Literature

A discussion of Judaism in antiquity must include an evaluation of the sages’ literary and intellectual endeavor. As noted above, the social power and political prestige that later rabbis gained, in particular after the Muslim conquest, and the canonical status of their writings at that later time, complicates any examination of their origin and development in the period under discussion here. As mentioned above, we need not accept the somewhat romantic and certainly anachronistic position voiced in the past, according to which the sages became the leaders of the Jewish people immediately or soon after the destruction of the Temple, constituting a kind of supreme council that steered the ship of Judaism and shaped its way of life. Even so, one cannot ignore the enormous literary project of the rabbis and their profound, mainly intellectual, achievements in the first centuries of the Common Era (S. Safrai 1987; Strack and Stemberger 1996).

First and foremost stands the Mishnah, the earliest known literary accomplishment of the sages. Dating from approximately 200 CE, it is a comprehensive legal text, a type of compendium (or legal anthology) to which we have but few parallels from this early period. The quality and precision of its phraseology and scrupulous editing combined with its intellectual vigor rank the Mishnah at the top of the ancient world’s legal documents. The view, embraced by some modern scholars (as well as orthodox Jews), that sees the Mishnah as a type of legal codex, a charter or rule of behavior addressed to the public at large, meant to lay out and dictate the Jewish way oflife, should be roundly rejected (Goldberg 1987: 213-14). Texts of such pragmatic nature are well known in the Middle Ages, for example Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and later on Joseph Karo’s Shulloan Arukh. The earliest such works date back to the end of the Byzantine period and were discovered in the Cairo Genizah (a repository of ancient Jewish texts that was discovered in the nineteenth century), and the genre continued to evolve in Persia after the rise of Islam under the guidance of a group known as the Gaonim, hundreds of years after the Mishnah. The editors of the Mishnah executed an entirely different agenda, evident in the simple fact that the work does not provide a clear and unambiguous legal ruling on nearly any subject. On the contrary, its editors gathered and then offered several opposing positions on each and every issue. Those who wish to conduct their life according to the Mishnah would quickly find themselves at a dead end. Whose views are they to follow? Rabbi Eliezer’s, Rabbi Yehoshua’s, Rabbi Meir’s, or Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai’s? Lacking the sophisticated hermeneutic tools that developed in much later generations which would enable them to choose between opposing positions, there is no way of deciding between the disagreeing voices of the Mishnah, and the editors were apparently uninterested in reaching such a verdict. Furthermore, from the work’s first line, the text ignores the larger public (most of whose members did not, in those days, know how to read: Hezser 2001). It requires prior knowledge of nuances and complex legal concepts that the sages had developed. The Mishnah itself does not convey this preliminary knowledge, and without it the text is accessible only to those conversant with the sages’ legal thinking - a doctrine so difficult to grasp that the untrained person could hardly understand it. The Mishnah contains no hint that its editors presumed, expected, or hoped that their text would turn out to be what it eventually became, a Jewish foundation document of the same, and in some cases even higher, standing than the Torah itself.

Apparently, the original target audience of the Mishnah was the sages themselves. The work sought to collect and summarize their legal project. Understanding this is inextricably linked to a balanced appreciation of the sages’ position in Jewish society after the destruction of the Second Temple. As noted above, I view them as individual intellectuals, with at most a handful of them gathered at any given time around a revered teacher (Hezser 1997). They were legally inclined, erudite scholars who devoted their lives to the study of the Jewish scriptures, and to examining them through legal paradigms. They developed methods for explicating and interpreting texts, some very original; others had been known to previous learned Jews in the Second Temple period (such as the people of Qumran); still others were borrowed from the Mediterranean non-Jewish intellectual milieu, which itself had a long tradition of textual and legal analysis (Lieberman 1941: 47-82; and somewhat differently in the articles collected in Hezser 2003). The destruction of the Temple, and the fact that the Romans prevented its rebuilding, produced an existential challenge that spurred and nourished the sages’ creative work. It posed a key question that lay at the foundation of their enterprise: What constitutes Jewish life in the absence of the Temple?

Individual sages pursued their study for several generations until, at the end of the second and the beginning of the third centuries, the conditions were right for the collection, editing, and production of a summary document. It was a huge undertaking that required intense organization and significant financial support. Emissaries had to be sent out to gather the material; scholars had to elucidate, arrange, organize, and edit it; scribes had to copy it and produce drafts. Carrying out this endeavor required a figure of authority and vision. Apparently all these conditions came together in the persona of Rabbi Judah ‘‘the Prince’’ (ha-Nasi, also translated ‘‘the

Patriarch’’). Peeling away the myths and legends that collected around this character in later generations, we encounter a member of the patriarchal family, perhaps the richest clan in Palestine, who found his way to Rabbinic circles, first as a student and later as an esteemed teacher. I have already argued that the production of the Mishnah supplied the impetus for the amalgamation of the class of sages, rather than vice versa. The Mishnah wove the fabric that brought together individual intellectuals who had previously been linked, if at all, only loosely and informally, and turned them into a group founded on recognition of the importance of the text it had created.

The third century opened a new stage in the history of the sages. First, they diverted their intellectual focus from the scriptures to the Mishnah itself. Some of the rabbis, apparently displeased with the final product, launched a supplementary work, the Tosefta. But this new composition assumed the Mishnah’s internal organization - six ‘‘orders,’’ each covering a large category of subjects, and further divided into subsections called tractates - so acknowledging its appreciation of the older work. In the third century we also hear, for the first time, of organized centers of learning - the yeshiva - some with dozens of students, who arrived from distant communities, like Persia, to hear the teachings of the sages and study the Mishnah (L. I. Levine 1989: 25-9; cf. Hezser 1997: 195-214). Some of them even transported the Mishnah outside the borders of the Roman Empire and founded centers of study in Sasanid Persia. Other works amassing the sages’ commentaries on the Bible - called ‘‘midrash’ - began to appear at this time as well. It is in the third century that we can first really talk about a movement led by the sages, even if they still had a long way to go until they were accepted by all strata of the Jewish public and the legal products of their scholarship - the halakha - became the obligatory infrastructure of Jewish life. That happened only after the rise of Islam, outside the traditional borders of the Roman world, in Persia, and from there back to Palestine, and thence to North Africa and Europe.