The Phenomenon of the Rabbi in Late Antiquity* by Jacob

THE PHENOMENON OF THE RABBI IN LATE ANTIQUITY* BY JACOB NEUSNER Brown University Jewish religious leadership through history has taken many forms. From biblical times onward the ancient tradition put forward one type of leader after another, from the patriarch to the prophet, from the anointed king, God-inspired general and judge, to the temple priest and guardian of both culture and cult. In the first century A.D., one kind of religious leader began at first to compete with, then to exclude from legitimacy and power, all others, and that was the rabbi. He maintained that all of the great leaders of Israel had been rabbis, in perfect anachronism even calling Moses "our rabbi" and crediting King David with having "studied the Torah" in the manner of the third century rabbi. It is no exaggeration to call the rabbi Israel's character- istic religious-leadership type, even though what a rabbi was and is has changed over the centuries. 1 ) I What unites all historical forms of the rabbinate is devotion to "study of the Torah," by which was meant both the written Scriptures as we have them and the Oral Revelation handed on by God to Moses at Sinai. It was invariably the claim of the rabbi that the whole Torah, both written and oral parts, was preserved, handed on, and embodied in the schools where rabbis were educated. The form of the oral tradition finally became the corpus of rabbinic literature, beginning with *) Jacob Neusner is Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. This paper is based upon his Morron Lecture at Hamilton College, April 2, 1968. I) The egregious ascription of the title "rabbi" to biblical figures is matched by the retention of the title in subsequent, equally alien, settings, long after the Talmudic-rabbinic tradition had disintegrated. We have no history of the rabbi in America, for example. Abraham J. Karp is pursuing researches on that question, and promises a comprehensive account in time to come. 2 the Mishnah and Tosefta, extending then to the beraitot, or external traditions not included in either document but nonetheless held to be authoritative; encompassing further the gemara, the traditions and acute discussions on the Mishnah of the Babylonian and Palestinian schools; and including as well the various collections of exegetical saying on Scripture, under the name of Midrash; and, in later times, comprehending the legal codes, commentaries on the Talmud and on Talmudic commentaries, responsa, and other post-Talmudic, rabbinic creations. To the oral tradition one should add the philosophical and mystical traditions, both of which drew heavily upon rabbinical literature, partially shaped their concerns through it and confronted the issues set by it. "Heretics" were heretical because they diverged from, or even denied the validity of, rabbinical traditions. While not all Jews were masters of rabbinical learning, 'normative Jews' were Talmudic students. The Jewish school studied Scriptures as mediated by rabbinical lore. The Jewish student achieved distinction through his mastery of Talmud and its commentaries and codes. Jewish religious life was lived in the light of the learning of the rabbi. Jewish political and legal affairs were determined by rabbinic decision, based upon Talmudic and subsequent laws. Jewish theology derived from the biblical-Talmudic legacy. Judaism at it was known from the first to the end of the eight- eenth century was rabinic Judaism. In some ways, the rabbi is to be compared to the Mandarin. His stress upon perfect mastery of a specific body of literature, his view that the only valid qualification for leadership was such learning, his acceptance of the assessment of others older and wiser than himself of the quality or calibre of his knowledge-and therefore of his worth-these are highly Mandarin attributes. Further, the rabbi aspired to, and did, govern the Jewish community by the laws he learned in rabbinical schools, and held, as I said, that he was qualified to do so not because of any political, military, or economic power wielded by his class or estate, but because of his legal learning. The perseverance of master-disciple relationships in rabbinic Judaism and Confucianism, the stress upon the disciple's reverence for every deed and word of the master, the preservation of stories of the master's doings as much as of his sayings, and the citation in the context of new situations in daily life of old sayings of the ancient teachers, beginning in the Jewish case with Moses, in the Confucian one with Confucius .

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