Notes to an Oral-Performative Translation of Sifre Devarim

“The Weaver of Midrash in Performance”: Notes to an Oral-Performative Translation of Sifre Devarim Martin S. Jaffee It is an honor to be asked to contribute to this celebration of Jacob Neusner’s remarkable career, now some fifty years in duration (and still counting!). It is also an honor to share that honor with so many of his colleagues and former graduate students. The list of contributors, containing the names of so many scholars whose work and professional example have inspired me reminds me of the truism whose truth is often forgotten: that scholarship is a group project, subsuming individuals and their gifts to the larger projects of a community. Perhaps my own desire for community explains not only why a life of scholarship early on became a dream for me, but also why the subject of much of my work has concerned the processes of rabbinic oral tradition, the collective development of the cultural knowledge that became “Torah” in the late antique worlds of Mediterranean and Mesopotamian Judaism. It was Prof. Neusner who opened this textual and historical world up to me. I have him to thank for the insights into the pervasive, person-forming, power of tradition that have sustained my intellectual work since my days at Brown and into the present. It is out of a sense of obligation that I have chosen this particular forum as the venue for sharing some current work of mine. The work is an experiment in rendering into idiomatic English the flavor and literary style of midrashic texts with a basis in oral-performative praxis. Like so much of my past work, it has been directly inspired by Prof. Neusner’s model as a translator, not only of rabbinic texts but also of the thought-world that is reflected within them— the textual tradition of Oral Torah and the learning practices that sustain it. I am pleased that this experiment will first appear in a volume created to honor him. The Oral-Performative Text in Graphic Representation For some time now, I have been working on a project that involves rendering an English translation of the text of the tannaitic midrash, Sifre Devarim (sd).1 1 For a very different “oralist” approach to the translation problems, see David Nelson, tr., Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai (Philadelphia, 2006), particularly his comments on translation methodology, pp. xxv–xxvii. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�84�89_009 “The Weaver of Midrash in Performance” 143 Most readers of this essay will know that during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a flood of academic interest in midrashic studies yielded four important aids to the study of sd in particular: Reuven Hammer’s translation of the Finkelstein edition of 1939 (based upon ms. Vatican 32),2 Prof. Neusner’s “analytical translations” and commentaries on the Finkelstein edition, which yielded translations that place emphasis upon presenting the text in units amenable to the analysis of its rhetorical and formal interests and capable of being compared with other rabbinic texts that had been analyzed with the same method.3 Herbert Basser’s translation of sd’s discourse on Deuteronomy’s Song of Moses (Deut. 32:1–43; Pisqa’ot 306–341),4 which contributed many new insights to the textual history and philological appreciation of the portion of sd that he trans- lated, and Steven Fraade’s study of the hermeneutical operations of sd, which includes extraordinarily erudite translations of significant portions of sd along with extensively researched literary-critical discussions.5 Even were my own translation of the Finkelstein edition—samples of which I present here—completed and available,6 it would not replace any of these works. Rather, while my annotation to the translation does address some of the literary and rhetorical issues exposed by earlier scholars, this is not its primary aim. What I claim to offer is a readable rendering of sd that does some measure of justice to the oral-performative milieu that gave birth to the classic tannaitic texts, among them Sifre to Deuteronomy. Let me describe that milieu and its relationship to the surviving written documents. Such a description will help explain the choices I made in the translation of the Sifre to Deuteronomy.7 2 Reuven Hammer, tr., Sifre: A Tannaitic Commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy (New Haven and London, 1986). Louis Finkelstein’s edition was published in Berlin in 1939, under the title, Siphre ad Deuteronomium, and reprinted in New York in 1969. 3 Jacob Neusner, Sifre to Deuteronomy, vol. i–ii (Atlanta, 1987). Cf. Jacob Neusner, Sifre to Deuteronomy: An Introduction to the Rhetorical, Logical, and Topical Program (Atlanta, 1987). 4 Herbert Basser, In the Margins of the Midrash: Sifre Ha’azinu Texts, Commentaries, and Reflections (Atlanta, 1990). 5 Steven Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah and Its Interpretation in the Midrash Sifre to Deuteronomy (Albany, 1991). 6 Currently, my plan is to post the translation to the website of the Stroum Jewish Studies Program of the University of Washington (http//jewishstudies.washington.edu). 7 For guidance in the general features of oral composition-in-performance, as determined in folkloristic studies, I am most indebted to the late John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition (Bloomington, 1988) and idem, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington, 1995). The work of the New Testament scholar and oral theorist, Werner Kelber, has also been formative for my own. See his assessment of the current state of oral-performative studies in Werner Kelber, “Orality and Biblical Scholarship: Seven Case Studies,” in idem, Imprints, .

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