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This chapter examines the historical development of the anonymous layer, complicating the notion that the division in style and function between the stam and the traditions reflects a difference in provenance between two corpora. Instead, it argues that the Babylonian Talmud's creators produced both the anonymous layer and the cited traditions, or better, the division between them. This division is not simply a reflection of the different dating of these elements; it was, rather, constructed and imposed by the Bavli on earlier structures and sources. The chapter compares a sugya preserved in the Palestinian Talmud as well as in the Babylonian Talmud. In the earlier, Palestinian version, attributed traditions are employed both for interpretive, narrating functions and for apodictic rulings and brief exegetical comments. The Bavli reorganizes the sugya to create a distinction in function, dividing the material between two layers: a narrating, interpretive, discursive anonymous layer, and a layer of brief, non-discursive, attributed rulings.

This chapter completes the study of the cast of characters found in rabbinic execution, turning attention to the criminal’s relatives and to the role of the Rabbis themselves. In exploring the part of the relatives, it extricates the relevant passages of Mishnah from their accepted interpretation by the Babylonian Talmud to show that the criminal is permanently buried in a location separate from the family burial site. It argues that the Mishnah’s laws prescribing separate burial, prohibiting the relatives from mourning, and requiring the relatives to reconcile with the court are all means of asserting the primacy of the rabbinic community over the bonds of family. Finally, the chapter examines narratives in which sages are portrayed as agents of execution. It shows that these stories project the power of execution onto the Rabbis, but also evince a strategic ambivalence about that power.

This book examines compositional practices, historical developments, and passages that reveal the way the creators of the Babylonian Talmud (or Bavli) conceived themselves. It complements the continuous creative revision with a freezing of tradition and its containment in a way that produces discontinuity; it complements the fusing of horizons with a literary design that foregrounds one horizon from another. Part I of the book explores the Talmud's literary practice through a close analysis of selected passages, or sugyot. Part II focuses on the Talmud's creators‘ rhetoric of self-presentation and self-definition, arguing that they defined themselves in opposition to those who focused on the transmission of tradition, and that the opposition and hierarchy they created between scholars and transmitters allows us both to understand better the way they conceived of their project as well as to see this project as part of a debate about sacred texts within the Jewish community and more broadly in late ancient Mesopotamia.

This chapter examines the literary features in the Babylonian Talmud. The Gemara's use of earlier rabbinic voices appears partly carefully orchestrated and partly merely accumulative. The lemmatic division which defines the Gemara as a commentary of sorts on the Mishnah is described, the dialectical conversation which gives it its ‘talmudic’ flavour is analyzed, and some recurrent drills by which the Gemara interprets the Mishnah are listed. The way in which the Gemara suggests that the statements it quotes were historically connected, while presenting itself in an unbounded diversity of form and contents, is discussed.

This chapter examines three passages that associate with the “conservative,” transmission-oriented aspects of Torah study the occupation with the two bodies of knowledge that the rabbis received: the Written Torah (Scripture) and the Oral Torah (rabbinic tradition). These passages are all premised on a dichotomy between the “received” knowledge of Scripture and oral tradition, on the one hand, and the innovative, creative aspects of study on the other. Building on the work of Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, and others who showed that the Babylonian Talmud places a high value on dialectic and analysis at the expense of tradition and memorization, the chapter demonstrates the centrality of this preference to the self-perception of the Talmud's creators and situates it within a polemical conversation among Jews in late ancient Mesopotamia.

This chapter evaluates the use of the Babylonian Talmud for the study of the history of late-Roman Palestine using astrology as a case example. It explains that the Babylonian Talmud contains much material which derives from Palestine and may sometimes preserve Palestinian rabbinic material in a form closer to the original than is found in Palestinian compilations. Palestinian sources often do not contain trustworthy evidence about Palestinian Sages and institutions.

This chapter examines a thematic series of sugyot that concern the genealogical division of the Jewish people, arguing that the Babylonian Talmud trains its audience to view the production of genealogical knowledge, and the traditions in which it is transmitted, as manipulated and personally motivated. The chapter offers a critique of this genealogical knowledge, which encompasses statements, rulings, bits of information that the rabbis transmitted in the matter of Jewish genealogy, in particular, the classification of certain persons, families, or regions as genealogically “unfit” or “impure” for the purpose of marriage. Two principal sections of the Bavli's discussion of m. Qidd., each illustrating a different aspect of Talmudic composition, are analyzed. The first is a conversational sugya, which focuses on the purification of Israel. The second segment has at its center a long story about Rav Yehuda, and it concludes with a list of genealogical traditions.

This book has argued that it is precisely when the Babylonian Talmud's creators seem most conservative—when they preserve traditions rather than reject or revise them—that we find their most profound break with tradition. It has examined recitation as a practice against which the Talmud's creators shape their own literary practice, as well as the authority of the Talmud as an important factor in the reception of the layered structure. This conclusion recapitulates the book's central arguments and considers their implications. It also offers some reflections on developments in Jewish history that directed rabbinic culture away from the concerns and contexts studied in this book. It suggests that even if the Talmud's negotiation of tradition and its ideology of scholarship were born out of a particular historical dynamic, they still belong in the longer intellectual history of Judaism.

This chapter considers Hekhalot literature to show that the Sar ha-Torah narrative from this corpus responds to the Talmudic academies‘ ideology of Torah study, presenting an alternative vision for Jewish culture in which retention and recitation are central rather than marginalized. It argues that this response correlates with other Hekhalot texts that recruit powerful images such as heavenly vision, transformation, and angelic liturgy to the project of memorizing and reciting the Oral Torah. It also contends that there is some evidence that the individuals whom the Babylonian Talmud marks as its opponents—the tanna'im—had a role in the shaping of Hekhalot traditions. Finally, the chapter suggests, based on the fact that the Hekhalot texts enter Jewish history as texts transmitted by Babylonian reciters, as well as on other connections between the tanna'im and Hekhalot texts, that the Babylonian reciters took active part in the shaping of Hekhalot traditions.

This chapter examines the famous opening sugya of tractate Bava Qamma to show how the Babylonian Talmud's creators could use an ambitious literary design to highlight the gap between their own words and an Amoraic tradition. This sugya has been used before as an example of the strategies the Talmud's creators employed seamlessly to incorporate tradition to the literary and logical structures they constructed. This chapter suggests the opposite, arguing that the sugya is designed to emphasize the distance between the approach expressed by the stam (the creators‘ anonymous layer) and the approach expressed by the Amoraic dictum that it cites. Far from “hiding” themselves behind tradition or voicing their agenda through it, the authors of the stam become a presence in their own creation.

The earliest surviving texts of the birkat haminim were found in the Cairo geniza and date from c. 1000 CE. These texts allow a well-grounded discussion of the still highly flexible contents of the prayer and its intentions. While the chapter begins with a survey of the evidence for the prayer in geonic (early medieval rabbinic) literature, it focuses on an analysis of the possible meanings of the key elements of the geniza texts of the prayer, including especially the terms meshummadim (apostates), nozerim (Christians), minim (heretics), and malkhut zadon (empire of insolence). This analysis draws heavily on earlier rabbinic literature, especially the Babylonian Talmud, that which the rabbis of this period taught and promulgated as the key text of Oral Torah.

This chapter focuses on Metatron, that enigmatic figure assuming the title “Lesser God.” It begins with an analysis of a midrash transmitted only in the Bavli, in which Rav Idith—a Babylonian amora of the fourth or fifth century—deflects the fierce attacks of certain heretics who insist on assigning Metatron divine status. No doubt, the notion of a second divine power alongside that of God has gained followers among the Babylonian Jews. In order to substantiate this claim, the chapter surveys all the relevant Metatron passages preserved in rabbinic literature. It turns out that almost all of them are found either in the Babylonian Talmud or in the Hekhalot literature, most notably in 3 Enoch. The Metatron of the Bavli and the Hekhalot literature is a deliberate response on the part of the Babylonian Jews to the challenges posed by Christianity.

This chapter suggests a new narrative of the genesis of Ashkenazic culture. It points to a key source, one of the major components of that civilization. This source of Ashkenazic halakhah has been open to public view ever since 1881, when ‘The Brothers and Widow of Romm’ published in Vilna immediately became the standard edition of the Talmud. The chapter goes on to explain that this starting point goes far in explaining some of the lasting characteristics of Ashkenaz. It argues for the centrality of the Babylonian Talmud in Ashkenazic halakhic culture. Hence, this chapter sketches the contours of a proposal to conclude the re-evaluation of Early Ashkenaz on a constructive note.

This chapter examines discourses about recitation in Zoroastrian and Christian literature. It first considers a Zoroastrian distinction similar to the one the Babylonian Talmud makes between the reciter and the scholar. It then looks at a Christian author who is also using a negative portrayal of Zoroastrian recitation and argues that in both the Talmud and the Christian text, the representation of Zoroastrian practice is employed to promote particular visions of Judaism and Christianity and dehabilitate others. Both texts contrast the performative, embodying practice of recitation with the scholarly approach that they promote, and by associating that recitation with Zoroastrian ritual they seek to mark it as foreign, as non-Jewish or non-Christian. It is possible that the encounter with Zoroastrian culture, in which recitation took a central role as a main component of ritual and as the exclusive interface to sanctified traditions, increased the importance of recitation for some Mesopotamian Jews and Christians.