Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert

The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus

The article reexamines the Jewish character of the Syriac translation of theDidascalia Apostolorum.Whereas this text is commonly read as a Jewish-Christian text, theauthorial voice never identifies itself in these terms. The verycategory of Jewish Christianity can be questioned in light of theDidascalia.The Jewish character of the document is doubly reflected in thevoice of the author(s) as well as among the heretics against whom itpolemicizes. TheDidascalias heresiology clearly indicates a diversity of Jewish heterodoxpractices which are partially echoed in the rabbinic tradition. Basedon the authors familiarity with some of the rabbinic traditions, thepaper suggests that theDidascaliacan be read as a counter-Mishnah for the disciples of Jesus. In addition,the article explores the parallelisms between theDidascalias biblical hermeneutic and some of the rabbinic midrashic tradition. Thisprovides grounds for reading theDidascalias voice as a Jewish voice. Ultimately, theDidascaliaprovides further evidence that, even in the fourth century, rabbinicJudaism was still in the process of establishing itself as the representative form of Judaism. Simultaneously, the process of the separation between Judaism and Christianity still remained in flux.

The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies

During the past decade or so, there has been a “veritable boom … of projects that investigate questions of place and space” in Jewish studies. In this arena, scholars in various fields of Jewish studies have begun to engage with developments in the humanities at large. Since the 1980s, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have become more attentive to the cultural challenges of globalization, prominent among them the effects of increased movements of migration. From these movements have arisen questions about the effect and meaning of uprooting and dislocation, the significance of belonging to a place (or to various places), the emergence of diaspora communities, and so on. The spatial dimension of human existence began to move to the forefront of scholarly considerations, and with it, new names of fields of study, such as human, critical, or cultural geography. While Jewish studies has, of course, for the longest time been aware of “diaspora” as a dimension of human existence, often perhaps with the understanding that diaspora was historically a uniquely Jewish experience, to a certain degree our field remained caught in the binarism of diaspora versus nationalism or Zionism, at least until the advance of this new impulse in the humanities, identified by some as a “spatial turn.” Against such binarisms, the volumes under discussion repeatedly appeal to “multidimensionality” in Jewish topographies and in our approaches to them.

The Political Symbolism of the Eruv

Said R. Joshua ben Levi: “On what account do they prepare an eruv of courtyards? It is for the sake of peace.” There was the case of a woman who was on bad terms with her neighbor. She sent her [contribution to the] eruv with her son. The neighbor took him and hugged and kissed him. He went and told his mother this. She said, “Is this how she loved me, and I did not know about it!” They thus became friends once again.

Rabbinic Authorship as a Collective Enterprise

ALL THAT WRITING – AND NO WRITERS? THE PUZZLE OF RABBINIC AUTHORSHIP Rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity certainly had its audience. But can it be said to have had authors? From the perspective of the rabbinic tradition itself, the axiomatic answer is, of course, “no.” A half millennium of tradition, the Mishnah tells us, links the moment at which “Moses received Torah from Sinai” to the teachings of the Men of the Great Assembly who, in the shadow of Persian hegemony, “said three things: be cautious in judgment, raise up many disciples, and build a fence for the Torah” (M. Avot 1:1). In the rabbinic view, formulations of collective rabbinic wisdom, such as those ascribed to the Men of the Great Assembly, are “said,” “received” or “heard,” and “transmitted.” But they are not “authored.” Not any more than a rhythmic refrain, stemming out of seventeenth-century West African tribal dance, that - transplanted with its enslaved bearers to the cotton fields of the American South - adopts the musical scale of Scotch-Irish reels and emerges in 1938 as a chord progression supporting this recorded confession of a Robert Johnson: I went down to the crossroad, fell down on my knees; I went down to the crossroad, fell down on my knees; asked the Lord above “Have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please.”

Rabbinic Historiography and Representations of the Past

At the very conclusion of his monumental Antiquities of the Jews , the noted Jewish historian Josephus, sensing that what he had just achieved was the exception, rather than the rule, among Jewish intellectuals of his day, indulges in a measure of self-adulation. Singularly among the learned men of his day, he claims, he alone has succeeded in bridging the gulf between Greek learning, apparently a sine qua non for the historiographical achievement embodied in the Antiquities , and a curriculum that was far more revered among his Jewish compatriots: “For our people . . . give credit for wisdom to those alone who have an exact knowledge of the law and who have the capability of interpreting the holy writings.” This hierarchy of Jewish knowledge, he seems to be saying, relegated historiographical undertakings of the Hellenistic-Roman model to a somewhat neglected status, and while he does not chastise his fellow Jews for this neglect, one might conclude that those who did devote themselves to the study of the law and its interpretation felt no pangs of remorse for not embracing a pursuit of the past in the critical manner of their Greco-Roman counterparts. Indeed, the variegated corpus of rabbinic literature did not preserve any work that might point to an effort on the part of the rabbis at producing a systematic and critical study of the past. To be sure, the biblical past was at the center of much of their deliberations, but this “past” was for them already laid out in its fullest detail, thereby providing the basis for an ongoing search of its religious significance, and hardly requiring any compilation and examination of sources in a Thucydidean-type search for “truth” and “accuracy.”

Plato in Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai's Cave (B. Shabbat 33b–34a): The Talmudic Inversion of Plato's Politics of Philosophy

Thus we are told in one of the most famous narratives in talmudic literature, in its most elaborate and complex version in the Babylonian Talmud. The late ancient and early medieval rabbinic popularity of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohais (henceforth Rashbi) sojourn in the cave is demonstrated by the wide distribution of the motif in various rabbinic texts. It later gained additional prominence in the Jewish collective imagination to such a degree that no less than the composition of the Zohar was attributed to Rashbi; indeed, the text was considered a product of his sojourn in the cave. As is the case with other extensive narratives in the Babylonian Talmud about early rabbinic sages from the days of the Mishnah, different and most likely earlier versions of the whole or parts of this story can be found elsewhere in rabbinic literature. Others have gone about the task of carefully assembling and comparing the versions of the story, and various interpretations of it have been offered. Surely, any additional attempt at making sense of the story and decoding what the rabbinic narrators in the Babylonian Talmud sought to convey with its inclusion in the larger corpus needs to take this work into account.

Diaspora Cartography: On the Rabbinic Background of Contemporary Ritual Eruv Practice

[Abstract This essay takes as its starting point the observation that the earliest manifestation of the regulations concerning the eruv (hatzerot) can be found in the Mishnah (late second or early third century C.E.). A careful reading of the early rabbinic texts demonstrates that the eruv shapes a community’s relationship to the local space it inhabits in significant ways that are predicated neither on ownership nor on control over that space. Rather, that relationship is based on a set of negotiations with those who share the space, in rabbinic times predominantly neighbors, and later also jurisdictions. Further, as a tool of drawing symbolic Jewish maps, the rabbinic eruv enhances the concept of multidimensionality of space, as one map—a rabbinic map—of signification is superimposed on space without control over it. As such, the eruv is quintessentially the product of a diaspora imagination, not merely in a historical sense of a post-70 C.E. reality, but in the political sense of inhabiting a space that is shared with and even controlled by others., Abstract This essay takes as its starting point the observation that the earliest manifestation of the regulations concerning the eruv (hatzerot) can be found in the Mishnah (late second or early third century C.E.). A careful reading of the early rabbinic texts demonstrates that the eruv shapes a community’s relationship to the local space it inhabits in significant ways that are predicated neither on ownership nor on control over that space. Rather, that relationship is based on a set of negotiations with those who share the space, in rabbinic times predominantly neighbors, and later also jurisdictions. Further, as a tool of drawing symbolic Jewish maps, the rabbinic eruv enhances the concept of multidimensionality of space, as one map—a rabbinic map—of signification is superimposed on space without control over it. As such, the eruv is quintessentially the product of a diaspora imagination, not merely in a historical sense of a post-70 C.E. reality, but in the political sense of inhabiting a space that is shared with and even controlled by others.]

A View from Late Antiquity Onward

“THE MOST UNCANNY AND ALLURING THING is the fact that the most original products of Jewish thinking are, as it were, products of assimilation.”1 Thus admits, albeit reluctantly, Gershom Scholem, otherwise known perhaps as one of the most vociferous critics of Jewish cultural assimilation, in a letter written from Jerusalem to Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno in June 1939. Scholem writes in response to Adorno’s astonishment (Erstaunen) about the relationship of kabbalistic writings— seemingly one of the most Jewish of Jewish literatures, as it were, or as Scholem put it, “originellstes Produkt jüdischen Denkens”—to the Neoplatonic gnostic tradition. In response to Adorno, Scholem claims no less astonishment about such “paradoxical” or “dialectical connection”—in his words, a “secret” that he claims to have been trying to unlock in the preceding twenty years of his work. One might be tempted to read Scholem’s statement, untypical for him,2 as a commentary on Gerson Cohen’s remarkable speech,3 “The Blessing

Peter Schäfer. Die Geburt des Judentums aus dem Geist des Christentums: Fünf Vorlesungen zur Entstehung des rabbinischen Judentums . Tria Cordia: Jenaer Vorlesungen zu Judentum, Antike und Christentum 6. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. xvii, 210 pp., 5 Abb.

former, harmful justification that abides conspicuously in canonical sources’” (253). Although this constancy might be true for some, in addition to pointing to Rachel Adler’s B’rit Ahuvim ceremony as a starting point for moving forward, Labovitz might also have directed her readers to numerous other wedding or marriage models that have developed over the twelve years since Adler’s work (see, for example, http://www.ritualwell.org/). Thus whereas Labovitz finds it “emotionally easier to accept the continued authority of these traditions,” many have not. This is not to criticize Labovitz’s book in any manner, nor her personal reflections. It simply demonstrates the need for critical, engaged feminist scholarship—exemplified throughout her book—and the productiveness both of feminists who remain within an authoritative tradition (as “outsiders-within”?) and those who position themselves beyond such authority.

PURITY STUDIES IN JUDAISM: AN EMERGING SUBFIELD ?

Studies of textual traditions about menstruation in Judaism are seldom without an agenda. Perhaps they cannot be. The polemical history of the literature is simply too entrenched by now. This is also the case with Evyatar Marienbergs series of studies, recently published in France, about the place of menstruation in Jewish culture.