From Palestine to Babylonia and Back: the Place of the Bavli and the Tanhuma on the Rabbinic Cultural Continuum

From Palestine to Babylonia and Back: The Place of the Bavli and the Tanhuma on the Rabbinic Cultural Continuum

Ronit Nikolsky

One can almost say that as the number of scholars, so the numbers of constructed images of rabbinic culture; on the basis of a relatively small number of literary sources (talmudim and midrashim), with a limited amount of historical information (names of rabbis, place names, elements belonging to the beit-midrash, choice of proof-texts, halakhot etc.), each scholar constructs her or his own picture of rabbinic society, its social classes, its economy, the study institutions and so forth. I am no exception. Shifting my focus away from the external reality, I address rabbinic culture first and foremost as a semiosphere, a constructed reality, or world of meaning. Thus, without claiming to know the socio-historical circum- stances in great detail, I can still study the culture by studying the exogram (that is, the literature which is extant).1 The model that I use to envisage rabbinic culture—polysystem2—explains that although the elements of the cultural cannon—cultural knowledge and customs—are common to all parts of society, each group adapts it to fit its own narrative, resulting in the canon being active in the semiosphere of this group. Thus, although any particular group within the culture creates its own exogram to fit its point of view, this particular exogram is not oblivious to other groups, and traces of the exogram of one group can be found in the literature of another. Except for the social or geographical differences between groups within one culture, the polysystem model also talks about how cultures develop and change through time. This image of a culture as a dynamic multi- faceted developing phenomenon can be applied to rabbinic society.

1 The term “exogram,” coined by Merlin Donald (Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition [Cambridge MA and London 1993] 308–32), refers to the materialization of the semiosphere with the intent of recording it for others to decipher. 2 Developed by Itamar Even-Zohar in his “Polysystem Theory (Revised),” in: I. Even-Zohar Papers in Culture Research (2005). As far as I know the book is only available in an electronic version under http://www.tau.ac.il/~itamarez/works/books/ez-pss1990-toc.pdf; for the arti- cle see: http://www. tau.ac.il/~itamarez/works/papers/papers/ps-revised.pdf.

The advantage of this model is that it allows us to pay the same level of attention to two types of rabbinic material. On the one hand, we have material that was purposely and meticulously documented and disseminated by the rabbis traveling from the Land of Israel to Babylonia in the first centuries of our era (the nehutei). On the other hand, we have the ideas and parts of the narratives that were diffused en passant, originally not intended to be recorded, but which somehow found their way into the extent rabbinic texts, as vague statements and hints. Such hints are found in the examples discussed in the present study. The differences between the Jewish culture of the Land of Israel and that of Babylonian can be seen as a part of an on-going cultural dynamic, developing in two trajectories: the Palestinian rabbinic culture claims to be continuity from the Bible to the tannaitic corpus, from there to the amoraic Palestinian one, and then to the Tanhuma, which belongs to a later stratum of rabbinic literature in the Land of Israel. A geographically parallel route is the one lead- ing from the Land of Israel to Babylonia, where the Bavli reuses tannaitic and amoraic material to assert its own world view. In the present study I intend to show how the later stratum of the midrash from the Land of Israel, the Tanhuma, incorporates material from the Palestin- ian amoraim as well as from Babylonia. This use of Babylonian materials dem- onstrates that the influence of the Bavli can already be detected in the latest rabbinic Palestinian culture. I will address two narratives. In each case I will start with an analysis of a Palestinian midrash. Then I will analyze the reworking of the narrative in the Bavli, and in the end I will show that traces of a particular Babylonian reworking of each narrative is found in the late Palestinian midrash Tanhuma Buber. Since much of the aggadic material in the Bavli is a reworking of Palestinian material, in order to show influence of the Bavli on the Tanhuma, the latter has to exhibit acquaintance with unique Babylonian reworkings.3

3 The lateness of the Tanhuma corpus and its reworking of earlier material has been dealt in the scholarly literature, see e.g. C. Milikowsky, “Jacob’s Punishment: Studies in the Editing of Midrash Tanhuma,” Bar Ilan 18/19 (1980) 144–9 [Hebrew]; idem, “Seder Olam and the Tosefta,” Tarbiz 49 (1980) 246–63 [Hebrew]; M. Bregman, “Early Sources and Traditions in the Tanhuma-Yelamedenu Literature,” Tarbiz 60 (1990) 269–74 [Hebrew]; J. L. Rubenstein, “From Mythic Motifs to Sustained Myth: The Revision of Rabbinic Traditions in Medieval Midrashim,” Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996) 131–59; D. Steinmetz, “Beyond the Verse: Midrash Aggadah as Interpretation of Biblical Narrative,” Association of Jewish Studies Review 30 (2006) 325–45.