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Exploring
Mishnah’s World(s)
Social Scientific Approaches
Simcha Fishbane · Calvin Goldscheider ·

Jack N. Lightstone
Exploring Mishnah’s World(s)
Simcha Fishbane • Calvin Goldscheider
Jack N. Lightstone
Exploring Mishnah’s
World(s)
Social Scientific Approaches
Simcha Fishbane Calvin Goldscheider
Graduate School of Jewish Studies Maxcy Hall
Touro College & University System Brown University
New York, NY, USA Providence, RI, USA
Jack N. Lightstone
Brock University
St. Catharines, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-53570-4 ISBN 978-3-030-53571-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53571-1
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Preface
This volume offers a collection of essays, all of which take (or advocate
taking) social science approaches—sociological or social-anthropological
perspectives, to be specific—to the study of the evidence of the Mishnah.
While the authors wrote their contributions as individual stand-alone
pieces, the impetus to bring them together in this volume stems from the
authors’ participation in a thematic research unit hosted between 2015
and 2018 by the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS). A
number of scholars participated in the meetings. All made valuable contri-
butions to the research unit’s work; some of their contributions have been
revised and published in several issues of the journal, Studies in Judaism,
the Humanities and Social Sciences. However, the authors whose essays
appear in this volume were frequent participants in the EABS-sponsored
research unit over its four-year period of operation and as such have had
greater opportunity to dialogue with one another. Moreover, all three
authors have spent substantial parts of their lengthy academic careers mar-
rying their interest in social science approaches with their curiosity about
the evidence from and about Jews and Judaism. These factors provided
the motivation for the three of us to draw together this particular collec-
tion of our essays in one volume.
How these essays, with their range and scope, speak to one another will
occupy the latter half of this Preface. However, first, these prefatory
remarks broach anterior matters: Why this volume’s focus is on the
Mishnah, and why these authors’ commitment to promote and apply
social science perspectives to its evidence? To some degree, Lightstone’s
v
vi PREFACE
methodologically oriented essay appearing as Chap. 1 in this volume

addresses these questions. That said, let us deal with these questions here,
upfront, and directly.
Why Mishnah? And Why Promote Social Science

Approaches to the Study of Its Evidence?
Why Mishnah? First, Mishnah (composed circa 200 CE) is the only surviv-
ing literary oeuvre1 written by Jews for Jews in Roman Palestine in the
aftermath of the failed Bar Kokhba rebellion. The defeat by Rome of Bar
Kokhba’s militia functioned as a capstone to the events of the failed “Great
Rebellion” of the Jews in the Land of Israel against their Roman rulers
between 66 and 71 CE. The pacification of the Great Rebellion by Roman
forces resulted in the destruction in 70 CE of Jerusalem and its Temple.
With the latter’s demise, many of the principal practices of “Biblical
Judaism” as enjoined in the Hebrew Bible ceased, as did the social, cul-
tural, and administrative influence and authority of Temple institutions,
leadership, and personnel in the Land of Israel and beyond. The defeat
about 65 years later of the rebels led by Simon Bar Kokhba meant that no
imminent restoration of Jerusalem and its Temple-based institutions and
cult would be in the offing. Moreover, Rome’s policy in Judea after this
second rebellion was (understandably) more repressive, resulting in a sig-
nificant movement of Jews out of the Judean heartland to the coastal plain
and the Galilee (and beyond).
These upheavals of Palestinian Jewish society also affected a subset of
homeland Jews that identified themselves as followers of Jesus. There can
be little doubt that until the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple,
however far the fledgling Jesus movement had spread in the Middle East
and Mediterranean Lands, Christian leadership was based in Jerusalem.
For this early Jesus movement, the two failed rebellions were also a crisis—
not just a social, institutional, and cultural one, but equally a crisis of
1
The choice of the wording “literary oeuvre” is deliberate; since one may legitimately dif-
ferentiate a literary composition, such as Mishnah, from inscriptions, letters, or transactional
records, such as the Bar Kokhba Letters or the Babatha documents from the Cave of Letters
in the Judean Desert. The use of “surviving” (in parentheses) hints at another caveat. We
cannot know, as some scholars have suggested, whether our Mishnah is based on a proto-one
no longer extant. Moreover, some early rabbinic traditions speak of other rabbis’ “mish-
nahs,” specifically, the mishnah of Rabbi Akiva. We cannot know what is meant by such
references.
PREFACE vii
meaning, just as it was for other Judah-ists. After all much of the early
Jesus movement’s bible (the same bible as that revered by other Jews) was
also rendered moot.
The upshot of the foregoing is this. The latter half of the second cen-
tury CE and the beginning of the third in the Land of Israel was a time of
recovery and redefinition on many social, cultural, and economic planes in
the aftermath of crisis and dislocation. And leaving aside early Christian
authors of this period, the Mishnah is, as has been stated, the only extant
written oeuvre produced exclusively by and for Jews in the Land of Israel
in this period.
Second, Mishnah is the earliest surviving literary oeuvre composed by
and for members of the early rabbinic movement, group, guild, and/or
class (whatever the most appropriate social descriptor might be) in its for-
mative period. The early rabbinic movement underwent significant social
formation, consolidation, or institutionalization in Roman Palestine near
the latter part of the second century CE and the early decades of the third,
precisely the time of Mishnah’s creation and promulgation. We do not
know whether this early rabbinic movement exercised much power or
authority in Roman-ruled Palestine in the third or several subsequent cen-
turies. But over the next half-millennium or so, the vicissitudes of history
gave the rabbis that power and authority in the Jewish communities of the
Middle East and Mediterranean Lands.
Mishnah was not only the early rabbis’ foundational document. It was
also the early rabbinic group’s privileged object of study (after the Hebrew
Bible) for some 400 years, from circa 200 CE to about 600 CE, as
explained and documented in Lightstone’s essays in this volume. Culturally
and socially, how can 400 years of the devoted study of a particular docu-
ment as a central, core activity of a group not have significantly influenced
that group’s social formation and shared identity?
Third, Mishnah, a document whose subject matter is legal and norma-
tive in nature, is what social scientists would call a “thick” document. That
is, it is replete with details of social, religious, administrative, juridical, and
cultural phenomena for which its authors proffer rulings (or in many
instances alternative rulings) in accordance with what they understand to
be the demands of Torah, God’s revealed norms for Jewish life and society.
Social historians and social scientists crave “thick” evidence. “Thick” social
and cultural evidence is laborious to gather and, in the case of societies
long past, difficult to come by altogether. So, Mishnah is a treasure trove
of evidence.
viii PREFACE
That said, Mishnah’s thick evidence is not without its problems. Since
a significant proportion of Mishnah’s content is predicated on a function-
ing Judaic Temple in Jerusalem, and since no such institution had existed
for some 130 years when Mishnah was authored c. 200 CE, it is difficult
to discern precisely what in Mishnah is based on memory and what on
imagination. Moreover, it is one thing to say that Mishnah was authored
c. 200 CE. It is another to say that its content or the language of its bits
and pieces is datable to c. 200 CE. Only professional scholarship in tradi-
tion history, literary history, and redaction history can sort out such things.
So, the opportunities for research provided by Mishnah must be taken
with full appreciation of the methodological hurdles attending the use of
Mishnah’s evidence. Such an appreciation may mean qualifying one’s
claims or shying away from some questions altogether, when “discretion is
the better part of valour” (to quote “the bard”). These difficulties and
cautions are more fully spelled out in Chap. 1’s methodological exposition.
Fourth, it is reasonable to claim that Mishnah’s evidence represents the
thinking of its circle of authors—as stated, rabbis working near the turn of
the third century in Roman-ruled Galilee. What are the implications of
such a claim? One, these authors, at least, believed that what appears in
Mishnah belongs together as some sort of “whole cloth,” even if we may
also suppose that these authors worked with antecedent sources and tradi-
tions. Two, it is clear that Mishnah’s framers refashioned these sources to
fit together, using literary forms and conventions that were normative for
the authors. In other words, when working with the evidence of Mishnah,
one can, in some meaningful sense, argue that the evidence is not just, or
is not intended to be read as, an eclectic hodgepodge. This is important
for the social historian as much as it is for the social scientist. In the past,
many modern scholars of Early Judaism or of Early Rabbinism have taken
overly eclectic approaches to mustering their evidence, as if a piece of evi-
dence appearing in Mishnah may be meaningfully collated with evidence
that first appears, let us say, in the Babylonian Talmud edited some
400 years later. The first rule of golf is “play the ball as it lies”; all of
Mishnah’s evidence lies within a single document’s literary bounds,
authored or brought together and reframed by one group in a particular
place and time.
Let us now turn to the second question posed above. Why produce a
collection of essays that calls for and models various social scientific studies
of aspects of Mishnah’s evidence? Some of the answers to this question are
already implicit in the responses to the first question, Why Mishnah?
PREFACE ix
First, since Mishnah’s content is legal in nature, and since that content
spans many aspects of a people living a religiously informed life together
under a specified social-authority structure, Mishnah’s content is highly
amenable to the types of studies that sociologists and social anthropolo-
gists would routinely undertake. As already noted, Mishnah’s evidence is
socially “thick,” which is (or ought to) be catnip to social scientists. To be
sure, methodological challenges abound in using this evidence, but quali-
fying one’s claims and carefully choosing what to do and what not to
attempt will deal with these methodological issues, as intimated earlier.
Second, if one were to compare the mass of historical, literary-historical,
theological, and philological studies of Mishnaic evidence (or indeed of
early Rabbinic literature generally) with the volume of studies driven pri-
marily by social science questions and approaches to Mishnah’s content,
the amount of the former would far outweigh that of the latter. In other
words, there is, relatively speaking, a significant dearth of studies under-
taken primarily through the lens of social science approaches. It is worth-
while to redress that dearth.
Why, then, has this not already happened? For a number of reasons,
in our estimation. One, most social scientists work with contemporary
evidence or evidence of the recent past, largely because it is more abun-
dant and its value is easier to assess. Two, studying Mishnah requires
skills and knowledge that few social scientists possess. One must com-
mand Middle Hebrew (and some early rabbinic Aramaic) to work with
Mishnah in its original language. But even if one were content to work
with modern translations of Mishnah, other hurdles must be sur-
mounted. To make sense of Mishnah requires knowledge of a rather
arcane system of ancient Judaic law that everywhere underlies Mishnah’s
content. In addition, Mishnah’s language is crafted to be highly laconic,
demanding that the reader conceptually interpolate missing bits essential
to the interpretation of Mishnah passages. Three, matters of critical liter-
ary history, as noted, significantly affect the study of Mishnah’s evidence;
at the very least, the social scientist needs to be aware (or constantly
reminded) of these in order not to fall into methodological potholes. In
sum, social science approaches to Mishnaic evidence require that its
practitioners have had a “dual” schooling, or work collaboratively with
those who have been schooled, in matters of critical literary history of
early rabbinic texts and in matters of ancient Judaic law systems. (The
three authors of this volume have bridged these scholarly divides either
x PREFACE
by reason of the range of their individual professional training or by rea-

son of their conversations with one another.)
Third, there is great value in understanding the range of human social
experience across time and geography. For more than a century, anthro-
pologists have studied so-called primitive societies—all of them more
complex and sophisticated than the word “primitive” implies. When these
societies flourished in the ancient past, physical anthropology and archae-
ology have combined to reveal matters. And, of course, social science
approaches to the study of contemporary societies (whether “primitive” or
“modern”) abound for reasons already articulated. Fewer career social sci-
entists work with evidence from the “middle ground,” that is, from ancient
societies that have left us evidence in their literatures. The reasons for this
have already been spelled out. But one must state unequivocally that this
state of affairs is unfortunate. And, moreover, it is a state of affairs that
belies the very founding of modern social science theory and method.
After all, Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, developed
his “ideal typology” of forms of social authority on the foundations of his
reading of biblical literature. It is the authors’ hope that this collection of
essays dealing with the evidence of Mishnah, a late second-/early third-
century rabbinic legal text, will entice more scholars of a social-science
bent to enter this “middle ground” of research.
The Range and Scope of This Volume’s Essays

and the Authors’ Conversation
As stated, this volume reflects a project to encourage, and to propose and

model conceptual and methodological frames for, social science approaches
to the study the Mishnah. That framing is one that takes account of the
historical and literary-historical issues that impinge upon the use of
Mishnah for any scholarly purpose beyond philological study, including
social scientific examination of Mishnaic materials. Based on that framing,
articulated principally in Chap. 1, each subsequent chapter pursues, with
appropriate methodological caveats, an avenue or avenues of inquiry open
to the social scientist, providing examples of how to bring to bear on the
evidence of Mishnah social scientific questions and modes of inquiry.
The chapters authored by Fishbane and Goldscheider bring typical
sociological and social-anthropological categories to bear on Mishnah’s
“ideal vision for” a Jewish social world articulated via Mishnah’s legal
PREFACE xi
prescriptions and proscriptions. To understand what these chapters under-

take, one must appreciate the methodological import and implications of
describing Mishnah’s content as founded upon an “ideal” social vision.
This Preface will return to precisely this issue later.
The chapters authored by Lightstone model a very different type of
social scientific approach to the evidence of the Mishnah, by focusing on
Mishnah as a highly valued cultural object; that value was socially enacted
in devotion to Mishnah study as a core, socially formative group activity
among early rabbinic circles. In these chapters, the concepts and methods
of socio-rhetorical analysis are brought to bear on the evidence, and the
chapters’ interests lie in uncovering elements contributing to shaping the
social formation, social identity, and normative skills of the early rabbinic
group as a self-defining, self-promoting, quasi-professional elite within
Palestinian and Babylonian Jewish societies.
While the foregoing summarizes the scope and content of this volume’s
chapters, it does not suggest how to read them. There are three ways of
reading this volume’s essays from Chap. 2 through to the volume’s
conclusion.
One, these chapters may be read as a set of thematically linked, inde-
pendent studies that may each be taken on its own as an example of what
it might mean to approach the evidence of the Mishnah with a social sci-
ence lens. In such a reading of this volume, Chap. 1 may be viewed as
having elicited ten discrete contributions.
Two, in the remaining chapters, each of the three authors, Fishbane,
Goldscheider, and Lightstone, have canted their approaches to the evi-
dence of the Mishnah differently. And it is useful to read this book in that
light. For instance, Goldscheider’s recent studies (some presented in this
volume and others presented elsewhere) on Mishnah have tended to adopt
social-analytic categories that find some correspondence in Mishnah’s own
topical divisions—Mishnah’s thematic “orders” and topical “tractates.”
One can, and perhaps should, read this as a methodological choice made
by Goldscheider, since in social science research one is always faced with
the prospect of whether one is inappropriately imposing interpretive cate-
gories on the evidence rather than allowing those categories to emerge
from the evidence. There is, in principle, room for both in social scientific
inquiry, but there are prices to pay for leaning too far in one direction or
another. If categories are simply those articulated by the evidence itself,
then one risks engaging in (mere) description with little analytic and con-
ceptual power to view that evidence in light of analyses of other groups
xii PREFACE
and cultures in order better to understand what it has meant for humans
to be social beings who socially construct worlds for themselves. At the
opposite extreme, the imposition of overly “foreign” interpretive or ana-
lytic categories on the evidence of a group risks obscuring the nature of
their social order and world—in seriously misrepresenting them.
Goldscheider’s work on Mishnah, then, tends to capitalize on the fact that
Mishnah’s own categories for ordering and developing its legal materials
often closely correspond to typical interpretative and analytic categories of
sociologists such as himself.
What now of Fishbane’s chapters? His work on Mishnah (again, pre-
sented here and elsewhere) also has used normative sociological and
anthropological interpretive and analytic categories in examining
Mishnah’s evidence, but in so doing he has not restricted himself by stay-
ing within the lines drawn by Mishnah’s own literary thematic and topical
divisions and subdivisions. Rather, Fishbane explores themes of sociologi-
cal or anthropological import, for which there is evidence in Mishnah,
even if this evidence may be dispersed across several of Mishnah’s tractates.
Nonetheless, he can often justify his enterprise methodologically by
appealing to the fact that Mishnah frequently uses standard nomenclature,
used across the Mishnah’s topical and thematic divisions for these socially
relevant notions and values. So, for Fishbane, it is legitimate to study the
range of uses of Mishnah’s own appeal to such notions. He may ask about
how they are used across the expanse of Mishnah’s tractates.
Lightstone has opted not to conduct sociological or anthropological
analysis of Mishnah’s ideal world. Rather, he examines Mishnah as an
important social and cultural artifact of the early rabbinic movement, in
light of the fact that the devoted study of Mishnah was a core activity
within early rabbinic circles. Therefore, in his view, Mishnah’s dominant
traits, confronted regularly by the devoted Mishnah student, may tell us
something of the core values, expected profile, core skills, and shared
identity of this nascent quasi-professional movement in the Roman and
early Byzantine periods. His justification for so using the evidence of the
Mishnah is based on three claims. First, Mishnah is the first literary oeuvre
both authored by and promulgated as authoritative in the early rabbinic
group. Second, in addition to the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, Mishnah
remained the primary object of devoted rabbinic study undertaken as a
core activity that defined one as a member of the rabbinic group or guild
for nearly 400 years. Third, a number of subsequent early rabbinic literary
oeuvres produced during that 400-year period may be read (in part) as
PREFACE xiii
models for (if not reflections of) ways of studying Mishnah and therefore
tell us something about both the continuity and development of core
aspects of shared rabbinic identity and expected competencies. As stated
earlier, Lightstone’s methods are adapted versions of socio-rhetorical anal-
ysis—that is, adapted by him for use in the examination of early rabbinic
legal texts.
Three, and in light of (and following from) the foregoing paragraphs,
the studies of this volume may be read as a dialogue of sorts between
Fishbane, Goldscheider, and Lightstone, sparked and conditioned by pro-
legomena proffered in Chap. 1 by Lightstone. Mishnah is replete with
evidence of a social nature because (1) it is primarily legal in content and
(2) it encompasses norms for social, organizational/administrative, and
ritual life—realms that were not as highly differentiated in premodern
societies as they are today. But as Lightstone has pointed out in Chap. 1,
it is difficult to discern when Mishnah’s evidence reflects (1) contempo-
rary social norms, practice, and values of late second-century Jewish soci-
ety in the Land of Israel, (2) more or less accurate cultural memories of
Jewish society in the Land of Israel in the period or periods preceding the
late second century, or (3) Mishnah’s vision of an “ideal” Jewish society
founded on early rabbis’ understanding of the norms of the life lived
together with others in accordance with the demands of the Torah. There
is little doubt that there are elements of the first two in Mishnah, all con-
tained within an encompassing frame of material that represents the third,
the ideal vision of Mishnah’s early rabbinic framers. Sorting out what pre-
cisely in Mishnah may be assigned to each of these three rubrics is, one,
difficult, and, two, not a task for which social scientists per se are equipped.
It is, rather, a task for social historians and literary historians. As noted
earlier in this Preface, some scholars have the training and expertise that
span these disciplines and the social sciences. Most do not bridge these
divides. Alternatively, social scientists may work closely with social histori-
ans and literary historians with expertise in rabbinic texts and in the study
of Early Judaism and Jews. But as Chap. 1 points out, even bridging these
disciplinary divides is not enough, because social historians and literary
historians themselves have not yet come to a consensus view on what
materials in Mishnah fall into which of the aforementioned three categories.
For these reasons, Chap. 1 outlines three different, broadly defined
options for the social scientific study of Mishnah’s evidence: (1) the study
of late second-century Jewish society in the Land of Israel; (2) the study
of the “ideal” society underlying Mishnah’s legal content; (3) the study of
xiv PREFACE
Mishnaic evidence to shed light on aspects of the sociology or anthropol-

ogy of the early rabbinic group itself. Chap. 1 points out that each of the
three avenues requires attention to different methodological strictures and
challenges. The first necessitates sorting out what in Mishnah are more or
less accurate reflections of contemporary late second-century society, what
are more or less accurate historical and cultural memories, and what is
ideal construct. The second approach takes Mishnah’s “ideal” frame as the
methodological fulcrum; if everything is framed within the rabbis’ ideal
vision, let us examine the ideal as social scientists. This second approach
allows one to sidestep or finesse the historical issues attending to the first
approach. The third approach lies somewhere in between. It invites the
social scientific study of a “real” group, the early rabbis who produced the
Mishnah and were devoted to its study; as such the approach avoids some
but not all of the historical challenges imposed upon those adopting the
first avenue.
In this volume, Fishbane and Goldscheider, notwithstanding their dif-
ferent cants, have followed the second avenue. In fact, in their conversa-
tions together, the authors needed to continuously remind one another
that they were not adopting the first avenue and needed to avoid making
claims that might appear to the reader that they were. Lightstone has
opted for the third avenue, using the methods and concepts of socio-
rhetorical analysis to do so. This has allowed him to deal with certain
aspects of the sociology of the early rabbinic group. (Bracketing other
aspects that might have drawn him into the constraints of avenue one; for
instance, had Lightstone sought to examine the role of the rabbinic group
or its members in contemporary Jewish society he would have been tred-
ding along the first avenue.) In the end, none of the authors had the
temerity (this time) to adopt avenue one.
The underlying dialogue between and among these chapters, then, has
not only to do with choosing categories for social analysis that are neither
too close nor too far from the evidence to serve an analytic purpose.
Fishbane, Goldscheider, and Lightstone are also in dialogue about whether,
or to what degree, to ensnarl their social scientific inquiry in historical and
literary-historical questions. Some social scientific questions posed to
Mishnah’s evidence require delving into the latter more than others.
New York, NY, USA Simcha Fishbane

Providence, RI, USA Calvin Goldscheider
St. Catharines, ON, Canada Jack N. Lightstone
Acknowledgments
This volume would not have been written without the European
Association of Biblical Studies agreeing to host the research unit,
“Sociological and Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the
Evidence of the Mishnah” at the EABS’ annual meetings from 2015 to
2018. The authors thank the EABS and all participants in the research group.
Earlier versions of some of our essays, and those of other participants in
the EABS research group, were published in several issues of the journal,
Studies in Judaism, the Humanities, and Social Sciences. We are grateful for
the journal’s support and for their permission to bring some of these essays
together in revised form in this volume.
During the period in which Lightstone composed the initial essays that
underlie his four chapters in this volume, he was also involved in writing
an introductory guide to early rabbinic legal rhetoric and literary conven-
tions. Since his approach in this volume relies on socio-rhetorical analysis
of Mishnah and its post-Mishnaic legal literature, it is understandable that
his work for this volume and for the other are parallel enterprises with
mutually informing moments. In particular, the studies revised for publi-
cation here as Chaps. 7, 8, and 9 substantially inform the content and
language of the concluding chapter of the other book, In the Seat of Moses:
An Introductory Guide to Early Rabbinic Legal Rhetoric and Literary
Conventions (Eugene, OR: Cascade/Wipf & Stock and the Westar
Institute, 2020), even though the two volumes are very different in orien-
tation, purpose, and intended readership. We are grateful for both books’
publishers, Palgrave Macmillan and Cascade/Wipf & Stock/Westar, for
allowing and facilitating this cross-fertilization of the two volumes.
xv
xvi Acknowledgments
Finally, we are greatly indebted to Palgrave Macmillan for support and

professionalism in bringing this volume to press. Our thanks go especially
to Phil Getz in their US office for shepherding us through the process and
believing in the value of this volume’s studies to a scholarly and reading
audience.
The authors of this volume have in some cases known each other for
many years and in other instances have forged a relationship only since
2015. This is our first co-authorship of a volume, and we celebrate our
partnership. “The three-stranded rope is not quickly broken” (Eccl. 4:12).1
1
Simcha Fishbane would like to acknowledge and thank Professor Herb Basser and Dr.
Lynn Visson for their assistance and valuable input in preparing my chapters. I would like to
thank Academic Studies Press for sponsoring four editions of the journal Studies in Judaism,
Humanities, and the Social Sciences of which I am the editor and chief and where many of
the chapters have been published. The authors all would like to acknowledge Ms. JoAnn
Kestin, Mrs. Carrie Goodstein, and Yosef Robinson for their assistance in bringing this book
to Press.
Contents
1 Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities in the Social

Scientific Study of the Evidence of the Mishnah 1
Jack N. Lightstone
Outline of Our Programmatic Introduction 3
Why Is It Important to Seek to Know More About Palestinian
Jewish Society and Culture in the Latter Half of the Second
Century and Early Third Century CE? 5
Why Turn to the Evidence of the Mishnah? 9
Mishnah’s Most Pervasive Rhetorical and Literary Traits, the
Basis for Methodological Challenges and Choices in the Use of Its
Evidence 12
Three Potentially Compelling Topical Directions of Inquiry in the
Sociological and Anthropological Study of Mishnah’s Evidence 20
2 Dignity or Debasement: The Destitute in the World of

Mishnah 25
Simcha Fishbane
Introduction 25
The Support of the Poor 30
The Status of the Poor Person 30
Giver or Receiver? The Focus of Mishnah Peah 36
Care and Compassion 38
Personality Traits of Mishnah’s Poor 49
Concluding Remarks 56
xvii
xviii Contents
3 “The Land of Israel Is Holier Than All Lands”: Diaspora

in Mishnah’s Cosmos—The Message 63
Simcha Fishbane
Introduction 63
Mishnah 64
The Sociology of Space 66
The Land of Israel in Mishnah 68
Diaspora 72
Summary 76
Summary 87
Summary 92
Concluding Remarks: The Message 92
4 Marginal Person and/or Marginal Situation: The Convert

in Mishnah 95
Simcha Fishbane
Introduction 95
Theoretical Framework 96
Mishnah 99
The Convert’s Status and Literacy in Mishnah 99
From Gentile to Jew: A Transitional Situation 102
Concern and Compassion 106
Inheritance 108
Preserving the Holy Seed 110
Past Culture or Stigma 112
Principles of Halakhah and Biblical Marginality 114
Concluding Remarks 116
5 Religious Authority in the Mishnah: Social Science

Perspectives on the Emerging Role of Scholars119
Calvin Goldscheider
Searching the Mishnah for Evidence 120
Core Questions 122
Social Science Guidelines 124
The Identification of Rabbis/Scholars in the Status Hierarchy 126
Legitimating Rabbinic Authority 130
Multiple Paths to Legitimacy 131
The Emergence of Disputes and Disagreements Among the
Rabbinic Elite 133
Contents xix
Generational Transmission of Authority 136

Consequences of Scholarly Disputes 138
The Power of Local Custom and Memory of Temple Practices 141
Concluding Thoughts 143
6 Family Structure, Kinship, and Life Course Transitions:

Social Science Explorations of the Mishnah147
Calvin Goldscheider
Family Themes: Preliminaries 149
Family Formation: Marriage and Kiddushin 155
Yibum, Generational Continuity, and Kinship Relationships 157
Reproduction 160
Intermarriage and Marriage Regulations 161
Age Variation for Defining Girls (Women) 165
Marital Obligations and Rights 167
Rights of Widows and Stepchildren/Stepparents 170
Control over Daughters 172
Sotah 173
Divorce: The Dissolution of Marriage 176
Concluding Thoughts 178
7 Study as a Socially Formative Activity: The Case of

Mishnah Study in the Early Rabbinic Group181
Jack N. Lightstone
Contextual Elements: Text, Study, and Occupational Groups in
Ancient Judaic Societies 185
Contextual Elements: Sage and Scribal “Classes” in Middle
Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean Societies of the
Greco-Roman Period 189
Mishnah Study and Early Rabbinic Social Formation, a Case
Study 192
Extra-Mishnaic, Early Rabbinic Evidence for the Centrality
of Mishnah Study to the Inner-Group Life of the Early Rabbinic
Social Formation 193
Intra-Mishnaic Evidence and the Nature of Inner-Group,
Normative Traits Modeled and Re-enforced by Mishnah Study 197
Macro-Literary Traits: Mishnah’s Topical Agenda and Scripture 198
Micro-Rhetorical Traits: Inculcating “High-Grid”
Taxonomical Vision 204
Conclusions 214
xx Contents
8 When Tosefta Was Read in Service of Mishnah Study: What

Pervasive Literary-Rhetorical Traits of Toseftan Materials
Divulge About the Evolution of Early Rabbinic Group
Identity on the Heels of Mishnah’s Promulgation217
Introduction: The Question at Hand 217
Recalling Conclusions Based on the Evidence of Mishnah 217
The Task at Hand: The Evidence from Tosefta and the First
Developments of a Post-Mishnaic Social Identity Within the
Early Rabbinic Social Formation 222
Underlying Historical Premises for This Study’s Approach 225
What the Toseftan Evidence, Considered In Situ, Shows:
Prefiguring This Study’s Findings 228
Tosefta’s Literary-Rhetorical Traits as a Model of/for Mishnah
Study 230
Tosefta’s Macro Traits: Agenda and Organization 230
Tosefta’s Intermediate Level, Literary-Rhetorical Traits 235
Tosefta’s Micro-Level Literary-Rhetorical Traits 244
Concluding Observations 254
9 Studying Mishnah “Talmudic-ly”: What the Basic Literary-

Rhetorical Features of the Talmuds’ Legal Compositions
and Composite “Essays” Tell Us About Mishnah Study as
an Identity-Informing Activity Within Rabbinic Groups
at the End of Late Antiquity259
Introduction: Questions and Targeting a Specific Type of
Evidence in Response 259
Some Core, Pervasive Literary-Rhetorical Traits of the
Yerushalmi’s and Bavli’s Legal Compositions 268
The Literary-Rhetorical “Interrogative Drivers” of Compositions
in Yerushalmi and Bavli 274
Take, for Example, These Two “Parallel” Composite Essays from
the Yerushalmi and Bavli 279
What Has Happened to Mishnah Study in Studying It
“Talmudic-ly” as an Identify-Forming Activity Within the
Rabbinic Movement? Some Observations and Proposals 300
Index307
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities

in the Social Scientific Study of the Evidence
of the Mishnah
Jack N. Lightstone
This chapter1 is intended to be a call to renew the scholarly study of the

evidence of the Mishnah, but from decidedly social scientific perspectives.
The call, roughly in this form, was first issued in 2015 at the meetings of
1
This paper is a (lightly) revised version of my article entitled: Jack N. Lightstone,
“Sociological and Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the Evidence of the Mishnah:
A Call to Scholarly Action and a Programmatic Introduction,” Studies in Judaism, the
Humanities and the Social Sciences 2 (2019): 1–16. It is published here in this version with a
new title and with the permission of the journal, to whom I am grateful. The journal article,
as do most published journal articles, stands among those of other authors’ works on diverse
topics falling within the journal’s broad mandate. In this version, the essay, newly titled,
appears once more among contributions with which it shares a common theme. My use of
the language “once more” requires some explanation. This volume’s essays share a common
origin and inspiration, the work of a research group hosted by the European Association of
Biblical Studies (EABS) between 2015 and 2018, bearing the moniker, Sociological and
Anthropological Approaches to the Study of the Evidence of the Mishnah. And the current
paper, or rather the earlier journal article that bore the title of the EABS research group, was
the first paper presented to the research group in 2015, offering, as it were, a mandate for
J. N. Lightstone (*)
Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Fishbane et al., Exploring Mishnah’s World(s),
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53571-1_1
2 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS). And most of the

studies in this volume have a common origin; they are a subset of the
papers presented between 2015 and 2018 at the EABS in direct response
to that call. In their current versions they illustrate the variety of approaches
and topics that may come under the umbrella of social scientific approaches
to the study of Mishnah’s evidence, but by no means even begin to exhaust
the range or boundaries of such work.
The modern study of ancient Judaism has always shown a sustained
interest in Mishnah,2 the first authoritative text produced and promul-
gated by the early rabbinic movement near or soon after the turn of the
third century CE. Mishnah, on its own, or together with other early rab-
binic texts, has been the object of literary-critical and historical analysis,3
with much debate having ensued around fundamental and difficult
participants and as a call to others who might wish to join us. Perhaps it will play a similar
role yet again in its new venue in this thematic volume.
I wish to express my thanks to the EABS for its sponsorship of the research group, in par-
ticular to Prof. Ehud Ben-Zvi, who persuaded me to form the group and soon thereafter as
president of the EABS continued to encourage its work. I also wish to thank the co-chair of
the group Prof. Simcha Fishbane, as well as its most stalwart participants, including Profs.
Calvin Goldscheider, Shaye J.D. Cohen, Tirzah Meacham, Harry Fox, Michael Satlow, Eyal
Baruch, Lennart Lenhaus, and Naomi Silmann.
2
Abraham Geiger’s work on Mishnah in the mid-nineteenth century represents one of the
earliest such efforts. His “Lehr-und Lesebuch zur Sprache der Mischnah” was published in
1845 in the journal, Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben, that he himself edited.
See David Weiss Halivni, “Abraham Geiger and Talmud Criticism,” in New Perspectives on
Abraham Geiger, ed. Jacob J. Petuchowski (New York: Hebrew Union College-Jewish
Institute of Religion, 1975), 31–41. Similarly, Zachariah Frankel founded the academic jour-
nal Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthum in 1871, and among his
major works are Darkhey HaMishnah, first published in 1859, and reprinted as Darkhey
Ha-Mishnah, Ha-Tosefta, Mekhilta, Ve-Sifre (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1959). Geiger and Frankel, and
others like them, straddled the worlds of religious community and academic study; their
academic work was undertaken within a context of reforming and modernizing traditional
rabbinic Judaism, because they largely shared the conviction that rigorous historical study
would legitimize and underpin this modernization against the inertial counterforce of
tradition.
3
For example, exemplary of literary-historical criticism of Mishnah is the classic master-
piece of J.N. Epstein, Mavo le-Nusah haMishnah, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: press not specified,
1948), to which one should add his equally influential, posthumously published, Mavo le-
Sifrut ha-Tannaim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1957), and Mavo le-Sifrut ha-Amoraim
(Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1962), both of the latter two works edited by E.Z. Melammed from
Epstein’s manuscripts. As to the use of Mishnah’s evidence, on its own or in combination
with that from other early rabbinic documents, I shall have more to say later in this paper.
1 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SOCIAL… 3
methodological issues. Social scientific, and specifically sociological and

anthropological, inquiries and approaches to Mishnah’s evidence have
been, relatively speaking, less pursued. This paper both invites such inqui-
ries and suggests three broad topical rubrics for further scholarship, after
surveying some of the commonly discussed methodological challenges
that will impinge upon such work.
Outline of Our Programmatic Introduction

It is expected that those who have responded, or will respond, to this
chapter’s call share a “hunch” that is not yet a well-supported conclu-
sion—namely, that the early Palestinian Rabbinic document called the
Mishnah proffers important, but still underutilized, evidence for the
understanding of Palestinian Jewish society and culture in the latter half of
the second century CE and the first half of the third century. Consequently,
an anticipated aspect of the scholarship for which this chapter provides
prolegomena is to explore that hunch in order to (1) indicate whether,
how, and to what degree the hunch warrants being restated as a strong,
well-supported claim and (2) provide, where appropriate, cogent exam-
ples of reconstructing social and cultural aspects of Palestinian Jewish life,
and social and cultural constructs representative of the era under scrutiny
on the basis of Mishnaic evidence (taken on its own or, when appropriate
methodologically, in conjunction with cognate evidence).
But is it not strange that a document, the Mishnah, which has been
extant for about 1800 years, that has been studied continuously within
Rabbinic-Jewish circles since its production, and that has also been ana-
lyzed within early modern and modern academic circles since the 1840s4
should be deemed in the second decade of this twenty-first century to be
still-underutilized, albeit important, evidence for the society and culture
within which it first emerged? How can this be? The answer to the first
question is: Not so strange as one might think, when one has a flavor for
the answer to the second question, which will come to light as I proceed
through this paper.
What, therefore, this essay seeks to achieve is several-fold.
First, it strives to provide some preliminary indication of why one might
come to share the hunch that Mishnah’s evidence ought to be plumbed to
4
See especially the articles in Jacob Neusner, eds., The Modern Study of the Mishnah
(Leiden: Brill, 1972).
4 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
learn more about Palestinian Jewish society and culture in the period that
Mishnah was produced, plus or minus 50 (to 100) years. There are two
subtopics related to this first task. One is to give some heuristic indication
that knowing more about this period in Palestinian Jewish society and
culture is something that ought to be of greater scholarly interest—not
only for those who specialize in the academic study of this place and time,
but also for scholars with cognate interests and areas of specialty. The
other is to give some indication as to why scholars should turn to Mishnah.
Second, this chapter rehearses some of the more overarching (and by
now, often recognized) challenges encountered in using Mishnaic evi-
dence for the purposes indicated. This second undertaking aims to pro-
vide at least a general understanding of why the evidence of Mishnah will
have remained underutilized to date. That is, it provides a preliminary
answer to the earlier question, “How can this be?” Again, two subtopics
will be addressed. I provide a very brief survey of Mishnah’s most perva-
sive literary and substantive traits, since it is these that underlie the chal-
lenges faced when using Mishnaic evidence for our purposes. The chapter
then spells out some of those challenges, by way of example. The interface
between these two subtopics has much to do with how one chooses to
account historically for how and why Mishnah came to be produced and
to have the most pervasive traits that we observe.
Third, this chapter will outline in broad terms the three potentially
most compelling questions or topical directions of inquiry for the study of
Mishnah’s evidence called for in this programmatic chapter. Perhaps, it
would be more accurate to say that there are three logical avenues or topi-
cal directions that one might take. They are:
1. to try to use the evidence of Mishnah to tell us more about Palestinian

Jewish social and cultural constructs generally in the era in question
(roughly, the second and early third centuries CE);
2. to analyze Mishnah to understand the social and cultural dynamics of
the specific Palestinian group that produced, and thereafter studied,
Mishnah as an authoritative text, namely the early Palestinian Rabbinic
group; and
3. to study Mishnah’s evidence in order to describe the social and cultural
“world” that is imaginatively created by, and within, the document by
its framers, but which may describe no historical Jewish society
and culture.
All three of these avenues of inquiry should bear fruit; each will provide
important insights about Palestinian Jewish society, culture, or social
“visioning” in the Roman imperial period. But it is not the case that they
are, or will be, equally fruitful. Why? Because they are not all equally fraught
with methodological and conceptual challenges, as I shall indicate. In the
final analysis, only from the work of those who respond to this chapter’s
call will it become clearer which avenue, relatively speaking, bears more
fruit, and with what level of significant qualifications and caveats. Moreover,
one outcome will be to highlight that scholars legitimately differ with
respect to how fruitful each of these avenues of inquiry are, because, first,
they disagree concerning the levels at which the qualifications and caveats
should be set on the “dial” of the “warning meter,” and, second, they will
differ about the kind and degree of mitigation strategies that may be used
to reduce such methodological difficulties.
Such is the outline of this introductory chapter. Now to the task at hand.
Why Is It Important to Seek to Know More About

Palestinian Jewish Society and Culture in the Latter
Half of the Second Century and Early Third
Century CE?
Arguably, it is a historically cogent hypothesis that Jews in Palestine imme-
diately prior to the era in question experienced significant social and cul-
tural (including religious) dissolution and dislocation. Let me “play off
of” the influential work of Seth Schwartz at several junctures in the argu-
ments that follow. Schwartz5 in particular has argued that the first two-
thirds of the first century CE represent the slow decline into ever more
pronounced social and political chaos in Roman Palestine, especially for
the Jews of Palestine, in the aftermath of Herod’s reign. With Herod’s
kingdom divided in three, and distribution of authority spread across mul-
tiple players (e.g., local Roman authorities, the vestiges of Herodian-
Hasmonean royals, local aristocratic families that emerged during the
Hasmonean and Herodian periods, authorities in and associated with the
5
Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews: From Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), chapters 3, 4, and 5; see also Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish
Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2001).
6 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
Jerusalem Temple, and the nearby more highly ranked Roman governor
of Syria) and with growing tension between Jews, Greeks, and Syrians in
the Land of Israel, matters went from bad to worse, Schwartz argues.
Then, as is well known and widely acknowledged, the years from 66 CE
to 135 CE brought multiple, catastrophic upheavals. In the Land of Israel,
the Great Revolt (66–71) and the Bar Kokhba Rebellion (132–135) were
disastrous for the Jews of Palestine. In the second decade of the second
century CE, the malaise resulting from the failed Diaspora Rebellion of
Jews in Egypt, adjacent North Africa, and Cyprus (and probably indepen-
dently and to a more limited extent in Syria) may also have spilled over
into Palestine to some degree. The more pronounced social and cultural
shock to the well-established Jewish communities of the Roman Diaspora
seems to have been primarily limited to Jewish communities in Egypt and
immediately adjacent North Africa, which did not recover, according to
Seth Schwartz, until the fourth century.
The remainder of the Jewish Diaspora seems largely to have ticked
along reasonably well. Not so in the Land of Israel, and especially Judea.
The Jewish population of Judea was significantly “thinned” in the after-
math of the failed Bar Kokhba Rebellion. What remained of Jewish life,
society, and culture to be rehabilitated in the Land of Israel was concen-
trated on the coastal plain and the Galilee. How long and how steep the
incline that had to be mounted to recovery depends on how deep one
thinks the hole was dug.6
Yet for all of this, if one takes the very “long view,” the developments
within Judaism and Jewish society of Roman Palestine during the second
and third (and fourth) centuries CE ultimately proved to be among the
more seminal in the subsequent history of Judaism and of the Jewish com-
munities in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, through Late
Antiquity and the Medieval Periods, indeed into the modern period itself.
There and then, in the several centuries following the destruction of
Jerusalem Temple and the two failed revolts against Roman hegemony,
the early rabbinic movement coalesced correlatively with the establish-
ment—or perhaps “recognition” is the more appropriate term—by Roman
authorities of the Jewish Patriarchate in the Roman Levant.7
Seth Schwartz sees it as far more profound than some others might.
6
See Lee I. Levine, “The Jewish Patriarch (Nasi) in Third Century Palestine,” Aufstieg
7
und Niedergang der roemischen Welt, II, 19.2, ed. H. Temporini and W. Haase (Berlin and
New York: de Gruyter, 1979), 649–688; “The Status of the Patriarchate in the Third and
One general, historically defensible scenario for the development of the

early rabbinic movement is this: from what in all likelihood was a state of
relative insignificance at its earliest inception—sometime between 70 CE
(the Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and of its “national” adminis-
tration) and 135 CE (the failed Bar Kokhba Rebellion and the Hadrianic
Persecutions)—the early rabbinic movement developed and institutional-
ized to the point, sometime in the latter decades of the second century
and the first half of the third century CE, of aspiring to provide, probably
in competition with other administrative literati, a cadre of retainers for
the Jewish Patriarch’s administration.8 Within another 100–150 years, the
rabbis, or some rabbis, were likely among the cadre of scribal-administrative
personnel providing the same service for the government of the Jewish
Exilarch in Persian Babylonia.9 And within 200 years of the mid-seventh-
century Muslim conquest of the Middle East, the rabbis were increasingly
recognized as chief legal and religious authorities in the Jewish communi-
ties of the lands that ringed the Mediterranean.
Another scenario outlines a similar trajectory, but with a later start. It
places the prominence of the Palestinian Jewish Patriarchate and the emer-
gence of (aspiring?) rabbinic retainership in the Patriarch’s administration
in the latter half of the third century, reaching its apex only in the fourth
century.10
Whether one scenario or another is better supported, the upshot is the
same. Social and cultural developments among the members of an early
rabbinic movement or guild, emerging in the Land of Israel in the latter
half of the second and early third centuries from a battered social and
Fourth Centuries: Sources and Methodology,” Journal of Jewish Studies 47 (1996): 1–32.
See also Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 95–97. See also Martin Goodman, “The
Roman State and the Jewish Patriarch,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine
(New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 127–39; Lee I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class
of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and New York: Jewish
Theological Seminary, 1989).
8
See Levine, The Rabbinic Class.
9
See Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1966–69);
see especially vols. 4 and 5. To date, Neusner’s five-volume work on the Jews and Rabbinism
in pre-Muslim, Persian Babylonia is still the most ambitiously comprehensive.
10
This is the view promoted by Seth Schwartz in Ancient Jews. In his view, rabbinic stories
about the prestige of the Palestinian Jewish Patriarchate are anachronistically placed in the
second century in order to bolster the institution’s legitimacy and to bolster rabbinic legiti-
macy as a result.
8 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
cultural landscape, ultimately (sometime after the early spread of Islam),

exerted a major steering force in later centuries across every Jewish com-
munity in the Mediterranean, European, and Middle Eastern lands. Permit
me to clarify, but also to qualify, that claim.
Elsewhere, I have vigorously rejected the thesis that the rabbis “saved”
Judaism in the aftermath of the events of 70 CE by their creation of “a
Judaism without a Jerusalem Temple.” There can be no doubt that vital
forms of Judaism and Jewish life had developed apart from the Temple-
based religious, political, and social systems both before the advent of the
rabbis, and subsequently apart from and in parallel with the rabbinic
movement’s early development, particularly in the many significant
Diaspora communities of the Middle East and Mediterranean basin during
the Roman and Byzantine periods.11 By the first century CE, some of
these “diaspora Jewish” institutions were well established in the Land of
Israel.12 However, that said, in gradually acquiring positions of increasing
authority and legitimacy—first in Roman Palestine, and subsequently in
Persian Babylonia and beyond—over the course of 500 to 850 years, the
members of the rabbinic movement, “the rabbis,” came to influence,
reshape, or codify substantially the legal, organizational, ideological, and
liturgical-ritual framework of what were in many instances, before rabbinic
hegemony, already longstanding and well-defined institutions of Judaism,
of Jewish community organization, and of the daily life of Jews and their
households in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern world.13
11
J.N. Lightstone, “Roman Diaspora Judaism,” in A Companion to Roman Religion.
Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, Vol. 9, ed. Jörg Rüpke (Oxford: Blackwell,
2007), 345–77. See also J.N. Lightstone, “Is it meaningful to talk of a Greco-Roman
Diaspora Judaism? A case study in taxonomical issues in the study of Ancient Judaism,” in
Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, eds. W. Braun and R. McCutcheon
(London: Equinox Publishers, 2008), 267–81. See also J.N. Lightstone, The Commerce of
the Sacred: Mediation of the Divine among the Jews in the Greco-Roman Diaspora (Chico, CA:
Scholars Press, l984). Second Edition, with a foreword by Willi Braun and updated bibliog-
raphy by Herbert Basser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
12
See, for example, Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, the First Thousand Years (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
13
Indicative of this centuries-long trend is the Epistle of Rav Sherira Gaon. Writing in the
ninth century, Sherira’s monumental attempt to (re)construct a history of the rabbinic move-
ment and of its principal texts is fashioned as a response to questions posed by the elders of
the Jewish community of Kairouan. In the latter community, rabbinic authority was being
challenged by its detractors, and Sherira’s history affected a defense of rabbinic authority by
establishing its pedigree and the pedigree of early rabbinic literature. The challenge only
makes sense in a context that the rabbis had achieved a position of dominant legal and reli-
But I am getting too far ahead of myself and beyond the topic at hand,
the crucible of Palestinian Jewish society and the early rabbinic movement
in the second and third centuries CE. My point is simply this: what hap-
pened in that crucible had, over considerable time, long-lasting and sub-
stantial effects. We would do well to understand better the social and
cultural dynamics and developments within the crucible. So, what is the
evidentiary basis for such an understanding, such that we would give spe-
cial attention to the evidence of the Mishnah?
Why Turn to the Evidence of the Mishnah?

The problem at hand is this: while we have many reasons to surmise that
the second and early third centuries in Roman Palestine were seminal for
subsequent social, cultural, and religious development of Palestinian
Jewish communities (and later of Jewish life beyond the boundaries of
Roman Palestine), it has been and remains a difficult task historically to
reconstruct the sociology and anthropology of Palestinian Jewish com-
munities and groups of this important transitional period. What do we
know of the social and cultural developments and dynamics among Jews
of Roman Palestine generally, or of the early rabbinic movement specifi-
cally, in the last six decades or so of the second century and the first five
decades or so of the third century? More importantly, on what basis do we
think we know it? Obviously, as the title of this chapter signals, I am advo-
cating a focused and sustained look at the evidence of the Mishnah in
response to these questions. But to understand why, permit me briefly to
rehearse the other types and sources of evidence available to us.
In the face of such questions, one may point to important archaeologi-
cal evidence for the Land of Israel (and immediately adjacent locales) for
the years preceding, during, and subsequent to the time period of interest
to us. However, two points are critical to our assessment of the value of
this evidence. One has to do with the most general pattern of extant evi-
dence: for what years do we have what types of material remains? The
other point is an overriding methodological consideration.
gious authority in North Africa, with eyes turned to the major rabbinic academies of the
Babylonian plain for superior, authoritative pronouncements. To give added weight to his
response, Sherira explicitly states that he consulted the major luminaries associated with the
academy that he led, attesting, thereby, to an established and well-recognized authority
structure within the institution.
10 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
Archeological evidence is arguably much more abundant for the period

subsequent to the 100–150 or so years that is our focus. So much so that
we are often left to speculate about whether institutions well documented
in, let us say, the fourth or fifth century had the same shape and texture in
the second and early third centuries.14
Then there are writings that proffer claims about Palestinian Jewish life,
institutions, and belief systems in our period of interest. These writings are
both from contemporary authors and from works of the latter half of the
third century and later. The contemporary works are from non-Jews, both
Roman and especially Christian authors. In the former instance, the sub-
stance is much too thin to help us much in our specific task. In the latter
instance, the writings of Christians, writings usually are narrowly focused
and understandably highly tendentious, as Christianity struggles for legiti-
macy and self-definition against the backdrop of Jews and Judaism. What
we certainly do not have is a contemporary Palestinian, or even a non-
Palestinian, Jew writing a Josephus-like history. Josephus’ historical narra-
tives end with accounts of events in the several years immediately following
the destruction of Jerusalem. Leaving rabbis aside, we have no philosophi-
cal, legal, or “religious” text from a Palestinian (or non-Palestinian) Jew
for this period that proffers an account of the social and cultural situation
of Roman Palestinian Jews of last half of the second and the first half of the
third centuries. The only literary evidence in our possession from and
about Palestinian Jewish life of the period (or more accurately immediately
before our period) are a few letters and documentary fragments, such as
those from the Judean desert’s “Cave of Letters,” most notably the
Babatha papyri, and the Bar Kokhba letters.15 These are very important
and interesting sources, but still thin gruel.
If we consider non-contemporaneous, later writings, again we have sev-
eral distinct classes. We have writings from non-Jewish authors, increas-
ingly Christian and some Greco-Roman authors, with overly limited focus
and propagandistic purposes. Or we have the extensive writings of later
14
Again, the archaeological remains of ancient synagogues rank among the most abundant
material evidence for Jewish life in Roman and Byzantine Palestine. See Levine, The Ancient
Synagogue.
15
Judean Desert Studies, 3 vols. (1963, 1989, 2002); See Emanuel Tov, Discoveries in the
Judean Desert, vol. 39: Introduction and Indices (London: Clarendon Press, 2002); Benjamin
Isaac “The Babatha Archive: A Review Article,” Israel Exploration Journal 42 (1992):
62–75. See also Philip F. Esler, Babatha’s Orchard: The Yadin Papyri and an Ancient Jewish
Family Tale Retold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis. These documents speak much about

Palestinian Jews, Judaism, and Jewish life in our period of interest. But
their evidence must be carefully assessed for creative anachronisms and
speculative re-creations as concerns the social and cultural texture of
Palestinian Jewish life in the latter half of the second and the earlier decades
of the third centuries. Again, even for this period subsequent to that under
investigation, we have no Jewish chronicler to which to turn, no Jewish
version of what Eusebius does for the early Church16 to enlighten us about
Jewish life in the Roman Palestine in 200 CE, plus or minus 50 years.
There is, however (or perhaps, one might say, obviously), one major
document that is (1) widely held to be contemporary with the period and
place that is our focus, (2) written by Palestinian Jews, and (3) thick with
evidence covering a vast array of topics that would be grist for the mills of
sociologists and anthropologists (as well as social historians). It is the
Mishnah, produced by the early rabbinic movement toward the end of the
second century or in the first decades of the third.
The Mishnah is the first magnum opus of the early rabbinic movement.
And for the subsequent 400 years or so, the Mishnah was the most authorita-
tive document (after the biblical scriptures themselves) within rabbinic circles.
Mishnah is a legal “study” based on biblical law spanning 6 broad topical
“Orders” and (depending on how one counts them) comprised of 63 indi-
vidual tractates—62 without tractate Avot, likely a later addition—covering:
• agricultural gifts to (a now defunct) Temple, and prayer/blessings;

• festival and Sabbath law;
• family law;
• damages, torts, and judicial proceedings;
• sacrificial practice (again for a defunct Temple), slaughter for non-
sacrificial consumption; and
• purity law (much of which also requires Temple-based purifica-
tion rites).
The mastery of Mishnah and its life-long study, in correlation with

other biblical and, afterward, subsequent rabbinic literature, made one a
rabbi. This remained the case until, centuries later, the Babylonian Talmud
16
Megillat Ta’anit, if it is a type of chronicle at all, is an exception that proves the rule. And
one certainly does not want to turn to the ninth-century epistle of Sherira for these purposes.
12 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
displaced Mishnah at the apex of the rabbinic curriculum.17 As a result,

there survives a rich body of post-Mishnaic rabbinic literature from the
third and subsequent centuries that serve to elucidate Mishnah (although
often anachronistically).
Consequently, despite the considerable methodological and conceptual
challenges that must be addressed, the sociological and anthropological
treatment of the evidence of the Mishnah—both of its value and definitive
clarification of its limitations as evidence—would undoubtedly make a
major contribution to the understanding of the social and cultural land-
scape of Jewish society and/or of the early rabbinic movement in Roman
Palestine during the decades just before and after the turn of the third
century. But to ascertain precisely how and to what extent, one must first
understand the basis for the methodological and conceptual challenges
one confronts. That basis lies in the most pervasive literary and rhetorical
traits of Mishnah, and in the hard lessons learned from trying to use
Mishnaic evidence for historiographical purposes, something that sociolo-
gists and anthropologists may not be well attuned to. To that end, the
next section of this paper will serve those who would take up the socio-
logical and anthropological analysis of Mishnah’s evidence by helping
them first situate themselves within the historiographical debates concern-
ing the use of early rabbinic texts.
Mishnah’s Most Pervasive Rhetorical and Literary

Traits, the Basis for Methodological Challenges
and Choices in the Use of Its Evidence
Permit me to use, and take liberties with, Seth Schwartz’s turn of phrase;
he describes the range in “socio-historical” scholarship using Mishnah’s
evidence as spanning “minimalist” and “maximalist” notions of the value
of the text for historical purposes.18 I will take liberties with the use of his
language by inserting my own substance into Schwartz’s terms. For the
sake of argument, I characterize (even caricature) the extremes of a con-
tinuum at the ends of which are pure “minimalists” and pure “maximal-
ists.” Even if these characterizations are largely fictional, there is something
important to be learned by indulging in the fiction. Afterward, I retreat
17
See Jack N. Lightstone, “Textual Study and Social Formation: The Case of Mishnah,”
Studies in Judaism, Humanities and the Social Sciences 1 (2017): 23–44.
18
See the discussion in Seth Schwartz, The Ancient Jews, spanning his chapters 3, 4, and 5.
from the continuum’s ends and say more of the middle grounds of the
range, along which actual scholars are positioned.
Minimalists, at the extreme, would take the view that the text tells us
virtually nothing of historical value about society and events “outside” the
text. That is to say, the “world” of the Mishnah is a self-referential world
representing in “legal terms,” almost to the exclusion of all else, the ideas
and vision of the mind(s) of its producer(s), and, at that, only in so far as
concerned their work on Mishnah. In short, Mishnah, in extreme mini-
malist formulations, would be understood to reflect a utopian fantasy of its
authors. Apart from, and outside of, their work on Mishnah, these edi-
tors/authors may have had other notions of society than are reflected in
Mishnah. Indeed, under the extreme minimalist views, the editors/authors
of Mishnah would have had to have had other, complementary notions of
Jewish society, religion, and culture than those reflected in Mishnah.
Otherwise, they would have had to have been social hermits, operating
their own Temple, sacrificial cult, and priestly centered government at the
end of the second century, a historical phenomenon for which we have no
evidence in Palestine.
Minimalists, at the extreme, would tend to eschew using the evidence
from other early rabbinic writings, such as Tosefta, the Halakhic Midrashim,
and the Palestinian Talmud, in order to shed light on the “historical” soci-
ety and culture of Late Roman Palestine, for much the same reasons that
they would be very hesitant to use Mishnah’s. Moreover, mutatis mutan-
dis, they would also enjoin caution in using these other early rabbinic
writings to shed light on the “minds” of the framers of Mishnah—this
because they tend to see each of these latter rabbinic documents as reflect-
ing almost exclusively the minds of their own respective authors/editors,
even while these documents are organized to greater or lesser extents in
order to appear to be commentaries elucidating Mishnah.
Maximalists, on the other extreme, would largely see Mishnah as a
repository, expressed in normative legal terms, of “historical” traditions
and memories organized topically. In such a maximalist formulation, for
each topical treatment in Mishnah, one would perceive in Mishnah a
mélange of such traditions and memories, the origins of which range from
several centuries prior to Mishnah’s production to immediately prior to
the work of Mishnah’s authors/editors. The scholarly challenge, as
extreme maximalists might put it, would be to order the content histori-
cally so as to more accurately uncover historical development of Jewish
society, religion, and culture through these several centuries. In this
14 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
exercise, while recognizing that a majority of Mishnah’s content bears no

attributions to named authorities, such attributions would be viewed as
probative, because the generational ordering of the authorities would be
understood to provide a basis for historically sequencing that which is
preserved in Mishnah. Let me be clear, extreme maximalists would not
only tend to claim that the legal “topics” or “issues” can be so sequenced
historically, but also that the actual legal positions and rulings on these
issues can be historically aligned and assigned to various decades prior to
Mishnah’s production. (I will return to this distinction a little later in this
section of the chapter.)
As regards our hypothetical extreme maximalists, there is a corollary
that bears articulation. Just as Mishnah would be largely seen to be a
repository, so too would other “early” rabbinic documents, again Tosefta,
the Halakhic Midrashim, and the Palestinian Talmud specifically.
Therefore, for extreme maximalists, the content of these immediately
post-Mishnaic documents may be usefully correlated with the evidence
from the Mishnah as complementary bodies of historical evidence.
The differences between my hypothetical minimalists and maximalists
at the extremes of the continuum would not be a matter of caprice, con-
viction, or ideology. Rather their divergent views would reflect their
respective views—whether conclusions or assumptions, I will not specify at
this point—of how the Mishnah came to be and what role the ultimate or
penultimate editors/authors played in the production of the extant
Mishnah.
Extreme maximalists would read the literary evidence of the Mishnah as
preserving much of the pre-Mishnaic language of Mishnah’s sources,
whether oral or written. They would point to numerous examples in which
this seems to be the case. Minimalists would tend to point to the incursion
of the hand of the authors/editors into the wording not only of the fram-
ing and joining bits of Mishnah’s clumps of passages, but also of the very
language at the heart of the substance of Mishnah passage after Mishnah
passage. They would conclude from such evidence that even if Mishnah’s
authors/editors worked from pre-existent sources, virtually nothing
remains of the original language of those sources. Consequently, they
would maintain that such extensive refashioning of language has affected
the content, changing the meaning in subtle or substantial ways. Extreme
minimalists would also point to another literary feature of Mishnah. They
would see in many Mishnah passages the generation of hypothetical
“cases” to serve the agenda and rhetorical patterning of the larger sections
of which the individual “case” forms a literary part.19 They would argue
that many of these hypothetical cases are so inherently unlikely occur-
rences in reality that, outside of the context of the larger literary composi-
tion of which they are, rhetorically speaking, an integral part, these “cases”
should not be interpreted as residue of traditions of actual historical cir-
cumstances and associated rulings—a kind of case law.
It is easy to see why and how extreme minimalists and maximalists
would very differently undertake to use the evidence of Mishnah in a soci-
ological or anthropological perspective. For the maximalist, the preferred
task is recovering the historical social and cultural systems and dynamics of
Palestinian Jewish society in the centuries preceding the production of
Mishnah. For the minimalist, the only exercise that is defensible is probing
the social and cultural vision of the minds of the Mishnah’s authors/edi-
tors. And there is yet another lesson to be learned from our contemplation
of the positions of our hypothetical extreme maximalists and minimalists.
Anthropologists and sociologists who wish to use the evidence of Mishnah
(or for that matter, of any early rabbinic text) cannot do so without being
sensitive to fundamental literary-historical matters about what these texts
are and how they came to be. Their work must self-consciously take a stand,
or adopt someone else’s stand, on some of these fundamental literary-
historical issues, otherwise they are unconsciously doing so.
Today, very few, if any, contemporary academic scholars can be justifi-
ably located at either extreme, as I have characterized them. But scholars
do tend to align to one side or another of the center of the continuum,
and sometimes significantly so. There just is too much evidence of late that
draws one away from the extremes.
Let us consider an example. Even a minimalist-leaning scholar will
have come to recognize that Halakhic documents discovered at Qumran
give credence to the claim that religious-legal experts who authored
4QMMT, 130 or more years before Mishnah, are sometimes dealing with
the same ritual-legal issues that Mishnah attributes to late first-century
proto-rabbis like R. Yohanan b. Zakkai or to “the Pharisees” (perushim).
4QMMT represents the legal positions that Mishnah rejects.20 If this
19
Jack N. Lightstone, Mishnah and the Social Formation of the Early Rabbinic Guild: A
Socio-Rhetorical Approach (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press), 33–78.
20
See, for example, L.H. Schiffman, “The New Halakhic Letter (4QMMT) and the
Origins of the Dead Sea Sect,” Biblical Archaeology 53 (1990): 64–73; L.H. Schiffman, “The
Place of 4QMMT in the Corpus of Qumran Manuscripts,” in Reading 4QMMT: New
Perspectives on Qumran Law and History, eds. J. Kampen and M.J. Bernstein (Atlanta:
16 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
were observed once or twice, it might be said to be insignificant. If, how-

ever, one observes this to be a pattern, then we are dealing either with a
deliberate stance of Mishnah’s editors in opposition to some antecedent
faction and/or with a reflection of opposing factions among legal virtuosi
operating in Palestinian Jewish society well before the composition of
Mishnah. That is, in the latter case, both Mishnah (or rather, Mishnah’s
source traditions) and 4QMMT reflect either side of a contemporary rit-
ual-legal disagreement predating the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple
in 70 CE. As such, Mishnah in these passages at least could be read as
providing corroborating evidence about an aspect of cultural/cultic pre-
occupations of some groups of mid-first-century (or earlier) Jewish
Levantine society.
Still other evidence about Mishnah can be adduced to draw one away
from the extreme minimalist’s view. As early as the end of the 1970s and
beginning of the 1980s, Jacob Neusner, whom many would characterize
as one of the leaders of the minimalist camp,21 argued that the issues dealt
with within Mishnah’s tractates can be shown to be amenable to “logical”
sequencing that corresponds to historical layers of developing legal think-
ing within rabbinic circles over the decades preceding the production of
Mishnah.22 That is, Mishnah’s legal content can be re-arranged such that
ruling x, which applies in circumstance y, must be logically prior to ruling
Scholars Press, 1996), 81–98; see also L.H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The
History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran (Philadelphia
and Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1994); J.N. Lightstone, “The Pharisees and the
Sadducees in the Earliest Rabbinic Documents,” in In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, ed.
Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 255–296.
21
Indeed, relatively speaking, in the 1970s, Neusner emerged as situated well to the mini-
malist side of other scholars using early rabbinic evidence for social and historical reconstruc-
tion of Judaism and Jewish society in the Greco-Roman Period. For example, adopting
minimalist-like positions (as articulated earlier in this essay), Neusner critiqued, among oth-
ers, the work of George Foote Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, 3
vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), as well as that of his contemporary
Ephraim Urbach, The Sages: Their Beliefs and Opinions (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1977) (a
translation of the original work in Hebrew, Hazal). Aside from his review articles about
works like those by Moore and Urbach, Neusner wrote a monograph with the challenging
title, Reading and Believing: Ancient Judaism and Contemporary Gullibility (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1986), 30–31, 48–50. These works extended and lengthened the range of the
active continuum at the time between what I have called minimalists and maximalists.
22
Jacob Neusner, Judaism, the Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981). Neusner’s first major articulation of this historical-logico-deductive sequencing
of Mishnah law may be found in his History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities, Part 22 (Leiden:
a, which applies to circumstance b. For example, hypothetically speaking,

one must have established that there is a daily evening prayer before asking
whether the recitation of biblical verses associated with the Shema Yisrael
(“Hear Oh Israel”) declaration of faith are part of the evening prayer ser-
vice (see m. Bekhorot, chapter 1). Neusner demonstrated that where topi-
cally related rulings in Mishnah are attributed to named pre-Mishnaic
rabbinic authorities, their generational order parallels the logical order of
the rulings attributed to them. Neusner uses this finding not to argue that
these rabbinic authorities actually said what (or something like what) is
attributed to them, but rather to say that the preponderance of probability
indicates that there seems to have been a historical unfolding through
time of the legal issues dealt with in Mishnah—that “generation a” (how-
ever that is conceived) was concerned with one set of issues, while “gen-
eration b” seemed concerned with a second, logically derivative set of
questions. While other explanations of what Neusner has observed are
possible—for example, that what we see is the clever hand of the final
authors/editors making matters appear this way, an argument akin to the
early anti-evolutionists arguing that God put the fossils in the ground—
the preponderance of probability suggests otherwise, namely that
Mishnah’s evidence does preserve some indication of a historical sequence
of the unfolding of early rabbinic legal positions on a number of issues.
Even minimalists, then, must put water in their minimalist wine.
Evidence also clearly draws us away from the maximalist end of the
continuum. Here I would adduce evidence stemming from what appears
to be the massive reformulation of language, style, and rhetoric that the
final or penultimate authors/editors of Mishnah’s intermediate units
(“chapters”) imposed on even Mishnah’s smallest logical units (as opposed
to the preponderant use of joining language that would be characteristic
of less intrusive authors and editors). As Neusner, Green, and I have vari-
ously demonstrated,23 the very language and literary-rhetorical traits that
characterize a Mishnah “chapter” (a kind of topical essay within a tractate)
are often imposed on the “chapter,” its constituent pericopae (mishnayot),
Brill, 1977). See also J. Neusner, “History and Structure: The Case of Mishnah,” Journal of
the American Academy of Religion 45 (1977): 161–92.
23
Jacob Neusner, Purities, Part 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1977); Jack N. Lightstone, Mishnah and
the Social Formation of the Early Rabbinic Guild: A Socio-Rhetorical Approach (Waterloo:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press), pp. 33–78; William S. Green, “What’s in a Name? The
Question of Rabbinic Biography,” in Approaches to the Study of Ancient Judaism, vol. 1, ed.
William S. Green (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978), 77–96.
18 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
and, indeed, on the very protases that define the legal circumstances that
are ruled upon within the pericopae. And when, furthermore, the regis-
tered ruling (whether anonymous or attributed to a named authority)
appears in language as sparse as “clean” or “unclean,” “permitted” or
“forbidden” (to admittedly point to the more extremely truncated formu-
lations), little of anything can be said to have come from some antecedent
source or tradition. The “original case,” if there was one at all, is now
obscured by the chapter’s literary (re)formulations, and the original ruling
is now so laconic as to be no one’s language. One is reduced to saying that
if rabbi x (or an anonymous authority) ruled on a case like this, we no
longer have in hand the antecedent language that defined the substance of
the case or the language of the ruling.
That said, there are also few who would describe themselves, or would
be described by others, to be at the center, midway between maximalist
and minimalist ends, of the continuum. The center is too hard to occupy
in practical terms, for much the same reason that it is hard to occupy the
extreme ends. Just as it is difficult to maintain the extreme positions—
namely, that either the work of the authors/editors is so extensive that it
has effaced any and every remnant of the content of earlier sources or the
editors/authors have contributed virtually nothing themselves and only
acted to compile and order things they received—so too is it difficult to
maintain that the authors/editors did both in equal measure. One tends
to lean in one direction or another based on the evidence that seems most
cogent to one.
I avow that I sit on the minimalist side of center. But the studies written
as a result of this call to examine Mishnah’s evidence through anthropo-
logical and sociological lenses will undoubtedly reflect a range of positions
on the continuum. What, then, is the upshot of the foregoing for those of
us participating in this joint project? Simply put, the type of sociological
and anthropological questions individual participants ask, for which
Mishnah’s evidence will be adduced in answer, should be (pre)conditioned
by, and drag in their wake, methodological issues derived from each schol-
ar’s reasoned, self-conscious, and declared assessment of where he or she
sits on the maximalist-maximalist continuum. These methodological issues
will be more or less difficult to address, depending upon one’s self-
designated position. But none of us will be free of one or another type of
methodological difficulty.
If one’s reasoned position places one on the minimalist side of center,
then one encounters fewer methodological difficulties if one focuses on
the authors’/editors’ perhaps utopian views of an ideal Israelite society.

Such scholars may understandably shy away from posing questions of
Mishnah’s evidence to reconstruct elements of Palestinian Jewish society
and culture of 50 or 100 or 150 years before the production and promul-
gation of Mishnah at the end of the second or beginning of the third
century CE. Given their views of how, on balance, Mishnah came into
existence, that approach is the more methodologically sound one, because
it is the more cautious. But the approach still does not completely clear
important methodological hurdles in their path. They must still provide
warrant for why we should consider Mishnah’s editors/authors to have
one, unitary, coherent, and self-consistent understanding of that utopia.
After all, that unity and coherence cannot be presupposed. Or, if such
unity is not presupposed or cannot be demonstrated, they must tell us why
their inquiry is nonetheless worth doing from a methodological and con-
ceptual perspective. So, what some may adopt as the (apparently) more
cautious approach is hardly problem-free.
What now of those who lean to the maximalist side of center? These
scholars, in my view and from my vantage point on the minimalist-
maximalist continuum, face difficult methodological problems on at least
three principal fronts: these concern the “more precisely what,” “who,”
and “when” of matters. That is, given the degree to which, in my opinion,
the language, formalized style, and rhetoric stemming from the Mishnah’s
(pen)ultimate authors/editors have imposed themselves on both the pro-
tases (case descriptions) and apodases (rulings) of so many of Mishnah’s
individual literary units, how much specific content of any antecedent,
earlier source material is recoverable above and beyond general legal
themes? Moreover, how do we assign substance to a period, or to a person
or circle of persons, again in anything beyond the most general terms?
Scholars have worked out methodological approaches to deal with some
of these questions. Earlier, I noted that Neusner, a minimalist-leaning
scholar, provides one example. On the other hand, scholars to the maxi-
malist side of center are not as vexed with the methodological issue of
whether Mishnah represents a unitary system. Why? They rightly expect
that they may uncover in Mishnah’s substance evidence of factions and
periods proffering different visions of Israelite society, real or imagined,
with perhaps a glimpse of the social-historical winners and losers along the
way. But whether one takes one’s vantage from the maximalist or minimal-
ist side of center, I should like to know that one does and why.
20 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
Moreover, whether one is on one side of center or the other, there is a

general methodological challenge that all scholars face. This stems from
the high degree to which Mishnah has ordered and systematically thema-
tized its content. By so doing, Mishnah’s editors/authors have provided
sociologists and anthropologists with what can too easily be accepted at
face value as “analytic” categories: such as production (Agriculture); cult
(Sacrifices/Holy Things); calendar (Festivals); family and kinship
(Women); and so on. This begs the question of whether these are the
“right” or “best” analytic categories for those interested in sociological
and anthropological analysis of Palestinian Jewish society and culture, or
even of Mishnah’s utopian system for a fictive Palestinian Jewish society
and culture. To accept or depart from Mishnah’s categories is consequen-
tial. It is a methodological choice that ought to bespeak of a conceptual
and theoretical framework explicitly adopted for good reason. To stick
closely to Mishnah’s thematization of matters may be tantamount to opt-
ing for a more descriptive exercise, where what is described in large part is
the classification of matters in accordance with Mishnah’s editors’ percep-
tions of their (ideal?) world. But departing from Mishnah’s own themati-
zation will allow one to adopt a categorization of the evidence permitting
a comparison of Mishnah’s social and cultural system(s) to those of other
human communities, and to do so within a larger conceptual and theoreti-
cal framework. Such a choice may offer greater analytic purchase on the
evidence, even if it comes with a compensatory cost: namely, the subjects
(here Mishnah’s authors and editors) might no longer recognize their
own social and cultural system.
Three Potentially Compelling Topical Directions

of Inquiry in the Sociological and Anthropological
Study of Mishnah’s Evidence
As stated at the outset of this essay (and as befits its conclusion), in taking
sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of the evidence
of the Mishnah, those who respond to this call to engage in a renewed
scholarly effort, will likely pursue one or another of (or at times some
combination of) the three lines of inquiry:
1. the use of Mishnaic evidence to understand better the social and

cultural patterns of contemporary and/or immediately antecedent
Palestinian Judaism and Jewish society;
2. the use of Mishnaic evidence to reconstruct major aspects of the
sociology and culture of the early rabbinic movement itself, within
which Mishnah was produced and seemingly immediately revered
and studied as authoritative;
3. the use of Mishnaic evidence to understand the sociology and cul-
ture of the world defined by and in Mishnah’s substance, even if that
world does not mirror with precision (or perhaps at all) any contem-
porary Palestinian Jewish community’s world.
Each one of these three lines of inquiry has intrinsic value as contribu-
tions to the sociological and anthropological understanding of human
communities in the Levant during the Roman Period. Moreover, any one
of the three demonstrates how literary evidence from centuries past may
be used for sociological and anthropological ends. This in itself is not
trivial, because it is a significant academic contribution from and for those
whose intellectual roots lie in classical sociological and anthropological
inquiry, in which subjects can be observed and questioned, and literary
evidence can be complemented and supplemented by observation and
querying of members of the living community.24
It should also be clear from our earlier discussion that the choice of one
or another of (or of some combination of) these three lines of inquiry
aligns with explicit or implicit positions about the historical and literary
processes that brought Mishnah into being. One’s position on the latter
issue will tend to make one or another of the three avenues of inquiry
more or less fraught with methodological hurdles to be addressed and
overcome.
The lighter the hands of the editors on the production of Mishnah, in
one’s considered view, the greater the possibility of observing in Mishnah’s
evidence valuable glimpses of Palestinian Jewish life and culture “outside
of” and “prior to” the minds of Mishnah’s producers. The heavier the
hands of the editors/authors, the more likely that it is the “world” of the
minds of Mishnah’s producers that we glimpse, and we must offer war-
rants for extending what we observe to others or to circles beyond the
24
It is ironic that one of the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber, chose to analyze
ancient Israel, and the biblical evidence, as a major object of sociological inquiry.
22 J. N. LIGHTSTONE
immediate group, late second-century Palestinian rabbis, from which

Mishnah’s producers came, and for whom they intended their Mishnah.
And who can say, without appropriate research, whether the hands of the
editors/authors of Mishnah are equally heavy or light throughout all
Mishnah?
Moreover, even if one were to take the position that Mishnah’s evi-
dence overwhelmingly conveys a utopian fantasy of its producers due to
the “heavy” hands of its editors/authors, we may still rightly conclude
that there are limits to their imagination. We may at times surmise that in
articulating their fantasy they are telling us things about the social and
cultural world that they or their parents and grandparents lived. To give a
simplistic example, the producers of Mishnah do not imagine the tilling of
fields with diesel-powered tractors, or the harvesting of crops with motor-
ized combines. Rather in treating the system of agricultural gifts to the
poor and to the Priests and Levites grounded in biblical law, they are “by
the way” likely telling us something of agricultural modes of production
and the social organization these entail in second-century Palestine, even
if we might surmise that the system of agricultural gifts per se enjoined in
Mishnah is a utopian formulation. So too Mishnah speaks of towns in
Roman Palestine that are primarily inhabited by Jews, others that are pri-
marily inhabited by Gentiles, and others with large Jewish and Gentile
populations. These are incidental facts in Mishnah that are assumed back-
ground realities of the “utopian fantasies” that the Mishnah’s authors
weave. A similar conclusion may be drawn from Mishnah’s treatment of
Sabbath restrictions. Mishnah’s treatment “assumes” as commonplace
certain patterns of the physical organization of households, neighbor-
hoods, and towns. Are these too fantasies? Or do they bespeak of actual
systems of urban geography and organization Mishnah’s producers take
for granted in formulating their ideal Sabbath laws? There are plausible
arguments to be made for the latter position.25
What behooves all of us who respond to this call is, however, to some
meaningful degree, (1) to be explicit about our choices regarding the lines
of inquiry adopted, (2) to define and defend the methodological and
25
I have just such an argument—more for Tosefta, but also for Mishnah—in J. Lightstone,
“Urban (Re-)Organization in Late Roman Palestine and the Early Rabbinic Guild: What
Toseftan Evidence Indicates about the City and Its Institutions as an Emerging Salient
Category in the Early Rabbinic Legal (Re-)Classification of Space,” Studies in Religion/
Sciences Religieuses 36 (2007): 421–425.
conceptual bases for the choice, (3) to articulate how and to what degree
ensuing methodological difficulties deriving from our choices can be over-
come, (4) to demonstrate what can be derived from the evidence, and (5)
to specify what level of confidence we would assign to the results.
The result of such a collective effort, even in multiple volumes, cannot
hope to exhaust the subject on any of the three lines of inquiry, let alone
on all of them. What will emerge is clarity about the use of Mishnah’s
evidence for anthropological and sociological study, as well as many valu-
able and informative examples of such use. These will provide sound tem-
plates for others to further the work.
CHAPTER 2
Dignity or Debasement: The Destitute

in the World of Mishnah
Simcha Fishbane
Introduction
In a recent series of lectures on the topic of the “weak individual” in
Judaism, the Rabbi of Kibbutz Alumim argued that this group of indi-
viduals that includes the society’s destitute1 is strong enough to disrupt
the solidarity2 and stability of the community.3 Stability in a society is
maintained at the expense of the individual in favor of the group. In the
case of the pauper, it is the emphasis on the individual that becomes the
1
In this essay, I interchangeably use the terms poor, needy, pauper, and destitute. I define
the term poor below.
2
See Gregg E. Gardner, The Origins of Organized Charity in Rabbinic Judaism (n.p.:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3–4, who discusses the relationship between social soli-
darity and the poor.
3
I thank my son and daughter-in-law, Gilad and Noa, for this information.
S. Fishbane (*)
Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Touro College & University System,
New York, NY, USA
e-mail: fishbane@touro.edu
© The Author(s) 2020 25

S. Fishbane et al., Exploring Mishnah’s World(s),
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53571-1_2
26 S. FISHBANE ET AL.
focus4 and thus the vulnerability of the social structure. Simmel5 explains,
“Amidst all the positive differences, the commonality of the purely nega-
tive still had to bring the solidarity to the consciousness of a cultural circle
transcending the individual state.” The redactors of Mishnah6 were cogni-
zant of the dangers and threat from what we can classify as a “social
category,”7 the poor individuals. They were a threat to the rabbis’ ideal
world of Mishnah. Simmel8 develops this concept of the poor as a social
category: “The social meaning of the ‘poor’ as opposed to the individual
one, first allows the poor to unite into a kind of status group or unified
layer within society. … One may take up a gradually changed position
within the society because of poverty, but the individuals who find them-
selves in different statuses and occupations at this stage are in no way
united into a special social unit outside the boundaries of their home stra-
tum.” Simmel continues, “Admittedly this group is not held together by
interaction among its members but by the collective attitude that society
as a whole takes up towards it.”
Whenever the welfare of the social whole necessitates the care of the
poor, whether it is a social or legal requirement, the redactors of Mishnah
do not permit the pauper to become an active, dangerous enemy of
society.9
This essay will focus upon the status, role, and characteristics of the
pauper in the world of Mishnah.10 The areas that I will explore will include
4
See Mary Douglas, Cultural Bias (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and
Ireland, 1979), who discusses this issue within her grid-group theory.
5
Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms (Leiden, Boston:
Brill, 2009), 245.
6
Mishnah, the first redacted rabbinic document at approximately at the end of the third
century.
7
I cannot classify the poor as a group for they lack interaction, a component necessary to
be identified as a group. I thank Professor Nissan Rubin for this clarification.
8
Simmel, Sociology, 440.
9
Ibid., 412.
10
Scholarly works that deal with poverty in the Tannaitic period include: Leonard
J. Greenspoon, “The Bible, the Economy, and the Poor.” Journal of Religion and Society
Supplement, no. 10 (2014), 147–63; Gregg E. Gardner, The Origins of Organized Charity
in Rabbinic Judaism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Gardner, “Charity
Wounds: Gifts to the Poor in Early Rabbinic Judaism” in The Gift in Antiquity, M. L. Satlow,
ed. (n.p.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 173–88; Gardner, “Concerning Poverty: Mishnah Peah,
Tosefta Peah, and the Reimagination of Society in Late Antiquity” in Envisioning Judaism:
Studies in Honor of Peter Schafer on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, R. S. Boustan,
K. Herrmann, R. Leicht, A. Y. Reed, and G. Veltri, eds. (n.p.: Mohr Siebeck, 2013),
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ill-chosen words had given her, or whether he had dreamed that
once she was ready to flash, to respond, to be affectionate with him.
“Oh, no!” she answered. “But I have to read it over now and then like
‘Cranford’ and ‘Adam Bede’ and ‘The Ring and the Book.’”
“A lot you get out of ‘The Ring and the Book!’” David teased, with a
brotherly smile.
“I get what I can,” she answered, demurely, unprotesting, and with
just a hint of her old easy fun with him. It was enough to turn his
heart to water, and he formed within his confused mind a solemn
resolution not to fail her again, not to offend, to watch this timid little
seedling of returning confidence and friendship reverently and
tenderly; to keep that at least, if he might have no more.
“But Anna’s is a sad story,” he said, looking at the book.
“Yes, but I like sad stories,” Gabrielle answered, thoughtfully.
“Love stories. Don’t all girls like love stories?”
“I don’t call this love,” Gabrielle objected, after a brief silence, when
she had looked at the two words on the cover of the book until they
spun and quivered before her eyes.
“Come now,” David offered, mildly, actually trembling lest some
misstep on his part shatter the exquisite pleasure of this blue hour of
summer, and the ripple and quiver of the sea against the big shady
rocks, and the quiet beauty of the girl’s voice. “Don’t say that you
think ‘Anna Karenina’ isn’t a love story!”
“It isn’t my idea of love,” Gabrielle persisted, with a faint stress on the
personal pronoun.
“What would you call it?” David asked.
“Passion, egotism, selfishness,” the girl answered, unexpectedly and
quietly, not raising her eyes, and as if she were thinking aloud.
“Oh——? And do you get this out of books?”
“Get what?” Gabrielle asked, after a pause.
“Your knowledge of love, Gay.”
Again a silence. Her eyes did not meet his, but she did not seem
discomposed or agitated. She had gathered up a handful of white
sand, and now she let it sift slowly through her fingers into the
hemmed waters of the tide pool.
“Not entirely,” she answered, presently. And again the notes of her
husky sweet voice seemed to David to fall slowly through the air like
falling stars.
“I feel as if I had just begun to learn about it lately,” David said,
clearing his throat and beginning to tremble. And as she did not
answer, he told himself despairingly that he had again taken with her
the very tone of all tones that must be avoided. “You’ve never been
in love, Gabrielle?” he went on, desperately trying to lighten the tone
of the conversation, make it seem like an ordinary casual talk.
“Why do you say that?” she asked, quickly. And now he had a flash
of the star-sapphire eyes.
“But, Gay——” protested David, with the world falling to pieces about
him. “Already?”
“Enough,” she answered, in a low voice, her beautiful hands busily
straightening the little rocky, sandy frame of the pool, “to know that it
is not vanity, and passion, and selfishness!” And she glanced at
“Anna Karenina” again, as if their words were only of the book.
What she said was nothing. But there was a note of confession, of
proud acknowledgment, in her tone that struck David to a numbed
astonishment. Gay! This explained her silences—her depressions,
her attitude toward his kindly brotherly offer of protection! The child
was a woman.
“Gay, tell me,” he said, turning the knife in his heart. “Is it—a man?”
he was going to ask. But as the absurd tenor of these words
occurred to him, he slightly altered the question: “Is it a man I know,
dear? Is it Frank du Spain?”
She gave him a quick level glance, flushed scarlet, and looked out
across the shining sea. Cloud shadows were marking it with purple
and brown, and there was a jade-green reef in the blue. Far off
thunder rumbled; but in the hot still air about them there was no
movement.
“No, it isn’t Frank. I don’t think you know him,” she answered, quietly,
with her little-sisterly smile.
David was too thoroughly shaken and dazed to answer. He sat, in a
sort of sickness, trying to assimilate this new and amazing and most
disquieting truth. Here was a new element to fit in among all the
others—the child, the little tawny-headed girl of the family, cared for
some unknown man. An unreasoning hate for this man stirred in
David; he visualized a small and bowing Frenchman, titled perhaps,
captivating to these innocent, convent-bred eyes.
“And will there be a happy ending?” he asked.
The girl seemed suddenly to have gained self-possession and her
old serene spirit. She was smiling as she said:
“No. I think he likes another woman better than he likes me.”
“I can see that you don’t mean that,” David said, hurt and confused.
Gabrielle caring——! Gabrielle keeping this away from them all——!
He could not adjust himself to the thought of it easily, nor change all
his ideas to meet it. “Some day will you tell me?” he said, a little
uncertainly and clumsily, looking out upon what seemed suddenly a
brazen glare of sea and sky.
“Some day!” she answered, quietly. And there was a silence.
It was broken by a calling voice from above them, first like the pipe of
a gull, then resolving itself into a summons from Sarah. Gabrielle
and David got to their feet with disturbed glances; it was perhaps
only a caller, but Sarah sounded, as Gay said, scrambling briskly up
the cliff at his side, “important.”
Sarah looked important, too, and her face had the deep flush on one
side and the shiny paleness on the other that indicated an
interrupted nap. If they pleased, it was a man for Mr. Fleming.
“From Boston?” David said, as they accompanied the maid through
the garden.
“He didn’t say, sir.”
“It may be the electric-light man,” Gabrielle suggested, yet with an
odd impending sense of something grave. Sarah quite obviously felt
this, too, for she added curiously, flutteringly: “He’s a queer, rough
sort of feller.”
“Where did you put him, Sarah?”
“He didn’t go in, Miss Gabrielle. He says he’d walk up and down
outside. There he is.”
And Sarah indicated a tall, lean young man who was indeed walking
up and down among the roses with long strides, and who now turned
and came toward them.
Gay saw a burned, dark, sick-looking face, deep black eyes, a good
suit that was somehow a little clumsy, on a tall figure that seemed a
little clumsy, too. The man lifted his hat as he came toward them,
and smiled under a curly thatch of very black, thick hair.
“Hello!” he said, in an oddly repressed sort of voice, holding out his
hand. Gay could only smile bewilderedly, but David sprang forward
with a sort of shout.
“Tom!” he said. “Tom Fleming! My God, you’ve come home!”
CHAPTER XIV
So there was this new fact with which to deal: Tom Fleming had
come home. Tom, thirty, lean, burned a leathery brown by a
thousand tropic suns, had apparently determined to return with
infinitely less deliberation than he had exercised over his running
away, almost twenty years before.
He made no particular explanation of his old reasons for departure;
on the other hand, there was no mystery about it. The sea, and
ships, adventure, danger, exploration, storms, had always been
more real to Tom than his name and family and Wastewater. He had
found them all, drunk deep of them all, between fourteen and thirty;
he meant, of course, to go back to them some day.
Meanwhile, he had been ill, was still weak and shaken and unable to
face even the serenest cruise. And so he had come home, “to see
the folks,” he explained, with a grin on his brown face, which wore
smooth deep folds about cheek-bones and chin, for all his leanness,
that made him look older than he was.
In actual features he was as handsome as his handsome father. But
Tom, garrulous, boastful, simply shrewd and childishly ignorant, was
in no other way like Black Roger. Roger had been an exquisite,
loving fine linen, fine music and books, the turn of a phrase, or the
turn of a woman’s wrist. All these were an unknown world to Tom,
and Tom seemed to know it, and to be actuated in his youthful,
shallow bombast by the fear that these others—these re-discovered
relatives—might fancy him ashamed of it.
Tom never was ashamed of anything, he instantly gave them to
understand. No, sir, he had knocked men down, he had run risks, he
had been smarter than the others, he had “foxed” them! In Archangel
or Tahiti, Barbadoes or Yokohama, Tom’s adventures had terminated
triumphantly. Women had always been his friends, scores of women.
Mysterious Russian women who were really the political power
behind international movements, beautiful Hawaiian girls, stunning
Spanish señoritas in Buenos Aires, he held them all in the hollow of
his lean, brown-hided hand.
He was a hero in his own eyes; he wanted to be a hero in the eyes
of his relatives, as well. It was perhaps only Gabrielle, who had
wistfully longed to be claimed and admired, too, so short a time ago,
who appreciated, upon that strange first evening, that there was
something intensely pathetic in Tom’s boasting.
What were this old brick house, and these women with their fuss
about vases of flowers and clean sheets, to him? he seemed to ask,
scornfully. Let ’em think he was a rough-neck if they wanted to, he
didn’t care! Everyone looking at him so solemnly, everyone implying
that this money of his father’s was so important—let ’em find out it
didn’t mean so much to Tom Fleming!
Yet Tom was impressed, deeply and fundamentally stirred by this
homecoming, in a sense that all his adventures had never stirred
him. Old memories wrenched at his heart; his wonderful father had
been here at Wastewater when Tom had last been here, and his
father’s frail little second wife, the delicate Cecily, who had been the
object of a sort of boyish admiration from Tom. Perhaps the lean,
long, sun-browned sailor, whose actual adventures had taken the
place of that little boy’s dreams of the sea, felt deep within himself
that he had not gained everything by the change. Slowly all the fibres
of soul and body had been hardening, coarsening; Tom had not been
conscious of the slow degrees of the change. But he was vaguely
conscious of it now.
The old house had seemed to capture and preserve the traditions,
the dignified customs of his race; the very rooms seemed full of
reproaches and of questions.
His aunt he found only older, grimmer, more silent than he had
remembered her; Sylvia had grown from a tiny girl into a beautiful
woman, and Gabrielle’s birth had not been until after his departure.
But David and he had spent all their little-boy days together, and
David immediately assumed the attitude of his guide, wandering
about the old place with him in a flood of reminiscences, and taking
him down to the housekeeping regions, where old Hedda and Trude
and Margret, who remembered him as a child, wept and laughed
over him excitedly.
Tom enjoyed this, but when the first flush of greetings to the family
and the first shock of stunned surprise were over, a curious restraint
seemed to fall upon their relationship, and the return of the heir
made more troublesome than ever the separate problems of the
group.
Sylvia, from the first half-incredulous instant, had borne the blow with
all her characteristic dignity and courage. It was hard for her to
realize, as she immediately realized, that even in her loss she was
comparatively unimportant, and that whoso surrendered the fortune
was infinitely of less moment than whoso received it. But she gave
no sign.
She welcomed Tom with charming simplicity, with a spontaneous
phrase or two of eagerness and astonishment, and no word was said
of material considerations until much later. Yet it was an exquisitely
painful situation for Sylvia, the more because she had been so
absolute a tool in the hands of the fate that had first made her rich
and now made her poor in a breath.
She had not wanted Uncle Roger’s money; she had indeed been a
child when the will was made; Tom might easily have been supposed
to return, the second Mrs. Fleming might have had children, and her
own mother, although she had indeed married Will Fleming rather
late in life, might have given Sylvia younger sisters and brothers.
But gradually the path had cleared before Sylvia. Tom had not come
home, Sylvia’s father had died, leaving her still the only child, Cecily
had died childless, and Uncle Roger had died.
For years Sylvia’s mother and David, watching her grow from a
beautiful childhood to a fine and conscientious girlhood, had
prefaced all talk of her fortune with “unless Tom comes home.” But
gradually that had stopped; gradually they, and her circle, and the
girl herself, had come to think of her as the rightful heiress.
Now, between luncheon and dinner upon a burning summer
afternoon, all this had been snatched from her; instantly taken,
beyond all doubt or question. Here was Tom, indisputably
reëstablished as sole legatee, as owner of everything here at
Wastewater. Yesterday, a rather carelessly dressed brown-faced
sailor, with a harsh blue-black jaw, unnoticed among a hundred
others in a crowded harbour city, to-night he was their host.
Sylvia asked no sympathy and made no complaint. But the very
foundations of her life were shaken; all the ambitions of her busy
college years were laid waste, and from being admired and envied,
she must descend to pity and obscurity. She and her mother would
have Flora’s few thousand a year; plenty, of course, much more than
the majority of persons had, Sylvia knew that. But she must readjust
everything now to this level, abandon the little red checkbook, and
learn to live without the respectfully congratulatory and envious
glances. It was bitterly hard. Wherever her thoughts went she was
met by that new and baffling consideration of ways and means.
Europe? But could they afford it? Escape from the whole tangle?
Yes, but how? They could not leave Gabrielle here with Tom, even if
Sylvia were not indeed needed while all the matter of the inheritance
was being adjusted. Sylvia had said a hundred times that she would
really have liked to be among the women who must make their own
fortune and their own place in the world; now she found it only
infinitely humiliating and wearisome to contemplate.
She did not know whether to be resentful or relieved at the general
tendency now to overlook her; Tom naturally had the centre of the
stage. But it was all uncomfortable and unnatural, and the girl felt
superfluous, unhappy, restless, and unsettled for the first time in her
well-ordered life.
Flora had borne the news with the look of one touched by death. She
had not in fact been made ill, nor had her usual course of life been
altered in any way, unless her stony reserve grew more stony and
her stern gray face more stern. But David thought more than once
that her nephew’s reappearance seemed to affect Aunt Flora with a
sort of horror, as if he had come back from the dead.
She had presented him with her lifeless cheek to kiss when he
arrived, and there had been a deep ring, harsh and almost
frightening, in the voice with which she had welcomed him. Flora
was not mercenary; Gabrielle and David both appreciated clearly
that it was not her daughter’s loss of a fortune that had affected her.
But from the very hour of Tom’s return she seemed like a woman
afraid, nervous, apprehensive, anxious at one moment to get away
from Wastewater, desolated at another at the thought of leaving the
place where she had spent almost all her life.
Oddly, seeing this fear, David and Gay saw too that it was not of
Tom, or of any possible secret or revelation connected with Tom. It
was as if Flora saw in his reappearance the reappearance too of
some old fear or hate, or perhaps of a general fear and hate that had
once controlled all her life, and that had seemed to be returning with
his person.
“There is a curse on this place, I think!” Gabrielle heard her whisper
once, many times over and over. But it was not to Gabrielle she
spoke. And one night she fainted.
Tom had been telling them a particularly hair-raising tale at table,
and because he really felt the horrible thrill of it himself, he did not,
as was usual with him, embroider it with all sorts of flat and stupid
inventions of his own. It was the story of a man, stranded on a small
island, conscious of a hidden crime, and attempting to act the part of
innocence.
“Of all things,” Gabrielle had said, impressed, “it seems to me the
most terrible would be to have a secret to hide! I mean it,” the girl
had added, seriously, turning her sapphire eyes from one to another,
as they smiled at her earnestness, “I would rather be a beggar—or in
prison—or sick—or banished—anything but to be afraid!”
Flora, at the words, had risen slowly to her feet, staring blindly ahead
of her, and with a hurried and suffocated word had turned from her
place at the table. And before David could get to her, or Sylvia make
anything but a horrified exclamation, she had fainted.
This had been on Tom’s third evening at home, a close summer
night that had afforded Flora ample excuse for feeling oppressed.
Yet Gay, looking about the circle as the days went by—David as
always thoughtful and sympathetic, if he was more than usually
silent, Sylvia beautiful and serene, if also strangely subdued, Tom
seeming to belong so much less to Wastewater, with his strange
manners and his leathery skin, than any of the others, Aunt Flora
severe and terrible—felt arising in her again all the fearful
apprehensions of her first weeks there, almost a year ago.
What was going to happen? her heart hammered incessantly. What
was going to happen?
What could happen? These were not the days of mysterious
murders and secret passages, dark deeds in dark nights! Why did
Wastewater suddenly seem a dreadful place again, a place that was
indeed allied to the measureless ocean, with its relentless advance
and retreat, and to the dark woods, behind which red sunsets
smouldered so angrily, but that had nothing in common with the
sweet village life of Crowchester and Keyport, where happy children
played through vacation days and little boats danced in and out.
“I am afraid!” Gabrielle whispered to herself, more than once, as the
blazing blue days of August went by, and the moon walked across
the sea in the silent, frightening nights. David and Tom were there,
seven or eight maids, gardener, chauffeur, stableman—yet she was
afraid. “If we are only all out of here before winter comes!” she would
think, staring at the high, merciless sky, where distant wisps of cloud
drifted against the merciless bright distances of the summer sea.
She could not face another winter at Wastewater!
David was quiet in these days, spending long hours with Tom,
painting, taking solitary walks before breakfast, Gabrielle knew. The
girl would look at him wistfully; ah, why couldn’t they all seem as
young as they were! Why weren’t they all walking, talking, picnicking
together as other families did! David was always kind, always most
intelligently sympathetic in any problem; but he seemed so far away!
She could not break through the wall that seemed to have grown
between them. It made her quiet, unresponsive, in her turn.
David, watching her, thought what a mad dream his had been, of
Gabrielle as his wife! and felt himself, bitterly, to be a failure. Had he
taken his place years ago in the world of business and professional
men, had he risen to a reputation and an income, he might have had
the right to speak now! As it was, she was as inaccessible, from the
standpoint of his poverty, his stupid silences and inexperience, as a
star. She had no thought of him, except as a useful older brother,
and talking business with Tom. He was an idling fool of an
unsuccessful painter in a world full of conversational, pleasant
failures. He hated himself, his canvases and palettes, his paltry four
thousand a year, his old sickening complacencies over a second-
hand book or a volume of etchings. Life had become insufferable to
him, and David told himself that if it had not been for Tom’s needs he
would have disappeared for another long year of painting in Europe
—or in China!
As it was, he had to see her every day, the woman who filled all the
world with exquisite pain for him, and with an agonizing joy. She
came downstairs, pale and starry-eyed, in her thin white gown and
shady hat, on these hot days, she asked him a simple question, she
pleaded without words for his old friendship and understanding.
He could not give it. And one day Sylvia asked him if he had noticed
that Tom was falling in love with Gay.
David stood perfectly still. For a few seconds he had a strange
brassy taste in his mouth, a feeling that the world had simply
stopped. Everything was over. Hope was dead within him.
“Haven’t you noticed it?” Sylvia said. “Ah, I do hope it’s true!”
They were in the downstairs sitting room, which had been darkened
against the blazing heat of the day. All four of the young Flemings
had been down on the rocks, by the sea, on a favourite bit of beach.
But even there the day had been too hot for them, and now, at five,
they had idled slowly toward the house, through a garden in which
the sunlight lay in angry, blazing pools of brightness, between the
unstirring thick leafage of the trees. There was no life in the air to-
day, no life in the slow lip and rock of the sea. The girls had talked of
a sea bath at twilight when the night might be shutting down with
something like a break in the heat, but even that necessitated more
effort than they cared to make. Dressing again, Gabrielle had
protested, would reduce them to their former state of limp and sticky
discomfort.
The sitting room was hot, and smelt of dust and upholstery and old
books. Through the old-fashioned wooden blinds the sun sent
dazzling slits of light, swimming with motes. There was a warm
gloom here, like the gloom in a tropic cave.
Sylvia, whose rich dark beauty was enhanced by summer, and who
was glowing like a rose despite tumbled hair and thin crumpled
gown, came to stand at the window and look over David’s shoulder.
Gabrielle and Tom, with the dog, had just walked down the drive, and
disappeared in the direction of the stable. It had been Gabrielle’s
extraordinary voice, heard outside, that had brought David to the
window.
“You speak with feeling, Tom!” she had been saying.
The words had drifted in at the window, and David seemed still to
hear them lingering, sweet and husky and amusedly maternal, in the
air.
Of course, that was it. She would marry Tom.
The thought had never crossed his mind before; he seemed to know
the fact now, and his heart and mind shrank away from it with utter
unwillingness to believe. A month ago, poor as he was, he might
have done anything——!
Now it was too late.
“I see him just as you see him, David,” Sylvia was saying. “A big, lax,
good-natured sort of boastful boy, that’s what he is. But I don’t
believe she sees him that way! And—if she could like him, it would
be a wonderful marriage for her, wouldn’t it? Fancy that youngster as
mistress here. And isn’t he exactly the sort of rather—well, what shall
I say?—rather coarse, adoring man who would spoil a young and
pretty wife?”
“She likes him?” David managed to say, slowly.
“I think she’s beginning to. She has a nice sort of friendly way with
him,” Sylvia said. “He doesn’t seem to bore her as he does me! He
wearies me almost to tears.”
“I thought—it seemed to me it was just—her way,” David reasoned.
And the darkest shadow that he had ever known at Wastewater fell
upon his heart then, and he felt that he could not support it. Of
course; she would be the rich and beloved, the furred and jewelled
little Mrs. Fleming of Wastewater—he must not stand in her way——
A few days later he went off for a fortnight’s tramp, with Rucker, he
said, somewhere in Canada. He left no address, promising to send
them a line now and then. And Gabrielle, bewildered with the pain of
his composed and quiet parting, watching his old belted suit and the
sturdy, shabby knickers out of sight, said to herself again, “I am
afraid.”
Tom had made her his special ally and confidante of late, and only
Gabrielle knew how far her friendship had been influential in keeping
him at home at all. He disliked his Aunt Flora, and felt that Sylvia
looked down upon him, as indeed she did. David, affectionately
interested as he was, was a forceful, almost a formidable element,
wherever he might be, and nobody knew it better than Tom. David
might be, comparatively speaking, poor, he might wear his old paint-
daubed jacket, he might deprecatingly shrug when a discussion was
under way, he might listen smilingly without comment when Tom was
noisily emphatic, yet Tom knew, and they all recognized, that there
was a silent power behind David. He was a gentleman; books, art
galleries, languages, political and social movements, David was
quietly in touch with them all. He was what Tom would never be, that
strange creature, a personality. Even while he nodded and
applauded and praised, he had an uncomfortable effect of making
Tom feel awkward and even humble, making him see how absurd
were his pretence and his shallow vanity, after all.
But Gay was inexacting, friendly, impressionable, and she combined
a most winning and motherly concern for Tom’s physical welfare with
a childish appetite for his tales. She felt intensely sorry for Tom,
chained here in the unsympathetic environment he had always
disliked, and she assumed an attitude that was somewhat that of a
mother, somewhat that of a sister, and devoted herself to him.
She liked him best when he talked of the sea, as they sat on the
rocks facing the northeast, sheltered by the rise of the garden cliff
from the afternoon sea. Dots of boats would be moving far out upon
the silky surface of the waters; now and then a big liner went slowly
by, writing a languid signature in smoke scarcely deeper in tone than
the summer sky. Tom talked of boats: little freighters fussing their
way up and down strange coasts, nosing into strange and odorous
tropic harbours; Palermo, with the tasselled donkeys jerking their
blue and red headdresses upon the sun-soaked piers; Nictheroy in
its frame of four hundred islands; Batavia, Barbadoes, Singapore—
Tom knew them all. Sometimes the listening girl was fascinated by
real glimpses of the great nations, seen through their shipping, saw
England in her grim colliers, fighting through mists and cold and
rolling seas, saw the white-clad cattle kings of the pampas watching
the lading of the meat boats from under broad-brimmed white hats.
And it seemed to Gabrielle, and to them all, that as the days went by
Tom lost some of his surface boastfulness and became simpler and
more true. He was not stupid, and he must see himself how
differently they received his inconsequential, honest talk from the
fantastic and elaborate structures he so often raised to impress
them. “I’m beginning to like him!” she said. And she wondered why
Aunt Flora and Sylvia looked at her so oddly.
CHAPTER XV
One afternoon, when he had been at home for several weeks, he
and Gay were alone on the rocks. It was again a burning afternoon,
but Tom liked heat, and Gabrielle’s dewy skin still had the child’s
quality of only glowing the more exquisitely for the day’s warmth.
Sylvia and her mother had gone into Crowchester. David was still
away.
Tom had taken a rather personal tone of late with Gabrielle, a tone
that the girl found vaguely disquieting. Now he was asking her, half
smiling, and half earnest, if she had ever been in love. And as he
asked it, he put his lean brown hand over hers, as it lay on the rocks
beside him. Gay did not look down at their hands, but her heart rose
in her breast, and she wriggled her own warm fingers slightly, as a
hint to be set free.
“Have I ever been in love? Yes, I think so, Tom.”
“Oh, you think so? As bad as that! A lot you know about it,” Tom
jeered, good-naturedly. “If you’d ever been in love, you’d know it,” he
added.
“I suppose so,” Gabrielle agreed, amiably.
“Well, who is it?” asked Tom, curiously. “David, huh?”
Gabrielle felt as if touched by a galvanic shock. There was a choking
confusion in all her senses and a scarlet colour in her face as she
said:
“David? David is—Sylvia’s.”
“Oh, zat so?” Tom asked, interestedly. “I thought so!” he added, in
satisfaction. And with a long half whistle and pursed lips, after a
moment of profound thought, when his half-closed eyes were off
across the wide seas, he repeated thoughtfully, “Is—that—so? Say,
my coming home must have made some difference to them,” he
added, suddenly, as Gay did not speak.
“Only in this way,” the girl said, quickly, with one hand quite
unconsciously pressed against the pain that was like a physical cut
in her heart. “Only in that now he will feel free to ask her, Tom!”
“Sa-a-ay—!” Tom drawled, with a crafty and cunning look of
incredulity and sagacity. “He’d hate her with a lot of money tied to
her—I don’t think,” he added, good-naturedly. But a moment later a
different look, new to him lately, came into his face, and he said more
quietly and with conviction: “I don’t know, though. I’ll bet you’re right!”
Immediately afterward he fell into a sort of study, in a fashion not
unusual with him. He freed Gabrielle’s hand, crossed his arms, and
sat staring absently out across the ocean, with his lean body
sprawled comfortably into the angles of the rocks, and his Panama
tilted over his face.
“I wish to God I knew if I was going to get well and back to sea
again!” he said, presently, in a fretful sort of voice.
Gabrielle, who had relievedly availed herself of this interval to shift
by almost imperceptible degrees to a seat a trifle more distant, was
now so placed that she could meet his eyes when he looked up. She
had intended to say to him, as they had all been saying, some
comforting vague thing about the doctor’s hopeful diagnosis of his
illness, and about patience and rest. But when she saw the big,
pathetically childish dark eyes staring up wistfully, a sudden little
pang of pity made her say instead, gently:
“I don’t know, Tom. But you’re so young and strong; they all say you
will!”
“I’m in no condition to ask a girl to marry me!” Tom said, moodily.
“Oh, Tom,” Gabrielle said, interested at once, “have you a girl?”
He looked at her, as she sat at an angle of the great shaded
boulders, with a sort of sea-shine trembling like quicksilver over her.
She was in thin, almost transparent white, with a wide white hat
pushed down over her richly shining tawny hair and shadowing her
flushed earnest face. The hot day had deepened the umber shadows
about her beautiful eyes; tiny gold feathers of her hair lay like a
baby’s curls against her warm forehead. Her crossed white ankles,
her fine, locked white hands, the whole slender, fragrant, youthful
body might have been made for a study of ideal girlhood and
innocence, and sweetness and summer-time.
“Lemme tell you something,” the man began, in his abrupt way. And
he took from his pocket a slim, flat leather wallet, brown once, but
now worn black and oily, and containing only a few papers.
One of these was an unmounted camera print of a woman’s picture.
She was a slim, dark woman, looking like a native of some tropic
country, wearing a single white garment, barefooted, and with
flowers about her shoulders and head. The setting was of palms and
sea; indeed the woman’s feet were in the waves. She was smiling,
but the face was clumsily featured, the mouth large and full, and the
expression, though brightly happy, was stupid. The picture was dirty,
curled by much handling.
“She’s—sweet,” Gay said, hesitatingly, at a loss.
“Sweet, huh?” Tom echoed, taking back the picture, nursing it in both
cupped hands, and studying it hungrily, as if he had never seen it
before. “That’s Tana,” he said, softly.
“Tana?”
“My wife,” Tom added, briefly. And there was no bragging in his tone
now. “She was the sweetest woman God ever made!” he said,
sombrely.
“Your—Tom, your wife?”
“Certainly,” Tom answered, shortly. “Now go tell that to them all!” he
added, almost angrily. “Tell them I married a girl who was part nigger
if you want to!”
His tone was the truest Gabrielle had ever heard from him; the pain
in it went to her heart.
“Tom, I’m so sorry,” she said, timidly. “Is she dead?”
“Yep,” he said, like a pistol shot, and was still.
“Lately, Tom?”
“Two years. Just before I was ill.”
Gabrielle was silent a long time, but it was her hand now that crept
toward his, and tightened on it softly. And so they sat for many
minutes, without speaking.
Then the girl said, “Tell me about her.”
Tom put the picture away reverently, carefully. For a few dubious
minutes she felt that she had hurt him, but suddenly he began with
the whole story.
He had met Tana when she was only fourteen, just before the
entrance of the United States into the war. Her father was a native
trader, but the girl had some white blood. Tom had remembered her,
and when he was wounded and imprisoned, had escaped to make
his way back, by the devious back roads of the seas, to the tropical
island, and the group of huts, and Tana. And Tana had nursed him,
and married him solemnly, according to all the customs of her tribe,
and they had lived there in a little corner of Paradise, loving, eating,
swimming, sleeping, for happy years. And then there had been
Toam, little, soft, round, and brown, never dressed in all his short
three years, never bathed except in the green warm fringes of the
ocean, never fed except at his mother’s tender, soft brown breast
until he was big enough to sit on his father’s knee and eat his meat
and bananas like a man. There were plenty of other brown babies in
the settlement, but it was Toam’s staggering little footprints in the wet
sand that Tom remembered, Toam standing in a sun-flooded open
reed doorway, with an aureole about his curly little head.
Tom had presently drifted into the service of a small freighting line
again, but never for long trips, never absent for more than a few
days or a week from Tana and Toam. And so the wonderful months
had become years, and Tom was content, and Tana was more than
that; until the fever came.
Tom had survived them both, laid the tiny brown body straight and
bare beside the straightly drawn white linen that covered Tana. And
then his own illness had mercifully shut down upon him, and he had
known nothing for long months of native nursing. Months afterward
he had found himself in a spare cabin upon a little freighter, bound
eventually for the harbour of New York. Tana’s family, her village
indeed, had been wiped out, the captain had told him. The ship had
delayed only to superintend some burials before carrying him upon
its somewhat desultory course. They had put into a score of
harbours, and Tom was convalescent, before the grim, smoke-
wrapped outlines of New York, burning in midsummer glare and
heat, had risen before him. And Tom, then, sick and weary and weak
and heartbroken, had thought he must come home to die.
But now, after these weeks at home, a subtle change had come over
him, and he did not want to die. He told Gabrielle, and she began
indeed to understand it, how strangely rigid and unlovely and lifeless
domestic ideals according to the New England standards had
seemed to him at first, how gloomy the rooms at Wastewater, how
empty and unsatisfying the life.
But he was getting used to it all now. He thought Sylvia was a
“beautiful young lady, but kinder proud.” Aunt Flora also was “O. K.”
And David was of course a prince.
“He’s painting a I-don’t-know-what-you-call-it up in my room,” Tom
said, unaffectedly. He had furnished one of the big mansard rooms
at the top of the house with odd couches, rugs, and chairs, and
sometimes spent the hot mornings there, with David painting beside
him. If there was air moving, it might be felt here, and Tom liked the
lazy and desultory talk as David worked. “Can he paint good at all?
They don’t look much like the pictures in books.”
“They are beginning to say—at least some of them do—that he is a
genius, Tom. No, it’s not like the pictures that one knows. But there
are other men who paint that way—in his school.”
“He has a school, huh?”
“No, I mean his type of work.”
“I get you,” Tom said, good-naturedly. “I’m glad about him and
Sylvia,” he added, after thought. “Engaged, are they?”
“Well, I suppose they will be. There was an understanding between
them—he has something, you know, and Aunt Flora has an income,
too. Your father settled something on her when Uncle Will died.”
“Do you suppose it’s money that’s holding them back?”
“I don’t imagine so. I think perhaps it’s all the change and confusion,
and the business end of things.”
“I could fix ’em up!” Tom suggested, magnificently. “I wish to God,”
he added, uneasily, under his breath, and without irreverence, “that
something would happen! The place makes me feel creepy,
somehow. It’s—voodoo. I wish David would marry and take that
death’s head of an old woman off with him—Aunt Flora. And then I’d
like to beat it somewhere—Boston or New York—see some life!
Theatres—restaurants—that sort of thing!”
Gabrielle did not ask what disposition he would make of herself
under this arrangement. She knew.
She was down among the flowering border shrubs of the garden on
the quiet September day when David unexpectedly came home. The
whole world was shrouded in a warm, soft mist; the waves crept in
lifelessly, little gulls rocked on the swells. Trees about Gabrielle were
dripping softly, not a leaf stirred, and birds hopped like shadows, like
paler shadows, and vanished against the quiet, opaque walls that
shut her in.
She and Sylvia had been spending the afternoon upstairs in Tom’s
“study,” as his mansard sitting room was called. The old piano upon
which all these young men and women had practised, years ago, as
children, had been moved up there now; there was a card table,
magazines, books. The electric installation would be begun
downstairs in a few weeks, and the whole place wore an unusually
dismantled and desolate air; the girls were glad to take their sewing
up to the cool and quiet of Tom’s study. Flora had been wretched

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Exploring Mishnah's World(s): Social

Scientific Approaches Simcha Fishbane

Simcha Fishbane · Calvin Goldscheider ·

ISBN 978-3-030-53570-4 ISBN 978-3-030-53571-1 (eBook)

methodologically oriented essay appearing as Chap. 1 in this volume

Why Mishnah? And Why Promote Social Science

by reason of the range of their individual professional training or by rea-

The Range and Scope of This Volume’s Essays

As stated, this volume reflects a project to encourage, and to propose and

prescriptions and proscriptions. To understand what these chapters under-

Mishnaic evidence to shed light on aspects of the sociology or anthropol-

New York, NY, USA Simcha Fishbane

Finally, we are greatly indebted to Palgrave Macmillan for support and

1 Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities in the Social

2 Dignity or Debasement: The Destitute in the World of

3 “The Land of Israel Is Holier Than All Lands”: Diaspora

4 Marginal Person and/or Marginal Situation: The Convert

5 Religious Authority in the Mishnah: Social Science

Generational Transmission of Authority 136

6 Family Structure, Kinship, and Life Course Transitions:

7 Study as a Socially Formative Activity: The Case of

8 When Tosefta Was Read in Service of Mishnah Study: What

9 Studying Mishnah “Talmudic-ly”: What the Basic Literary-

Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities

This chapter1 is intended to be a call to renew the scholarly study of the

© The Author(s) 2020 1

the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS). And most of the

methodological issues. Social scientific, and specifically sociological and

Outline of Our Programmatic Introduction

1. to try to use the evidence of Mishnah to tell us more about Palestinian

Why Is It Important to Seek to Know More About

One general, historically defensible scenario for the development of the

cultural landscape, ultimately (sometime after the early spread of Islam),

Why Turn to the Evidence of the Mishnah?

Archeological evidence is arguably much more abundant for the period

Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis. These documents speak much about

• agricultural gifts to (a now defunct) Temple, and prayer/blessings;

The mastery of Mishnah and its life-long study, in correlation with

displaced Mishnah at the apex of the rabbinic curriculum.17 As a result,

Mishnah’s Most Pervasive Rhetorical and Literary

exercise, while recognizing that a majority of Mishnah’s content bears no

were observed once or twice, it might be said to be insignificant. If, how-

a, which applies to circumstance b. For example, hypothetically speaking,

the authors’/editors’ perhaps utopian views of an ideal Israelite society.

Moreover, whether one is on one side of center or the other, there is a

Three Potentially Compelling Topical Directions

1. the use of Mishnaic evidence to understand better the social and

immediate group, late second-century Palestinian rabbis, from which

Dignity or Debasement: The Destitute

© The Author(s) 2020 25

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New York, NY, USA Simcha Fishbane

1 Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities in the Social

2 Dignity or Debasement: The Destitute in the World of

3 “The Land of Israel Is Holier Than All Lands”: Diaspora

4 Marginal Person and/or Marginal Situation: The Convert

5 Religious Authority in the Mishnah: Social Science

Generational Transmission of Authority 136

6 Family Structure, Kinship, and Life Course Transitions:

7 Study as a Socially Formative Activity: The Case of

8 When Tosefta Was Read in Service of Mishnah Study: What

9 Studying Mishnah “Talmudic-ly”: What the Basic Literary-