FROM HISTORY TO HERMENEUTICS: THE TALMUD AS A HISTORICAL SOURCE

Jacob Neusner Bard College

I. The End of “Talmudic History”

So far as history claims exactly to spell out events that happened at a particular place and time, the Talmud and the rest of the Rabbinic canon of late antiquity do not serve. They do not supply reliable historical information about once upon a time. Rabbinic documents contain stories about things that allegedly took place, which we can- not validate or invalidate. They record statements in the name of biblical and Rabbinic authorities, which we have no means of ver- ifying or falsifying. They describe a social order, evidence for which we cannot locate in material records, and institutions the record or impact of which we cannot recover. The stories the Rabbinic canon preserves were not told by contemporaries, eye-witnesses to what is told, stenographers did not bear witness to what was said, and the chain of tradition of those stories generally commences with the ear- liest documentary testimony, long, long after the events that are por- trayed. The manuscript evidence for the documents hardly wins confidence. Attributions of sayings to named authorities at a specific time and place form part of the same flawed record. The same say- ings are attributed to two or more authorities, or a named author- ity may be given contradictory opinions. These flaws in the Talmud as a historical record do not argue for using the Talmud for the telling of the tale of what happened on a particular day to a particular person: gerade wie es gewesen sei. The debates about the historical usefulness of the Talmudic litera- ture have run their course.1 Those persuaded that the Talmud

1 I collected a variety of debates, including my own debate with Dr. Zeev Safrai, in Judaism in Late Antiquity. Volume Three. Where We Stand: Issues and Debates. Part One. In the series, Handbuch der Orientalistik. Judaistik. Leiden, 1999: E.J. Brill. Edited with Alan J. Avery-Peck. Paperback edition: Boston, 2002: E.J. Brill.Judaism in Late

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 Review of Rabbinic Judaism 11.2 Also available online – www.brill.nl from history to hermeneutics 201 provides objective testimony about past events and personalities will continue to treat the Talmud as a stenographic record of what was really said and its narratives as a reliable digital picture of what really happened. Those who bring a higher quotient of criticism to the sources will persist in regarding the other side as gullible and credulous.2 It does not pay to recapitulate familiar debates. It is time to move on. What is to be done now? The work of cultural description, analy- sis, and interpretation awaits: what is the cultural outcome of the Rabbinic law and its theological system? The Rabbinic documents provide absolutely dependable evidence about the mind of those that created and compiled those documents. The sequence of connected documents, Mishnah, Tosefta, the two Talmuds, for example, attests to the order in which ideas emerged. It follows that the canonical documents sustain the history of ideas, yield an account of what came first and what happened then, an account based on the char- acter of the documentary evidence. In place of narrative history and biography comes cultural analysis, hermeneutics broadly construed. But what is to be analyzed?

II. The Probative Value of Category-Formations in the Analysis of Culture

How a culture organizes the social order forms a problem on which the Talmud supplies absolutely dependable data. We can reconstruct the hypothetical thought processes that produced the Rabbinic sys- tem for Israelite culture. Let me explain. In the beginning is the chaos of data, vast clouds of information bearing no intelligible shape, deriving we know not whence, travel- ing we know not whither. Out of chaos comes order, in the case of the Halakhic sector of the Rabbinic canon effected through sorting

Antiquity. Volume Three. Where We Stand: Issues and Debates. Part Two. In the series, Handbuch der Orientalistik. Judaistik. Leiden, 1999: E. J. Brill. Edited with Alan J. Avery-Peck. Paperback edition: Boston, 2002: E.J. Brill. Judaism in Late Antiquity. Volume Three. Where We Stand: Issues and Debates. Part Three. In the series, Handbuch der Orientalistik. Judaistik. Leiden, 2000: E. J. Brill. Edited with Alan J. Avery-Peck. Paperback edition: Boston, 2002: E.J. Brill. 2 See my Reading and Believing: Ancient Judaism and Contemporary Gullibility. Atlanta, 1986: Scholars Press for Brown Judaic Studies. Now: Lanham, University Press of America.