'Rabbinic Scholarship': How the Talmud Yerushalmi was made - review
This book is a deeply scholarly and ambitious work that sheds new light on the Talmud Yerushalmi and its place within the intellectual world of late antiquity.
An illustrative image of someone reading the Talmud.(photo credit: yosefus / Shutterstock.com)ByRABBI REUVEN CHAIM KLEINThe book Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism: The Development of the Talmud Yerushalmi is a significant contribution to the study of rabbinic literature – especially the Talmud Yerushalmi (Jerusalemic Talmud) – and its place within the broader intellectual landscape of late antiquity. The book provides a thorough and scholarly examination of how the rabbinic circles in Roman-Byzantine Palestine compared and contrasted with their contemporary Greco-Roman and early Christian counterparts, particularly in terms of educational structures, intellectual pursuits, and compilation techniques. In doing so, Catherine Hezser’s scholarship represents a valuable resource for understanding the development of the Talmud Yerushalmi and the broader cultural and scholastic environment in which it emerged.
The author begins by positioning the rabbis of the Talmud Yerushalmi as intellectuals on a par with their Greco-Roman contemporaries, despite the differences in the subject matter of their studies. She highlights the rabbis’ self-identification as “sages,” and draws parallels between their scholastic culture and that of Greek-educated early Christian writers. This comparison sets the stage for her exploration of the educational frameworks within which the rabbis operated, including the disciple circles that mirrored those of Hellenistic and Roman philosophers, Roman jurists, and early Christian writers.
A look at the Talmud Yerushalmi and the rabbis who made it
In the first part of the book, Hezser examines the settings of rabbinic learning – be it in formal study sessions, informal interactions, or public lectures – and discusses the extent to which ancient higher education can be considered to have been institutionalized. As she demonstrates, rabbinic learning could happen in seated study sessions (where a master taught a close circle of students) and in everyday life and outdoor settings (like when students attended to the master’s personal needs, or even when walking with the master in the marketplace). There is much discussion about seated learning sessions versus impromptu ones. Furthermore, the author suggests that some of said rabbinic students would have been members of their masters’ immediate family, whereas others were outside pupils who came to study with them. In the context of Greco-Roman education, she also delves into the question of whether the actual studying took place in a dedicated building, and concludes that late antique higher study usually took place in disciple circles rather than institutionalized schools.Read More
One of the book’s strengths, which the second part focuses on, is its detailed analysis of the transmission of rabbinic knowledge from teacher to student and from one generation to the next. She argues that transmission was primarily oral but also seems to have included limited note-taking for personal reference. Indeed, the author stresses the point that rabbinic culture was averse to producing written collections of individual rabbis’ teachings because their dissemination could have led to halachic confusion among the public. Within the framework of oral transmission, the author brings to the fore evidence of reliable repeaters, who would simply repeat verbatim the teachings of earlier sages – even if the repeaters themselves were not necessarily sages. To that end, Hezser explores the role of tradents (transmitters) in preserving and passing down rabbinic traditions across generations, often through legal statements and stories in ways that parallel similar methods of continuing traditions in late antiquity.
She also emphasizes the impact of network connections among rabbis that determined which traditions were perpetuated and selected to be included in the Talmud. The nodes within those networks may have crisscrossed both horizontally (between rabbinic colleagues, usually located within close geographic proximity) and vertically (in teacher-student relationships). This discussion is particularly illuminating, as it situates rabbinic scholarship within the broader context of late antique methods of knowledge transmission in which similar networks existed to differing degrees.
The Talmud (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)Hezser’s comparison of the Talmud Yerushalmi to Hellenistic philosophical compilations and collections of Roman jurists’ law is another highlight. She argues that the Yerushalmi’s pluralistic approach to juxtaposing opposing opinions more closely hews the trends in philosophical compilations by Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch and in Justinian’s Digest, in contrast to the more dogmatic tendencies of single-authored early Christian works (which sought to tout one true version of “the truth” instead of allowing discourse on a multiplicity of interpretations). This perspective underscores the rabbinic emphasis on dialogue and debate. Moreover, she sees parallels between the rabbinic penchant for viewing rabbinic scholars as paragons of lived virtue (not just important theoretical sources of information) in ways that are similar to how ancient philosophers were viewed (as not just purveyors of philosophical truth but as followers of those truths in their personal lives and lived experience).
Furthermore, Hezser delves into the judicial role of the rabbis, drawing parallels with Roman jurists, which adds another layer to her comparative analysis. In their community-facing roles, rabbinic sages also preached/lectured to the public, and their students also learned from them at those events. Rabbis also fielded questions from the public at large, and their students often stood by to absorb the subject-matter and be able to later relay their master’s rulings.
The third part of this book is dedicated to discussing the editing and redaction of the Yerushalmi. Unlike other works from antiquity, rabbinic literary output was never attributed to a single author; rather, it functioned as a digest incorporating multiple voices, with some degree of editorial shaping. The author examines the nature of this editing, particularly how the redactors of the Talmud Yerushalmi collected, selected, organized, and combined the various traditions they received, arranging them in a thematic manner, following the structure of the Mishna but going beyond it in their halachic discussions. One interesting question she considers in this context is the relationship between the editors and the scribes. Some of the editors may have been scribes themselves, but they also used scribes as secretaries for note-taking and copy-editing purposes. Hezser also expands on Rabbi Shaul Lieberman’s assertion that the Bavot tractates of the Yerushalmi represent an early recension in its development and editing, explaining what this might entail and identifying the tell-tale signs of this more rudimentary editorial layer.
Despite this work’s great contribution to scholarship on the topic, one may disagree with some of the suggestions and formulations. For example, in discussing the nature of the oral transmission of rabbinic teachings, she writes: “If written collections circulated, the power of the rabbi as a living incorporation of rabbinic knowledge would be diminished” (p. 81). Here, the author may have overlooked the rabbis’ own stated reasons for preferring oral transmission, namely that orality mirrors the mode in which God Himself revealed the Torah at Sinai. Although she does address this argument later in the book (Part II, Section 2), she does not explore it further.
Likewise, the author may have overstated the case for the unreliability of attributions in rabbinic literature. She often treats such attributions as the results of the editors’ literary agendas rather than as historically grounded traditions (pp. 133–149). In reality, many of the difficulties with such attributions stem from the manuscript transmission of these texts after their initial “editing.” These issues are often mitigated by variant readings preserved in manuscripts and in medieval sources. That said, this reviewer acknowledges that attributional inconsistencies are indeed more prevalent and problematic in the Jerusalem Talmud than in the Babylonian Talmud.
For a book that uses the Jerusalem Talmud as its main example for exploring rabbinic compilatory techniques in late antiquity, the author does not cite the text as frequently as one might expect. This is probably due to the many subject areas she addresses, which leaves limited space for detailed analysis of specific texts. Moreover, when she draws on examples from the Talmud and other sources – such as the New Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, or Roman jurists – she assumes a high level of prior knowledge on the part of the reader. She sometimes presents these examples without providing sufficient background or context for non-academic readers, using them as evidence for her claims without adequately introducing or explaining them. Perhaps this is more of a shortcoming of the reviewer than of the author.
While the writing is dense and academic and therefore most suitable for academic readers, the study is well sourced and meticulously researched. The author poses important and thought-provoking questions, even if her answers and suppositions may not convince everyone. Her application of insights from Greco-Roman and Byzantine Christian contexts to rabbinic literature may sometimes be speculative, but she demonstrates impressive familiarity with a wide range of late antique sources and is undeniably a scholar of considerable erudition. She is certainly at home in many different corpora of writings from late antiquity and draws from that body of knowledge to benefit our understanding of the formation of the Talmud Yerushalmi.
In my final assessment, this book is a deeply scholarly and ambitious work that sheds new light on the Talmud Yerushalmi and its place within the intellectual world of late antiquity. While some of its conclusions and hypotheses may be contested, the book is a must-read for scholars of rabbinic literature and late antique studies, offering fresh perspectives and stimulating ideas that will undoubtedly inspire further research and discussion.■
Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism: The Development of the Talmud Yerushalmi
