other, but they share much material in common. The most plausible assumption in the case of such shared substance is that the editors of both collections have received this material from common sources, oral or written.

    The descriptions of God's voice at the giving of the Torah are practically identical word for word in the Mekhilta and the Sifra, a fact which, I would maintain, practically guarantees that they are tannaitic in origin, because these two texts clearly do not cite each other and must, then, be drawing from a common earlier source. This conclusion would seriously disturb Neusner's thesis that the Judaism of the tannaim was not a religious but a philosophical system. It follows, even in cases in which we do not have such parallelisms from other independent witnesses to the text, that it is at least as plausible to assume that the materials from which the text was built were older than the stage of redaction and that, in fact, they derive, roughly speaking, from the same time as the texts from which the Mishna and Tosefta were constructed. Since the midrashim cite, by and large, the same authorities cited in the Mishna and Tosefta, we can utilize the...

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