Introducing tosefta: Textual, Intratextual and Intertextual Studies.

• Author: Segal, Eliezer
• Position: Review

Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual and Intertextual Studies. Edited by HARRY FOX and TIRZAH MEACHAM. Hoboken, N.J.: KTAV PUBLISHING HOUSE, 1999. Pp. xix + 340. $79.50.

The present volume originated in an April 1993 conference on the Tosefta held at the University of Toronto, and it has been presented as a memorial tribute to Mr. Manny Rotman, an elderly student of religion at the University of Toronto whose brief autobiographical memoir introduces the book.

The ten papers (including an introductory essay by H. Fox and a critical summary by T. Meacham) represent a cross-section of the questions that have been posed by rabbinic scholarship from at least as far back as Rav Sherira Ga'on's Epistle regarding such matters as: When and by whom was the Tosefta composed? What was its purpose, and how does it relate to the Mishnah? Is it the same work as the Tosefta that is mentioned in the Talmud (and ascribed to Rabbi Nehemiah)? Were the Amora'im in Palestine and Babylonia familiar with the Tosefta--and if so, why do the Talmuds so often ignore it, or cite it in different versions from the ones known to us? (This latter question has usually been directed at the Babylonian Talmud; however, as demonstrated here by Meacham's study, it applies to the Palestinian as well.) These were questions that excited the nineteenth-century pioneers of academic Rabbinic studies, but which failed to find satisfactory answers, as becomes clear in R. Zeidman's analytical and critical surve y of previous scholarship. Though a few of the essays (e.g., those by H. Basser and P. Heger) are devoted to the exegesis of specific texts, most of the contributors to the collection have taken on larger redactional and methodological issues. As several of the authors in this volume are aware, research into the "higher criticism" of the Tosefta was put on hold pending the completion of S. Lieberman's definitive edition and commentary, which he did not complete before his death in 1983, and which did not result in any substantial programmatic conclusions relating to the questions listed above.

Reading the papers in this volume, one is constantly made aware of the changed vocabulary of the discourse, as the older conceptual terminology, largely modeled after that of classical philology, yields to the language of post-modern cultural and literary studies, with a strong dose of interdisciplinary inspiration. Thus, J. Hauptman applies feminist perspectives in comparing the...