Halevy the Historian of the Talmud

Chapter 3 Halevy the Historian of the Talmud 3.1 Introduction Y. I. Halevy approached the study of the Talmud’s formation from two perspec- tives at once. On the one hand, he considered himself to be an historian whose modern historical skills, combined with his background in traditional Talmud study, could help illuminate the process of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli. On the other, he thought it necessary for the Talmud to support his political and polemical agendas, especially as they related to the antiquity of the Oral Law and the ideal rabbinic structure for Agudath Israel. Halevy’s split view resulted in two types of conclusions about the Bavli’s formation: well-reasoned contributions to the emerging field of the history of the Bavli, on the one hand, and muddled, often forced, arguments that seem to twist the text to serve his polemical agenda, on the other. This chapter will focus on Halevy’s sound contributions to the study of the Bavli and what impli- cations they might have for the field of academic Talmud study today. The next chapter will follow Halevy’s creative but ultimately quite problematic efforts to press the talmudic text into the service of his politics and apologetics. 3.2 Halevy’s contributions to the history of the Bavli’s formation 3.2.1 The four stages One of Halevy’s important contributions to the history of the Bavli’s formation was his development of a framework that outlined the process of that formation. He describes the formation of the Talmud as an extended process consist- ing of four principal stages: 1) the assembling of tannaitic teachings relevant to each section of the Mishnah, which began immediately after the publication of the Mishnah in the early third century CE; 2) the collection of amoraic teachings by the renowned sages Abbaye (ca. end of third cent.-339) and Rava (ca. 280–351/52), which resulted in a common body of amoraic traditions, which was then studied by all academies and disciple circles; 3) the editing of Rav Ashi (352–427), who put the Talmud into its (almost) final form as the head of a rabbin- ical council [beit hava’ad] starting around the last decade of the fourth century in Matta Mehasia in southern Babylonia; and 4) the post-Rav-Ashi period, in which Open Access. © 2021 Ari Bergmann, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110709834-004 92 Chapter 3 Halevy the Historian of the Talmud the sages of Rav Ashi’s court were permitted to finish editing the Talmud until the death of Ravina bar Huna at the end of the fifth century.1 This chapter will focus primarily on the first three stages, since Halevy’s conclusions regarding the latest parts of the Talmud’s formation are the weakest from an historical perspective. 3.2.1.1 The initial stage: The disciple circles’ tannaitic teachings Halevy recognized that the Talmud was still evolving during the initial stages of the amoraic era, in the third century CE. The tannaitic teachings represented the understandings of individual schools of rabbis and their disciples. They contained traditions not included in the Mishnah, together with other anony- mous explanations. They used a structure and terminology similar to those of the baraitot.2 Notable examples are the baraitot of the Palestinian sages Rabbi Hiyya (end of the second century CE), Rabbi Oshaya (or Hoshaiah; ca. 200 CE), Bar Kappara (early third century CE), and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi (first half of the third century CE). Various individual amoraic disciple circles preserved the teachings through a process of memorization and transmission involving tannaim (reciters of sources, confusing called by the same name as the rabbis of the Mishnah). Those tannaim essentially functioned as human tape recorders.3 In Halevy’s view, the Mishnah on which the Amoraim commented was the original form of the Oral Law. His apologetic agenda is obvious, and he stood alone in his radical opinion of the antiquity of the Mishnah. The theory agreed upon by Halevy’s contemporaries and by traditional rabbinic scholars, such as Rav Sherira in his Epistle, was that after Ezra, during the period of the scribes [soferim], the Oral Law was transmitted as midrash halakhah in conjunction with Scripture.4 Halevy argued that the Mishnah was compiled in the second 1 On the early amoraic times, see Halevy, Dorot harishonim, 2:114–152; on Abbaye and Rava’s era, see Halevy, 2:473–496; on Rav Ashi’s era, see Halevy, 2:522–596 and 3:80–3:85; and on the post-Rav-Ashi period, see Halevy, 3:1–23. 2 For more details, see Nahman Danzig, “On the Development of the Term ‘Baraita’” [in Hebrew], Sinai 89 (1981). See chapter 2 of this book for the approximate dating of the tannaitic, amoraic, saboraic, and geonic eras. 3 On amoraic teaching and transmission, see Halevy, Dorot harishonim, 2:114–152. 4 Lewin, ed., Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon, 39. This was the view of contemporary scholars, such as David Zvi Hoffmann in Hamishnah harishonah,5–12. See a detailed list and further discus- sion in David Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 19–37. See also William Scott Green, “The Talmudic Historians: Nachman Krochmal, Heinrich Graetz, Isaac Hirsch Weiss,” in The Modern Study of the Mishnah, ed. Jacob Neusner, Studia Post-Biblica 23 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 107–121. 3.2 Halevy’s contributions to the history of the Bavli’s formation 93 century CE based on an earlier foundational Mishnah [yesod hamishnah], composed by the sages of the Great Assembly during the era of the establishment of the Second Commonwealth. This yesod hamishnah, he claimed, did not include any creative additions by the sages of the Great Assembly; it was based solely on earlier oral traditions.5 Even with this more nuanced approach, in which he ac- cepted tannaitic intervention in what eventually became the Mishnah, Halevy’s apologetic agenda can be recognized in his analysis of midrash halakhah. In his defense of Orthodoxy, Halevy attempted to demonstrate scientifically that Jewish law was static, and that the rabbis were primarily passive transmitters, rather than active developers, of law. Halevy claimed that midrash halakhah provided only support and mnemonic devices, not exegesis, for laws known through tradition. In short: Midrash did not create halakhah.6 Halevy believed that the law was immutable and repeatedly made statements like, “It becomes evident that the rabbis never relied upon any exegesis, even the most elementary, to derive biblical law. The source of law has always been exclusively tradition, nothing else.”7 The arguments and discussions of the Tannaim were thus limited to details and explanations of the earlier Mishnah and did not provide any substantial evolution. Their contribution comprised only the clarification and the practical application of the original tradition. Finally, Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi canonized and fixed the Mishnah in the beginning of the third century CE.8 Halevy claimed that Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi’s Mishnah was universally ac- cepted upon its redaction as a sealed corpus and, therefore, was not added to afterwards. He thus argued that any additional teachings had been saved as ex- planatory glosses that were later appended to the authoritative Mishnah and taught alongside it.9 This understanding clashed with the Wissenschaftler Zacharias Frankel’s view that the baraitot were composed as addenda to the Mishnah.10 According to Halevy, this initial stage continued during the first two generations of Amoraim, and thus similar explanations and traditions were, in certain cases, transmitted both as baraitot and as amoraic traditions.11 The first 5 Halevy, Dorot harishonim, 1c:204–310. 6 For a detailed analysis of the role of Midrash and the modern religious reform agenda, see Jay M. Harris, How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 211–263. See also Sariel, “A Historian from the World of Torah,” 54 and 54n23. Sariel shows from Halevy’s attitude that this approach to midrash halakhah was not limited to German Orthodoxy. 7 Halevy, Dorot harishonim, 1c:307. See also Halevy, 1c:292–311 and 1e:467–543. 8 Halevy, Dorot harishonim, 1c:296. 9 Halevy, Dorot Harishonim, 2:126–135. 10 On Frankel’s opinion, see Zacharias Frankel, Darkhei hamishnah, 313. 11 Halevy, Dorot harishonim, 2:138. 94 Chapter 3 Halevy the Historian of the Talmud amoraic generation included Rav and Shemuel, who both died ca. 250 CE; the second included Rav Huna (second half of third century CE) and Rav Hisda (ca. 217–309), a student of Rav.12 During this initial stage, the central and most influential academy was located in Sura in Babylonia.13 3.2.1.2 The second stage: Abbaye and Rava Halevy argued that the Talmud’s first stage of development came to an end, and the second stage began, when Abbaye and Rava revolutionized talmudic learning by composing a common body of amoraic traditions. Halevy postu- lated that talmudic learning during the first two generations of Amoraim (up to circa 308–309 CE, following the death of Rav Hisda, Head of Sura, after which the Sura academy closed) was decentralized, with each school following its own particular traditions.14 These predecessors to the academies essentially functioned as disciple circles, meaning that the traditions of a particular Amora were individually debated and preserved by disciples of that center.15 The term “disciple circles” comes from modern scholarship, but it is also helpful for thinking about Halevy’s conception of early amoraic learning.16 Although Halevy, who did not admit to any institutional change from the early amoraic to the late geonic period, claimed that structured yeshivot existed in Babylonia from the era of the first Amoraim, he also wrote that the earliest debates of the amoraic period were confined to the particular traditions of one Amora.

Load more