The Writings of Rabbinic Judaism

Dennis Geller

Actually, the story is quite different. It takes place during the period between 70 C.E. and 1800 C.E.

With the destruction of the Temple and the associated exile the Jewish religion lost its centers — the Temple, which was the one place on Earth that God resided; sacrifice as the focal action of religious observance; and the sense of being a people attached to a homeland.

The Pharisees were a priestly (but not High Priestly) group, largely followed by the lower and middle-classes. They tended to be opposed to Hellenization. Their unique religious doctrine was to posit the existence of a second Torah, complementary to the written one. This "oral" Torah — which had been passed on from Moses outside of the priestly hierarchy because he did not "trust" Aaron and the priests — was not seen as a gloss on the Pentateuch, but rather was supposed to be an independent tradition of equivalent standing. The Pharisees were developed a class of scholars that could interpret and transmit their oral sacred text; these were initially called sofreem — "masters of the book." It is important to note that while the Pharisees differed with the Sadducees, the High Priestly family, they were not in any kind of open (or even covert) opposition to the ruling religious tenets of Judaism. The priests all prayed together (and stayed together).

However, when the Temple was destroyed the Pharisees were in an advantageous position. They had, in the sofreem, the nucleus of a clergy that was not tied to the Temple. They saw how to take advantage of the synagogues. These were meeting places (the Hebrew name is Beit HaKnesset) that had come into fashion as local sites to gather for prayer at the time that morning and evening sacrifices were taking place in the Temple. The Pharisees also had organizational sense. And, they had chutzpah. In particular, when the rebellion broke out they decided not to support it. Rabbi Johannan was arrested by the rebels when Jerusalem was under siege, but by pretending to be dead got himself removed from the city in a coffin. He promptly made his way to the Roman General Vespasian and as a result of his smooth talking the Romans accepted the Pharisees as the religious leaders after the rebellion was suppressed.

Over the next hundred years the Pharisees created the Yeshiva, as the place where Rabbis were trained in the oral Torah. They made their headquarters in Yavneh in about 80 C.E., at an academy founded by Rabbi Gamliel, a descendant of Hillel. After the Bar Kochba rebellion in 132 CE (in which the Rabbis did caught up because the Romans under Hadrian had determined to make Jerusalem a Roman colony and had — among other nasty reactions to the rebellion against that decree — prohibited circumcision) the Pharisees made a clever move. With mass deportations and a renaming for Jerusalem and for Israel having been decreed by the victorious Romans, the Rabbi Judah HaNasi seems to have persuaded the Romans that, with 5-7% of the Empire being Jews, it would be in Roman interest to centralize authority of the Jews in one person — him. This begins the Patriarchate, which lasts as the agency responsible for the behavior of all Jews in the Empire until the fifth century. The center of the Patriarchate is north of Jerusalem, in three centers: Sepphoris, Beit She’anim, and Tiberias.

The Mishnah is the written form of the major part of the oral law. It emerged between 160 and 200 CE. The purpose of the yeshiva became to introduce Mishnah and the study of Torah. Mishnah (the name means "repetition," a subliminal argument that the ideas in it are an oral tradition stretching back for a millennium) is an instance of a nifty new idea that the Rabbis got from the Greeks — categorization. It is organized in six topical Orders — Farming, Holidays, Family, Crime, Temple, and Purity. It is written in Hebrew, although the people spoke Aramaic when it was written, because Hebrew is the language that Moses would have spoken it initially. The redaction of Mishnah actually begins before the Bar Kochba revolt, at least in part in individual notebooks of scholars, but is brought together under the leadership of Judah HaNasi and edited for the next 300 years.

It is important to understand that Mishnah is proffered as an independent tradition. It contains no references to the Pentateuch, any more than that contains references to Mishnah.

While Mishnah has many valuable ethical and legal statements, it argues (usually implicitly) by authority or on the basis of reward and punishment. Most of what we consider Orthodox Judaism comes from Mishnah. The Messiah, final judgement, redemption in the Garden of Eden are all important ideas that do not appear in Tanakh or in Biblical Judaism; they are Mishnaic ideas.

Mishnah is fairly cryptic. Its statements and conclusions are terse to the point of puzzlement, and often were found to be merely starting points for complex discussions. The discussions over interpretation form the Gemara, and Mishnah and Gemara together are what we now know as Talmud. There are actually two Talmudim, one compiled in Jerusalem and one in Babylon; the latter is considered more authoritative but both are referred to. Gemara is the product of discussions by a group of scholars called amoraim ("explainers"). It is often very chatty, presenting conflicting views and arguments based on Mishnah, Torah, and other parts of the oral Torah that were not put into Mishnah. In Gemara we find the use of Scripture to justify laws in Mishnah. This shows a weakening of the original strong separation that the Pharisees maintained between the written and oral Torahs, and also probably reflects a fact that (written) Torah was still regarded as more authoritative than Mishnah by "the people."

There are some other important writings associated with Talmud. You may hear about Tosefta and Beraita. Tosefta consists of other Mishnaic commentaries that didn’t get into the Mishnah -- afterthoughts and late entries, as it were. The Beraita is an unwritten collection of commentaries that we know of because they are mentioned in the Talmud and used as authorities or to draw conclusions. There is also Midrash. Midrash is an explanation of --or conclusion from -- scripture, used to justify the Oral Law. It comes in two flavors: Halakhic, which relates to the laws of Torah, and Aggadic, which is not considered obligatory and casts its comments in the form of stories and veiled metaphors (Esau, Jacob’s enemy and brother, is used to represent an enemy. especially Rome. So, a statement like "Esau enjoys this world but not the next" is a code for "Rome is powerful today, but soon we’re going to be free of it.") You’ll see similar veiling of reference in Daniel, which speaks about the oppression by Babylon when it, too, means Rome.

Now lets watch as the 7^th century dawns. Before it is over Muhammad will have created Islam and built the largest empire ever known. Jews (and Christians and Zoroastrians) were given a special second-class status, and for a number of reasons Jews were able to do quite well within that constraint. Although they tended to live separately and maintain their religious and dietary laws, they were generally accepted in the highest circles, and became physicians, politicians, philosophers and poets. By 700 about 80% of the Jews of the world lived under this empire, and the Caliph named the Exilarch (the logical descendant of the Patriarch) to be the ruler of all of them. This resulted in a "Supreme Court" in Baghdad that was able to answer questions of Jewish Law forwarded to it from around the world. These answers, called Responsa, were produced primarily between 650 and 1050 and are another source of interpretations of the Oral Torah.

Under Islam the Jews were a world people with a central administration, working in alliance with the Muslims. But all good things are subject to inter-family squabbling and fundamentalist revisionism. The happened to the Muslim empire, as 10^th century Egypt was taken by a rival to the Caliph and the empire was split East from West. In the 11^th century the Turks took the Eastern part of the empire. Then in the 13^th century Ghengis Khan arose and his grandson not only took Baghdad but also killed everyone in it. None of this was good for the Jews.

Meanwhile, in 9^th-10^th century Judaism an internal opposition arose. This is the Karaite "heresy." The Karaites reverted to the Sadducean belief that the Oral Torah was a fraud, and chose to adhere strictly to the written Torah. In their heyday they claimed about half of all Jewry as adherents. One thing that helped them was the practice of writing scripture without vowels. This allowed for many ambiguities, which the Karaites and Rabbis each exploited to prove their points. As a result of Karaite successes, the Rabbis created a version of Tanakh (the Masoretic text) which had all the vowels, and therefore resolved the ambiguities. The Rabbis at this time also wrote a standard book of prayer — the siddur.

But before we leave the Muslim world we must mention two other Rabbinic innovations. With Talmud, Midrash, and all the Responsa, it was getting pretty hard for the average ibn Benjamin on the street to know how to behave. Maimonides addressed this need with a superbly organized code of law, called the Mishneh Torah. But even this was too complex to serve as a ready reference for the average Jew, so Joseph Caro created the Cliff’s Notes of Judaism, the Shulkhan Arukh (the Set Table).

In discussing the significant writings of the Rabbinic period, we should also say a few words about medieval Jewish philosophy. Note that philosophy as known to the Greeks — the pursuit of knowledge through reason — is antithetical to religion. It was certainly frowned upon during Second Temple times. However, when they reach positions of wealth and stability under the Muslims Jews become attracted to it, in part because they look for ways to prove their religious tenets through reason.

Hellenistic philosophy was dominated (is this ever a breathtaking oversimplification!) by four schools, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus. Plato’s shtick was Idealism, which led to the later (neo-Platonic) supposition that the Universe contains two different kinds of thing: substance and mind. Here soul is a piece of the mind (or spirit) world that gets stuck in the material world. Your job as a living being, should you choose to accept it, is to get unstuck. Aristotle saw mind and matter as inseparable. As he wrote in his famous MCAS question, mind is to body as shape-of-chair is to chair. He imagined a spectrum of seven related levels (spheres) from purely material to purely form. Zeno, the Stoic, said that everything that exists exists in Nature, and that Nature itself has a controlling intelligence. Epicurus followed the atomic theory and materialism of Democritus. He rejected supernatural concepts — if there are gods, he said, they are made out of the same stuff as the rest of us. The prime good was pleasure, but not in a hedonistic way. Rather, he believed in achieving inner peace and equilibrium. He wanted to banish fear and religion. He later took up residence outside of Detroit…

Once Romans start killing each other for the chance to be emperor (see I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, or Suetonius if you prefer original sources) philosophy withered somewhat. Its next major upsurge in Western (loosely interpreted) history was in the Muslim empire, where the wealthy Court became interested in pleasure and secularism. Muslim philosophy built upon the four Hellenistic traditions mentioned above — with the caveat that the Epicureanism in particular was seen as a threat by all but the most liberal regimes. (One philosopher who flourished in such liberal times was Omar Khayyam.) When philosophy broke out among the Muslims it was quickly adopted by Jewish intellectuals.

Although the Rabbis generally opposed philosophy, there was a series of Jewish philosophers in the 11^th — 15^th century who attempted to reconcile reason with Rabbinic Judaism. As a beginning of attempts to introduce reason into Jewish life, such philosophers as Judah HaLevi, Maimonides, Gensonides and Joseph Albo, can be viewed as among the roots of Humanistic Judaism, although their speculations and conclusions were not particularly Humanistic. (One possible exception is the 11^th century Afghan philosopher Hiwalbalkhi, who argued that reason could not be used to prove or disprove the existence of God or of an immortal soul or life after death. He was of course widely denounced, but not actually killed!).

And now for something completely different. When Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 he saw a need to build trade. So he turned to the small group of Jews — called Romaniots --in Northern Italy. He invited them North; the Jewish name for Northern Europe was Ashkenaz. Imagine this. Did the Muslims and the Jews that lived with them eat beets, cabbage, onion, turnips and Baltic Sea Herring? Did they wear heavy furs? No way. The move into Ashkenaz was a profound culture shock for these Jews, who had to give up almost all of their cultural, domestic and culinary customs in their strange new land. In fact, even the common practice of removing shoes in the synagogue to show respect had to be abandoned.

The Jews in Ashkenaz became traders, and then bankers. Traders because, as had happened in the Muslim world already, they had contacts in every port. Bankers originally on the large scale --financing commercial ventures and the building of castles. There’s an excellent picture of the cultural differences between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews at this time in a recent novel by A. B. Yehoshua, A Journey to the End of the Millennium. But around 1100, the Pope starts his Crusades and the Lombards of Northern Italy begin to compete as bankers, which two events lead to 400 years of Jewish decline; the final blow is the Black Death of 1348 which triggers outbursts of Anti-Semitism. (Not that this was absent before; for example in the Lateran Council of Innocent III the Jews were named as agents of the devil, segregated, and forced to wear a distinctive badge.) Unable to participate in the feudal agricultural system, and forced out of merchant banking, the Jews were reduced to lending money to the peasants.

In the 14^th century the Jews begin to move into the new Western Slavic state of Poland, which had been formed from smaller states in self-defense against the Germans, and which, unlike the other Slavic areas of Russia and Yugoslavia, had chosen the Roman Catholic instead of the Greek Orthodox religion. The new Poland had no economy to speak of, and so again the Jews were invited to immigrate and create one. One difference in Poland (and, when it merged with Poland, in Lithuania) was that Jews also became estate managers.

Poland was initially a great place to be Jewish. They were granted a strong self-autonomy — communally as well as locally, with a federated government meeting in Lublin, and later a second in Lithuania. But in 1648 the Russian peasants rose up in rebellion against their Polish landlords — and the Jewish estate managers. They massacred 100,000 Poles and 100,000 Jews under the leadership of Chmielnitski. The Polish economy was destroyed so badly that it never completely recovered. There were now hundreds of thousands of economically depressed Jews. In particular, whereas with wealth the Jews had developed a class of parasites called Yeshiva buchers — young men who were able to spend their lives studying at the Yeshiva -- the economy could no longer support such excess. However, the practice continued, so important had it become to have people studying all the time and giving nothing back, that the communities impoverished themselves further to support it.

What has all this to do with Rabbinic literature? With the Mishnah and Talmud and Responsa it may seem that we’ve got it all, but there’s one more significant tradition. It’s part of a religious idea much older and more universal than Judaism — shamanism. Judaism has always had people who claimed to be in direct contact with God. In Biblical times these were the prophets, and were honored. In medieval times these often appeared as false Messiahs, the best known being Shab’tai Tzvi in the 17^th century Ottoman empire. In 18^th century Ukraine a different sort of mystic appeared. Yisrael Ben Eleazar was shammes in a shul when he discovered that he had miraculous powers. Although he never claimed to be the Messiah his reputation spread, especially because of his compassionate teachings. One of the things he did that marks him as outside traditional religious doctrine and as one with magical powers was to say the name of God in his sermons; because of this he was called the Master of the Good Name — the Ba’al Shem Tov.

His students spread out to form what we know as the Hasidic movement. Each center formed around a miracle worker — its Rebbe. By the middle of the 18^th century almost 50% of the Jews in Poland followed Hasidism.

How did the established Rabbis welcome them? Exactly as you’d expect— with horror. In fact the Hasidim were excommunicated en masse by the head of the Vilna shul. However, the movement continued to grow; the Rabbinic establishment was called by them the opposition — mitnagdim.

The Rabbis challenged the Hasidim to justify their teaching by reference to Torah. That being non-trivial, the Hasidim turned to an earlier tradition that was already associated with miracle workers — Kabbala. Kabbala is a Platonic mystical philosophy that begins with the Sefer Ha Bahir in the 12^th century, and receives its most significant exposition in the Zohar (The Shining) in 14^th century Spain. The Zohar, incidentally, was written in Aramaic to "prove" that it was an authentic book from the Second Temple era. In Kabbala every word of Torah is taken to have two meanings, with heavy application of anagramming, gematria (numerology), and puns used to tease out the hidden "true" meaning.

Although originally reviled, after 135 years the Hasidic movement was finally regarded as firmly Orthodox — "ultra-Orthodox" as is sometimes said. By the time the 18^th century came to a close, however, Rabbinic Judaism was collapsing due to such external forces as the money economy and the Enlightenment.

And here we are.