Around the Web, English, Ruminations

Defending the Talmud in the Digital Age: Four Reflections

1. When we relaunched The Talmud Blog, back in 2011, I set a Google reminder for the word “Talmud.” After all, we claimed to provide “Talmudic news, reviews, currents and criticism,” and what better way to stay current than with handy email reminders from the indexers of the Internet. At the time, the Internet was a simpler place, or at least so it seemed. We may have had our suspicions of the influence of Facebook and ad tech on our lives, but certainly not to the extent that we do now. Rather quickly, however, I discovered that my expectations of the Google alert were rather naïve: the vast majority of the material on Talmud that Google dredged up for me in daily emails could best be described as anti-Semitic drivel. Continue reading

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Around the Web, English

A Synopsis of the Entire Talmud

Few texts present philologists with as many difficulties as the Babylonian Talmud, whose complicated transmission history – oral and written, spanning centuries and continents – has created countless conundrums that we are only now beginning to understand. At the same time, scholars dispute the proper way to understand the development of the text of the Bavli, meaning that opinions vary with regards to the proper way in which one should explain a difference in the Talmudic text: Is this event a consequence of fluidity during an early stage of oral transmission, or is it perhaps a later interpolation of a learned scribe? Such differences between textual witnesses of the Bavli are countless, and the different scholarly attempts to approach them are related to different ways of understanding how the Talmud developed over time. Thus, the close study of thousands of differences between manuscript versions of the Bavli not only helps explain the sugya at hand, but also sheds light on the development of the Bavli itself. Continue reading

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Guest Posts

The ‘Status of The Talmud’ on Sefaria

Like many Jewish text geeks, I’ve been following the goings-on at Sefaria closely. Beyond providing free versions and translations of oodles of Jewish texts, Sefaria has made them available through a stunning, extremely accessible platform that allows for an expansion of the community of learners and an enrichment of the dialogue within that community. I’ve asked Sefaria’s Ari Elias-Bachrach to share his recent report on the status of the Talmud on Sefaria and to invite our readers to share what they would most like to see on the website. – Y.L.

Sefaria is a non-profit organization that is creating a massive library of interconnected Torah texts. It is all free and all in the public domain. To do this we’ve done a number of things including importing text from other open source projects on the web like WikiSource, and digitizing public domain sefarim and putting them on the web. One of the things we’re working on is building a Talmud that gives a better learning experience than anything that comes before it. Our goal is to have the standard Talmud text with not just Rashi and Tosafot, but also other major commentators all in the same place. Additionally, citations from things like the masorat hashas and ein mishpat will be linked so you can see the relevant halachot automatically.

Our Talmud text comes from WikiSouce, and we’ve been correcting it to ensure it matches the text of the Vilna shas. We realized that given the number of mefarshim we plan on having, an amud was simply too large a unit of measure to reasonably use. When we did the Tanach it was comparatively simple – the commentators usually comment on specific verses, so any given verses just needs to link to those commentaries. However, a single amud might contain 100 comments from Rashi Tosafot, the Rosh, and the other major commentators. Without breaking up the amud into smaller units, there’s no way to know which subset of those 100 commentaries to display. When you click on a pasuk in the Torah, you see all the commentaries on that pasuk in Torah. We wanted something similar here – when you click on a sentence in the Talmud, we wanted to display the relevant commentaries on that sentence. The conclusion was clear – we needed a way to break up the dapim. Thankfully Koren Publishers graciously allowed us to use their punctuation to break up the amud. Each line of the amud now corresponds to a grammatical phrase (not a line of the Vilna printing). We undertook a massive project to segment all of shas in this manner, and finished in the fall of 2014. In the process we also double checked the text we had from WikiSource to make sure it matched the Vilna shas. (As a side note, we found a significant number of errors in the WikiSource Talmud in both the Talmud text and the Rashi and Tosafot. These errors have unfortunately propagated to many sites across the web, and in many cases it is clear we’re the first people to actually check the text for accuracy).

Next up of course is the commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot. Now that the Talmud was segmented, we needed to make sure to associate each comment with the appropriate line. One of our wonderful volunteer developers Noah Santacruz made a commentary poster – a program that looks at the dibur hamatchil and tries to place the comment in the right place. Unfortunately, it cannot place every comment based solely on that information, as sometimes the text of the dibur hamatchil will appear multiple times in a daf, or it might not match at all if there are roshei teivot in use, or the commentator decides to abbreviate the text in some other fashion. To fix those, we’ve had people going through manually learning the appropriate masechtot and placing the commentaries where they belong. At the same time they’ve also been checking the contents of the comments against the Vilna shas to make sure our text is accurate. So far we’ve finished Brachot, Megillah, and Taanit. Kiddushin and Ketubot are in progress. Those of you doing Daf Yomi will be happy to know we’ll be keeping the Ketubot progress in front of the Daf Yomi cycle, so you don’t have to worry. This is still an ongoing process and while we’re looking for ways to improve our automation, we’re also looking for volunteers. If you, your chevruta, or your school group is learning Talmud and wants to help out the cause of Talmud learning on the internet, you could help by placing the missing commentaries in the right place as you learn. If you’re interested please let us know and we’ll help to get you started.

Throughout this process we’ve been checking the text of the Talmud and the commentaries. We’ve found a significant number of mistakes and typos, most of which have been copied over and over again by countless websites. One of the advantages to our system is that we’re able to spot and correct these errors quickly and easily. Sefaria currently has the most accurate Talmud text freely available on the internet today (using the Vilna shas as the standard), and when we’re done we will have the most accurate copies of Rashi and Tosafot too.

After Rashi and Tosafot of course come the other major commentaries. We’ve recently finished digitizing the Rosh and the Nosei Keilim there. We’re currently working on digitizing Maharsha, Maharal, Maharsham, the Rif, and the Nosei Keilim on the Rif. We’ve also acquired digitized versions of the Pnei Yehoshua, Yad Ramah, Ramban, Shita Mekubetzet, Rashba, and Tosafot Rid. So far we’ve done Shita Mekubetzet on Brachot. While getting these into our system is difficult for the same reasons as Rashi and Tosafot, you can expect to start seeing all these commentaries appearing on Sefaria starting in a few months.

Lastly, we’re also working on a few other features that should be helpful to people including an integrated dictionary with data from Jastrow and the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, as well as a way of integrating the Mesorat Hashas and Ein Mishpat Ner Mitzvah. We’re also going to put in links to the Mishnah whenever the Gemarah quotes a Mishnah so that you can easily navigate to the Mishnah to see the various Mishnah commentaries we have. Currently that includes Ovadia M’Bartenura and the Tosafot Yom Tov, but we should be adding the Rambam this summer.

What other features would you find useful? One of the advantages to our system is that while extracting text is much more difficult than just putting images online, it also gives us a lot more flexibility and allows for the building of some features which may not have been possible before.

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English, Events

How Open is ‘Open’?

For those of you who couldn’t make it to last night’s event– we’re sorry, but we unfortunately failed to to take Germany-USA into account when reserving the space a few weeks back. I would like to summarize some of the topics and projects that were discussed for the benefit of the larger Talmud Blog community and also to help developers and digital humanists at large understand the problems facing talmudists.

After an extremely helpful introduction on what the term “open” means by the apostle of digital humanities in the Holy Land, Sinai Rusinek, yours truly attempted to briefly summarize the main stages of rabbinic text curatorship and which websites talmudists use while performing such “manuscript work.” One of the issues I raised is the simple inconvenience of having to keep track of what is out there: the internet is a big place, and the number of websites containing either images or transcriptions of manuscripts is constantly growing. Between the National Library’s online catalog, which links to every available online image of Hebrew manuscripts, and The Talmud Blog‘s “Toolbox,” one can get to all of these different resources, but it is unfortunate that there is not more of an attempt to centralize all of these different projects under one roof.

The conversation quickly turned to the question of what questions we can ask using our computers, and three different subfields quickly emerged. The first two dealt with working with manuscripts:

A) How can we use computers to help us edit rabbinic texts? This question was addressed via two parallel projects, one led by Hayim Lapin and another by Daniel Stoekl ben Ezra, both of whom began editing the text of the Mishnah ahead of English and French translations and are now working together. Different issues that arose under this topic were how to crowd-source such relatively mundane tasks as transcribing manuscripts and tagging lemma, using Hebrew in TEI, and to what extent should scholars make their synopsi or databases of manuscripts available to the public. For example, many of the transcriptions currently available online are presented as PDFs, but others may want to access them in different formats so that they can more easily (and legally, where those issues arise) use them in making their own editions or to ask other questions of the text.

File:Karl Lachmann - Imagines philologorum.jpg

Karl Lachmann (1793-1851)

B) Can computers help us ask questions with regards to what one participant termed “fundamental issues of how the Bavli was formed and transmitted?” Time and again, and especially now that the Cairo Genizah corpus is more readily available, a certain brand of philological work of the Bavli has problematized the notion that we can use Lachmannian stemmatics to try and understand the relationship between manuscripts. How can we use computers simply to keep track, quantify, and characterize the various differences between talmudic manuscripts? As mentioned, these questions pertain not just to how to “edit” the talmudic text- what the text can be- but also to the very question of what the talmudic text is.

C) Manuscripts aside, what other questions can we ask of rabbinic texts using computers? The questions that came up for the most part dealt with the Bavli, harkening back to some issues discussed here on the blog. Itay Marienberg-Milikwosky of Ben Gurion University’s Department of Hebrew Literature described some of the projects he has started working on in a Franco Moretti inspired lab for digital humanities at Ben Gurion. One of the projects he is working on is trying to restructure how we think of the sugya. Given that the term itself is somewhat foreign to the Bavli and is largely a construct of later interpreters, Itay has been using word-frequency statistics and other quantitative computations to map the Bavli differently, taking special note of how- and perhaps even why- the Bavli repeats itself (“חזרתיות” in his words). You can be assured that Shai and I will be pressuring Itay to guest-post on his findings.

Additional themes that arose related to the relationship between the academic talmudist and the programming or non-academic other. In terms of the latter, how much can projects such as Sefaria (presented by Ephraim Damboritz) and Sefer haAggadah (presented by Amit Assis) benefit from academic talmud? In terms of the former- how and where should talmudists be working with programmers? On the one hand, some talmudist participants were adamant about not studying programming and insisting on working alongside programmers instead. At the other end of the spectrum were those eager to create programming boot camps for talmudists and other humanities scholars. In between were the newbies who got lost after the ‘m’ of XML. Either way, it was clear that talk of “open resources” brings together scholars who are themselves rather open to new ways of thinking about their research.

Next Steps

I would like to see a couple of things come from this evening. First of all, it is clear that a growing number of talmudists are excited by the possibilities that digital humanities opens open up before them, and that many of them already have some idea of how they would like to use moderately sophisticated programs in their own research. I think it would be great if we could use The Talmud Blog– perhaps in the comments section here, through guest posts and maybe even by adding a forum- to create some kind of clearing space for ideas and projects.  Such a space is needed to connect people who may have similar projects in mind, to generate discussions about what we can do with digital humanities, and to address the more philosophical questions of how humanities scholarship is changing before our eyes in this digital age. Let us know what you think!

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English, Events

The Talmud Blog Live- A. Becker and I. Rosen-Zvi

Live from Jerusalem: Professors Adam Becker and Ishay Rosen-Zvi on the Evil Inclination in Syriac Literature and its Implications for the Bavli!

We’ll be starting at 7:30 PM Jerusalem time (12:30 in New York). For those of you joining us virtually, Adam’s source sheet is available here and the original Syriac texts can be found here. The Google Hangout can be accessed here. And below you’ll be able find the video stream on YouTube. Questions can be asked either over Google Hangout or in the comments section.

 

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English, Interviews

An Interview with Shamma Friedman

Today, May 6th 2014, Prof. Shamma Friedman of the Jewish Theological Seminary and Bar-Ilan University will be awarded the Israel Prize in Talmud, the most prestigious prize that the field has to offer. Over the course of my undergraduate studies at Hebrew University, I had the great fortune to work for Prof. Friedman as a research assistant. Earlier this week I visited him at his office at Machon Schechter to conduct this interview, and to continue work on his new website. 

Friedman’s office is a place of pilgrimage for students, scholars, and just about anyone interested in the academic study of Talmud.  I have been amazed by the amount of time Friedman generously gives to all who seek his counsel, whether they be established scholars like Prof. Haym Soloveitchik, administrators from the seminary like Chancellor Arnold Eisen, an interested layman, or a young yeshiva student bitten by the academic Talmud bug. Friedman seems happy to speak to anyone with whom he can share his excitement for Talmud.

Several months ago, before receiving the call from MK Shai Peron, Friedman was in and out the hospital with a health issue. He had an amazingly quick recovery, and managed to read countless articles and books while home-bound. On his first day back in the office at Schechter, he was accompanied by his wife, Rachel, who was concerned for his wellbeing. Rachel informed me that the doctors had told her husband that he could return to his normal schedule. They may have thought otherwise had they known that a “normal schedule” for the 77-year old Shamma Friedman means being at his office six days a week, standing at his shtender in front of his computer screen for hours on end. Amidst countless shelves and piles of books, with classical music from “Kol Yisrael” playing in the background, Friedman only breaks to speak to visitors and to teach his weekly class. His insatiable curiosity drives him to read yet another line of Talmud, to check another manuscript of the Aruch, to run another search in the Lieberman Talmud Text Databank — his face lighting up with every new discovery. Given the centrality for Friedman of his “home away from home,” it is fitting, as Rachel insisted, that part of the photo-shoot for the Israel Prize be done at the office. And it never occurred to me that I could interview him anywhere else.

YL: Prof. Friedman, for more than forty years now the focus of your research has been the Bavli. How did that happen? Your first book and PhD dealt with the medieval commentator R. Yehonatan of Lunel.

SF: I have been asked questions like this recently in one form or another and I don’t really have a good answer, or at least not an exciting answer. I never sat down and decided what I have to do, or what I want to do, weighed the possibilities and came to a decision. Actually, in most of the academic decisions I made over a long period of time I was really quite passive. Things just happened. Strangely passive in retrospect, especially given that one might say wait a minute, these are important things! A certain amount of siyata deshmaya, min hashmayim, yad hagoral, mazal, or whatever, played much more of a role than my making a clear, objective and weighted decision at any point.

I did not know that I was doing a PhD until I was told that I was doing one. I did not know what my research would be until I was told. “Told” in the sense of “helped.” I did not know what I would work on in my PhD until it happened. Before you ask me how I got to the Bavli, you should go back and ask me the simple question — why did I go to the Seminary?

YL: Why did you go to the Seminary?

SF: Well, definitely not because I wanted to work in the pulpit rabbinate. What I wanted to do was to learn and study in these fields and the Seminary was an excellent place to do it. I didn’t fight the fact that if you go to the Seminary, you came out as a communal rabbi, but that definitely was not what I was after. I was after the studying itself — I enjoyed it, I was attracted by it. And during the course of my time there the Seminary came to the decision that they would create what was then called the “Talmud program”: a concentration in Talmud study that freed you from other types of coursework, most certainly practical rabbinics, as well as other things too. It was mainly, Talmud, Tanakh and history — that was about it. More of a graduate program in that sense. And behind the Seminary’s decision to found that program — you see, they’re the one making the decisions — was a realization that the Seminary needed to train the future generation of faculty. At that point, just about the entire faculty was European-trained — where will the others come from? They established a PhD program, there was a modest stipend, we had a meeting in the sukkah in which Lieberman announced this program, and to me it was very good — I was happy to go along.

And so, that decision was made for me.  Lieberman assigned to me Peirush R. Yehonatan of Lunel to Bava Qamma, and he assigned me to Dimitrovsky, who was also my teacher at that time and who was a wonderful guide. My head was completely in editing R. Yehonatan’s commentary for four years. I didn’t think about what I was going to do afterwards. I never made a calculated step to move into an academic career either. That was also a decision that was made for me when I was appointed to teach at the seminary, and I’ve been there since. A type of inertia. So after I got my head out of four years of R. Yehonatan, I came across certain things that I read agav orha, along the way. Somebody shared some offprints with me and I read Hayim Klein, I read Heschel’s Torah min haShamayim, I eventually got to Avraham Weiss. Especially by reading Hayim Klein — that’s where the change in my thinking took place. I started to see the daf of gemara differently. I was also taken by Louis Jacobs’ concept of the Bavli’s literary conceit, and Avraham Weiss’ work on literary forms such as the sugya, memra, kovetz.

Klein293

Friedman on H. Klein, from haIsha Rabbah, pg. 293.

YL: Weiss also talks about the development of the sugya and of the Bavli, what he calls “shikhlul.” Did that have an impact on you at all?

SF: Yes, on the deep level, Weiss had the idea of intervention, or editing of texts — I think you put your finger on the right thing — that’s an idea that’s also quite clear in Klein, and not necessarily part of the regnant line of thinking of the time, according to which “yesh masoret, ki yesh masoret lifnei khen,” and a certain belief in non-intervention. Weiss did show that there actually is quite a lot of intervention going on in the Bavli.

But even after reading Klein and Weiss I didn’t sit down and say, “I’m going to work on sugyot or the structure of sugyot.” That’s something that really came out of teaching. I decided to teach the tenth chapter of  Yevamot, haIsha Rabbah, because I was interested in a specific sugya there, in the idea of “beit din matnin la’aqor davar min haTorah.” It’s somewhat ironic to me that I was first led by an idea and not by a text, given that I often terrorize my students by telling them not to go by svarot, and that first we deal with the text and then we deal with the svarot. I wasn’t really satisfied with how we finished up studying the perek, particularly the first sugya,so I decided I’d teach the perek again the next year. And then I figured out what happened there in the first sugya, and I said, “I’m going to write an article on this sugya.” However, by the time I got to the second sugya, the same thing happened, and I said that I would write an article on the second sugya as well. I didn’t think “now I’m starting Talmud haIgud,” yet when I got to the third sugya I did realize that I would have to write on the entire perek. From that emerged the concept of the genre of writing consecutive studies of parshanaut, commentary, of Bavli.  And, well, hitgalgel davar li-tokh davar.

mavoisharabbah

The first page of Friedman’s commentary on haIsha Rabbah.

YL: What about nusach, real manuscript work, which isn’t really there in your commentary on haIsha Rabbah, but features heavily in your work after that. How did you end up writing such detailed work on Bavli manuscripts?

SF: Did I study textual theory? Did I even decide that this was what I was going to do? Absolutely not. All I was doing was teaching haSokher et haOmanim — which after I published haIsha Rabbah, became the target for really doing-up a perek — to a group here in Jerusalem. One of the people who welcomed me when I came on Aliyah, and who was interested in the scholarly work I was doing — and don’t forget that it was 1973, so a lot of these things weren’t out there yet — was Shaul Stampfer. Shaul actually got me to talk to a little group about what I was doing. And then Shaul said, “okay let’s set up a shiur.” He had an excellent core group who today are excellent professors in various fields — Chaim Milikowsky, Baruch Schwartz, Peretz Segal, Shaul, at some point David Golinkin. The group ran undisturbed for five years in which we studied haSocher et haOmanim and haSokher et haPoalim — fifty sugyot, and then I had to decide: do I see myself as a person that writes, or do I see myself as a person who primarily teaches? And I wanted to write it, I had all these ideas that came up and I wanted to write. So I told the group that I no longer had the time to continue preparing new material.

About that time I had a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies, which was actually the institute’s first year, which was located in the Truman building up on the Mt. Scopus campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The central scholars were Lieberman and Scholem, and each of them, in addition to having a double office, was allowed to bring on two younger scholars, so Lieberman brought me and Danny Sperber. It was rather odd that they put us up on Mt. Scopus in the Truman building. We were supposed to spend the whole day there, but there were no books there, and of course, no internet. So there was a research assistant who would go to the National Library and bring us whatever we would want. The assistant was Yehoshua Schwartz, now a professor at Bar-Ilan. I didn’t ask to be in this group, and I said that it was purely min hashamayim,and I didn’t ask to have a research assistant, so I said “what do I with a research assistant?” I told Yeshoshua to get me copies of all the manuscripts of haSokher. So he photographed all of them, and I was able by then to incorporate the girsaot into what I was doing, and it hit me one day, and I still have that piece of paper, it hit me that the Florence and Munich manuscripts in that chapter are a team, that they represent a tradition — a little later it would turn out that there was a counter-tradition, represented by Genizah-Hamburg — but when I saw that they have a tendency to go together, I wrote on top of the piece of paper, that I still have, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” whom always appear together in Hamlet. I’m telling you this just to show how devoid I was of all of the talk of stemma, and so forth. It’s just that ha-dvarim histadru li-neged einai. I was an observer, hayiti mashqif min ha-tsad, min ha-hutz. I looked at it, and I saw things.

All the other areas that I worked on — language, tannaim, and the other studies — were by and large offshoots of the consecutive treatment of texts of Bavli, of sugyot, which led me to the great value of this method, in contrast to picking specific topics. The discipline of consecutive text, which I began with, leads you to things you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to. If you’re looking at things with a hard look, you don’t walk around them, you’re forced to address them, and ultimately, that can lead to interesting investigations.

So with the correct fact that you began with, that the Bavli is the very central center piece of what I’m trying to do, my hand is at the same time in all these kinds of offshoots, like language. For instance, Matthew Morgenstern bases a lot on my work in articles like “Shayarei kitvei-yad.” Here’s what he writes in his recent book on Jewish Babylonian Aramaic [Studies in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, pp. 33-35 — Y.L.]:

The most significant publication of the early 1980s was a seminal article by Friedman, “Early Manuscripts,” which has unfortunately escaped the attention of many Aramaists. While undertaking a study of early manuscript sources for the Babylonian Talmud tractate Bava Mezia, Friedman reconstructed from fragments found in several libraries the remains of a substantial Geniza manuscript, which contained virtually all of the sixth chapter of the tractate, as well as parts of the seventh chapter…The significance of this manuscript lies not only in the fact that it contains an early version of the textual tradition…, but also that its language is of a type that until then was known primarily from Geonic manuscripts. Friedman effectively demonstrated that many of the characteristics associated with the best Geonic sources (plene orthography, phonetic spellings) also appear in early Talmudic manuscripts. Hence the manuscript’s textual status (early eastern) rather than its genre/provenance (Geonic) determines the nature of the language (p. 24).

YL: Interestingly, Lieberman did not actually write that much about the Bavli, even if he taught it at the Seminary.  How did he perceive of your work on the Bavli?

SF: I have some fantastic material on that, but since they were so personal, I never really promulgated it. In a letter that he sent me he makes a general statement that the methodology I use is correct:

בעה”י אור ליום ה’ לסדר זכור אשר עשה לך עמלק תשל”ה
שמא יקירי, רק היום הספקתי לקרוא את מאמרך “קידושין במלוה” ועלי לאמר שהיתה לי הפתעה מאד נעימה.
הנך צודק כמעט בכל דבריך, ושיטת הניתוח היא אמיתית ומדעית עד לאחת.
לרגלי עבודתי אין בידי לעמוד על כל סוגיא וסוגיא ולקיים בה הדמין תתעבד, ובאים תלמידיי וממלאים את החסרון.
תתברך מן השמים ליישר כחך לאורייתא
באהבה
שאול ליברמן

 

With the help of God, Thursday of the week of “Remember what Amalek did unto thee” 5735
My dear Shamma,
Only today did I have time to read your article “Qiddushin bi-Malveh” and I must say that I was most pleasantly surprised. You are correct in almost everything that you wrote, and the method of analysis is both accurate and scientific to the utmost point. Due to the intensity of my current work, I cannot address each and every sugya and fulfill ye shall be cut into pieces [see Daniel 2:5 — Y.L.], and my students come and fill in the gaps. You should be blessed from the heavens and may your strength be directed towards the Torah.
With love,
Saul Lieberman

 

sl letter 1

From Prof. Shamma Friedman’s personal collection.

I later found out that he always uses the word “kimat,” when I saw that he also used it in a letter to Sperber that Sperber published. The article he’s referring to in the letter to me was a very early article — “Qidushin bi-Malveh” [published in Sinai 76 — Y.L.], in which I even disagreed with something that Lieberman wrote in his Tosefta, and I said that “וכבר לימדונו רבותינו כמה פעמים, שאין לדיין אלא מה שעיניו רואות” — which is something that Lieberman always said. Lieberman certainly would have known that that was essentially a “nitilat rishut”, and he was extremely positive about that article.

And there’s a passage in Tosefta ki-Pshuta in Bava Batra where he refers to me as his “talmid muvhak.” Why is he quoting me? I once asked him a question while I was working on haMafkid — does the word “nifkad” ever appear in the Yerushalmi? I had to ask Lieberman because I had already reached my conclusion, but I didn’t have a concordance for the Yerushalmi, so therefore I had to ask him. He liked the question, and he said “no,” and then when he touched that point while doing Tosefta Bava Batra he quoted me as making that point.

tkbb

Saul Lieberman, Tosefta ki-Pshuta, Bava Batra , pg. 382.

YL: You mentioned that there is a difference between your commentary to the tenth chapter of Yevamot and your commentary on haSokher et haOmanim in terms of the work with textual versions. Has anything changed in your methodology over the years?

SF: As you know, the major evolution occurred mostly towards the beginning of my career while working on haIsha Rabbah, and that that came out of teaching. Already in the introduction to haIsha Rabbah, which I wrote while I was already working on Bava Metsia, I say that in the work on Bava Metsia I will give a full representation of the sugya. I don’t give the full text in Yevamot, and the use of girsaot is only agav orha to see the best way to say a word — it’s not heker hanusah. I should also note that when I started working on Yevamot I really had something else in mind. The original topic was to be the structure of sugyot and structural patterns within the Bavli, and it was the experience of trying to understand the sugya that switched me from dealing with structural patterns to parshanut, because I became more fascinated with understanding the languages or the texts of the Bavli, which of course created all sorts of problems.

I think that the reader of haSokher has the sense that the commentary is too long — it goes into too many things. In my language, it’s “too perfectionist.” I thought that we could write a Tosefta ki-Pshuta kind of commentary on the Bavli, even if the obvious differences are clear: the Bavli is different from the Tosefta, and the writer is different from Lieberman. For both of these reasons it could maybe be on one perek or on several, but not more. The nature of what Lieberman does on just every line is just so overwhelming, and that sort of became a pattern of what I strived for.

One of the things that most impressed me while working for Friedman is his curiosity, which, combined with his thoroughness, can be somewhat of nightmare for a research assistant. Friedman must see the German original of a hard-to-find article by Gustaf Dalman; he must then get a copy of the pages from the work of another Lutheran Orientalist referenced by Dalman, only to then send his research assistant back to the library to locate that author’s doctorate. “What you photocopied for me really whet my appetite.”

All of this is on display in his footnotes. Friedman writes for someone like himself. Someone who would want to see the full quote both in its official English translation and in the original German along with a brief biographical sketch of the scholar at hand, and someone who, even though he may well have much of the material on the shelves of his personal library, would prefer not to be mivatel Torah for the few minutes it would take to retrieve the volumes, because hamelakha merubah

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An example of Friedman’s footnotes: footnote 17 in his article “On the Origin of Textual Variants in the Babylonian Talmud”.

YL: Besides the editing of the text and style of commentary — what else has changed, even since haSokher?

SF:  Earlier I was talking about separation with the aim of scrutinizing the memrot, and not so much scrutinizing the stamma. The switch that took place more recently with my article Al Titmah” [published in the volume of essays Malekhet Makhshevet and in Friedman’s Sugyot — Y.L.] is that I began to look at the stamma as a fantastic corpus within itself, and therefore the stamma doesn’t simply have to be shaved off in order to get to the memra.

Another shift was a much a greater emphasis on the tannaitic world, and this also came about over the course of sugya by sugya work in haSokher — particularly in the ninth sugya, nefah umasui [in the Commentary, pp. 223-238 — Y.L.]. In that sugya, unless you put together the Tosefta, Baraiyta, and Mishnah, you can’t understand what’s happening in the Bavli or in the sugya, and that reflected itself in the whole subject of Mishnah and Tosefta. That’s one of the formative parts of my thinking, and it’s so complex that I’ve never really repeated it in any of my more methodological studies — I usually just said in two or three words, “see there.” But this was really formative, the Mishnah and Tosefta thing. Also the toseftan Baraiytot study in the Dimitrovsky volume came out of the sugya by sugya work.

An additional aspect of the adding of more emphasis on the tannaitic side will be seen in my commentary to the ninth perek of Gittin. In haSokher there’s a strange thing — the Mishnah doesn’t even appear! I deal with the sugya, and I refer people to the Mishnah, but I didn’t deal with it myself. In Gittin, I don’t deal with every Mishnah, but in many cases there’s a special unit for the Mishnah because there are things to say about it that I can’t simply say to the reader, “learn the Mishnah and come back here and we’ll do the sugya.”

YL: How about the attempt to recover the original memrot — has anything changed in that regard?

SF: I’m reading a book about physics now. It’s really a fascinating book, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, it’s by someone named Zvi Schreiber, and it’s called Fizz, and it’s about a girl named Fizz who time travels and visits all of the great physicists from Aristotle,  Copernicus  and so on. The type of thing that happened to me happens in the History of Science:  once you find something or understand something, and based on your understanding that you’ve picked up, you can kind of do an about-face and change the basis that the understanding was based on. What it means in this case is like this: there are memrot, there is stam hatalmud, each one is very clear; you can see the memrot in their literary form, we have parallels in the Yerushalmi; you know the language and we know what the stam hagemara says and how it talks and how it fills in space betweenn memrot. I say this in “Al Titmah”: having gotten to a sense of the style and touch of stam hatalmud, we now confront things that look like memrot but sound like stam hatalmud. I find a sufficient number of cases like this, including that very interesting case in Ketubot about 32b-33b on which I had a long discussion with Robert Brody [Sugyot, pp. 105-109 — Y.L.]. I’ve been seeing a lot of this in Gittin, and that will come through in the volume. The mahloqet of Abaye and Rava about “al mnat shelo tokhli basar hazir” [b. Gittin 84 — Y.L.] — I can’t see Abaye! It has the scholastic feel and the rhetoric of stam hatalmud, and therefore I conclude that it is stam hatalmud using Abaye. While I was writing “Al Titmah,” I didn’t realize how this was such a central part of my thinking.

The stam hatalmud uses Rav Papa’s and Abaye and Rava just like it used R. Yohanan to display Palestinian material. This will be a “pizmon hozer” in the Gittin volume, and it comes up a lot in my volume “מונח מונח רביעה” which discusses four munahim, each one taking up a reva of the book.

These methodologies of the study of the Bavli of the recent decades are sort of a “torat hasod” that’s known only by the inner circle, and people in related fields are often using methodologies that are a hundred years old when they get to the Bavli. To be sure, there are people like Menahem Kister, a talmudist whose work in recent years has focused on adjacent areas of scholarship, that have sophistication in all the fields, as can be seen in his fantastic recent article on Metatron [Tarbiz 82 — Y.L.]. But people farther out, in different fields, never had a chance to get these insights, and therefore you can overturn a lot of what they say. One of the frustrations that I have in talking about these two books of mine, Gittin and Minuah, is that they really represent my thinking of the last ten years, which is not even available to the inner circle! I use an article of mine on magic that is due to come out soon in English as a way of introducing the uninitiated into the methodology, and there’s a great example of how separating the layers and really understanding the sugya helps us make sense of the theological issues. Essentially, the nature of magic is generalized from stam hatalmud, whereas there’s a basic mahloqet amoraim about whether it’s real or not [the article has since appeared in Rabbinic Traditions between Palestine and Babylonia– Y.L.].

In 1973, after having already been an assistant professor at JTS for six years, Friedman and his family moved to Israel. From then and until 1990 Friedman directed the Seminary’s Jerusalem campus at Neve Shechter.

YL: Why did you and Rachel decide to move to Israel?

SF: We wanted to, we loved Israel, we loved the language, we had been thinking about doing so for many years. In 70’-71’ I spent a sabbatical here and the kids were already in schools and had friends. The trick wasn’t coming, the trick was doing so and still staying within the Seminary. That was a trick that I had enough hutzpah to try. Most of the things I’ve done with scholarship take a lot of hutzpah, but I assure you that it’s a lot of naïve hutzpah. In those days people were frozen into non-action because of Lieberman. You couldn’t operate in the field when there was something like that. I didn’t see myself as competing with Lieberman or something like that. In the talk that I gave over at his shloshim I told the story that Lieberman used to call on people to read and he would say “read now…” And then there was a pause in which he would think of who to call on and everybody was terrorized. Everyone would look down and avoid eye-contact, and I used to look him straight in the eyes. I don’t know how I had the hutzpah to do something like that. It was a pause of many long seconds that I used to look him straight in the eyes, and he wouldn’t call on me, because he knew that I wasn’t afraid to read. But the same thing went with my writing. I wrote that article disagreeing with Lieberman in Sinai, and it took a lot of hutzpah.

People tend to discuss Friedman’s work alongside that of another Israel Prize Laureate, Prof. David Weiss-Halivni, in that around the same time, both began to publish scholarship that broke up the sugya into different parts with emphasis given to an anonymous redactional layer. While multiple differences between their approaches have been noted, one of the stark differences in their output is that Friedman has not published a theory of how the Bavli came into being, whereas Halivni has.

YL: According to Rav Sherira Gaon, Rav got to Bavel in around 219. Then what happened?

SF: several people have dealt recently with the ambivalence of the Rambam to the Geonim and how behind his apparent admiration for them he doesn’t simply accept all of what they said. Haym Soloveitchik explained to us that the mindset of the Arabic speaking Geonim was somewhat of a shift from the Talmudic thinking, and certainly there are parts of Geonic writings that have a simplistic way of explaining the gemara and tend to explain things literally. Isaiah Gafni has already written on this in regards to Rav Sherira. So, Sherira Gaon says that Rav brought the Mishnah from Eretz Yisrael — it’s a little too simple. I have not worked on this issue per se, but it’s too clean and absolute of a kind of thing. One thing that I have touched upon is the concept of mishnat bavel and mishnat eretz yisrael, which Y.N. Epstein formulated in his lecture at the opening of Hebrew University in the twenties. I think mishnat eretz yisrael is quite clear, but you can’t really find mishnat bavel and therefore it’s one of these absolutes that must be dismantled. But as per your question, how exactly did the Bavli come into being from the first generation of amoraim — I don’t have a lecture on that. I guess I have some ideas, but, per se, I’m working on the memrot, and not on the translation to the historical examination.

YL: If I may, it seems like you see yourself more as a commentator than as someone who would write an historical introduction.

SF: Right, of course. Well, I have big introductions to everything, but they’re methodological. I’m interested in methodology. But my hero is the Rashbam — omek hapshat, pshatot ha-mithadshim bi-kol yom. If you bore down far enough you’ll get to the real pshat, or as close to the real pshat as you’re going to get.

YL: Who are you favorite Rishonim or Ahronim, or who are the ones that you commonly use?

SF: Well look, with Rishonim, I’m so involved with Rashi and Rambam. I’ve written a lot about that and I think that when the Rambam went up to yeshiva shel ma’alah, he went and visited Rashi right away. I have another unpublished Rambam article that I’m working on, and I have a lot of notes where I quote Isadore Twersky in about seven or eight places in which he says in very simple language: the Rambam was not a modest person. He actually says that –the great Twerksy! Of course, he says it nicely.

What I’m often impressed with is the tremendous genius of Rashi, combined with his modesty. I still am fantastically excited by reading Rashi. We must allow our eyes to sparkle a little more when reading Rashi. Avraham Grossman shows you how to do that in the certain issues that he has dealt with — Rashi’s attitude towards women, for example, as well as other things. But there’s a tremendous amount in Rashi.

In terms of Ahronim: you know that ani lo ish Ahronim — but I have picked up from what Lieberman said and I think it’s quite correct. There are certain Ahronim or certain schools of them that have the roots of the critical philological approach — in contrast to others with other approaches — and one of them is the Ohr Sameach.

YL: How do you see academic Talmud and your own scholarship fitting into the larger history of Jewish learning?

SF: You know the story about somebody that comes to some gadol, rosh yeshiva, somewhere in Jerusalem, and sees that Lieberman’s Tosefta is there. So he says, don’t people ask you why do you have Lieberman’s Tosefta? So he says: look, people who don’t know what it is, don’t ask me, and people who do know what it is, certainly don’t ask me! We find tremendous excitement in Wissenchaft, in madaei hayahudut, in Lieberman and Epstein. It’s so exciting that your first sense is that if you show it to people then everybody will want to use it! Look, that’s true to a certain extent, but we have to be realistic — and in terms of sociology, there’s too much ideology in certain sectors not to look at these things. We won’t get to the vort. It won’t happen in our time — but the scene is so variegated that it will reach a lot. I mean on the dati scene, take places like Ma’ale Gilboa or other yeshivot, where they are incorporating our work.

YL: Do you see academic Talmudists actively trying to make it into the larger world of Talmud study?

SF: It has definitely come up in some recent thinking of Talmud haIgud– –this idea of communicating the exciting aspects of philology and other research methodologies to people who learn in the more regular way, the way that it used to be in the earlier decades. We don’t say that this is the Igud’s goals. We’re going to have Talmud haIgud — I don’t know why exactly. It’s like everything else, because we want to understand the gemara! Because we wanted people to apply our approaches, to analyze sugyot, so that when I learn that perek I can benefit from their scholarship. Let me show you a reaction that I got from someone:

[Talmud HaIgud gives] the serious, open minded Talmud scholar, as not yet aware of the beauty and power of the academic approach, an opportunity to get hooked. How many superlatives can I use to describe the latest addition [=Benovitz]. Amazing! Fantastic! The best part is that he addresses all the issues that bother me and finds great answers. Regarding Wald, here is a very brief assessment. His definitions of the key concepts in Shabbos in the introduction are superb. They go beyond the standard definitions in their scope and relationship to each other. His grasp of the material is especially evident in Sugya 16, Hunting the Chilozon, where his explanation of Peshik Raisha D’Lo Necha leh in the context of this sugya is the best I have seen.

Here’s a quote from someone who reads our work who isn’t from the world of academic Talmud, Dr. Shalom Kelman of Baltimore, a physician and a very competent talmid chacham. He’s very fast — he can dance around me in terms of speed — he introduced himself to me and he’s always full of enthusiasm. And there are many other such people that we reach as well.

The six volumes of Tamud haIgud on Friedman’s shelf.

YL: You insist that you’ve been passive all along, but it definitely does seem like you have a vision.

SF: Yes, now I do! There’s no question about it, and the projects were essentially tools in order to do this — tools that I wanted. I wouldn’t say I made the bibliography for other people to use, but ner li-ehad ner li-meah.

YL: What do you think of where the field is now?

SF: I’m very impressed with the field, people who I consider younger but are really already accomplished professors already. I see myself as part of a generation that was a sort of a bridge generation. Here we had on one side giants — Lieberman — and now we have on the other side people who are very capable, but who are coming from a different world. Reading Kister’s article now is one example, maybe he’s a more outstanding one, but there are really many very capable people that are writing today and in a sense they’re much more disciplined, they have better backgrounds and training, they do the language side carefully, etc. I see so much talent and exciting work that’s coming out of people not yet retired and even from people who are just finishing their doctorates. People who are well versed in all kinds of different fields, which is not easy today considering how much is out there. There are good things happening.

YL: And how about even younger — how do you think that Talmud should be taught in High Schools in Israel?

SF: I don’t know if you know — during the Yom Kippur war I volunteered to teach in LiYadah [Hebrew University’s High School — Y.L.]. That was a time when they were studying Talmud, so all you had to do was be a substitute teacher and teach a little different. Now, I don’t even know how to get it back into the curriculum. I have these little ideas of Talmud education and I’ve discussed this before. What I guess is one of the reasons why Talmud has a bad name that would have to be overcome — this goes back to a talk that I gave at a conference for mamlakhti dati Talmud teachers and principals in the late seventies or something like that, which I mentioned in my Chair talk. I think that if a teacher is strongly intellectually engaged in the material he’s going to communicate, then the way to do it is to prepare himself for his own needs before preparing his lesson. And then I started preparing a list of things that he would need to prepare and they laughed me out, because I was essentially describing how I would prepare for that group that Shaul Stampfer put together that I told you about before. So I gave that sort of recipe of those seven things, structure of the sugya, and the relationship of the component parts, and the influence of the stam hatalmud. What I did in LiYadah was simply the idea of undressing the sugya first and then reattach the stam hatalmud. So I took out the memrot, and the divrei tannaim, and I said okay this is what this says and this is what this says, all of which makes sense. Now let’s see how the Talmud integrated that into discussion, which immediately gives a double way of approaching what the memra says itself and what the stam hatalmud creatively had to do, even though it wasn’t the “pshat,” in order to weave the things together. Now the students are not shocked by the strangeness of the Talmud — are the memrot or beraiytot strange? No. Is what the stam hatalmud wanted to do strange? It’s creative, but it’s not strange. You can begin to understand what someone would like to do, which is quite different from if you teach it monolithically.

As anyone who has visited his office knows, Friedman has collected quite a few books over the years, some of which are placed on rather high shelves. On one occasion, while his arm was in a sling due to a fall, Friedman asked me to return a rather heavy book to a rather high shelf. After climbing up on a chair and lifting up the book, I had to ask him: how did he get the book down in the first place? “The man I am when I want a book isn’t the same man that I am when I need to put a book back.”  The delight in whatever sugya he is learning that gives Prof. Friedman so much energy, as well as pleasure and excitement, continues unabated.

SF: I’ll give you an example from something I’m teaching right now from haHovel. Every sugya I teach I always think “this is the most fantastic sugya.” Some of the things in the Talmud are funny, there’s humor, there’s exciting things, there’s things that make you jump, but there’s different genres within it, and one of them are piskei halakha, as Rashi says, and the piskei halakha that we have here are in the form of a list of arguments that the hovel can make to the nehbal, and all of the answers are all pitgamim. After you break your head on a long and interesting sugya with a complicated mahloqet — don’t skip over the beauty of those last four lines, which although simple, are actually very exciting.

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English, Readings

Haman the Barber- Some Addenda

The section of the Babylonian Esther Midrash quoted by Shai in his post has a parallel in Vayikrah Rabbah and in the Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (Vayikrah Rabbah 28:6 [664-666]):

על ואזא קאמינא ומזג בלנאיא ואסחייה… אזל המן בעי ספרא ולא משכח. על לביתיה אייתא זוגא מביתיה וספריה. מן דספר ליה שארי מתאנח. אמ’ ליה- מה לך מתאנח? אמ’ ליה- לא ווי ליה לההוא גברא מאן עביד קומוס בדין מאן עביד קומוס קלאטור עביד בלנא וספר! אמ’ ליה- לא אנא חכים ליה לאבוך מכפר קרינוס דהוא ספר ובלניי והוא עביד סטוכטון והדין זוגא דיליה?
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Conferences, English

A Conference on “Aggadic Midrash in the Communities of the Genizah”

Along with fellow students in Hebrew University’s Program for the Study of Late Antiquity, I set out to Haifa University early yesterday morning in order to attend a conference organized by an inter-university research group on “Physical Culture and Textual Culture in the History of the Land of Israel.” One of the day’s highlights was that I happened to sit next to Haifa University’s Dr. Moshe Lavee, who asked that I share the following information about an exciting conference that he is organizing, to take place at HaifaU next week:
The newly founded center for Genizah Research at the University of Haifa will hold the second conference of the research group on “Aggadic Midrash in the Communities of the Genizah” on Wednesday and Thursday next week, 15-16/1/2014 . The conference will present the fruits of the group, as well as lectures by scholars who deal with the subject and adjacent topics such as the relationship between Piyyut and Midrash, the question of oral homilies and sermons, the representation of Midrash in Judeo Arabic materials, and more.
The first day will also include an event marking the recent publication of Uri Ehrlich’s edition of the Amidah prayer according to Genizah fragments . On the second day there will be a special session on the use of new computational tools for classifying and analysing material from the Genizah from Qumran.

agada-heb

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