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Exploring
Mishnah’s World(s)
Social Scientific Approaches
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
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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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
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
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
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
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
xvii
xviii Contents
Index307
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