(David Stern) The Anthology in Jewish Literature (BookFi) PDF

The Anthology in
Jewish Literature
David Stern,
Editor
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Anthology in Jewish Literature
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The Anthology in
Jewish Literature
Edited by
David Stern
1 2004
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The anthology in Jewish literature / edited by David Stern.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: Ancient Israel and classical Judaism, Anthology in the Torah and the question of Deuteronomy / Jeffrey
Tigay—Wisdom and the anthological temper / James Kugel—Order, sequence, and selection: the Mishnah’s
anthological choices / Yaakov Elman—Anthological dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud / Eliezer Segal—
Anthology and polysemy in classical midrash / David Stern—The Middle Ages. The prayerbook (siddur) as an
anthology of Judaism / Joseph Tabory—Yalqut Shimoni and the medieval midrashic anthology / Jacob Elbaum—
The Hebrew narrative in the Middle Ages / Eli Yassif—Midrash rabbah and the medieval collector mentality /
Marc Bregman—The modern period. Homo anthologicus: Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the anthological genre /
Zipora Kagan—Sefer haaggadah: creating a classic anthology / Mark Kiel—The ingathering of traditions: Zionism’s
anthology project / Israel Bartal—Gender and the anthological tradition in modern Yiddish poetry / Kathryn
Hellerstein—Our poetry is like an orange grove: anthologies of Hebrew poetry in Eretz-Yisrael / Hannan Hever—
Anthologizing the vernacular: collections of Yiddish literature in English translation / Jeffrey Shandler—
Textualizing the tales of the People of the Book: folk narrative anthologies and national identity in modern Israel /
Galit Hasan-Rokem—The Holocaust according to its anthologists / David Roskies.
ISBN 0-19-513751-5
1. Jewish literature—History and criticism. 2. Anthologies. 3. Rabbinical
literature—History and criticism. 4. Judaism—Literary collections—History. 5.
Jews—Literary collections—History. I. Stern, David, 1949–
PN842 .A58 2004

808.8'98924—dc22. 2003061137
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Acknowledgments
his book began as a workshop entitled, “The Anthological Ontology in Hebrew

TLiterature,” held in May 1995 under the auspices of the Porter Institute of Tel
Aviv University and with the special encouragement of its director at the time,
Ziva ben Porat. Some of the papers from that workshop along with numerous
others appeared as three special issues of the journal Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish
Literary History (17:1 [January 1997], 17:2 [May 1997], and 19:1 [January 1999]). I
especially want to thank Alan Mintz and David Roskies, the editors of Prooftexts,
for lending the journal’s support and resources to the topic. A special acknowl-
edgment of gratitude goes to Cynthia Read, our editor at Oxford, for both her
support and her patience; to Robert Milks and Theo Calderara for overseeing a
complicated process of publication; and to Patricia Wright for her extremely dis-
cerning eye for detail. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude that even an anthology
of thanks could not convey to Kathryn Hellerstein, my beloved, and to our chil-
dren, Rebecca and Jonah, for their constant inspiration and for allowing me oc-
casionally to use the computer.
Contents
Contributors ix
1. The Anthology in Jewish Literature: An Introduction 3
David Stern
I. ANCIENT ISRAEL AND CLASSICAL JUDAISM

2. Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 15
Jeffrey H. Tigay
3. Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 32
James Kugel
4. Order, Sequence, and Selection: The Mishnah’s Anthological
Choices 53
Yaakov Elman
5. Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud 81
Eliezer Segal
6. Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 108
David Stern
II. THE MIDDLE AGES

7. The Prayerbook (Siddur) as an Anthology of Judaism 143
Joseph Tabory
8. Yalqut Shimoni and the Medieval Midrashic Anthology 159
Jacob Elbaum
9. The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages 176
Eli Yassif
10. Midrash Rabbah and the Medieval Collector Mentality 196
Marc Bregman
vii
viii Contents
III. THE MODERN PERIOD

11. Homo Anthologicus: Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the Anthological
Genre 211
Zipora Kagan
12. Sefer Haaggadah: Creating a Classic Anthology 226
Mark W. Kiel
13. The Ingathering of Traditions: Zionism’s Anthology Projects 244
Israel Bartal
14. Gender and the Anthological Tradition in Modern Yiddish Poetry 259
Kathryn Hellerstein
15. “Our Poetry Is Like an Orange Grove”: Anthologies of Hebrew Poetry
in Eretz Yisrael 281
Hannan Hever
16. Anthologizing the Vernacular: Collections of Yiddish Literature in
English Translation 304
Jeffrey Shandler
17. Textualizing the Tales of the People of the Book: Folk Narrative
Anthologies and National Identity in Modern Israel 324
Galit Hasan-Rokem
18. The Holocaust According to Its Anthologists 335
David G. Roskies
Contributors
Israel Bartal is Avraham Harman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Hebrew Uni-
versity of Jerusalem.
Marc Bregman is Professor of Rabbinic Literature, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute
of Religion, Jerusalem, Israel.
Jacob Elbaum is Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Yaakov Elman is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies in the Bernard Revel Graduate
School, Yeshiva University.
James Kugel is Meisler Professor of Bible at Bar Ilan University.
Galit Hasan-Rokem is Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.
Kathryn Hellerstein is Ruth Meltzer Senior Lecturer in Yiddish Language and Literature
and Jewish Studies at the University of Pennslyvania.
Hannan Hever is Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Zipora Kagan is Professor of Hebrew Literature Emeritus at Haifa University.
Mark W. Kiel is Rabbi at Congregation Bnai Israel in Emerson, New Jersey.
David G. Roskies is Sol and Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature at The Jewish
Theological Seminary.
Eliezer Segal is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada.
Jeffrey Shandler is an assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers

University.
ix
x Contributors
David Stern is Ruth Meltzer Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature at the University of
Pennslyvania.
Joseph Tabory is a professor in the Talmud Department of Bar Ilan, incumbent of the
Zoltan and Lya Gaspar Chair for Talmudic Studies.
Jeffrey H. Tigay is A. M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Eli Yassif is professor of Hebrew Literature at Tel-Aviv University.

The Anthology in Jewish Literature
1
david stern
The Anthology in Jewish

Literature
An Introduction
rom the Talmud to the latest collection of contemporary American Jewish

Fwriters in your local bookstore window, the anthology has been a pervasive,
ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature throughout its history. The anthology may
also be its oldest literary genre—if, that is, one accepts the documentary hypoth-
esis, according to which the Pentateuch is a collection from different literary
sources. Even if one does not accept the thesis, it is clear that many biblical books
either are themselves collections, such as the books of Psalms or Proverbs, or tend
to exhibit what might be called the “anthological habit”—that is, the tendency of
gathering together discrete, sometimes conflicting retellings of stories or traditions
(e.g., the two versions of the creation of woman, or analogous lists of unrelated
commandments and miscellaneous laws) and preserving them side by side as
though there were no difference, conflict, or ambiguity between them.
Eventually, of course, this tendency assumes its full shape in the many explicit
anthologies, or anthology-like works, that populate later Jewish literature. Among
these are almost all the canonical texts of the rabbinic period, including the Mish-
nah and the Tosefta, the classical midrash collections, the Palestinian and Baby-
lonian Talmuds, and the siddur (prayerbook) and its offshoots, including the Pass-
over Haggadah. Subsequently, in the Middle Ages the anthology continues to hold
its prominent position in the literary spectrum. In addition to the many summae
of the classical rabbinic heritage that are compiled throughout the medieval pe-
riod, the anthology becomes a primary medium for the recording of stories, poems,
and interpretations of classical texts original to the period. Finally, in the modern
age the anthological genre is transformed into a decisive instrument for cultural
retrieval and re-creation, not only in such classic works as Sefer Haaggadah and
Mimekor Yisrael but also in innumerable works of the early Zionist project and in
modern Yiddish literature. No less important, the anthology has played an indis-
pensable role in the creation of significant fields of research in Jewish studies,
including midrash, Hebrew poetry, folklore, and popular culture.
And yet, despite the ubiquity of the anthological presence in Jewish literature
3
4 The Anthology in Jewish Literature
and its centrality to that tradition, the genre has hardly been recognized, let alone
studied or analyzed. As a literary form, the anthology has typically been shrugged
off as the slightest of genres, “a hodgepodge of this and that,” as one well-spoken
scholar in the field has put it. This neglect of the genre is not unique to Jewish
literary studies. In general literary studies, the anthology has hardly been noted,
at least until recently, and even today, when it has become a subject of some
critical discussion, that is almost exclusively for its significance for canon forma-
tion.
This volume hopes to redress this neglect by presenting essays that treat ex-
emplary anthologies in Jewish literature throughout its history and significant mo-
ments in the evolution and development of the genre. Among the works treated
here are many of the classical foundational texts of Jewish literature. Alongside
these canonical works, however, are a number of lesser-known but no less signif-
icant works that equally, and sometimes even more revealingly, show how the
anthology has played a formative role in the history of Jewish literature and culture.
In selecting the primary texts to be treated in these essays under the anthological
rubric, I have more or less kept to the dictionary definition of the term as “a
collection of choice literary extracts,” although one might quibble with the use of
the word “choice,” and I have not limited myself in any way to conventionally
literary—that is, belletristic—sources. Surely one of the more striking signs of the
genre’s significance in Jewish literature is the fact that, at one point or another,
there has been an anthological composition for virtually every discipline and field
in the Jewish intellectual and literary heritage. But as the essays in this volume
demonstrate, the definition of the form is hardly settled; what is called an anthol-
ogy is still open to redefinition. In addition to conventional anthologies, I have
included such works as the Talmud—even though it may resemble an encyclo-
pedia more than an anthology—precisely because it was a collaborative project
that programmatically preserved and systematically collated the traditions of earlier
generations. In fact, for such works as the Talmud, which are generically “prob-
lematic” precisely because they do not fit neatly into any of the familiar literary
genres, the category of the anthology provides an extraordinarily useful heuristic
tool for defining literary identity.
I have not, in any case, allowed the strict definition of the term to delimit or
discourage exploration of the anthology’s generic possibilities. As the essays in this
volume repeatedly show, the Jewish anthology has taken numerous forms and
played many different roles; all in all, it has shown itself to be far richer and more
flexible than anyone might initially suppose. Furthermore, precisely because its
features may appear so antithetical to many of our usual assumptions about literary
form, authorship, and genre formation, the anthology offers a splendid opportunity
to test and expose the boundaries of our conceptions about literature.
Although it is customary in an introduction of this sort for the editor to offer
a kind of summary of the essays that follow, it may be more worthwhile here—
because of the absence of an existing “theory” of the anthology—to offer some
prefatory remarks on significant theoretical issues that are raised by the subject of
the anthology in Jewish literature.1 Of these, there are at least five worth men-
tioning.
An Introduction 5
The first is the anthology’s own literary form. Although this would seem to
be an obvious fact, it is important to acknowledge that not all anthologies collect
and organize their contents identically. One needs to distinguish, for example,
between compilations in which the editor or compiler chooses relatively small
units of preexisting material and then recombines and revises them to create es-
sentially new compositions, and anthologies that consist of larger blocks of material
that the editors have not tampered with but simply combined with other large
blocks, sometimes even with entire works so as to form what are in effect small
libraries.2 (In contrast, the Hebrew Bible, which analogously combines whole
books, is a large library.) This is a useful distinction, but it is not entirely adequate,
since even anthologies that simply present texts “as they really are” (to paraphrase
Ranke) can radically alter and shape their readers’ reception and understanding
of their contents according to how they are placed within the anthological context.
For example, a poem by Bialik juxtaposed with a Rabbinic aggadah will have a
different meaning than when it is juxtaposed with another poem by Tcherni-
chowsky. Unlike beauty, which lies in the eyes of its beholder, the meaning of an
anthologized text always lies in the mind of its compiler. Or to put the same point
in more jargon-laden terms, there is no anthological organization devoid of an
ideological orientation. In the anthology, literary form, organization, even se-
quence, are all ideological subjects.3
A second distinction one might make in regard to literary form is that between
“explicit” and “implicit” anthologies—that is, works that present themselves overtly
as collections of preexisting sources and traditions, like the classical midrashic
collections, and those that don’t, like certain books in the Bible or the Talmud or
some medieval collections of narratives or even a modern work like Louis Ginz-
berg’s Legends of the Jews, a monument of twentieth-century Jewish scholarship
that retells the biblical narrative by reweaving nearly every strand of extrabiblical
lore its author could gather into a single narrative cloth.4 Whether to consider
these last examples under the formal rubric of the anthology is less crucial than
to recognize those elements in them that have been shaped by the collecting-and-
preserving needs of the anthological habit.
The “explicit” anthologies, on the other hand, may profitably be viewed as
forming a kind of continuum along whose trajectory we might characterize dif-
ferent works by the strength of their principle of selection. Accordingly, one might
distinguish between an “archive,” which claims to have no significant principle of
selection except for the wish to preserve material; a “collection,” which is deter-
mined by a clear and acknowledged principle of selection although the sheer
desire for preservation still remains its primary motivation; and an “anthology
proper,” in which a very strong principle of selection regardless of desire for pres-
ervation is the operative criterion of inclusion.
These gradations in anthological “strength” are only a small indication of the
varieties of anthologies, and of the different kinds of choices and decisions that
stand behind the historical genre. But what, then, are the primary principles of
selection that have historically determined the genre? Is it possible to discern
explicit, or even implicit, conventions according to which anthologists have dealt
with their materials? Do these conventions or principles themselves form a tradi-
tion that is in any way continuous? And how has the anthology as a literary genre
changed, and to what extent have those changes been shaped by the gentile, non-
Jewish host cultures in the many lands of the Diaspora in which nearly all Jewish
anthologies were composed until the Zionist renaissance in the modern period?
The study of the anthology as a literary genre leads to the second issue raised
by the genre, namely, the study of the “anthologist” and “editor” or “redactor” as
a literary agent and persona in his own right, and the mechanics of anthologizing.
How have anthologies actually been produced? What have been their composi-
tional and publication histories? What causes and motives have led their authors
to compile them, and how have the editors looked upon what they have done?
How have the processes of their production related to the nature of the material
collected, that is, the politics of anthologizing? Have Jewish anthologies in different
cultural centers and historical periods been influenced by comparable models or
processes in the non-Jewish host culture? In responding to these questions, schol-
arship in other areas of Jewish studies and related fields often proves helpful. For
example, Bible scholarship has long concerned itself with the processes of redac-
tion, and some of it has touched upon questions related to the anthologizing
process.5 In a different vein, contemporary scholarship on Jewish manuscript cul-
ture in the Middle Ages and on the history of the Jewish book in the early age of
printing has demonstrated the often highly creative and formative role that scribes,
correctors, and early printers played not only in silently transmitting Jewish texts
and their traditions as passive agents of intellectual commerce, but in actively
shaping the contents and forms of those texts and traditions and thereby deter-
mining the ways in which they were read and disseminated.6 The editors and
anthologists of Jewish literature were no less creative and formative; indeed, even
such seemingly passive acts as the decision to copy several discrete texts within a
single codex—which may be considered a rudimentary form of the anthology—
may have given shape to a major moment of literary history, as we are just now
beginning to understand. What, then, can we learn from our anthologies about
their often anonymous creators, and what can such knowledge about anthologizers
and editors teach us about Jewish literary culture?
The question of the anthologist/editor brings us to the third issue of interest
raised by the genre of the anthology, namely, its function. Surely the most (and
often the only) discussed aspect of the anthology has been its role as a medium
of canonization, its service in authorizing, sacralizing, and legitimating certain
works and in marginalizing, delegitimating, and anathemizing others. Some of
these canonical questions have been raised by contemporary critics in respect to
modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary anthologies, but outside this specific area the
topic has hardly been treated.7 Even when the subject has been treated, little
attention has been paid to the special valence that the concept of canon possesses
in Jewish tradition and the different natively Jewish ways in which the act of
canonization has historically been exercised in traditional Jewish literature (such
as through the composition of authoritative interpretations and commentaries).
But how has the canonizing process changed as it moved from the classical sacred
tradition to the modern, more secularized realm? How do certain anthologies not
An Introduction 7
only canonize and authorize the traditions they choose to preserve, but become
themselves canonical documents?
The fourth area of theoretical interest is perhaps the most singular Jewish trait
of the anthology: its role in serving as a medium for the transmission, preservation,
and creation of tradition. In his seminal essay “Revelation and Tradition as Reli-
gious Categories in Judaism” (published in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and
Other Essays), Gershom Scholem demonstrated how the commentary genre has
served as a medium for innovation in Jewish religious tradition precisely by pre-
tending merely to present the “original” meaning of earlier, more ancient, and
typically canonical texts when, in fact, the commentary has regularly presented
some of the most radically new ideas in Jewish thought. A similar argument can
be made for the anthology that pretends merely to present, quote, and select
sources from earlier authoritative works. In fact, the very act of selection can be a
powerful instrument for innovation; juxtaposition and recombination of discrete
passages in new contexts and combinations can radically alter their original mean-
ing. This is certainly the case with implicit anthologies—the Talmud is easily the
best example—but it is also true of explicit anthologies in classical, medieval, and
modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature.
In modern Jewish culture, the anthology has also explicitly served an addi-
tional function. This is the fifth and final area of special interest: the anthology’s
role as an agent in the creation, or re-creation, of Jewish culture and community.
Not only has the anthology functioned as a medium for retrieving and re-creating
tradition—the most famous case is Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Sefer Haaggadah—but
it has also served as a figurative, idealized space for imagining new communities
of readers and audiences, for transforming the past into a new entity through
conscious fragmentation, literary montage, and collage. In these works, political
and cultural ideology takes on material form in the shape of the anthology, and
inevitably these examples of the literary form most insistently raise the question of
the relation between ideology and literary production. Whether we are talking
about early Zionist anthologies or more recent attempts to anthologize the Holo-
caust, it is in their writing that the anthology as a genre meets history.
While the seventeen essays in this volume do not cover every aspect of the
anthology in Jewish literature, let alone every anthology, they touch upon most of
the major topics I have just delineated.8 The essays are arranged chronologically
in three sections, devoted to Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism (through Late
Antiquity), the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period.
The five essays in the first section, on anthological compositions in the Bible
and in the classical literature of the Rabbinic period, together constitute a powerful
argument for the anthology as perhaps the single most important literary genre in
early Jewish literature. By making this argument, of course, the authors in this
section are using the term “anthology” broadly. As Jeffrey Tigay suggests in his
essay on Deuteronomy and anthology in the Torah, the anthological dimension
is partly to be found in how we imagine the redactor thought; on the other hand,
Tigay also makes a strong case for viewing anthologization as a compositional
device in putting together even a “single” passage like Moses’ first speech. In his
essay on Proverbs and the wisdom literature, James Kugel follows an analogously
double-pronged approach to what he calls “the anthological temper.” As Kugel
argues, the anthological form of this literature is intrinsically connected to its basic
assumption: that there exists a divine plan behind human reality in all its chaos.
Further, it is understood that even if a sage might never know everything, it is still
possible for him to compile a collection of what he does know, and that is decid-
edly not—as the collections demonstrate—an idle activity.
Kugel’s insight about the cultural value of the anthologizing activity in the
ancient world finds direct application in the three essays devoted to the anthology
during the classical Rabbinic period—Yaakov Elman’s study of the Mishnah, Eli-
ezer Segal’s essay on the Babylonian Talmud, and my own exploration of the
subject in relation to the various midrashic collections. As all three essays acknowl-
edge, the literary works they focus upon are all sui generis—that is, each is difficult
to define independently in ordinary generic terms. To give only the most obvious
example: What is the Mishnah? Is it a law code, study collection, or textbook? Or
a gathering of lecture notes, or a philosophical work? Different scholars have pro-
posed each of these possibilities. By focusing upon its anthological dimension, it
is possible for one to avoid the necessity for a monolithic or single answer to the
question of the Mishnah’s identity; it is also easier to isolate its “ungeneric” features
and thereby to identify its salient features. The same is true of other Rabbinic
texts. Even if in the end it is impossible to arrive at a satisfactory or conclusive
definition for the documents, the anthological approach helps us articulate “how
little these generic categories help us in defining the singularity of a work like the
Mishnah,” as Elman writes. Eliezer Segal comes to an even more radical conclu-
sion in his study of the Babylonian Talmud: the final editors / redactor of the BT
sought to make their text more than an anthology, that is, more than a mere
collection. For Segal, the Talmud challenges our notions of anthology itself, de-
manding an even more dynamic notion of the genre if it is to prove useful in
describing works like the Talmud. Finally, in my own essay on midrash, I use the
anthological genre as an avenue for appreciating both the elementary forms of
midrashic discourse and the nature of the larger collections, but the very nature
of the latter as anthologies also leads me to the conclusion that these were not
commentaries to be studied by ordinary readers but essentially source books for
professionals.
The four essays on the anthology in the Middle Ages begin to show even
more dramatically how the genre is a category of cultural as well as literary sig-
nificance—indeed, how literature and culture are inseparably linked through the
medium of anthology. Thus the prayerbook, in its multiple and variegated designs,
has historically reflected different communal identities, as Joseph Tabory conclu-
sively demonstrates in his article on the literature of liturgy, and its very antholog-
ical dimension points to an inherently communal function. So, too, in his fasci-
nating study of medieval Hebrew story collections, Eli Yassif shows how Eleazar
Halevi’s habits of anthologizing in Sefer Hazikhronot, especially his repetitions of
the same material, seem to reflect an attempt to present a pluralistic account of
the Jewish historical narrative that would appeal to different audiences of readers
and thereby link them. Jacob Elbaum’s investigation of late midrashic collections
An Introduction 9
such as Yalqut Shimoni raises the additional question of the “originality” of an-
thologies. Anthologies are typically conceived as inherently secondary and lacking
in originality, but, as Elbaum shows, it is often impossible to distinguish between
early and late collections of traditional material and to know precisely how the
editors of “late” anthologies like Yalqut Shimoni viewed their work in relation to
that of their predecessors. The real question Elbaum’s essay raises is the role of
the anthologizer or editor: How active is his (or her) intervention in the act of
anthologizing? This question is implicitly advanced in Marc Bregman’s ground-
breaking study of the compilation and publication history of Midrash Rabbah,
which was, as Bregman shows, essentially the creation of a printer who joined a
number of disparate midrashic collections together to make a more marketable
commodity, thereby creating a new community of readers as well. Bregman’s study
transports us out of the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period, but he
also shows how the abiding problematics of the earlier period survive into the later
one.
Fittingly, the final section, devoted to the Modern Period, is also the length-
iest. The first three essays—Zipora Kagan’s study of Berdyczewski and his many
anthologies, Mark Kiel’s treatment of Bialik’s Sefer Haaggadah, and Israel Bartal’s
essay on the Zionist kinnus anthologies—all vividly demonstrate the multiple func-
tions of the anthology in modern Hebrew literature: on the one hand as a primary
medium for the retrieval and transmission of past tradition, and on the other as a
force of cultural consolidation and community building. In all three cases the very
act of anthologizing and anthology making comes to possess a virtually ontological
status. The next two essays in the section—Kathryn Hellerstein’s survey of Ezra
Korman’s anthology of Yiddish women’s poetry against the backdrop of other Yid-
dish poetry anthologies, and Hannan Hever’s treatment of modern Hebrew poetry
anthologies—both demonstrate unequivocally the power of anthologies as can-
onizing labors. Hellerstein’s study connects the act of canonization to the politics
of gender, Hever’s to the politics of Zionism. The final three essays in the section
extend the cultural reach of anthologies in modern Jewish culture in three very
different directions. Jeffrey Shandler shows vividly how anthologies of Yiddish lit-
erature in translation essentially saved and transmitted different visions of Yiddish
culture for English-speaking, primarily American, audiences. Galit Hasan-Rokem’s
study of Dov Noy and the Israel Folklore Archive shows how the act of antholo-
gizing played a formative role in creating both notions of modern Israeli identity
(by, paradoxically, reflecting the diversity of Israeli society) and (perhaps less wit-
tingly) the scholarly discipline of Jewish folklore—and how these two were insep-
arably connected as well. Finally, David Roskies’s treatment of various Holocaust
anthologies offers a compelling demonstration of the abiding power of anthologies
to shape contemporary Jewish culture in its own self-understanding by presenting
and authorizing different ideological visions of the most horrible trauma in Jewish
history and its impact.
If nothing else, this collection of essays should show readers that, to paraphrase
Horatio, there exist more types of anthologies in Jewish literature than you have
ever dreamt of. One of the more famous literary adages of our age proclaims: “The
meaning of a literary work is always another literary work.” The anthology, perhaps
more literally than any other literary work, realizes the truth of this formulation
through its very existence.
Yet the same recognition has also enabled us to appreciate the anthology as
a literary form and to make it such an invaluable key for unlocking the enigmatic
identities of so many classic, foundational Jewish texts. More than being simply a
subject of literary interest and value, the anthology as a form and genre seems to
touch upon essential aspects of the Jewish imagination: its desire always to incor-
porate opposites, to preserve multiplicities of traditions, to incorporate parallel
traditions rather than impose orthodoxy by accepting one version and excluding
the other. These aspects, along with the anonymity and collective nature of the
genre, its fragmentary yet collage-like effect, and above all, its utopian dream to
gather in the dispersed sparks of Jewish literary creativity, all make the subject of
the anthology a uniquely fitting vehicle for broaching new questions about the
meaning and shaping of Jewishness. By reinserting the anthology into the Jewish
literary tradition, it is hoped that this anthology of essays on the Jewish anthology
will stimulate such questions.
Notes
This essay was adapted from Prooftexts 17 (1997):1–7 and Prooftexts 19 (1999):83–86, by
permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
1. While there is as yet no definitive book on the theory of the anthology, see pro
temp Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (Stanford,
Conn.: 2001); cf. The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed.
Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), esp. Barbara A. Shai-
lor, “A Cataloger’s View,” pp. 153–67, and James J. O’Donnell, “Retractations,” pp. 169–73.
The classic work on the medieval anthology remains Richard A. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse,
Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland
(Toronto: 1979), esp. pp. 3–92.
2. On compilations, see Sara Japhet, “The Nature and Distribution of Medieval Com-
pilatory Commentaries in the Light of Rabbi Joseph Kara’s Commentary on the Book of
Job,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought and History, ed. Michael
Fishbane (Albany, N.Y., 1993), pp. 98–130. I want to thank Marc Bregman for calling my
attention to this essay as well as the one in the next note.
3. Lucia Re, “(De)Constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the
Scene of Modern Italian Poetry,” Modern Language Review 87 (1992):585–602.
4. On Ginzberg, see my introduction to the new edition of the Legends of the Jews
(Philadelphia, 2003).
5. See Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay (Philadelphia,
1985), esp. Tigay’s introduction, pp. 1–20; and his essay, “Conflation as a Redactional Tech-
nique,” pp. 53–96.
6. For a good survey of the current state of scholarship in this emerging field of Jewish
scholarship, see the proceedings of the conference “Artefact and Text: The Re-creation of
Jewish Literature in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts,” published as a special issue of the
Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75, no. 3 (autumn 1993), esp.
the essays of Israel M. Ta-Shma, Malachi Beit-Arie, and Stefan C. Reif.
An Introduction 11
7. See, for example, Abraham Novershtem, “Yiddish Poetry in a New Context,” Proof-
texts 8 (1988):355–63; Kathryn Hellerstein, “A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yid-
dish,” in Handbook of Jewish-American Literature: An Analytic Guide to Themes and Sources,
ed. Lewis Fried (New York, 1988), pp. 195–237; “Canon and Gender: Women Poets in Two
Modern Yiddish Anthologies,” Shofar 9 (1991):9–23, reprinted in Women of the Word: Jewish
Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit, 1995), pp. 136–52; and Hellerstein’s
essay in this volume. See also James Kugel’s review essay of T. Carmi’s Penguin Anthology
of Hebrew Verse in Prooftexts 2 (1982):209–26; and David G. Roskies, “The Treasures of
Howe and Greenberg,” Prooftexts 3 (1983):109–14. The reader may also find relevant a
number of the essays in the special issue of Prooftexts 15 (January 1995), “The Role of
Periodicals in the Formation of Modern Jewish Identity,” esp. Alan Mintz’s insightful in-
troduction, “The Many Rather Than the One: On the Critical Study of Jewish Periodicals,”
pp. 1–4.
8. I would like to mention two important essays that appeared in Prooftexts (19, no. 1
[January 1999]) and that, for reasons of space, could not be reprinted here: Marjorie Leh-
man, “The Ein Yaaqov: A Collection of Aggadah in Transition,” and Boaz Huss, “The
Anthological Interpretation: The Emergence of Anthologies of Zohar Commentaries in the
Seventeenth Century.” The reader interested in additional aspects of the Jewish anthology
will find much of significance in both essays.
i
ANCIENT ISRAEL AND

CLASSICAL JUDAISM
2
jeffrey h. tigay
Anthology in the Torah

and the Question of
Deuteronomy
nthologies go back to the oldest stage in Jewish literature.1 The Bible consists
A of twenty-four distinct books according to the Jewish count, and the very term
“Bible,” though singular in English, goes back to the Greek plural ta biblia, “the
books.” The original separateness of the Bible’s components was manifest in the
fact that prior to the adoption of the codex (by Christians in the second and
following centuries and by Jews after the talmudic period) it was, physically, a
group of scrolls rather than a single volume.2 Accordingly, early writers had no
name for the collection as a whole and could use only descriptive phrases such
as “the Law, the Prophets, and the other books” (Prologue to the Greek of Ben
Sira [Ecclesiasticus]) and “the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44).
Several of the names eventually adopted also reflect the Bible’s anthological char-
acter: not only rabbinic haSefarim, “the books” (cf. Daniel 9:2) and Kitvei ha-
Kodesh, “the sacred writings,” but the names used in the Middle Ages even after
the codex was adopted: Esrim ve-arbah or Kaf-dalet, “the twenty-four (books),”
and Tanakh, the acronym for Torah, Neviim uKetuvim, “the Torah, Prophets, and
Writings.” Note as well Bibliothēca, “collection of books,” used by Jerome and
others.3
In this sense the Bible as a whole is what David Stern calls an explicit an-
thology.4 The same is true of certain of its individual books, which explicitly con-
tain the works of different writers, such as Psalms, Proverbs, and Trei Asar, “the
Twelve” (i.e., the Minor Prophets, which were written on a single scroll).5 The
term “anthology” also refers to a collection of the works of a single author. This
sense applies to most of the individual books of the prophets, which consist of the
collected speeches of the prophets whose names they bear.
Other books are implicitly anthological, combining materials from originally
separate sources without explicitly saying so.6 A few prophetic books seem to con-
tain the speeches of two or three different prophets, such as Isaiah, Hosea, Micah,7
and Zechariah. The best-known implicit anthology in the Bible is the Torah, as
15
16 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism
its composition is understood in modern scholarship. In the next section we look

more closely at its composition.
The Torah
The Torah presents a running narrative of Israel’s early history composed of ma-
terials from originally separate sources. Its evolution was a process of composition
followed by conflation. That is, three variant narratives of early Israelite history
(called J, E, and P by scholars) were each created by the combination of originally
separate materials; they are each, in other words, composite. Subsequently, these
three variants were interwoven, or conflated, with each other, and a fourth source
(D) was added, thus creating the Torah essentially as we know it today.
Sources
A typical view would summarize the process of composition more or less as fol-
lows.8 The original literary units underlying the Torah were narratives about the
early Hebrew tribes and their leaders. Such narratives were for the most part cre-
ated, and at first transmitted, orally, some think in poetic form. In the course of
time some of them were gathered into cycles dealing with various individuals (e.g.,
Abraham, Jacob) or other common subjects (e.g., the Egyptian bondage, the Ex-
odus); the cycles were later linked together into lengthier narrative series (such as
the patriarchal period), and, later still, these series were linked into comprehensive
historical epics (such as the history of Israel from the patriarchs through the death
of Moses or the conquest, or later). Apparently from one such epic (what Martin
Noth termed “G,” for gemeinsame Grundlage, the “common basis”) there
branched off separate versions which then in the course of transmission developed
their own unique characteristics in terminology, style, ideology, and content.
These versions are called the Yahwistic, Elohistic, and Priestly sources, or J (from
German Jahwistisch), E, and P, respectively.9 By this stage the narrative was in
prose. Whether G itself was written is debated, but in the view of most critics, J,
E, and P were. By this time certain older written documents had also been in-
corporated into the narratives, such as the book of the Covenant (Exod. 21–23)
and quotations from “the Book of the Wars of YHWH” (Num. 21:14). Other
traditions about early Israelite history were omitted from these written sources.
Some disappeared forever while others survived, either orally or in other written
forms, for centuries and in some cases were picked up in postbiblical literature.
When the old narratives about early Israelite history were gathered into larger
complexes, they were organized by the itineraries and genealogical links of the
patriarchs and the Exodus generation and held together by the theme of the divine
promise to the patriarchs of land, progeny, and protection. This promise was prob-
ably an original part of at least some of the old traditions. In any case, many of
the original narratives had nothing to do with this theme; each had a meaning
and function of its own. Once drawn together, however, these narratives were
transformed into episodes on the way to, or threatening, the fulfillment of the
Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 17
promises. Literary topoi were pressed into service to this end: for example, the
promise was threatened by the repeated barrenness of the patriarchs’ wives, and
the future deliverer, Moses, was endangered and hidden in infancy and saved in
a basket in a river.
The smaller cycles within the larger complex also have their own subthemes.
The biography of Abraham, for example, appears as a story of personal growth
from loyalty to God based on an expected reward to loyalty even when that reward
is threatened. This theme, too, is not present in all the individual narratives, but
it is imparted by the literary frame (note how Genesis 12:1–4 is echoed in 22:1–3)
and the recurrent promises appearing in the narratives.
Redaction
After developing independently for a time, the two main offshoots of G (J and E)
were ultimately conflated into a single running narrative, one serving as the basis
of the new narrative, with selections from the other supplementing it. Later, two
other elements were added to this complex. One was the P source, which was
now spliced into the combined JE much as J and E had been joined. The fourth
element, D, was placed near the end of the account of the desert period because
for the most part it was not a variant account of the earlier history, parallel to J,
E, and P, but dealt with Moses’ last days. The relative order in which P and D
were composed is debated. Most scholars have considered P the latest element,
while a minority regard P as roughly contemporary with or earlier than D and
think that P and D were joined to JE simultaneously. Recently a new approach
has been suggested: the author(s) of the “Holiness Document” (H)—which was
previously thought to be an older source embedded in P—represent a separate
priestly school later than P; it was he / they who edited and rewrote P and blended
it with the other sources, producing the Torah as a whole.10
By the time these documents were to be joined, their texts had become largely
fixed, and the redactors did not have, or at least did not exercise, much freedom
to revise them. Rather than rewrite the sources in their own words, they strove to
incorporate them essentially as they found them, using the documents’ own word-
ing, making only such modifications as were necessary for fitting the various ex-
tracts together, or for other purposes they hoped to achieve with the new version.
Where the two versions extensively duplicated each other, one version would be
dropped, except for significant variants which were maintained alongside the other
version. Depending on the nature of the materials or the redactors’ intentions, the
separate versions of the same episode might be interwoven to present what was
taken as a more complete account of it (e.g., the account of the flood, where the
doublets are presented as different moments in the unfolding sequence of
events),11 or left apart and treated either as separate events (as in the case of the
three stories in which a patriarch presents his wife as his sister) or as a main
account and a partial recapitulation with greater detail (as in the two creation
accounts in Genesis 1–2). The redactors added their own connective and transi-
tional phrases between the passages and often achieved fine artistic effects simply
by skillful arrangement of the material. Somewhere in this lengthy process, ma-

terial deemed objectionable or not suitable for the traditionists’ purposes was omit-
ted, but on the whole they seem to have preserved as much as they could.
This summary is far from encompassing the complete range of opinion on
the subject, but it gives a fair impression of the kinds of processes that most critical
scholars think were involved in the evolution of the Torah. While the role of these
processes in the case of the Torah is hypothetical, inferred from contradictions,
doublets, and other phenomena identified by reading between the lines of the
text, it can be documented, by the comparison of older and younger versions of
many ancient texts that such processes regularly operated in the development of
ancient literature.12
The Redactors’ Thinking

That the redactors who combined the Torah’s source documents preserved so
much of the sources’ original wording and contents, even when doing so caused
inconsistency or redundancy, appears to be due to the status of the sources when
they received them. The comparison of older and younger copies of certain an-
cient texts shows that in the earlier stages of a work’s development, when it was
not yet considered classical or sacred, editors felt free to rewrite almost at will, and
early revisions of a work show very few inconsistencies even when new matter has
been added to them. But once a work acquired sacred or classical status, it became
increasingly difficult for editors to revise it even in order to remove inconsistencies.
The inconsistencies in the Torah are due to the fact its source documents were
combined at a time when they already had a quasi-canonical status, and the com-
pilers did not feel free to do much more than juxtapose or interweave the sources
and add some transitional phrases. Probably they resolved the inconsistencies ex-
egetically in their own minds but did not feel free to add their explanations to the
text.13 Some of the harmonistic interpretations of the Rabbis may well be similar
to those of the editors.
It is hard to be certain exactly what the redactors thought made their sources
almost inviolable even when they were inconsistent with each other. It could have
been the authority of their respective authors. Talmudic and post-talmudic liter-
ature records numerous instances of liturgical texts created by combining the word-
ing proposed by different rabbis because the authorities refused to choose between
the differing views.14 Their thinking seems nicely expressed by a latter-day author-
ity, Rabbi Jacob Emden, who explained how he resolved the disagreement over
which version of Kol Nidrei to recite, the older one, which nullifies vows made
from last year to this, or Rabbenu Tam’s version, which refers to vows made from
this year to the next:
The statements of the ancients of blessed memory, that the wording was formu-
lated with reference to the past, are convincing, and I have no doubt at all about
that. Nevertheless, in deference to the statement of Rabbenu Tam, since it comes
from the mouth of that tzaddik, my custom is to say it in both formulations and
to conflate the wording: “[vows] that we vowed and will vow, swore and will
swear, with which we bound ourselves or will bind ourselves, etc. from last Yom
Kippur [to this and] from this Yom Kippur to [the next], etc.” so as to satisfy both
views.15
But it could also have been the redactors’ belief that elu veelu divrei Elohim
hayyim, “these and those are the words of the living God,” that all of their sources
were divinely revealed and hence were all valid, or at least potentially so. This
phrase, in which the Talmud characterizes conflicting opinions of different sages,16
may be applicable as well to the redactors’ evaluation of their sources.
In either case, the redactors seem to have felt that no one version of the past,
of a law, or of a belief necessarily preserved the whole truth, and where they felt
unable to decide, they preserved what they had received, harmonized inconsisten-
cies as well as they could, and left the rest to posterity. As one nineteenth-century
scholar observed, “It is this way of writing that makes the Bible history so vivid
and interesting,” for no book written by the modern technique of digesting and
rewriting the sources “could have preserved so much of the genuine life of antique
times.”17 By not imposing unity and consistency on the sources, the compilers
preserved the variety and richness of ancient Israelite belief, tradition, law, and
literature.
Deuteronomy
Deuteronomy, on the explicit level, is an anthology of speeches by Moses, con-
nected by brief narrative passages. The speeches are the three main discourses (1:6–
4:40; 5:1–28:68; 29–30) and the poem and blessing of Moses (Ha’azinu in 32 and
Ve-zo’t haBerakhah in 33).18
Deuteronomy is also anthological on the implicit level. First of all, it contains
some material from the non-Deuteronomic sources, JE and P as well as other
sources independent of those, including the two poems just mentioned.19 Further,
even some of the Deuteronomic narrative material seems to come from different
hands within the Deuteronomic “school.”20 But here I wish to raise the question
of whether one may also view Moses’ first two discourses as implicitly anthological,
that is, whether each of them consists of shorter, originally separate speeches.
The Analogy of Prophetic Literature

Before turning to these speeches, it is worth looking more closely at prophetic
literature, which is analogous to Deuteronomy because it, too, consists of speeches.
As was noted, most of the books of the classical prophets are clearly anthological.
They consist of speeches by the prophets, and since most of them were active for
many years (as is indicated in their headings), their books consist of different
speeches uttered on different occasions during their careers (whether they also
include interpolated matter not written by the prophets will not concern us here).
The book of Jeremiah (36:2) says explicitly that God had him dictate to Baruch
Ben Neriah “all the words that I have spoken to you . . . from the time I first spoke
to you in the days of Josiah [the thirteenth year of Josiah, 627 b.c.e., according to
Jer. 1:2] to this day” (in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, 605), and Jeremiah remained
active until after the exile began in 586. Many of his speeches, and those of other
prophets, contain headings, often dated, indicating that they are separate speeches.
Moreover—and this is why the subject is pertinent for present purposes—many
scholars believe that these “speeches” are actually not single speeches, publicly
delivered in their present form, but “literary speeches,”21 collections of shorter
oracles, uttered on different occasions, that have been secondarily gathered to-
gether in the larger entities of which they now form parts.22 The demarcation of
the putatively independent units is based on such criteria as introductory and
concluding formulas, changes of subject, grammatical person or number or literary
genre, different function, abrupt shifts, completeness and independence of
thoughts, and above all, the obliviousness of one unit to another.
This approach is controversial because the testimony of such criteria is not
always unequivocal, and some scholars deny the validity of at least some of them.
We cannot be certain that what we perceive as logically unconnected would have
been perceived the same way in antiquity.23 The approach is especially problem-
atic if one becomes so “programmed a priori to discover small separate units” that
one ignores the units’ present context (regarding it as both chronologically and
qualitatively secondary) and the meaning that it imparts to them, effectively ig-
noring the character of the prophetic book qua book.24 Increasingly, scholars have
shown that the prophecies are arranged in ways that show careful design, being
grouped into complexes that share common subjects or extrinsic similarities (such
as key words) and arranged in esthetic patterns (such as chiasmus) and framed by
similar opening and closing verses, and that have meaning as wholes.25 These
groupings may sometimes be secondary, but after one reads the books over re-
peatedly in light of such studies, it can become increasingly difficult to be sure
that these groupings are secondary.26
On the other hand, ignoring the possibility of original separateness brings its
own dangers, particularly the likelihood of forced interpretations and rationaliza-
tions that can be no less subjective than the criteria used for identifying separate-
ness. Those criteria at least have the heuristic value of focusing attention on each
unit’s potential discreteness and forcing the attentive reader to ask how it fits into
its present context, a question that can stimulate one to discover the design of the
context as a whole. Furthermore, even though separateness may be difficult or
impossible to prove, it is also difficult or impossible to disprove, and as a historical
question it is worth considering the possibility of original separateness and sec-
ondary arrangement as a working hypothesis to see how much clarity it brings to
our understanding of a literary work.
The Units Underlying the Homiletic Speeches

in Deuteronomy
Returning to Deuteronomy,27 we can observe that in some places the homiletic
speeches in 1:6–4:40 (the first discourse) and 5–11 (the nonlegal prologue and
preamble to the second discourse) look as if they have incorporated brief sermons
or teachings, or précis of such, that were originally composed for oral delivery28
and at least some of which were originally separate from each other (whether
composed by the same author or different ones).29 More important, many of the
smaller sections within these speeches have no inherent connection to each other
and are largely oblivious of each other. They could easily be moved elsewhere
without the reader feeling that something is missing from their present context or
that they are extraneous in their new context. Frequently, after a few verses the
text seems to have reached a conclusion and then changes topics, sometimes
without any transition.
All of these phenomena are illustrated by Deuteronomy 4:1–8.30 Note first that
although all of vv. 1–40 are a discrete unit within the first discourse of Deuter-
onomy, both vv. 1 and 5 have introductory formulas (“Hear” in v. 1 and “See” in
v. 5; similarly, introductory formulas appear four times in chaps. 5–11, though they
are presently part of a single discourse: “Hear” in 5:1; 6:4; and 9:1; “See” in 11:26).
Vv. 1–4 read as follows:
And now, O Israel, give heed to [lit. “hear”] the laws and rules that I am in-
structing you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that
the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you. You shall not add anything to
what I command you or take anything away from it, but keep the commandments
of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you. You saw with your own eyes what
the Lord did in the matter of Baal-peor, that the Lord your God wiped out from
among you every person who followed Baal-peor; while you, who held fast to the
Lord your God, are all alive today.
In this paragraph the consequences of the Baal Peor incident demonstrate that
observing the laws, particularly the law prohibiting worship of other gods, is es-
sential so that Israel may live to enter the Promised Land. Then in the next
paragraph (vv. 5–8), the argument that observance is a matter of life and death is
dropped and replaced by the argument that Israel should observe the laws because
they are uniquely just and uniquely effective in securing God’s closeness, hence
following them will demonstrate Israel’s wisdom to the nations.
See, I have imparted to you laws and rules, as the Lord my God has commanded
me, for you to abide by in the land that you are about to enter and occupy.
Observe them faithfully, for that will be proof of your wisdom and discernment
to other peoples, who on hearing of all these laws will say, “Surely, that great
nation is a wise and discerning people.” For what great nation is there that has
a god so close at hand as is the Lord our God whenever we call upon Him? Or
what great nation has laws and rules as perfect as all this Teaching that I set
before you this day?
The two arguments are of very different character. The first, rooted in an experi-
ence in which gentiles lured Israelites to sin (Num. 25), is historical and is focused
on a specific law. The second, unrelated to the first, refers to all the laws. It appeals
to national pride and sounds almost contemporary in its contention that the Torah
is uniquely just and will win Israel the respect of the gentiles, who are portrayed
positively as appreciating justice and prepared to give Israel credit. Logically this
argument has nothing to do with vv. 1–4 or the following verses (9–31) and, if
moved elsewhere, would not be missed. In fact, vv. 5–8 would fit very nicely in
chapter 6, before or after vv. 4–9 or 20–25. Finally, the arguments in 4:1–4 and 5–8
are brief and virtually beg for elaboration, suggesting that they are outlines or précis
of longer speeches.
As in the prophetic books, in Deuteronomy units such as these appear as parts
of larger groups that share common subjects, vocabulary, and themes and are
arranged in esthetic patterns and framed by similar opening and closing verses
(see below). It is these arrangements that may be secondary.
Again, as in the case of the prophetic books, the original separateness of these
units is difficult to prove. They are not overtly contradictory, inconsistent, or char-
acterized by a different worldview, style, or vocabulary the way that J, E, and P
are. If they were originally separate from each other, they may still have come
from one writer or school of writers who shared the same worldview, style, and
vocabulary.31 But the occasion of viewing the Bible through the conceptual prism
of anthologies suggests that we give this theory a try and see how much this
perspective clarifies.
1. Deuteronomy 6:4–25. This passage (beginning with the introductory formula
shema ) is divided by the traditional parashah breaks into four units, (A) vv. 4–9,
(B) 10–15, (C) 16–19, and (D) 20–25. A calls for exclusive love and loyalty toward
YHWH, taking His instructions to heart and teaching them to future generations.
B warns Israel, after they take possession of the Promised Land and its infrastruc-
ture, not to forget YHWH and turn to other gods, lest he wipe Israel out. C warns
not to try the Lord but to do what is right and good in order to thrive and capture
the land from the Canaanites. D calls on people to answer their children’s in-
quiries about the meaning of God’s commandments by telling about the Exodus
and explaining how observing the commandments will bring merit. Although these
four paragraphs share certain themes, they are themes common to much of Deu-
teronomy; they do not bespeak a closer connection between these paragraphs than
between any one of them and many others in the book. The later paragraphs in
the chapter do not build on the earlier ones, and they show no particular awareness
of them. In fact, paragraph B seems to put the cart before the horse: its perspective
is after Israel has already conquered the land, while paragraph C states that loyalty
to YHWH is a precondition for successfully doing so. Furthermore not “try[ing]
YHWH . . . as you did at Massah” in paragraph C refers to an incident when Israel
lacked water (Exod. 17:1–7), a warning that fits oddly after paragraph B, which
refers to the time when Israel will settle in a land full of bounty, including cisterns,
vineyards, and olive trees. Not only could these four paragraphs appear separately
in many other places in the book without seeming out of context or being difficult
to understand, but in view of the incongruities between paragraphs B and C, some
other locations might make those paragraphs easier to understand.
Notwithstanding the seeming disparateness of its components, however, as a
unit 6:4–25 can also be shown to possess a chiastic, symmetrical structure and
certain shared themes well suited to its location in Deuteronomy. Paragraphs A
and D mirror each other in referring to teaching God’s words and instructions to
one’s children; paragraph B refers to God’s providence and C warns against testing
His ability to provide. B’s warning not to forget God can be seen as continuing
A’s exhortation to recite and teach His words constantly. In addition, C and D,
emphasizing the rewards for obedience and the role of the laws in expressing and
inculcating reverence for God, echo the first paragraph of chapter 6, vv. 1–3,
which, depending on the perspective from which it is viewed, can be seen as the
concluding section of the previous masoretic parashah, 5:19–6:3, or as the intro-
duction to the preamble to the laws given in Moab starting in 6:4.32 Deuteronomy
6:4–25 also suits its location following the Decalogue because allusions to the
Decalogue, especially the first commandment, appear throughout the chapter. Vv.
4 and 14 restate the first commandment, “you shall have no other gods beside
Me,” and vv. 12, 21, and 23 echo its introduction, “I the Lord am your God who
brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.” In v. 15 the injunc-
tion against worshiping other gods is backed with a warning about God’s jealousy,
just as we find after the first two commandments. The exhortations to love God
and keep His commandments in vv. 5 and 17 echo the Decalogue’s description
of God as showing kindness to “those who love Me and keep My commandments.”
V. 18 echoes the reward promised for observing the fifth commandment, “that it
may go well with you” (vv. 2–3 also echo both rewards promised in that com-
mandment). In light of these allusions, the exhortations to love God, to remember
Him, to teach children about His words and deeds, and all the other themes of
chapter 6 can be regarded as a sermonic reflection on the first commandment,
explaining what must be done to carry it out. Thus, although the individual units
of 6:4–25 do not relate directly to each other, they all relate in some way to the
Decalogue of the preceding chapter.
2. Deuteronomy 11:1–25. This passage consists of three self-contained argu-
ments for obedience to God’s commandments: (A) vv. 1–9 (which are a natural
continuation of 10:12–22),33 (B) 10–21, and (C) 22–25. Like 6:4–25, they share certain
common Deuteronomic themes34 but have no inherent connection to each other.
In A Moses argues from history that Israel should obey God’s commands because,
having witnessed His punitive acts against Egypt and rebellious Israelites, which
he enumerates, this generation is able to understand better than any future gen-
eration that success, both in conquering the land and in remaining in it, depends
on obedience. In B he argues for obedience on the basis of nature and topography:
the mountainous Promised Land, unlike Egypt, depends on rain, without which
Israel would perish, and God will dispense the rain only if Israel is loyal and
obedient. In C he urges obedience on the strength of a promise: if Israel is loyal
and obedient, God Himself will dislodge the Canaanites for them. These argu-
ments for obedience are independent of each other. A and C refer to military
success while B refers to avoidance of starving. The three paragraphs make distinct
points and none refer to each other or build on each other.
Nevertheless, these three paragraphs share many features and complement
one another. Each calls for “loving the Lord your God” (vv. 1, 13, 22) and “keeping/
obeying the commandment(s) which I command you (this day)” (vv. 1, 8, 13, 22;
the verbs shamar, “keep,” and shama, “obey,” sound alike). The first two para-
graphs share the themes of “the land which you are about to cross into/invade and
occupy” (vv. 8, 10, 11)35 and “enduring long upon the soil which the Lord swore
to your fathers to give to them” (vv. 9, 21). They complement each other in that
the first and third section deal with God’s power as manifested in historical events,
while the second deals with His governance of nature.36 In context, B and C
explain the two conclusions of A (success in conquering the land and in surviving
in it) in reverse order. All three paragraphs fit nicely as a sequel to 10:12–22. In
the latter, having reviewed the Israelites’ history of faithlessness during the wilder-
ness wanderings, Moses summed up God’s demand for loyalty and obedience, the
central theme of Deuteronomy (10:12–22). In 11:1–25 he seeks to persuade Israel
that its future depends on compliance with this demand. He frequently refers to
it, urging Israel “to walk in all His ways,” “to love Him,” “to serve Him with all
your heart and soul,” “to keep/obey all His commandment(s) which I enjoin upon
you this day,” and “to hold fast to Him” (11:1, 8, 13, 22), echoing the same phrases
in 10:12–13 and 20.
3. Deuteronomy 4:1–40. This speech, part of which has already been discussed,
consists of four main sections, each arguing in its own way for obeying God’s laws
and rules: (A) vv. 1–4, (B) 5–8, (C) 9–31, and (D) 32–40. Section A calls for
obedience, prohibits adding to or subtracting from the commandments, and backs
up the prohibition by a reference to the worship of Baal Peor and its disastrous
consequences. B appeals for obedience on the ground that it will earn Israel the
admiration of its neighbors, who will perceive the justice of the laws and the
nearness of God that Israel enjoys because of obeying them. C is a lengthy ar-
gument for obeying the prohibition of idols. It shows that this prohibition is based
on the Exodus and particularly the encounter with God at Horeb, and it backs
up the prohibition with the threat of exile. D argues on the basis of the Exodus
and Horeb experiences that there is no other God but the Lord (YHWH) and that
His laws should therefore be obeyed.
Logically each of these sections is self-contained. They do not refer to each
other or rely on each other for their effectiveness and, in fact, any of them could
be removed without the others losing any of their force. They are very different
in character. A and B are short and skeletal, each appealing for obedience to all
the commandments and briefly stating a reason for it. They read like précis rather
than speeches or even parts of a speech. Unlike the others, B is based not on
history but on the justice and effectiveness of the laws. C is a lengthy argument
for the commandment against worshiping idols and heavenly bodies, based on a
somewhat detailed narrative and warning of the long-range consequences of dis-
obedience. D is an appeal, of intermediate length, to consider history and realize
the truth of monotheism, followed by an appeal to obey all the commandments.
In context these four sections are held together by a frame in which Moses
urges obedience to God’s laws so that Israel may live to occupy the land and
remain in it indefinitely (vv. 1, 40). This message is underscored within the chapter
by a warning that failure to observe the law against idols will lead to banishment
from the land (vv. 23–28). The four units of the chapter have numerous features
in common, both thematic and verbal, which reflect the sermonic, didactic char-
acter of Deuteronomy. In all of them Moses refers to the laws he is teaching or
commanding and to the land Israel is about to enter.37 In three of the units Moses
bases his argument on history. In A he argues that history shows the consequences
of obeying or disobeying the commandments. In C he argues that history justifies
the prohibition of images. In D he argues that history proves that the Lord is the
only true God. Each unit opens with an appeal to the mind: “hear,” “see,” “do
not forget,” and “inquire” (vv. 1, 5, 9, 32). The themes of seeing and hearing—
the senses through which Israel experienced history—are mentioned throughout,38
as are teaching and learning (l-m-d),39 knowing and making known (y-d- ),40 for-
getting,41 wisdom and understanding.42 In each unit Moses lends immediacy to
his words by referring to ha-yom (“today,” “this day,” “as is now the case”).43 B
and D show that Israel and its laws are unparalleled among the nations and the
Lord is unparalleled among the gods.44 C and D refer to the theophany at Horeb
and the Exodus, and both speak of heaven and earth.45
The four units of the chapter are arranged in reverse chronological order,
based on their allusions to the past: A alludes to the recent incident at Peor (v.
3), C to the theophany at Horeb, the Exodus, and the division of nations (vv. 10–14,
19–20), and D to the creation and the patriarchs as well as the Exodus and Horeb
(vv. 32–34, 36–37) (the order within each unit is not chronological).46
Unlike 6:4–25 and 11:1–25, 4:1–40 as a whole doesn’t have many similarities to
the preceding chapters. Its first unit, referring to the Baal Peor incident, does
connect nicely with 3:22, which locates Israel at Peor. But the other events in the
chapter have nothing to do with that incident, and although chapters 1–3 revolve
around the issue of obedience and disobedience, the point of 1–3 is the importance
of obeying God’s orders about conquering the Promised Land, whereas the em-
phasis of 4:1–40—and the rest of Deuteronomy—is obedience to God’s laws as a
way of life in the land, not to ad hoc orders. Hence the transitional “And now”
in 4:1 looks like an editorial link, and despite the many similarities and connections
between these two sections, they may have had separate authors.47
I do not believe that phenomena that lend unity and design to each of the three
sections described are strong enough to argue that the units comprising them were
originally composed to stand with the others as they now do. These phenomena
consist primarily of simple patterns of arrangement (chiasmus, frames, reverse
chronological order) that are not integral to the contents of the units, and common
Deuteronomic themes and formulas. They do not overcome the disjointed im-
pression that these sections make on the reader. For the sake of contrast, consider
how different these sections are from chapters 7, 8, and 9–10. Each of these sec-
tions develops a single theme, and when another theme is introduced, it develops
naturally from the main theme. Chapter 7, for example,48 is concerned with the
conquest. Its first section (vv. 1–6) states the requirement to eradicate the Canaan-
ites and their religious artifacts, and its final section concludes with that theme
(vv. 17–26). Since v. 1 refers to the Canaanites as more numerous than the Isra-
elites, the second section (vv. 7–16) uses this statement as the occasion to warn
Israel against delusions of numerical importance (v. 7) but promises that if Israel
obeys God’s commandments, God will increase its numbers (v. 13). The last sec-
tion urges Israel not to be discouraged by the Canaanites’ numerical superiority
(v. 17), since God will defeat them. The surface unity of the chapter is supported
by the fact that it is based on the covenant documents in Exodus 23:20–33 and 34:
11–16 and that allusions to those documents are found throughout the chapter.49
In view of this contrast between smooth-reading sections such as chapter 7 on
the one hand and more disjointed sections such as 4:1–40, 6:4–25, and 11:1–25, a
plausible case can be made that the latter consist of originally separate units, many
of them sermon précis, brought together by a compiler who arranged them in
their present patterns. If this is indeed the case, it represents another sense in
which Deuteronomy is anthological. Whether the smooth-reading chapters 7, 8,
and 9–10 should also be seen as originally distinct works is a question that will
have to be left to another occasion.
Conclusion
We have seen multifaceted aspects of explicit and implicit anthologies in the Bible,
with special attention to the Torah, and to Deuteronomy in particular.
Anthology is not only a literary phenomenon but an intellectual one as well.
As David Stern has written,
the anthology as a form and genre seems to touch upon essential aspects of the
Jewish imagination: its desire always to incorporate opposites, to preserve multi-
plicities of traditions, to incorporate parallel traditions rather than impose ortho-
doxy by accepting one version and excluding the other.50
The viewpoints of the various books gathered together in the Bible vary widely.
The four main sources of the Torah not only have different views about the details
of Israelite history and law, but—particularly Deuteronomy and the priestly ma-
terials—markedly different ideologies on such matters as God, sacrifice, the Tem-
ple, and holiness.51 Even within the priestly materials, recent scholarship has
shown pronounced differences between H (the Holiness Document) and the rest
of P.52 Similarly, Chronicles covers much the same ground as Samuel and Kings
from the perspective of very different interests and ideology.53 On key issues, such
as eschatology and the relative status of ritual and morality, the classical prophets
see things differently than the Torah and the Former Prophets do.54 Wisdom lit-
erature differs from the Torah and prophecy regarding “the source, the ground,
and the bearers of moral responsibility,”55 while at the same time within wisdom
literature Job and Ecclesiastes see the question of reward and punishment very
differently than Proverbs, and the prose framework of Job has a different approach
to that question than do the poetic sections of the book.
The Bible’s “anthological habit” set the pattern for subsequent Jewish thought
about the Bible, as it did for many other aspects of Judaism, as is manifest in every
chapter of this volume. The midrashic works of talmudic and later times bring
together the teachings and sermons (or précis thereof) of numerous sages, both
named and unnamed, along with the explicit and implicit views of their redac-
tors.56 A more recent case is the Mikraot Gedolot, in which separate commentaries
“of diverse authorship, provenance, dating and exegetical approaches, often mu-
tually incompatible and contradictory . . . coexist within the confines of a single
page, all accommodated within the framework of a single tradition” (N. M.
Sarna).57 Ever since the Second Rabbinic Bible of 1524, no Rabbinic Bible has
ever contained a biblical book accompanied by only one commentary, and differ-
ent editions vie with each other to claim the largest number of commentaries on
their title pages (e.g., 32, 50, and even 120 commentaries).58 As B. Barry Levy has
observed, this practice
is a forceful statement about the multi-dimensional approach to Scripture put
forth by the collective rabbinic tradition and the limitations inherent in approach-
ing the text through the eyes of a single commentator.59
The conviction that “these and those are the words of the living God” has thus
followed both the composition and the interpretation of Scripture throughout his-
tory.
Notes
1. The vast majority of biblical books are anthologies, composed, according to M.
Haran, to preserve the remnants of ancient Israelite literature and with the aim of becoming
“canonical” or “scriptural.” See M. Haran, HaAsupah HaMikrait (The Biblical Collection)
(Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and Magnes Press, 1996), pp. 5, 7, 39–40, 92, 308 (Hebrew).
2. See N. M. Sarna, “The Order of the Books,” in C. Berlin, ed., Studies in Jewish
Bibliography, History and Literature (New York: Ktav, 1971), pp. 407–8.
3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Bible,” etymological section.
4. David Stern, introduction to this book, p. 5. Stern observes, by the way, that “in
the anthology, literary form, organization, even sequence, are all ideological subjects” (p. 3).
Although this is not always the case (the components of an anthology can also be ordered
by mechanical criteria, e.g., chronologically, by length, by similarity of phraseology or
theme, etc.), it is nicely applicable to the differing organizations of the Hebrew Bible in
the Jewish and Christian canons. The order described in b. Baba Bathra 14b ends with
Chronicles, indicating that “for Jews, the canon of Scripture ends with a narration of the
return of the Jewish community to its homeland” (M. Signer, “How the Bible Has Been
Interpreted in Jewish Tradition,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. L. Keck et al. [Nash-
ville: Abingdon, 1994], 1:65; essentially the same effect is achieved by ending with Ezra–
Nehemiah, as in St. Petersburg [Leningrad] Codex b19A and related manuscripts). Christian
Bibles, on the other hand, follow the order of the Septuagint, which places the prophets
last so that they immediately precede the Gospels, thereby reflecting the Christian view
that the primary significance of the “Old Testament” is found in its prophecies of the
Messiah.
5. N. M. Sarna, Ancient Libraries and the Ordering of Biblical Books (Washington,
D.C.: Library of Congress, 1989), pp. 9–10.
6. It is not clear whether and how the various royal chronicles and prophetic writings
cited in Kings and Chronicles were used by the authors of those books. The text does not
identify them as sources but as places where further information is found, but it is con-
ceivable that the writers extracted information from them and perhaps even incorporated
parts of them in their own texts. For a recent discussion see M. Haran, “The Books of the
Chronicles ‘of the Kings of Judah’ and ‘of the Kings of Israel’: What Sort of Books Were
They?” Vetus Testamentum 49 (1999):156–64.
7. The cases of Isaiah and Zechariah are well known and discussed in the standard
biblical introductions and encyclopedias. On Hosea see Y. Kaufmann, Toledot ha Emunah
haYisreelit (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv: Mosad Bialik/Dvir, 1955), 3:93–107, 319 (Eng. trans. by M.
Greenberg, The Religion of Israel [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], pp. 368–
77); H. L. Ginsberg, “Hosea, Book of,” EJ 8:1010–22. On Micah see Ginsberg, The Israelian
Heritage in Judaism (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982),
pp. 25–30.
8. The following several paragraphs are drawn from my “The Evolution of the Pen-
tateuchal Narratives in the Light of the Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic,” pp. 22–25, in
Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. J. Tigay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1985). Interested readers will find fuller documentation there.
9. The names Yahwistic and Elohistic are based on the fact that in the J source the
divine name YHWH is known to humans throughout the patriarchal period, whereas in
the E source it is first revealed to Moses and until then God is called Elohim. The Priestly
source is so called because it includes extensive cultic rules and even its narratives reflect
the concepts and terminology found in those rules. Some scholars think that the priestly
material was not a fully developed source document but rather a redactional strand pro-
duced by a priestly writer or school that edited JE and supplemented it with extensive
priestly lore. For bibliography on, and a refutation of, that view see B. J. Schwartz, “The
Priestly Account of the Theophany and Lawgiving at Sinai,” pp. 103–134 in M. V. Fox et
al., Texts, Temples and Traditions. A Tribute to Menahem Haran (Winona Lake, Ind.:
Eisenbrauns, 1996). It has long been recognized that the priestly materials are also not all
of one cloth. The “Holiness Code,” or H (Lev. 17–26 and some related passages), is generally
thought to constitute a distinctive work; both it and P seem internally composite as well.
The relationship of H and P is debated; see n. 10.
10. I. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). See further H. T. C. Sun, “Holiness Code,” Anchor Bible
Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 3:254–56; J. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16 (New York:
Doubleday, 1991), pp. 1, 13–42.
11. See Tigay, “Conflation as a Redactional Technique,” in Empirical Models, pp. 53–
89 and the comments of M. Greenberg cited there, p. 54.
12. See Tigay, Empirical Models.
13. Cf. Tigay, “Evolution,” in Empirical Models, pp. 44f., and the comments of Green-
berg cited there.
14. Tigay, “Conflation,” in Empirical Models, pp. 84–85. See also D. Sperber, Min-
hagei Yisrael (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1989—), 1:39–45; 2:23–75, 203. Examples in-
clude various blessings, including the different versions of Modim Anahnu Lakh, the dif-
ferent answers to the Four Questions in the Haggadah shel Pesah (that is, the answers of
Samuel and Rab, respectively—namely, Avadim Hayyinu and Mitehfi illah Ovedei Avodah
Zarah, b. Pesahim 116a), and Ahavah Rabbah vs. Ahavat Olam. Not only what is recited,
but physical practices as well are sometimes “anthological,” combining different versions
of what a practice ought to be, sometimes intentionally trying to satisfy multiple opinions;
one well-known example is the practice of wearing two different sets of tefillin, each made
in accordance with a different view of how the texts in them should be arranged. See
further Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy (Devarim) (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1996), p. 241, comment to Deuteronomy. 26:10. As Sperber notes, some
Jewish practices are conflate because they are based on books of customs that are antho-
logical.
15. Sheelat Yaavetz, no. 145, cited by Y. Weingarten, HaMahfi zor HaMeforash, Yom
Kippur, Nusahfi Ashkenaz (Jerusalem: Gefen, 5747 / 1986–87), Introduction, p. 25.
16. B. Eruv. 13b; Git. 6b. See D. Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998), pp. 116–19; A. J. Heschel, Torah Min Hashamayim 3 (New York:
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990), esp. chap. 4. While the issue in Eruvin is
halakhic, that in Gittin deals with the interpretation of a biblical narrative and provides an
instructive example of exegetical harmonization. R. Abiathar (a third-century Palestinian

Amora) and R. Jonathan debated the reason why the Levite’s concubine deserted him (Judg.
19:1–2). The former held that it was because the Levite had become angry at finding a fly
in his food, while the latter held that he had found a hair. R. Abiathar met Elijah and
asked him what God thought of the matter, and Elijah answered that God had quoted both
opinions. When R. Abiathar questioned whether God could have doubts, Elijah answered
that both opinions are the words of the living God and went on to explain (harmonistically)
that the Levite first found a fly but had not become angry, but later found a hair and did.
By indicating that both opinions reflected different moments in the same episode, God had
removed any conflict between them and enabled them to coexist, exactly as redactors do
in arranging conflicting details of the same event (see earlier, text to n. 11, and “Conflation,”
in Empirical Models, p. 76).
17. W. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 3d ed. (New York:
Appleton, 1892), pp. 328–29. For the evidence see Tigay, ed., Empirical Models, chap. 1.
18. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. xii.
19. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. xxiv–xxvi, 494–97, 502–07, 510–13, 518–21, 522–24.
20. Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 504.
21. This phrase is modeled on “literary homily,” a phrase used by J. Heinemann to
describe the final stage in the redaction of homiletic midrashim, as he understood the
process (J. Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash: The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 [1971]:141–50; “The Art of Composition in
Midrash Vayikra Rabbah,” HaSifrut 2 [1971]:808–34).
22. The existence of short oracles does not depend on the now discredited evolutionary
assumption that prophecy originally consisted of short oracles and only later of longer ones.
Short oracles are actually attested, both early and late. See, for example, J. B. Pritchard,
ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3d ed. (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 624, texts e, f, and g (note the contemporaneous longer
prophecies on pp. 623, 625–26); 1 Kings 20:13; 22:11, 17; Jonah 3:4; Josephus, War, 6.301, 304,
309.
23. Cf. M. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (Anchor Bible 22; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1983), pp. 5–6.
24. A. Berlin, Zephaniah (Anchor Bible 25A. New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 17–23
(the quoted phrase is from p. 21).
25. See, for example, Greenberg, Ezekiel, Berlin, Zephaniah, and S. Paul, Amos (Min-
neapolis: Fortress, 1991), 11–15; M. Haran, “Amos, Book of Amos,” Entsyklopedia Mikrait
5, cols. 275–76.
26. The difficulty is nicely expressed in Steven Fraade’s description of a similar prob-
lem in analyzing the composition of midrashic compositions:
Do the apparently disjunctive way in which individual traditions have been com-
bined and the internal incongruities reflect the conscious creativity of the “sto-
ryteller” or rhetor who works such tensions into his narrative so as to hold his
audience in suspense, or the haste of a collector/preserver of traditions who does
not get to ironing out all such “seams”? . . . At what point does relative formal
and thematic unity such as we have witnessed cease to reflect the redactor’s
conscious intent and begin to be simply the text’s effect on the mind of its reader/
listener? Here the line between the relatively objective literary criteria and more
subjective impressions becomes blurred and our task of describing and evaluating
the redactional activity which produced such a midrash meets its limits. For the
more we read and reread this kind of text and it becomes lodged in our minds,
the better its pieces seem to fit together, the more its language seems to echo,
and the more its messages seem to coalesce. The historian must be careful to
recognize the limits of such inquiries into midrashic redaction, distinguishing
always between controlled analysis and intuitive impressions. It is all too easy
when searching for a consistent “mind” behind such a collective text to find it,
but only after having read too much between the lines.
Steven D. Fraade, “Sifre Deuteronomy 26 (ad Deut. 3:23): How Conscious the Composi-
tion?” HUCA 54 (1983):292–93.
27. Much of the following is drawn from the pertinent sections of J. Tigay, Deuter-
onomy, where interested readers can find fuller documentation.
28. Cf. C. Brekelmans, “Wisdom Influence on Deuteronomy,” in D. L. Christiansen,
ed., A Song of Power and the Power of Song (Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbraun’s, 1993), pp. 125–
27.
29. The tannaitic chronological work Seder Olam Rabbah implies that the five main
speeches of Deuteronomy actually consist of several shorter speeches. The Seder Olam says
that Moses expounded (peresh) the entire Torah—that is, delivered the speeches of Deu-
teronomy (ending at 31:14, hen qarevu yameikha lamut, “the time is drawing near for you
to die”)—over a period of 36 days, from 1 Shevat through 6 Adar. See Seder Olam Rabbah
10 (ed. Ratner, p. 41, re: Deut. 1:3). This implies that Deuteronomy contains 36 days’ worth
of speeches, in other words that it consisted of units that were smaller and more numerous
than what is implied by the headings in the book. This view leaves room for the possibility
that the present arrangement is secondary and not in the order in which the speeches were
originally given (ein muqdam umeuhfi ar baTorah).
30. The translation that follows is based on Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1985) (slightly modified).
31. See M. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon,
1972).
32. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 74.
33. Together, 10:12–11:9 are printed in siddurim as Parashat haYir’ah.
34. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 109.
35. Yarash, “occupy,” is also echoed in the third paragraph, where it and its derivative
are rendered “dislodge” and “dispossess” (v. 23), and in the assonant noun tirosh, “wine”
(v. 14).
36. For the juxtaposition of these two themes, see Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. 237–38.
37. Vv. 1, 5, 14, 21, 26, 40.
38. What Israel saw, or did not see, with its own eyes (vv. 3, 9, 12, 15, 34–36); the
impression observance will make in the eyes of the nations (v. 6; see also 5, 19, 28); hearing
(vv. 1, 6, 10, 12, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36).
39. Vv. 1, 5, 10, 14.
40. Vv. 9, 35, 39.
41. Vv. 9, 23, 31.
42. V. 6.
43. Vv. 4, 8, 20, 38–40.
44. Vv. 7–8, 33–34. Both of these units refer to “great” things (vv. 6–8, 32, 38).
45. See vv. 10–12, 26, 32–33, 36, 39.
46. This arrangement contrasts with that in Deuteronomy. 1:6–3:29, which begins with
the departure from Horeb and progresses chronologically up to the encampment at Peor
(see 1:6; 3:29) (N. Lohfink, cited by J. Levenson, “Who Inserted the Book of the Torah?”
HTR 68 [1975]:203, 204).
47. See M. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Univer-
sity, 1981), pp. 13–14, 33–34.
48. Chapters 8 and 9–10 display similar integrity. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. 91–92,
96–97.
49. See A. Rofé, The Belief in Angels in the Bible and in Early Israel (Jerusalem:
Makor, 1979), pp. 289–97; Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, pp. 34,
46.
50. Stern, “Introduction” to The Anthological Imagination in Jewish Literature, Proof-
texts 17, no. 1 (January, 1997):6.
51. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, pp. 179–319; “Theological
Currents in Pentateuchal Literature,” in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish
Research, 1969, 117–39.
52. I. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995).
53. S. Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997).
54. Kaufmann, Toledot 1:23–44 (Eng. trans., The Religion of Israel, pp. 157–66).
55. Kaufmann, Toledot 3:557–87 (Eng. trans. The Religion of Israel, pp. 316–27).
56. The redactional techniques of the midrashim are the subject of lively discussion.
See, for example, Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash”; R. Hammer, “Section 38 of Sifre
Deuteronomy: An Example of the Use of Independent Sources to Create a Literary Unit,”
Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979):165–78; R. Hammer, “Complex Forms of Aggadah
and Their Influence on Content,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research
48 (1981):183–206; Steven D. Fraade, “Sifre Deuteronomy 26 (ad Deut. 3:23): How Con-
scious the Composition?” Hebrew Union College Annual 54 (1983):245–301; J. Neusner,
Judaism and Scripture. The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986).
Deuteronomy has more in common with midrash than its anthological character. Its
argumentation resembles that of midrash in that it builds its arguments on specific premises
much as midrash uses biblical verses as the premises of its arguments. In Deuteronomy the
“texts” that serve as the premises of arguments are not verses of sacred writ but historical
events (such as the Exodus, Horeb, the manna, the Golden Calf and Baal Peor incidents),
the topography of the Promised Land, the justice of God’s laws, and other phenomena;
these play a role analogous to that of biblical verses in midrash. When historical events are
mentioned, for example, they are not narrated in full or for their own sake as they are in
Exodus and Numbers, but in order to prove a sermonic point: the Exodus and Horeb
events are cited to show that the Lord is the only true God and that Israel should therefore
obey His laws and shun idols (4:9–20, 32–40); the journey from Horeb to the Promised
Land is cited to point out that Israel’s faithlessness caused an entire generation to perish
in the wilderness (1:1–46); when the manna is mentioned, it is to show that God controls
nature and can make anything He chooses nourishing, for which reason Israel should always
obey Him (8:1–6). In this way Deuteronomy can be seen as a kind of forerunner of the
homiletic exposition of biblical verses in the midrashim.
57. N. M. Sarna, Studies in Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 2000), pp. 69, 258–59.
58. See Mikraot Gedolot im l″b peirushim (New York: Pardes, 1951); H fi umash q″k
peirushim (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, n.d.); Sefer Keter HaTorah. Ha″Taj″
HaGadol . . . kolel hfi amishim mefarshim . . . , ed. Y. H
fi asid (Jerusalem, 5730/1970).
59. B. Barry Levy, “Rabbinic Bibles, Mikra’ot Gedolot, and Other Great Books,” Tra-
dition 25 (1991):69.
3
james kugel
Wisdom and the

Anthological Temper
here existed in ancient Israel a particular notion, “wisdom,” which uniquely

Tfavored the anthology genre; the biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes
present the clearest examples of the anthological character of wisdom within the
Jewish canon. Indeed, wisdom was an international pursuit, and wisdom anthol-
ogies are found elsewhere as well in the ancient Near East, constituting among
the oldest surviving literary texts from that region.1 Before examining how these
anthologies emerged in Israel, however, it will be necessary to explain what it is
about wisdom that is inherently anthological.
The word “wisdom” (Hebrew hfi okhmah) does not generally designate in the Bible
a person’s capacity for understanding or insight, though it can sometimes be used
in this sense. Principally, however, “wisdom” designates a body of knowledge. So,
for example, the Bible’s assertion that Solomon’s wisdom “was greater than the
wisdom of the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt” (I Kings 5:10 [some
books, 4:30]) does not seek to compare his power of understanding with that of
the sages of other nations, but refers to the greater body of learning that he had
acquired. (For this reason, indeed, the text goes on to specify what that body of
learning consisted of: 3,000 proverbs, 1,005 songs, plus a knowledge of plants,
animals, birds, reptiles, and fish [I Kings 5:12–13].) So similarly, when Qohelet,
the author of Ecclesiastes, speaks of acquiring wisdom, it is clear that he does not
mean increasing his potential for understanding, but coming to possess some ac-
tual body of learning: “I had gotten more and greater wisdom than all who ever
ruled before me over Jerusalem, and my mind had come to know much wisdom
and knowledge” (Eccles. 1:16). Wisdom usually designated things known.
Those things, however, were neither infinite nor random, for in the ancient
world, knowledge was conceived to be an altogether static thing: whatever a person
might come to know belonged to a defined corpus of things; it was this finite body
that “wisdom” designated. This defined corpus of insights was deemed to play a
special role in the world: it underlay all of reality, constituting the great set of
32
Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 33
master plans by which the world—the natural world, of course, but also human
society—was governed. In biblical Israel, as indeed elsewhere in the ancient Near
East, this meant that wisdom had a divine character.2 Wisdom was, in an oft-stated
biblical view, the set of plans with which God had created and continued to run
the world:
By wisdom the Lord founded the earth, by understanding He established the
heavens.
Prov. 3:19
How great are your works, Lord, you made them all with wisdom, the world is
full of your creations.
Ps. 104:24
How great are your works, O Lord, deep indeed are your plans.
One who is a fool cannot know this, nor a boor understand it.
Ps. 92:6–7
God, in other words, had established a set of highly detailed rules by which His
world would be governed: the sun would rise in the east and set in the west,
precious metals would be hidden inside rocks and extracted therefrom with fire,
storks would roost in fir trees, and so on. Such rules as these three were obvious
enough. Other parts of the divine plan, however, were hidden; however finite, the
totality of wisdom, of the divine plan, was somehow beyond the grasp of any
human being.
In alluding to this circumstance, the Bible offers various explanations for it.
One, certainly, was that God had intentionally hidden the rules by which the
world worked, leaving it up to this or that sage to discover individual pieces of the
puzzle:
It is the glory of God to conceal things, and the glory of kings to find them out.
Prov. 25:2
If only God would speak, if only He would open His lips to you, then He would
tell you the secrets of wisdom, [reveal] understanding twice over;
Yea, God would make you forget your suffering!
But can you grasp God’s insights? Can you probe to the Almighty’s limit?
Job 11:5–7
But where does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding?
She [⫽ wisdom, understanding] is hidden from the sight of all the living, and
concealed [even] from the birds of the sky . . .
God [alone] knows the path to her, yea, He knows her place.
Job 28:20–23
On the other hand, how could a mere human being even hope to discover all of
wisdom? After all, the paltriness of human life was a byword among Israel’s sages:
Since his [mankind’s] time is apportioned, numbered by You [God] down to the
months, who have set his portion irrevocably,
Leave him alone, desist, and let him finish out his day like a hired hand.
Job 14:5
The time of our lives is but seventy years, or if mightily [doled out], then eighty,
and most of them [are consumed in] toil and fatigue. . . .
Ps. 90:10
It is only toward the very end of life that human beings can begin to grasp God’s
ways:
Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days.
With [God] are wisdom and might; He has counsel and understanding.
Job 12:12–13
And so, finite though it might be, the corpus of knowledge underlying the world
could hardly be mastered in a single human lifetime.
For we are from yesterday, and [therefore] know nothing, our time on earth is a
fleeting shadow.
Job 8:9
Indeed, sometimes the two motifs—God’s hiding of wisdom, and man’s brevity
on earth—were combined to explain human ignorance:
[God] creates everyone nicely in His time, but He puts something hidden in their
hearts, so that man cannot find out what God has created from beginning to end.
Eccles. 2:11
Given these fundamental circumstances, what indeed could a human being hope
to discover of the great rules governing life on earth?
It is here that wisdom literature comes in. For if human beings could not discover
the whole of the divine plan underlying reality, surely parts of it were indeed given
to discovery. Already mentioned were those elements of the natural world—sunrise
and sunset, the phases of the moon and movements of the stars, plus the ways of
animals and birds and plants—that could be understood through careful obser-
vation. If it is true that observations such as these scarcely had a place as such in
biblical wisdom literature, well, this is in itself an important datum (to which we
shall return). But it is nonetheless the case that such “scientific” matters certainly
formed part of the theoretical corpus of wisdom known to biblical sages, as the
above-mentioned passage detailing Solomon’s wisdom (I Kings 5:10 ff) attests on
one end of the biblical time line. On the other, there is the figure of the biblical
sage Enoch, to whom is attributed, in a section of the relatively late (third century
b.c.e. and later) treatise bearing his name, observations about the length of the
solar year as opposed to the lunar year and other complex astronomical and me-
teorological calculations (I Enoch 72–82). So what we think of as science was

certainly part of the ancient sage’s domain. But it was only part; the other part
had to do with human affairs, with how people behaved with one another and
how God (sometimes in consequence) treated human beings. In the wisdom men-
tality, such matters were, no less than the path of the stars, subject to careful
observation and formulation—and so these too were, from ancient times, set down,
formulated, fixed.
The manner in which such insights were formulated was itself fixed. For while
the “wisdom mentality” infuses all manner of different compositions and genres
within (and outside of) the biblical world—from the biblical narrative of Joseph
to the prophecies of Amos to a good number of biblical psalms—wisdom itself
was typically imparted through one literary form alone, the mashal, or proverb.
A biblical mashal is a brief sentence consisting of two parts, A and B. This
two-part construction is hardly an incidental detail: it is the very genius of the
form, for the relationship between A and B is often quite subtle. A good example
might be a biblical mashal whose subject is, as a matter of fact, meshalim (that is,
the plural of mashal):
A thistle got stuck in a drunkard’s hand, and a proverb [mashal] in the mouth of
a fool.
Prov. 26:9
Drunkards in the Bible are known not particularly for their boisterousness or
meanness or insensitivity to pain, but for their lack of balance: they are often
depicted as “staggering” and falling to the ground (Isa. 19:14, 24:20; Ps. 107:27; Job
12:25, etc.). So, apparently, the drunkard in this proverb: he must have fallen to
the ground and, in groping around, thrust his hand into some sort of thornbush
or briar and so gained possession, as it were, of a thistle or thorn: it got stuck in
his hand. The event described in part B, the proverbist asserts, is of a similar
character: a fool may quote proverbs, but this does not mean that he has purposely
set about learning them, nor that he truly understands, or lives by, their wisdom.
Like the drunkard’s thorn, the fool’s proverb has been acquired quite by accident.
Part B, as is usually the case, is thus the whole point of the mashal here, and part
A, as frequently, is an image or specific case to which B is being compared. But
of course, to say only that is to pass over the little details, the poetry, of the
comparison. Certainly it is important that the fool of part B is being compared to
an utterly senseless drunk in part A, and still more that the proverb mentioned in
part B is implicitly compared to something sharp and prickly in part A—since, in
the biblical world, proverbs were proverbially sharp (Eccles. 12:11, also Deut. 28:
37, I Kings 9:7, etc.).3 The aptness, the associatedness, of likeness and likened in
both cases seems to confirm the truth of the mashal well beyond the matter of
accidental acquisition, which is its overt common term. And so, yes, a proverb in
a fool’s mouth is indeed just like a thistle in a drunkard’s hand—isn’t it obvious
once you think about it?
It is noteworthy that the comparison in this proverb is not formally stated: the
mere juxtaposition of two assertions is sufficient for us to understand that one is
being compared to another. So similarly:
Gold ring in a pig’s snout, a beautiful woman of errant sense.
Prov. 11:22
Here, too, the genius is all in the details—the fact that, in this proverb’s syntax,
we first glimpse the gold ring and only afterward its repugnant setting, so to speak,
is meant precisely to duplicate the onlooker’s experience of glimpsing first the
woman’s beauty and only later that beauty’s unfortunate, larger context. What is
more, the proverb’s assertion that the “beautiful woman of errant sense” is fun-
damentally inappropriate, conjoining two things that don’t, or at least shouldn’t,
go together, does not mean that they are opposite equals. On the contrary, the
woman’s physical beauty ends up being submerged and overwhelmed by some-
thing much bigger, a dirty, sloppy, wallowing: it becomes a small detail, an insig-
nificant little glint of gold quite lost in or dwarfed by her piggish behavior.
Proverbs like these were certainly pondered, studied. I do not mean to imply
that biblical sages were literary critics, or that they would have formulated their
thoughts precisely as I have above; but if a proverb was to be truly understood
(and not simply picked up like a thorn), it had to be savored for its full implica-
tions.
Better is a name than scented oil, and the day of death than the day of one’s
birth.
Eccles. 7:1
Part A seems quite indisputable: one’s name, one’s reputation, is better than any
material possession, better even than the precious oils that, in biblical times, were
scented with rare spices and imported from distant regions at great cost. Valuable
as such oils might be, they could, in the world of biblical wisdom, scarcely match
in value the worth of a person’s own name. Indeed, the truth of part A is only
driven home by the near-perfect chiasmus of its sound, bwj !mXm ~X bwj. But what
about the second half of the proverb: how is the day of death better than the day
of one’s birth? Birth is almost always a happy occasion and death almost always a
sad one; in what sense can the day of one’s death be “better”? More overtly than
most, this mashal is a riddle. Yet a biblical sage would probably say that every
mashal is a riddle in that it needs pondering in order to reveal its full sense.
Here the precious oil mentioned in the first half of the proverb provides the
clue. Such oil was valuable, so valuable that it was usually kept stoppered in little
vials to protect it. In such vials it could survive for some time. Even so, precious
oils could, would, eventually go bad. As Ecclesiastes itself later mentions, “flies of
decay,” tiny fruit flies, can get into the oil and become the proverbial “fly in the
ointment,” causing it suddenly to turn and go bad (Eccles. 10:1). And if it were
not such a fruit fly, then the mere passage of time would eventually do the same
thing; no matter how valuable the oil, sooner or later it would turn, and what was
worth hundreds of dollars one day would be quite worthless the next.
So is it with the human being, or at least the human body. Sooner or later
our physical existence gives out; this does not necessarily happen all at once, but
eventually what had once been vigorous and full of strength begins to deteriorate,
and the way of all flesh leads to the grave. Quite the opposite, says Ecclesiastes,
is a person’s name (by which he means, I think, not only a person’s reputation—
what other people know about him or her—but rather, more abstractly, the sum
total of a person’s accomplishments, what can be said afterward, a kind of con-
densation of everything that he or she has done). A name, in this sense, is not
acquired at birth: the newborn baby quite literally has no name, and even after it
has lived for a time, it has no name in the sage’s sense: that name begins to be
acquired only as the person does things on earth, starts to show the world what
he or she is made of. The more a person lives and does, the more that name
grows and becomes more detailed and specific.
Quite unlike the body, a person’s “name” in this sense is altogether immune
to the inroads of time. A name—in this abstract sense of the sum total of all a
person’s deeds—is immutable, so that eventually that name is all that remains of
our earthly existence; years, centuries after our death, the name—in this abstract
sense—is what we are, what our life has amounted to. For this reason, the prov-
erbist says, the day of a person’s death may be a sad day, but it is indeed better in
the sense that the process of building that name, which only began on the day of
birth, is now at last complete. Just as you concede, says Ecclesiastes, that a good
name is better than precious oil in the sense that the precious oil is bound to go
bad but the name is immune to decay, so you must also admit that the day of
death, although the precious substance of the body has at last gone, is nonetheless
better than the day of birth, for on this day the person’s “name” is now complete
and set for eternity.
Similar sentiments are found in the Book of Proverbs:
In the goodness of the righteous a city rejoices, and when the wicked disappear
there is gladness.
Prov. 11:10
At first one might think that this proverb simply presents a straightforward
contrast: a city rejoices in the life of its righteous citizens and in the death of its
wicked ones. But that is not quite the point: if such had been the Hebrew sage’s
intentions, I think he would have written something more like:
In the lives of the righteous [and not in their “goodness”] the city rejoices, and
when the wicked die [and not “disappear,” which is not precisely a synonym of
death] there is gladness.
The fact that the proverbist avoided this obvious, and rather simple-minded,
bit of parallelism, writing instead goodness and disappear, suggests a different in-
terpretation. As a matter of fact, everyone in this proverb is already dead. The
proverb’s claim is that, even after their deaths, the righteous leave a legacy of
goodness to the world, a goodness (in biblical Hebrew the word can, in fact, mean
“abundance” or “wealth”) from which people will continue to benefit long after-
ward, whereas the wicked, however harmful they may be during their lifetime, do
not merely perish at the end but disappear without a trace: they leave no legacy.
In other words, this proverb’s sentiment is quite the opposite of Marc Antony’s
in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The evil that men do, it says, can scarcely outlive
them: as soon as they die they are powerless to harm us. The good that people
do, on the contrary, lives on after them, so that generations not yet born will reap
the benefits of that good. The city that rejoices, in this proverb, thus stands for all
our fellow human beings: our true achievement is in what we are able to leave
to them, whereas wickedness (which in Proverbs is often a synonym for self-
indulgence or even foolishness) simply spends itself out and leaves nothing.
The mashal form,
, .
A B
was thus the basic building block of wisdom. True wisdom, that is, any true insight
into the great divine plan underlying all of reality, could be, and was, packaged
in this two-part sentence. This form was, in fact, used for many things other than
wisdom: from earliest times all manner of laws, prophecies, songs, and other care-
fully constructed pronouncements had been put into pithy, two-part utterances
like this. It is important, therefore, to distinguish the wisdom mashal from its close
cousins, namely, most of the rest of what has been called the “poetry” of the Bible
(all the more so because the spirit of wisdom truly does inform much of the Book
of Psalms, a good part of the prophets, and even some legal sections of the Bible).
The wisdom mashal is essentially an independent insight, a great general rule about
the way the world works, packaged in a two-part sentence of the type seen here.
It stands on its own, a one-line poem, and invites our contemplation.
Despite their modular form, these individual insights were, from earliest times,
gathered into collections. The reason is not hard to find. As was already men-
tioned, the sage was one who had acquired wisdom—the wisdom set down in
proverbs—and acquiring wisdom meant, quite literally, coming to possess
(whether orally or in writing) a large stock of proverbs.4 So it was altogether natural
that sages themselves would assemble such collections and pass them on to their
pupils. Indeed, here and there within the biblical corpus are clear signs of the
anthologist at work. Sometimes meshalim are organized within an individual book
according to some mechanical principle, like the bwj sayings of Ecclesiastes 7:1–
18, with their recurrent “Better X than Y. . . .” Often individual meshalim are jux-
taposed in the Bible because they deal with the same or related subjects. It is
clear, for example, that chapter 26 of Proverbs methodically deals first with the
subject of fools (vv. 1–12), then that of lazy men (13–16), then that of quarrels:
One who grabs a dog by the ears, a passerby who meddles in a dispute not his
own.5
Like a jester6 who shoots [real] firebrands, arrows, and death, so is one who
cheated his fellow and said, “I was just joking.”
Without wood the fire goes out, and without [third-party] slanderers, the quarrel
is quieted.
Charcoal to embers and wood to fire, a quarrelsome man to a heated dispute.
The words of a slanderer are gulped up fast, but they end up in one’s guts.
Prov. 26:17–22
Such thematic organization notwithstanding, it seems likely that these prov-

erbs originated independently, or at least were composed as individual units rather
than as continuous discourse. Indeed, the anthologist of the just quoted passage
is scarcely bothered by the repetition of images (wood added to fire) or specific
terms (the roots for “slander” and “quarrel”) in it, precisely because each verse is
an independent unit; each can, and probably did, travel on its own before being
anthologized here. So it is no accident, for example, that the last mashal of the
passage appears elsewhere in the same book, Proverbs 18:8. The tendency to bring
together meshalim of similar subject or importance is still more pronounced in
the late wisdom collection of Ben Sira (early second century b.c.e.), which consists
principally of miniature treatises, each made up of individual meshalim dealing
with such subjects as friendship, honoring of parents, or divine providence.
Beyond this phenomenon are passages of what is called biblical “wisdom
literature,” which are only formally meshalim but which in fact present a contin-
uous, developing argument. Even a unit as large as chapters 1–9 of Proverbs, it
has been argued, may be a consciously composed whole, however much it may
here and there appear to be a collection of individual proverbs.7 Whether or not
one accepts this particular argument for chapters 1–9, it is certainly beyond dispute
that, for example, chapter 7 is a narrative, though written in the two-part, mashal
form:
And now a woman meets him, dressed as a harlot, wily of heart.
She is loud and wayward, her feet do not stay at home;
one step outside, then a step to the market, and at every corner she lies in wait.
She seizes him and kisses him, and with impudent face she says. . . .
Prov. 7:10–13
But again, that is just the point: so much was the one-line mashal the vehicle of
wisdom, the accepted form by which wisdom insights were expressed, that this
author, in wishing to dramatize the dangers of a smooth seductress (herself, ap-
parently, representative of “foreign wisdom”), had little choice but to tell his story
in two-part bursts, adopting the familar rhythms of wisdom-speak to narrate his
young hero’s downfall.8 Wisdom meant the mashal.
The anthological character of wisdom in the ancient Near East thus derives di-
rectly from the various considerations just outlined. It begins with the belief that
nothing that happens in the world is random: everything occurs in keeping with
a highly detailed set of (divinely established) rules, divine “wisdom.” No single
human being can hope to discover or master the whole of the divine rule book,
for God has hidden at least part of His plans far beyond human discovery, and,
in any case, human life is much too short to allow a single sage, no matter how
discerning, to understand everything. But parts of the divine plan have been
grasped by sages past, and they have formulated their insights and set them down
for later generations. Their understanding, packaged in individual meshalim, might
best be compared to sets of coordinates on a graph. While the detailed totality of
the graph is beyond human ken, a number of specific insights—forty-seven squares
to the right, five squares up, or again seventeen units to the left, three units down—
had already been established for all time. One who wished to know at least some
wisdom had thus to master these fixed points on the graph, master meshalim, and
in so doing one could gain, in addition to the specific insights, a feel for the
existence of the divine plan in its entirety.
But these meshalim, the encapsulation of divine wisdom, hardly constituted
a single individual’s, or even an individual nation’s, undertaking. Some points on
the wisdom graph, like stars in the stratosphere, had been glimpsed only once, by
this or that sage in a distant land ages past. Charting wisdom was thus inevitably
a collective, international enterprise, and one who wished to acquire wisdom had
willy-nilly to learn from all true sages everywhere. (It is thus scarcely surprising
that Sumerian proverbs were translated into Akkadian,9 or Egyptian ones into He-
brew,10 nor yet that the Hebrew Bible can unashamedly speak, as we have seen,
of the “wisdom of the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt” [I Kings
5:10].) By the same token, one who wished to transmit wisdom to one’s students
would be foolish to limit them to one’s own insights. However much he may have
reformulated old truths in his own idiom, however much the individual sage
weighed and studied and made many proverbs

Eccles. 12:9
his stock-in-trade consisted of the timeless, collective insights of all sages every-
where. By definition, then, any sage was an anthologist, any wisdom book a bou-
quet de pensées gathered from here and there.11
One might think it unlikely, given the anthological character of wisdom literature,
that it would end up possessing a particular character or espousing a particular
point of view: after all, it had been assembled from here and there, formulated by
sages of every nation and ideology. But, of course, any student of anthologizing
knows better. Anthologies are often, and quite consciously, tendentious, the hand
of the anthologizer visible in every act of inclusion or exclusion. And even when
such conscious Tendenz is not apparent, there are the “rules of the game” observed
by all players, sometimes quite unconsciously; in our case, the common back-
ground and training and literary experience of all those who contributed to the
wisdom undertaking could not but make itself felt in what they had to say. It might
thus be appropriate, at this point, to say something about the overall character of
biblical wisdom and, in particular, the ideology that stands behind the Bible’s
wisdom collections.
The first element of that ideology has already been mentioned, the belief in
a great set of divine plans underlying all reality. To those trained to read the Bible
through the lens of later Judaism or Christianity, the idea of such a set of plans
might seem to be pan-biblical: is not God’s control of all of reality everywhere
assumed? It is necessary, therefore, to be precise: it is not merely God’s control of
reality that this ideology postulates (though even that idea is hardly attested uni-
versally in the Bible), but the existence of the great, preestablished pattern. In a
sense, God Himself is subject to that pattern (though He is, of course, frequently
presented as its author), since everything that He does or will do must obey its
general stipulations. This is hardly an assumption shared by every biblical writer.
Indeed, the author of Hannah’s song of celebration in I Samuel 2 seems to glory
in just the opposite notion, that God breaks all the rules:
The bow of the mighty goes slack, but the ones who were weak now triumph.
Those who had plenty are hired out for food, while the formerly hungry are
feasting.
A barren woman gives birth to seven, and she who had many is left alone.
The Lord can kill and bring back to life, send down to Sheol and lift up again.
The Lord can make poor and make rich, humiliate or exalt.
He picks the needy up from the dust, lifts the destitute out of the scrapheap,
Yea, sets them up next to princes, grants them a glorious throne.
I Sam. 2:4–8
Not so in the world of wisdom: here everything is regular, and almost everything
is predictable.
It was remarked earlier that the wisdom included in the Hebrew Bible con-
tains very little of what we would call “science”: the materiae of the natural world
may be alluded to in catalogs such as Job 28, but the setting forth of such learning
is decidedly not the purpose of biblical wisdom literature. This, too, seems to be
an ideological statement: biblical wisdom is not so much out to educate as to
inculcate. Not startling new facts, but timeless old verities, is what the biblical
sage wishes to pass on, and his clever formulations stand in contrast to the obvious
character of what he has to say: tread the straight and narrow, resist all excess, be
good, wait for your reward. That is why inculcating—pounding, grinding, the ideas
in—is what he is all about: his point needs to be driven home again precisely
because it has been heard, and ignored, so often in the past.
It should be observed in this connection what an abstract, spiritual world is
that of biblical wisdom: it is a place of essences and ideal states. The previously
cited Proverbs 11:10 could not be more eloquent in this regard. Shakespeare, who
lived nowhere but on this earth, knew all too well about the power of the wicked
to continue to affect our lives long after their own demise; they rarely just “dis-
appear.” Perhaps the biblical proverbist knew this too. But if so, he chose never-
theless to maintain the opposite, for that is the way things ought to be, that is what
would suit the great divine plan underlying all events.
Indeed, it is this same otherworldly, abstract sense of things that caused wis-
dom writers to divide all of humanity into the two groups mentioned in Proverbs
11:10 (and almost everywhere else in wisdom writings), the “righteous” and the
“wicked”—though “good” and “bad” might be a better translation, providing at
least a feel for how these paired opposites usually function. Anyone who inhabits
terra firma knows full well that few human beings belong entirely to one category
or another; why, then, does wisdom literature insist on assigning all of us to one
of these two groups? It is, I think, because in that severe eternity of spiritual
essences, there really is no room for, no point in, nuance and shadow: the great
choices are made in the depths of the human soul, far from the sunlight. In this
sense, the world of biblical wisdom is very much akin to that of medieval European
painting or medieval and Renaissance allegory: here is no attempt to render re-
alistically the human form or the ordinary events of this world, since that reality
is, in any case, trivial. What counts is what is underneath, the true significance of
ordinary things, and so everything turns into heraldry and symbolism; life happens
in slow motion.
For the same reason, the mentality of biblical wisdom could never be trans-
lated into, for example, ordinary cinema; but animated cartoons—there is a me-
dium suitable for its spirituality. In that domain of primary colors, there are no
shadows, and if the sun is seen at all, it is as a big yellow circle with squiggly rays
shooting out of it. Only such a medium can capture the inside events of the soul,
such as the time when the (wicked) cat, out to trick the (righteous) mouse, quickly
sketches a picture of a tunnel and tacks it up onto a brick wall. Along comes the
mouse on his motorcycle, heads straight for the picture, and drives on through
it—it is a tunnel! Then the cat, in hot pursuit, heads his motorcycle toward the
same spot, but craaash! It is back to being a picture of a tunnel tacked to a brick
wall.
This is wisdom’s world as well, in which the testimony of the senses is by
definition suspect and treacherous, and everything that happens obeys a set of
higher moral laws. Indeed, the human being depicted by orthodox wisdom is not
so much man as little man, that small, sometimes laughable little fellow glimpsed
from above, as if from the divine perspective.12 This is how the poor fool of Prov-
erbs 7 first appears:
For at the window of my house, through my lattice, I looked down.
There, among the foolish ones, I glimpsed amidst the boys a senseless lad,
passing in the street next to her corner, now striding up toward her house.
Prov. 7:6–8
It is from this same perspective that a wisdom-imbued psalmist could assert:
From the heavens the Lord looks out, seeing all of humanity.
From the place of His dwelling He looks down on all of earth’s inhabitants.
He who made the hearts of all of them [likewise] perceives their every deed.
No king will escape through force of arms, no mighty man through power.
The cavalry’s useless for victory, no matter its force, it will not be saved.
But the Lord’s eye is turned to those who fear Him, who trust in His beneficence.
Ps. 33:13–18
Just as little man’s vaunted powers are as nothing before God, so his little plans
are meaningless in the presence of the Great Plan, the underlying “wisdom” that
guides all the world’s affairs. This same psalmist likewise asserts:
The Lord overthrows the nations’ plans, undoes the peoples’ designs.
The Lord’s plan stands forever, the designs of His heart for every age.
Ps. 33:10–11
Similarly:
The Lord knows human designs—that they are a breath [i.e., passing, futile].
Ps. 94:10
A man’s mind may plan his path, but it is the Lord who will determine his steps.
Prov. 16:9
Many are the designs in a man’s mind, but the Lord’s plan—that is what will
stand.
Prov. 19:21
The divine plan is not, however, indifferent to little man, for all his smallness.
On the contrary, what happens in human affairs, no less than the great cataclysms
of nature, is determined by God’s underlying set of rules. So it is that the theme
of reward and punishment is also a crucial one in wisdom literature. As orthodox
wisdom would have it, the righteous will inevitably be rewarded for their goodness,
while the wicked will just as inevitably be punished. Indeed, one might call this—
beyond the very existence of the divine plan—the great theme of wisdom writings:
since the world is fundamentally divided into the righteous and the wicked, there
can be no doubt that their Maker will, in the course of events, apportion to each
group its just deserts.
Here, however, reality intrudes. The author of Ecclesiastes was certainly not
the first to observe that
Sometimes the righteous receive what befits the deeds of the wicked, while the
wicked sometimes receive what befits the deeds of the righteous.13
Eccles. 8:14
Even in the ideal world of wisdom, one could not hide from the fact that boorish
fat cats drive around town in limousines while wellborn professors must take the
bus (Eccles. 10:6–7). So it is that patience is the cardinal virtue of the sage: since
he knows that all happens according to the divine plan, the apparent triumph of
the wicked must be only temporary. In the end, right will win out, so it is necessary
simply to wait. What one waits for is not the world to come or a reward after
death, but something in this world: eventually, right here on earth, the wicked of
each generation will get what is coming to them, and so will the just. Therefore,
patience meant not just waiting for the divine equilibrium to be established, but
waiting patiently:
Better is the end of a thing than its beginning; better is patience than a haughty
spirit.
Eccles. 7:8
Once again, a mashal’s coordinated assertions really stand in the relation of “Just
as A, so B,” or “You agree with A, now therefore admit B.” The wisdom of A here
is indeed undeniable. Anyone would concur that something completed is far better
than something that is merely in the planning stage, its final outcome far from
sure; the difference is that between unarguable fact and laudable intentions. Just
as this is so, says the sage, so patience, a willingness to take the long view, is better
than haughtiness. For if you are not willing to hold off until the thing is completed,
your “I will not allow this to happen” or even “How can this happen to me?” will
always be off the mark, a reaction to something-in-potential rather than something
that really is.
There is only one of Israel’s ancestors who is described as “wise,” and that is
Joseph (Gen. 41:39); not only is he so described, but he does precisely those
things—interpreting dreams, advising the king—that were typical of the ancient
Near Eastern sage.14 So it is hardly surprising that the cardinal virtue of patience
characterizes this wise hero’s action at every turn. Sold as a slave by his brothers,
he does not despair but soon rises to the top of Potiphar’s household staff; even
his next reversal—when he is cast down into a dreary dungeon because of a false
accusation by his master’s wife—does not break Joseph, because, like any sage, he
knows that righteousness in the end will win out. And so it does: he becomes,
through a series of divinely manipulated events, viceroy of Egypt. The divine plan
is thus not only something Joseph believes in; it is something that his whole life
story demonstrates. For everything here had indeed been plotted in advance, the
seven years of plenty followed by the seven years of famine; God in fact com-
municates this plan to Joseph, using Pharaoh as a mere conduit to the true sage’s
powers of understanding. Then, set in his justly deserved place of honor, Joseph
never seeks to repay his brothers the ill that they caused him—since, in any case,
all has happened according to the Great Plan. As Joseph himself tells them, “You
are not the ones who sent me down here, but God” (Gen. 44:8), and later, “As
for you, you planned evil against me, but God planned it for the good, so as to
keep alive a mass of people, as indeed has happened” (Gen. 50:20).
Being patient is related, in Latin as in Hebrew, to bearing and suffering. The
ancient Near Eastern sage’s patience included, prominently, his ability to suffer,
to take it, knowing as he knew that his pains were either the just punishment for
some sin he had committed, or part of some divinely instituted test; in either case,
if the divine plan means that the righteous will ultimately be rewarded, what harm
could there be in a few bumps along the way? “Are your sufferings pleasing to
you?” asks one exponent of Rabbinic Judaism—the most direct heir of the biblical
wisdom tradition in postbiblical times—to another (b. Ber. 5b). It is a reasonable
question if you believe, as he did, that human suffering is ultimately a way of
setting things right again between the sufferer and God—indeed, a down payment
for future rewards.
But if a toothache is always the true test of one’s philosophy, then Israel could
scarcely be said to have passed that test with distinction. However much patient
suffering was part of the ancient Near Eastern sage’s ideology, it is hardly the
dominant note sounded in Hebrew Scripture, and surely it is indicative that even
of the three biblical wisdom books mentioned, only one—Proverbs—might be
said to subscribe to the rigors of “orthodox” wisdom in this crucial regard.
The Book of Job, as is well known, is actually an Israelite’s own view of what
he considers this strange, eastern philosophy. Even Job himself, who speaks for
the book’s author, is not an Israelite, but one from the land of Uz, and all his
comforters are similarly identified as foreign sages, graduates of the elite academies
of wisdom far from the Israelite west coast. So when Job is struck down, these
easterners come up with the pat wisdom answer: everything goes according to the
divine plan, therefore your sufferings must be deserved. Indeed, their words are
not so much intended to “comfort” Job (though this is a common misunder-
standing of the book) as to bring him to the state called, in mishnaic Hebrew,
!ydh qwdyc, that is, the acceptance of the justice of God’s unfavorable decree. The
ritual of repeatedly refusing to accept the assertion of friends and loved ones that
the world makes sense despite the pain, that God’s decree must have been fair—a
ritual called “refusing to be comforted” (Gen. 37:35)–was part of the mourning
process; “accepting comfort” (!ymwxnt tlbq in mishnaic Hebrew) meant finally
giving in.
But Job will not. Despite his years of training and mastery of the wisdom
idiom, he will not stand by (or rather, sit, since that is what mourners did) and
allow black to be called white. The comforters’ words are full of high sentence
and a bit obtuse, but behind them it is not hard to glimpse an Israelite author of,
probably, the exilic or early postexilic period who, for all his own fascination with
wisdom, cannot quite make his peace with patient suffering. Nor, of course, would
it be correct to call his book a “wisdom anthology.” It is more like a drama written
by someone who can sound like a sage—indeed, who peppers his speech with
just enough recherché, usually foreign, words and roots so as to give it an alto-
gether alien flavor—but who is actually rather short on meshalim. His point is to
sound like a sage in order to protest the flawless simplicity of the sagely view of
suffering. If, paradoxically, he himself ends up justifying God’s decrees in rather
classical wisdom fashion—hence justifying, in no uncertain way, wisdom itself—
well, the paradox is the point: he wants wisdom to be true but cannot stand the
smugness of its orthodox exponents.
The Book of Ecclesiastes presents a rather more complicated situation. Many
early wisdom collections from the ancient Near East had taken the form of, for
example, a master’s instructions to his pupil, or a father’s words to his son15 —but
these were by and large a literary fiction for the anthologist, a framing device. In
Ecclesiastes the literary fiction has become fact, to the point that it compromises
the very abstract, ideal world of wisdom that it seeks to inhabit.
Ecclesiastes is apparently a real person. The name Qohelet (“Ecclesiastes” is
but a misguided attempt to render this name in Greek)16 comes from a relatively
rare root qhl, which means “argue” or “harangue,”17 and it probably was indeed
the man’s real (by)name or, possibly, a very thin persona through which a real
man spoke. A sage of probably the fifth or fourth century b.c.e., he was a wealthy
Jerusalemite who apparently served for a time as governor of the Jews there, an
office he describes, perhaps a bit grandiloquently, as “king” (Eccles. 1:12).18 The
very fact that we know these things about him, the fact that he recounts at length
(Eccles. 1:12–2:11) his youthful pursuit of self-indulgence (“all for the sake of sci-
ence, of course,” Eccles. 2:3) and details further stages of his life, is indicative of
how far this book is from the idealizing, inner spirituality of Proverbs. Qohelet is
a man of this world, and his particular time and place intrude into the world of
wisdom he constructs like a ray of afternoon sunlight seeping in under the

screening-room door. Indeed, one phrase that he repeats and repeats, a linguistic
tic that reveals his true frame of mind, is “under the sun” or “under the heavens”
(Eccles. 1:3, 9, 12, 14, etc.); he is down here, out here, making deals, bemoaning
the cruelties of fate, growing older. He is a sage, irredeemably so, yet he frequently
holds the received wisdom of sages up to the light and finds it wanting. This he
reports without joy, since, as he has discovered, there is no alternative to the path
of wisdom.
If only things were different! But how can you maintain that a person’s “name”
is imperishable (Eccles. 7:1) when you know perfectly well that
those of former times have no remembrance and even those who live in time to
come will have no remembrance with those that come after them.
Eccles. 1:11
His discontent is reflected in the very style of the book. Gone are the seamless,
measured niceties of the mashal: there are meshalim, of course, plenty of them,
but they are interrupted here and there by bits of autobiography, transitional sen-
tences, sidelong glances. What Qohelet particularly likes is to quote an established
mashal and then argue with it, or merely comment, “This also is unfair” (Eccles.
6:9; in the same sense, Eccles. 2:15, 21, 23, 26; 4:4, 8, 16, etc.). He takes a perfectly
good mashal such as
Two are better than one, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken
and, instead of just citing it, interrupts it with a long, prosy parade of illustrations:
Two are better than one, since they will surely profit from their work. For if they
should fall, one of them will pick up the other, but if there were only one and
he fell, the second would not be there to pick him up. Likewise, if two people
lie down together, they will keep warm, but one person alone cannot stay warm.
And if one of them is attacked, the two will be able to withstand it; and a threefold
cord is not quickly broken.
Eccles. 4:9–12
It is almost as if Qohelet cannot stand the symmetry, the poetry, of wisdom.19

It would be inexact to call this brief book an “intellectual autobiography,” but
the little intrusions of Qohelet’s life represent a clever strategy on the anthologist-
author’s part. At the beginning of his composition, Qohelet is young, vigorous,
planting gardens, building himself a pleasure palace without equal: he tells us, in
the language of wisdom’s eternal verities, how the world looked to him then (Ec-
cles. 1–2). But time passes and he reaches new conclusions: “Then I turned to
consider” (Eccles. 2:11), “I understood [or “saw, considered”]” (Eccles. 2:13, 14; 3:
10, 14, 16; 4:4, 15; 6:1; 9:1, 13, etc.), “I thought to myself” (Eccles. 1:16; 2:1; 3:17, 18,
etc.), “I returned and saw [that is, “I reconsidered”]” (Eccles. 4:1, 7; 9:11, etc.),
“Here is what I myself have seen” (Eccles. 5:17), “Here is what I have found out”
(Eccles. 7:27, 29), and so forth. These personal references are not merely little
reminders of the man behind the mashal, but a way of encompassing a host of
different, sometimes jangling, bits of wisdom in one book. What was obvious back
at the beginning, when the sage was relatively young, no longer holds by the end,
when he is old. Names may be forgotten, but a name is nonetheless all that
remains; woman may be all traps and snares (Eccles. 7:26–28), but “enjoy life with
the woman whom you love” (Eccles. 9:9); sages and fools may meet the same
end, “so why should I be wise?” (Eccles. 2:15), but still, “a sage’s mind is his right
hand, a fool’s his left” (Eccles. 10:2), “there is nothing better for a man than that
he eat and drink and enjoy what he has gotten” (Eccles. 2:24); nonetheless, “know
that God will bring you to judgment concerning all these things” (Eccles. 11:9).
To Qohelet well applies the French barb, Il se contredit pour avoir tout dit (“He
contradicts himself in order to have said everything”). An anthologist could
scarcely aim higher.
The wisdom tradition in Hebrew hardly ends with Qohelet: after him follow Ben
Sira, the anonymous author of 1 Baruch, and a host of apocryphal and pseudepi-
graphic writers of the Second Temple period, culminating in the anthologized
wisdom sayings of the mishnaic tractate Abot. But Abot is something of a self-
conscious throwback, an attempt to resurrect one last time the old wisdom an-
thology genre at a time when the very nature of wisdom in Israel had changed
radically, and with it the whole role of the anthology in Jewish writings.
What changed was that, sometime before the start of the second century
b.c.e., “wisdom” came to include Torah. It is a striking fact that nowhere among
the wise sayings of Proverbs, Job, or Ecclesiastes is there the slightest reference to
anything from the Bible—not a mention of Israel’s illustrious ancestors Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, nor of Moses or the great Sinai revelation, nothing! One could
scarcely doubt that relatively late sages like Qohelet or the author(s) of at least the
later sections of Proverbs were keenly aware of Israel’s glorious past, nay, knew
parts of its sacred library of texts by heart; yet they give not the slightest evidence
of such knowledge in their own writings. The reason is not hard to discover:
references to biblical Israel or to individual figures or events in its history surely
must have seemed to violate the international, eternally valid character of wisdom.
Abraham or Jerusalem were far too particular, too earthly, too historical; wisdom’s
domain was the general and ethereal and eternal.
As time went on, however, Jewish sages began to view things differently: the
Torah was not merely a single people’s book, a record of that people’s past history
and laws, but a divine guidebook, the text in which the Great Plan finds its most
complete expression. Thus, after having praised the figure of wisdom very much
in the fashion of earlier sages, Ben Sira (a wise man of the early second century
b.c.e.) relates that at a certain point she (wisdom) left heaven in order to dwell
among men:
[Wisdom says:] “Then the Creator of all things gave me a commandment, and
the One who made me assigned a place for my tent.
He said: ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inherited prop-
erty.’ ”
Sir. 24:8
Wisdom’s coming to dwell in Israel’s midst is no idle boast on Ben Sira’s part.
What he means is that the Torah, Israel’s sacred book, is nothing less than eternal
wisdom come down to the human realm:
All this [wisdom] is the book of the covenant of the Most High, the Torah that
Moses commanded us as an inheritance to the congregation of Jacob.
Sir. 24:23 (cf. Deut. 33:4)
In the same fashion, another Jewish sage some decades later could assert about
wisdom:20
He [God] found the whole way to knowledge, and gave her to Jacob His servant,
and to Israel whom He loved. She is the book of the commandments of God,
and the law that endures forever.
Bar. 3:36–4:1.
It is important to spell out the consequences of the change heralded by such

pronouncements. For where wisdom had previously consisted of contemplating
the natural world and the social order and deducing from them the general plan
by which God conducts the world, it was now more and more Scripture that was
to be contemplated in order to understand God’s ways. And so the sage, who had
previously walked about the world or stood at his window looking out, now sat
down at his table and opened the Book. The Book, even more than the world,
was the place in which God’s will and God’s ways were expressed—but it required
much thought and contemplation in order to understand fully the sacred messages
contained therein.
Thus, starting in the early second century b.c.e. (or conceivably still earlier),
sages began to add to their repertoire of ancient proverbs and sayings other texts,
biblical laws and narratives and prophecies, which likewise embodied discrete
formulations of the Great Plan. Not surprisingly, however, their approach to an-
alyzing texts remained basically unchanged. That is, schooled in the ways of mesh-
alim, in the careful comparison of part A with part B and the search for all the
hidden nuances, these sages quite naturally applied the same techniques to the
rest of Israel’s literary heritage. Were not its other words just as likely to be cryptic,
esoteric, in need of sustained contemplation in order to be fully understood? Like-
wise, the very conception of Scripture as a great corpus of divine instruction whose
lessons, therefore, are relevant to every age—a notion that underlies all of ancient
biblical interpretation—was not this also merely a projection of the sage’s as-
sumptions about wisdom literature onto all of Israel’s variegated corpus of ancient
writings? The treatment of various biblical figures as examples, models of proper
conduct, is similarly a sagely construct. Indeed, it is certainly significant, in light
of wisdom literature’s polarized division of humanity into the righteous and the
wicked, the wise and the foolish, that a similar polarization takes place in ancient
exegesis: biblical heroes are altogether good, with any fault airbrushed away,
whereas figures like Esau or Balaam are altogether demonized—as if their neither-
good-nor-evil status in the Bible itself is somehow intolerable.21 (The most con-
vincing instances of such polarization occur with figures like Lot or Enosh, si-
multaneously demonized by one group of interpreters while pronounced

altogether righteous by another. Apparently they could go one way or another, but
not remain in the intolerable ambiguity of the middle.)
Thus the ancient sages of Israel’s past now became interpreters of Scripture.
This is quite literally true of Ben Sira, who devoted not a little of his book to the
elucidation of biblical laws and narratives, and who concluded it with an exten-
sive—six chapters long!—review of Israel’s biblical heroes, replete with allusions
to well-known biblical phrases and a considerable body of interpretive material.
The anonymous sage who authored the Wisdom of Solomon (first century b.c.e.)
did no less, devoting chapter 10 of that work to a similar catalog, and a good deal
of the remaining chapters to exploring the wisdom contained in, specifically, the
Exodus and desert-wandering narratives of the Pentateuch. This author did not
simply retell Scripture, but included the fruits of interpretive research, his own
and that of earlier sages, in its every word. Thus, in retelling the events of the
Exodus, he observed:
She [wisdom] gave to holy men the reward of their labors; she guided them along
a marvelous path, and became a shelter to them by day and a starry flame through
the night. She brought them over the Red Sea and led them through the deep
waters; but she drowned their enemies and cast them up from the depth of the
sea.
Wisd. 10:17–18
Quite a bit in these two sentences testifies to the advanced state of biblical inter-
pretation at this time. For example, the biblical account presents the Israelites as
having borrowed silver, gold, and other precious items from the Egyptians before
leaving, and so having “despoiled” them (Exod. 12:36). Wisdom of Solomon is quick
to explain that this was not thievery or even deception, but “the reward of their
labors”; that is, it was only fair of the Israelites to take these items in recompense
for all the years of slavery in which they had served the Egyptians without being
paid. As for the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire that accompanied the Israelites
on their way out of Egypt (Exod. 13:21), Wisdom of Solomon here explains what
the book of Exodus somehow had not, that while the nighttime pillar was made
of fire in order to guide them in the dark, the purpose of the daytime pillar of
cloud was to give shelter to the Israelites from the sun—hence two pillars were
necessary. Moreover, this same author specifies that, after drowning Israel’s ene-
mies, Wisdom “cast them up from the depth of the sea.” This is no gratuitous
flourish, but an attempt to resolve an apparent contradiction in the Exodus ac-
count, which at one point specifies that the Egyptians “were drowned in the Red
Sea, the floods covered them, they went down into the depths like a stone” (Exod.
15:4–5) but on the other hand says that the Israelites “saw the Egyptians dead upon
the seashore” (Exod. 14:30). Where were they, on the seashore or at the bottom
of the sea? This author’s answer is that they at first sank to the bottom of the sea
but then were “cast up” to the shore again to be seen by the Israelites.
In short, wisdom’s course took a sharp new turn in Israel at this time. Henceforth
the sage would be a Schriftgelehrte before all else, and his stock-in-trade would
include most prominently the Torah itself, written by the greatest of sages, Moses-
our-teacher. It is thus no exaggeration to state that the true Rabbinic continuation
of the biblical wisdom tradition is not so much Mishnah Abot as the Mekhilta
deR. Ishmael or Genesis Rabbah, those anthologies of pithy explanations of indi-
vidual, isolated verses from Scripture. Surely there is no mystery in the fact that
these and so many other midrashic collections of the opening centuries of the
Common Era are anonymous anthologies rather than authored commentaries
(such as appeared among Christians in the same period). The Jewish sages (called,
in fact, hfi akhamim, “sages”) responsible for these early midrashic works were, con-
sciously or otherwise, continuing an anthological tradition of wisdom that stretched
back centuries and centuries into the distant past, back to the time when humans
had first concluded that, while no one can know all that is worth knowing, a sage,
mastering a thousand discrete insights handed down from here and there, can
nevertheless assemble them into a single book and so pass on to future generations
something of the great divine order by which the world is run.
Notes
Prooftexts 17 (1997):9–32. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.
1. From Old Kingdom Egypt (third millennium b.c.e.) come such collections as the
“Instruction of Ptah-hotep” and the “Instructions from Kagemni”; see R. O. Faulkner, E. F.
Wente, and W. K. Simpson, The Literature of Ancient Egypt (New Haven, Conn., 1972).
Old Sumerian proverbs survive from early in the second millennium b.c.e.: S. N. Kramer,
History Begins at Sumer (New York, 1959), pp. 119–26.
2. As has been frequently pointed out, this notion of wisdom is to be connected with
the Egyptian concept of maat, the divine order; see A. Volten, “Der Begriff der Maat in
den ägyptischen Weisheitstexten,” in Les sagesses du Proche-Orient ancien (Paris, 1963),
pp. 72–102; E. Würtwein, “Egyptian Wisdom and the Old Testament,” in J. Crenshaw,
Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom (New York, 1976), pp. 113–33.
3. This subject is developed further in my Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven, Conn.,
1981), pp. 11–12.
4. For this reason Ecclesiastes complains, in a famous phrase that is almost always
mistranslated, “there is no end to the collecting of books, and much study wearies a person”
(Eccles. 12:12). On śh in the sense of “collect” or “gather” in Ecclesiastes (parallels Phoe-
nician p l): J. Kugel, “Qohelet and Money,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 51 (1989):34–35n.
5. The point, of course, is that the dog will end up biting the hand that grabs him—
that is, one cannot remain an uninvolved, or uninjured, meddler. But beyond this obvious
lesson, it seems that the proverbist takes delight in the fact that, while the passerby begins
with the dog’s ears—namely, speaking to the ears of the disputants—he ends up getting it
from their mouths.
6. Reading, conjecturally, mithalhel.
7. On the subject of larger compositional units in Proverbs there is a substantial schol-
arly literature, some of it quite delirious: see P. Skehan, “The Seven Columns of Wisdom’s
House,” “A Single Editor for the Whole Book of Proverbs,” and “Wisdom’s House,” all
collected in his Studies in Israelite Poetry and Wisdom (CBQ MS 1) (Washington, D.C.,
1971), pp. 9–45; Christa Kayatz, Studien zu Proverbien 1–9: Eine form- und motivgeschicht-
liche Untersuchung (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1966); G. E. Bryce, “Another Wisdom-Book in
Proverbs,” JBL 91 (1972): 145–57; B. Lang, Die weisheitliche Lehrrede: Eine Untersuchung
von Sprüche 1–7 (Stuttgart, 1972); B. Lang, Wisdom and the Book of Proverbs: An Israelite
Goddess Redefined (New York, 1986); T. Hildebrandt, “Proverbial Pairs: Compositional
Units in Proverbs 10–29,” JBL 107 (1988):207–24; Daniel Snell, Twice-Told Proverbs and the
Composition of the Book of Proverbs (Winona Lake, Ind., 1993); J. Goldingay, “The Ar-
rangement of Sayings in Proverbs 10–15,” JSOT 61 (1994):75–83. On the same question with
regard to Qohelet: W. Zimmerli, “Das Buch Qohelet: Traktat oder Sentenzensammlung?”
VT 24 (1974):221–30; S. Glender, “Ecclesiastes—a Collection of ‘Diverse’ Sayings or a Uni-
fied Worldview?” Beit Miqra 26 (1981):15–23.
8. The same thing may be said of the Book of Job, another wisdom composition with
a story to tell. True, the mise-en-scène here has been entrusted to normal, straight, narrative
style (chapters 1–2 as well as the conclusion, 42:7–17). But what occurs in the middle is not
so much an exchange of individual insights as an argument framed in the idiom of wisdom
sages, a kind of drama in mashal form; see later.
9. J.J.A. van Dijk, La Sagesse suméro-accadienne (Leiden, 1953); W. G. Lambert, Bab-
ylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, 1960).
10. The Egyptian origin of Proverbs 22:17–24:34 was first argued by A. Erman, “Das
Weisheitsbuch des Amen-em-ope,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 27 (1924):241–52; see
also J. M. Plumley, “The Teaching of Amenemope” in Winston Thomas, Documents from
Old Testament Times (London; 1958), pp. 172–86; R. J. Williams, “The Alleged Semitic
Original of the Wisdom of Amenemope,” JE 47 (1961):100–106; and Diethard Romheld,
Wege der Weisheit: die Lehren Amenopes und Proverbien 22:17–24:22 (Berlin, 1989). Further
on Egyptian and biblical wisdom: B. Gemser, “The Instructions of Onchsheshonqi and
Biblical Literature,” Vetus Testamentum Congress Volume, Vetus Testamentum Supple-
ments 8 (1960): 102–28; Kayatz, Studien zu Proverbien 1–9; F.-J. Steiert, Die Weisheit Israels
(Freiburg; 1990); Nili Shupak, “Where Can Wisdom Be Found?” The Sage’s Language in
the Bible and Ancient Egyptian Literature (Göttingen; 1993).
11. To be sure, some collections of wisdom in the ancient Near East were presented
as the Teachings of X, So-and-so’s words to his son, etc. This format is found very early in
Egypt: “The Instruction of Ptah-hotep,” “The Instruction of Amen-em-hét for His Son
Sesostris I,” “The Instruction of the Scribe Cheti,” etc.; see Gemser, “The Instructions of
Onchsheshonqi,” pp. 103–4. Nevertheless, it is clear that these are collections of individual
proverbs, anthologies.
12. Such is, of course, also the effect achieved by depicting human beings as talking
animals, whether in animated cartoons or Aesop’s fables or the reasoned moralities of Marie
de France or La Fontaine.
13. Jeremiah, for example, asked the same question: Jer. 12:1–2.
14. This was discussed by G. von Rad in his “Josephsgeschichte und ältere Chokhma,”
Vetus Testamentum Congress Volume, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 1 (1953):120–27. I
do not believe that the foundations of his argument have been undermined by more recent
examinations; see G. W. Coats, “The Joseph Story and Ancient Wisdom: A Reappraisal,”
Catholic Bible Quarterly 35 (1973):285–97.
15. See n. 11.
16. “Man of the assembly,” as if the Hebrew were derived from qahal, “assembly.”
Later, of course, the Greek ekklesia became the Christian “assembly,” the Church,
whereupon Ecclesiastes became “the preacher.”
17. See Nehemiah 5:7, and the Arabic and Syriac cognates of qhl—all of which were
pointed out by E. Ullendorf, “The Meaning of Qohelet,” Vetus Testamentum 12 (1962):215.
To these examples might be added Numbers 16:3, 17:7, and Job 30:28, where the word
clearly means “complain.”
18. Kugel, “Qohelet and Money,” pp. 47–48.
19. A different view of this passage (and of the phenomenon it represents): R. Gordis,
“Quotation in Wisdom Literature,” in Crenshaw, Studies, pp. 220–44.
20. Note in the same connection a wisdom text from Qumran that asserts that God
has granted wisdom “to Israel, He gives her as a gracious gift,” (4Q185) Sapentiential Work
2:10.
21. Particularly suggestive in connection with this topic is B. Otzen, “Old Testament
Wisdom Literature and Dualistic Thinking,” VTS 28 (1974):146–57. “Dualistic thinking” in
his definition includes the polarization of humanity not only into good and evil or wise
and foolish, but as well such dualisms as the “sons of light/sons of darkness” and “two
spirits” found at Qumran. See also such texts as Ben Sirah 15:14–20; Testament of Asher 1:
3–5; Philo of Alexandria, The Worse Attacks the Better, pp. 82–84; as well as R. A. Baer,
Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden; 1970).
4
yaakov elman
Order, Sequence,
and Selection
The Mishnah’s Anthological Choices
n the tenth century, nearly 800 years after the Mishnah’s “publication,” R. She-
Irira Gaon described how Rabbi Judah the Prince, the Mishnah’s editor, “com-
piled . . . and added to it what was in his time, and reconciled it[s difficulties]
properly.”1 In reconstructing the Mishnah’s formation, R. Sherira repeatedly em-
phasized Rabbi’s faithfulness to his sources—primarily the earlier compilation of
R. Meir—and the faithfulness of the latter to his sources. “And not in his own
words [lit., “from his [own] heart”] did Rabbi compile them,” or, “nothing was
omitted or added but for a few places”—this theme recurs in his description of
the process, along with a detailed series of proofs for his contention.2 The motive
for this emphasis is clear: the anti-Karaite polemic which underlies R. Sherira’s
history of the Oral Torah.
Whatever may be its historical value today, Sherira’s monograph was the first
to seek to understand Rabbi Judah’s motives and methods.3 This investigation has
been renewed each time the authority or authenticity of the Oral Torah has been
called into question and, with the emergence of the modern critical study of
Rabbinic literature, has gained particular force since the middle of the nineteenth
century down to our own time.4
R. Sherira employs four verbs to describe the process of compiling the Mish-
nah: liqqet, tereiz, osif, and hibber—“collect,” “solve [its difficulties],” “add,” and
“formulate,” respectively.5 R. Sherira emphasizes that, before Rabbi’s time, the
existence of differences of opinion made it impossible “to recite it with one voice
and in one formulation.”6 The implication would seem to be that Rabbi’s intention
was to produce a code of Rabbinic halakhah as it existed in his time. A few lines
further on he adds that “the words of the Mishnah were like [those that] Moses
enunciated from the mouth of the Most High.” Rabbi’s code was based on earlier
sources, in particular the views of R. Akiva and his disciples, as formulated by R.
Meir. In responding to the implicit question of why minority opinions were cited
as well, R. Sherira quotes the view of R. Judah b. Ilai, that this was done “in order
53
to invalidate them” should a person wish to decide a dispute in favor of the

minority view.7
The Mishnah is thus both authentic and authoritative, a conclusion that the
polemic needs of his time—that is, the Karaite challenge—required. Less than a
century before Sherira, another of the gaonim, R. Saadiah, dated the beginning
of the redaction of the Mishnah to the early years of the Second Temple period.
His motives were the same: in order to assert the antiquity, authenticity, and
authority of the Oral Torah against Karaite claims to the contrary.8 R. Sherira,
however, was the first to devote a monograph to the subject and, in doing so, to
set the agenda for the discussion of such matters for the next millennium.9
The debate surrounding Rabbi’s motives and the purpose for which the Mish-
nah was composed has continued into our own time. As Eliezer Segal writes
elsewhere in this volume, “a long-standing dispute has focused on whether the
Mishnah was intended to serve as a normative codex or corpus iuris, or as a digest
or encyclopedia of sources for theoretical instruction.”10 In fact, many more the-
ories of the Mishnah’s genre have been proposed in the last century and a half,
and many of them reflect the religious polemic of the nineteenth century.11 And
nearly all of these theories relate to David Stern’s second area of concern in regard
to anthologizing: the question of its genre, and the distinctions he draws between
an “archive,” a “collection,” and an “anthology proper.”12
In regard to the Mishnah’s genre, we can begin by saying that no one argues
that the Mishnah was composed de novo.13 The Mishnah is clearly an anthology
of some sort, a collection of previously existing sources. The question is the pur-
pose of this collection.
Among the many definitions that have been proposed for its genre we may
single out five: (1) a code, (2) a collection of halakhic sources for study, (3) an
introductory textbook of halakhah, (4) Rabbi’s lecture notes, and (5) a philosoph-
ical work. Let us briefly consider each one separately and then return to the
problems raised by each definition.
The first two views of the Mishnah—that it is a code or a source collection—
have a long history. Both views assume that the Mishnah was intended from the
beginning to be authoritative. As we have already seen, R. Sherira considered the
Mishnah to be an authoritative collection of halakhic sources, that is, a code. So
too did Maimonides, the Codifier par excellence. In the introduction to his Com-
mentary on the Mishnah and elsewhere, he accounts for a number of its features
in terms of that assumption.
The third view—that of the Mishnah as a “textbook of halakha”—is of more
recent invention and was proposed by Abraham Goldberg. The precise meaning
of the term “textbook” is somewhat ambiguous. A legal textbook is authoritative,
but only in the pedagogical sense, not in the legal sense: it is not meant to be a
code, or even an immediate source for working lawyers.
The fourth view—that the Mishnah was “Rabbi’s lecture notes”—was a pop-
ular notion in the nineteenth century, when Maimonidean ideas of order and
arrangement were taken as all but normative even by “enlightened” scholars, and
it has more recently been revived by Abraham Weiss. This view attempts to explain
the Mishnah’s anthological features; it does not directly address the question of
Order, Sequence, and Selection 55
authoritativeness, although it could be used as an argument for the Mishnah’s

authority despite its somewhat disordered state. On the other hand, this argument
is something of a double-edged sword; it could as easily be employed against such
a view.
Finally, there is Jacob Neusner’s view of the Mishnah as a philosophical work.
The critical term here, of course, is the word “philosophical,” which Neusner uses
in his own, somewhat idiosyncratic way. We shall examine his view in greater
detail, but in light of the thumbnail historiographical sketch, the apologetic thrust
of this view should be sufficiently clear.
None of the views just set forth can dispense with a consideration of the
Mishnah’s structure and contents. All views of the Mishnah as a code or as an
authoritative legal work must deal with at least three problems: (1) its lack of
cohesiveness and particularly its inner contradictions and unresolved disputes; (2)
its lack of comprehensiveness, namely, the areas of tannaitic halakhah that it does
not cover; and (3) its shortcomings in organization, particularly its duplications
and its noncontextual arrangement of material. Thus, some sections are famously
heterogenous, like Megillah 1:4–11, Pesahim 4, and all of Eduyot. Usually these
problematic sections are explained as having resulted from oral transmission and
are used as evidence for the view that Rabbi did not or hardly altered his sources.
This view, however, is the opposite to Maimonides’, at least according to the
account of Isadore Twersky. According to Twersky, Maimonides glowingly praises
the Mishnah’s “comprehensive scope, muscular method, apodictic form, brief yet
mellifluous style,” and Rabbi’s “nearly perfect wisdom, unexceptionable piety, per-
sonal austerity . . . , unrivaled mastery of Hebrew.”14 Nothing of its arrangement
was left to chance—least of all, its contents and the order of its tractates.
Whether or not Maimonides was correct in this view, his discussion essentially
set the terms of the modern debate over the Mishnah’s form and structure, and
permutations of his views make their appearance in virtually every theory that has
been proposed to date. Two aspects of the Mishnah’s form—its arrangements and
its omissions—were of particular interest to Maimonides, both for what they told
him about the Mishnah’s place in the history of the Oral Torah and for his own
codificatory efforts. Because of the systematic cast of his thought, Maimonides
preferred philosophical/theological explanations to literary or historical ones. This
preference is no more apparent than in his discussion of the Mishnah’s arrange-
ment which, as we shall see, is closely tied to the question of its genre.
Consider, for example, Maimonides’ explanation for the order of the different
tractates in Seder Moed, the Order of Appointed Times. The Order begins with
Shabbat, the tractate dealing with the Sabbath, because of the latter’s “precedence
in sanctity; the fact that it recurs every seven days and so occurs frequently in the
course of time; and that Scripture begins with it in its list of festivals (in Lev. 23:
3).” Maimonides thus explains the placement of the tractate in separate theolog-
ical, sociological/personal, and scriptural terms. Eruvin comes next in the Order
because of its obvious thematic relationship to Shabbat. Pesahim follows “because
it was the first mitzvah the Israelites were commanded by Moses, and also because
it is adjacent to the Sabbath in the [scriptural] section on festivals.” To explain
the placement of the next tractate, Sheqalim, Maimonides again turns to scriptural
order as the reason, but in this case he shifts the focus to another part of Scripture,
Exodus 30:11–16, which follows the exposition of the Passover laws in Exodus 12.
To do so, however, he skips over the mention of all the pilgrimage festivals in
Exodus 23, aside from shifting back from Leviticus 23. Thus, because a theological/
philosophical explanation will not serve in all cases, Maimonides must fall back
on scriptural order, even when that “order” is itself not “orderly”! Yoma then
follows because, according to Maimonides, the scriptural description of the service
of the Day of Atonement occurs in Leviticus 16—although he again ignores the
passages in Leviticus 23:23–27, where the order is different. Indeed, were the Mish-
nah to have followed the order of Leviticus 23, all the Pentateuchal festivals would
have been presented in the order in which they occur through the year.
Maimonides’ explanation for the order of tractates is also not the only possible
explanation. The Babylonian Talmud itself uses scriptural order to explain the
order of mishnayot within a tractate15 but in some cases attributes the arrangement
of tractates to the amount of material to be covered (and related matters).16 In
other cases, it explains their order on the basis of a law’s derivation (e.g., from
Rabbinic exegesis),17 and in one case it even raises the possibility that tractates
could follow a causal, quasi-midrashic rationale. Thus, R. Judah explains that the
reason the scriptural passages detailing the laws of the Sotah precede those of the
nazirirte (Num. 4:11–5:21) is that “one who sees a suspected adulteress in her deg-
radation will withhold himself from wine [by becoming a nazirite]”—a homiletic
explanation. In the Mishnah, however, the order of tractates relating these two
laws is reversed. In response to why this is so, the Talmud explains:
Since the Tana taught [Tractate] Ketubot [Marriage Settlements] and taught [the
laws governing] “one who imposes a vow upon his wife,” he next teaches [Trac-
tate] Nedarim [Vows]; and since he taught [Tractate] Nedarim, he proceeded to
teach [Tractate] Nazir, which is analogous to Nedarim [because a Nazirite un-
dertakes a vow to observe the Nazirite prohibitions], and then [the Mishnah]
continues with the Tractate Sotah for the reason given by Rabbi.18
The reason for their sequence, in other words, is partly thematic and partly the
result of causal connections.
Over a century ago Abraham Geiger suggested still another reason for the
order of tractates within an Order of Mishnah. In Abraham Goldberg’s summary
of Geiger’s argument:
The logic of the arrangement is purely external: it is according to the size of the
tractates, the largest being first and the smallest last. . . . The only exception to
this principle of arrangement is the first Order, according to its traditional se-
quence. Yet even here certain manuscripts preserve a more basic arrangement,
as does the Vienna MS of the Tosefta. Here the arrangement is as follows: Be-
rakhot (9 chaps.), Pea (8), Demai (7), Terumot (11), Sheviit (10), Kilayim (9),
Maasrot (5), Maaser Sheni (5), Halla (4), Orla (3) and Bikkurim (3). In this ar-
rangement there are two distinct frames with a descending order, the second
starting with Terumot. What we really have, then, are two sub-orders. Indeed, the
first three tractates are a unit by themselves, differing from the rest of the Order
which deals either with hallowed or with prohibited agricultural products. As the
first three tractates could hardly make up an order by themselves, they were placed
with no change in their own sequence together with the tractates making up the
other “sub-order.”19
The logic of the order, then, was neither thematic nor scriptural but virtually
“material,” that is, based on the actual size of the tractate.
In his own Code, Maimonides followed still another logic in arranging its
topics—a logic which, as Isadore Twersky showed, Maimonides chose while fully
aware of the other options, including that of the Mishnah, that were available to
him.20 As Maimonides wrote in a letter, “I follow neither the order of the Talmud
nor the order of the Mishnah, but I have collected all the laws, wherever they
have been formulated, relating to every subject.”21 While Maimonides used some
of the Mishnah’s principles in arranging topics in the Mishneh Torah itself, his
avowed rejection of the Mishnah’s principles of order is noteworthy. Maimonides
seems to be saying, as Twersky writes, that “even if my explanatory insights [of the
Mishnah’s order] are correct and valid, the [Mishnah’s] scheme itself has too many
conceptual lapses and superficial links.”22 In rectifying these lapses, Maimonides
subdivided and rearranged the Mishnah’s ordering and sequence; the result is a
reclassification of the Mishnah’s six orders into fourteen books. Thus, the Mishnaic
Orders of Seeds, Appointed Times, Women, and Purities find their equivalents in
the Maimonidean books of Seeds (with the exception of Berakhot), Times, and
Women. Damages is subdivided into Damages, Acquisition, Statutes, and Judges,
while Holy Things is divided between the Temple Service and Sacrifices. But
Maimonides also created several new classifications. Sanctity (Qedushah) included
laws regarding the sanctity of marriage and food; Hafla’ah covered laws that in the
Mishnah were divided between Nedarim (vows) in Seder Nashim and Shevuot
(oaths) in Seder Neziqin. Finally, Maimonides created an introductory book which
had no precedent in any order or even tractate in the Mishnah: Fundamentals of
the Torah. This book included both theological principles and fundamental laws:
rules relating to human behavior and the laws pertaining to idolatry and blas-
phemy. The Book of Love (Ahavah) deals with liturgy, including prayers and
blessings, and thus replaces the mishnaic tractate Berakhot, but it also includes
the laws of circumcision, which have no formal place in the Mishnah.23
Thus, Maimonides’ code differs from the Mishnah not because of its certain cod-
ificatory intent as against the Mishnah’s possibly anthological one, for the subject
of each work is legal exposition; Maimonides’ Code differs from the Mishnah in
omitting disputes, and in its introduction, which lays out a programmatic theolog-
ical/historical foundation for the entire work. In essence, though, both are legal
expositions, and the arrangement of rules, rituals, and laws in the Mishnah is not
dependent on whether it was composed as a code or as a collection; in either
case, pedagogical or expository needs take precedence.
The question of what constitutes a code relates more to the manner of pre-
sentation than to its arrangement. Generally speaking, we expect a collection to
contain divergent opinions, whereas a code does not (or ought not to). The fact
that the Mishnah does contain many such divergent opinions is problematic. In-
deed, the very fact that the Mishnah seems to contain an attempt to explain why
it preserves divergent opinions (in Mishnah Eduyot 1:5) seems to indicate that the
Mishnah’s redactor himself felt that the practice had to be explained.
The Question of Codification

The question of the Mishnah’s intended genre is closely bound up with the ques-
tion of its purpose. Here the matter is somewhat clearer, since the Mishnah’s
concentration on legal material limits the choices to essentially two. Was it in-
tended to be an authoritative collection, that is, a code, or “merely” a guide or
textbook?24 These seemingly simple alternatives, however, mask a far more difficult
and ambiguous question, since both codes and textbooks can take different forms
that may even meld into one another, as the appropriation of Gaius’s Institutes as
a prologue to Justinian’s Code illustrates—a case to which I will return. Still, a
code is by definition legally authoritative, whereas other genres of legal material,
whatever prestige or authority they may possess, are not authoritative in the same
sense. It is thus no wonder that much of the debate over the presumed function
of the Mishnah has centered around the question of whether it was intended as a
code.
Several features of the Mishnah seem to belie codificatory intent. First is its
scope: it is manifestly incomplete, as we shall see. Moreover, it contains alternate
views of important matters and does not explicitly decide between them. If we
assume that opinions cited anonymously are meant to be authoritative, we must
ask why an anonymous opinion in one place is disputed in another. In this respect
and in others, the Mishnah seems to contain contradictory material, surely not
the mark of an authoritative code.
Numerous scholars have dealt with these questions, but because modern Rab-
binic scholarship began in the nineteenth century, there has been an unfortunate
tendency to transmute these essentially literary questions into historical/source-
critical ones, chiefly the question of the Mishnah’s sources. Yet because the Mish-
nah is also the earliest surviving collection of Rabbinic material, it was impossible
for scholars to pursue comparative work in the usual sense. Instead, Mishnah
scholars based their work mainly on internal evidence in the Mishnah, aside from
occasional talmudic obiter dicta that assumed historical importance far out of pro-
portion to their actual significance. Thus, Zechariah Frankel, in his Darkei ha-
Mishnah, claimed that Rabbi had “critically reviewed” the Mishnah he had pro-
duced. This claim was based on Frankel’s understanding of a talmudic statement
that R. Ashi, the presumed redactor of the Babylonian Talmud, had produced two
editions of his work, a statement that Frankel assumed was also true of Rabbi
Judah, even though there is no textual support whatsoever for it!25 Nonetheless,
Frankel used this rationale to explain the existence of contradictions in the Mish-
nah which, he argued, resulted from R. Judah’s change of mind over time. And
in order to explain why Rabbi himself did not eliminate these contradictions,
Frankel proposed that he could not because the Mishnah had already begun to
circulate in oral form. From this one example, one can see how certain source-
critical assumptions, once accepted, generated wide-ranging conclusions about the
nature of the Mishnah without, however, much evidence to back them up.
The classic period for the adoption of source-critical methods in researching

the Mishnah was the generation before World War II. Hanokh Albeck and Y. N.
Epstein exemplified this trend, the former in his early volume Untersuchungen
ueber die Redaktion der Mischna,26 the latter in the lecture notes that were edited
and published by E. Z. Melamed as Mevo’ot le-Sifrut ha-Tanna’im.27 Albeck and
Epstein had virtually opposite understandings of the Mishnah’s redaction. Accord-
ing to Albeck, Rabbi Judah did not alter his sources in the least; according to
Epstein, he did.
Albeck based his view on the twin facts that the Mishnah contains duplica-
tions, contradictions, and differences in style, all manifestations of a collection
built on earlier sources. He explains that the duplications are sometimes identical
as a result of Rabbi’s policy of not changing or modifying his sources. On the
other hand, when duplications occur in different formulations, Albeck explained,
the reason is that they stem from different schools, while contradictions were to
be seen as representing the views of different authorities.28 Similarly, Albeck used
the large blocks of texts that deviate from the Mishnah’s order by subject matter—
mini-collections of diverse, unrelated laws all attributed to a single early author-
ity,29 or passages in which disparate laws share identical literary formulations such
as “no less than . . . nor more than. . . . ,”30 or “the only difference be-
tween. . . .”31 —to prove that these passages were incorporated from earlier collec-
tions without change.
The Mishnah’s manifest incompleteness, however, was more of a problem for
Albeck to explain. Why, for example, does the Mishnah omit views cited in the
parallel Tosefta passage? Albeck argued that Rabbi’s Mishnah began to circulate
among his disciples before it was complete and, as a result, Rabbi had not been
able to include certain views as yet. This explanation is hardly sufficient to explain
the absence of a specific rule that was the subject of a tannaitic dispute. This is
especially so in cases (which are not uncommon, as in M. Sheviit 3:2 and T.
Sheviit 2:14) where R. Meir’s view is omitted. After all, according to Albeck, R.
Meir was the author of the putative version of the Mishnah which is said to have
played a part in Rabbi’s redaction.32
Further, and more seriously, Albeck’s explanation of premature circulation
did not explain why a number of important matters never receive systematic treat-
ment in the Mishnah; indeed, some are missing almost entirely. Among these are
discussions of ritual objects like phylacteries and ritual fringes, and systematic
expositions of the laws and history of the festival of Hanukkah. Although Albeck
tried to argue that these omissions were also due to the premature circulation of
the Mishnah,33 it is difficult to imagine that Rabbi would have sanctioned the
release of his work without these matters being treated at some point, either then
or later.
Albeck’s explanation also does not account for another of the Mishnah’s signal
characteristics, namely, its tendency to devote great attention to subjects that were
not practically relevant in Rabbi’s own time; indeed, probably more than half the
Mishnah is devoted to laws dealing with either the Temple service or ritual purity
(which was truly relevant only to priests actively involved in the Temple service)
and to the laws of agricultural tithes (although some of these were still being
collected after the destruction of the Temple, at least in the land of Israel). How
could Rabbi treat these matters in exquisite detail and leave out systematic expo-
sitions of tefillin, tzitzit, and Hanukkah? What, in other words, was Rabbi’s plan
for his work, his purpose in carrying it forward? Maimonides, in his introduction
to his Commentary on the Mishnah, suggested that the Shavuot festival was not
treated in the Mishnah because its observance did not involve any rituals peculiar
to it,34 and so the exposition of the general laws of festivals in Tractate Betza were
sufficient. This explanation, however, does not explain why the laws of Hanukkah
never made it into the Mishnah.
In contrast to Albeck, Epstein attempted to show that Rabbi had, in fact,
altered and edited his sources. Whereas Albeck, to prove his point (that Rabbi had
not altered his sources), pointed to duplicate mishnah-sections in which no alter-
ations were made, Epstein, in good source-critical style, seized on infelicities of
expression which, he explained, were the result of Rabbi’s editing. Similarly, Ep-
stein claimed that the anonymous opinions in the Mishnah were anonymous be-
cause Rabbi preferred those opinions, not because they were really anonymous.35
Albeck, in contrast, insisted that these opinions had come down to Rabbi anony-
mously. To capture the flavor of the debate between the two scholars, it is worth
citing some of Albeck’s arguments in his own words. (Epstein’s side does not
survive in his own words.) Albeck describes in exemplary fashion the ways in which
the Mishnah’s structure and style lend themselves to a source-critical analysis, and
how this explains the Mishnah’s repetitions, contradictions, changes of style, and
so on. Albeck emphasizes the importance of his contention that Rabbi did not
edit his sources and ends on a distinctly apologetic note.36
According to current concepts (lit., “in our own generation”) we must admit that
had Rabbi not proceeded in this manner, but would have changed his sources
according to his own judgment, his production would have been deficient (hayah
be-maasehu pegam), and it would have been said that he “traduced” the
traditions, that he did not say things in the name of the one who said them—
and not only that, but that he put words in the mouths of people who did not
say them but never thought of them—as those who attribute to Rabbi changes,
omissions, and additions. . . . How was he permitted to choose what seemed plau-
sible in his eyes and to reject early views or change them according to his own
judgment? On the contrary! His entire goal in the redaction of the Mishnah was
to preserve their words with exactitude so that they would not be forgotten, and
to mention even the opinion of a single individual [who differed] with the ma-
jority in case “a court sees the words of the individual it may rely on him” (Eduyot
1:5).37
Mavo la-Mishnah was published in 1959, two years after the publication of
Epstein’s lecture notes on these matters by E. Z. Melamed,38 and it is difficult not
to see Albeck’s harsh words as a reference to Epstein, Albeck’s erstwhile colleague.
It is revealing that Albeck rejected Epstein’s conclusion on ultimately apologetic
grounds rather than on scholarly ones. According to Albeck, Epstein had in some
sense impugned the Sages by asserting that Rabbi had changed his sources and
had thus undermined the authority of the Mishnah, the foundation of halakhah.
Recently Shamma Friedman has attempted to demonstrate that the origins of

certain difficult texts and of problems in the arrangement of the Mishnah may at
times be traced to Rabbi’s desire for concision.39 Consider, for example, Mishnah
Shabbat 16:1 and its parallel in Tosefta Shabbat 13:1–2. In the Mishnah, which is
much shorter than the formally parallel toseftan passage,40 the order of exposition
begins with the requirement to save scrolls of scriptural texts from a fire that has
broken out on the Sabbath, even though such activity (i.e., taking objects out of
one’s personal domain into the public domain) is generally forbidden on the Sab-
bath. Appended to this general rule are two other laws. The first is the stipulation
that these scrolls must be saved whether or not they are used as texts for the public
reading of the Torah, and the second is that even though the scrolls may be written
in languages other than Hebrew, they still must be stored away in a respectful
manner. This mishnah text then concludes with a somewhat gnomic explanation
for why such texts are not read: “Why are they not read? Because of the neglect
of the study hall.”
As Friedman notes, the parallel Tosefta is more topically arranged, beginning
with various rules regarding the reading of scriptural texts in 13:1 and continuing
with an exposition of the rules of storing them away in 13:2. The two passages are
joined by the term kitvei qodesh, “holy writings,” which is deployed in two different
ways. In Tosefta Shabbat 13:1, as in Mishnah Shabbat 16:1, the term refers to
Scripture in general, “the holy writings,” but the last clause of the mishnah refers
to kitvei qodesh (without mentioning them explictly) in the sense of Hagiographa—
those writings that may be not be read on the Sabbath at the time that the legal
and ritual expositions are presented in the synagogue. The purpose of this rule is
to discourage people from staying home to read the stories in the Hagiographa
rather than attend these study sessions.
Friedman continues:
The redactor of our mishnah, that is, Rabbi, taught the text regarding the saving
[of scriptural scrolls] (Shabbat 13: 1–7). If [these] early mishnayot, which were
recited before Rabbi, were formulated in the style of the halakhot before us in
the Tosefta, it is clear that Rabbi wanted, on the one hand, to include some
reference to the halakhah that one may not read sacred writings [⫽ Hagiographa]
on the Sabbath. On the other hand, he did not want to leave it as an isolated
addendum unto itself in his new compilation without building it into the flow
of the chapter. In order not to relinquish this halakhah, and also in order to retain
the tight structure [of the new Mishnah], he combined this halakhah with the
primary one, by interleaving their cases one within the other.41
Friedman thus attributes the lack of clarity in the rule to the impact of these
conflicting desires on Rabbi’s part. The assumption underlying this chain of rea-
soning is that Rabbi had before him not only the halakhot that now appear in
Mishnah Shabbat 16:1, but also those in Tosefta Shabbat 13:1–2. Friedman’s claim,
however, is somewhat problematic, since even the synoptic chart of these halakhot
that he provides shows hardly any overlap between the two groups of laws, except
in the most general way. Moreover, if Rabbi’s desire for concision led to the lack
of clarity which Friedman rightly laments, what may we say of Rabbi’s redactional
skills? Even if the process of oral transmission generally leads to such condensa-
tion,42 conscious editing on the part of a careful redactor can hardly be the cause
for such a result.
Nonetheless, Friedman opens up what is potentially a highly fruitful method
of gauging Rabbi’s intentions and purposes, for if the Tosefta is the compilation
from which Rabbi worked, the differences between it and the Mishnah must be
a result of his planning. However, Friedman’s argument cannot be fully evaluated
until he has presented a far larger number of examples in which the two texts are
parallel. In this case, as his own synoptic table shows, there is hardly any overlap
except in general subject matter.
Still, the argument that Rabbi consciously edited the Tosefta to produce his
Mishnah bespeaks his desire to produce a concise text. The question is whether
concision is more the mark of a code or of an anthology. For the present moment,
this question must remain moot. In either case, there is no question that concision
would have been looked upon with favor in the world of late antiquity however
the Mishnah was transmitted, orally or in written form. This last point brings us,
in turn, to a question that Friedman’s source-critical predecessors hardly ever con-
sidered: the cultural context within which the redactional activities that produced
the Mishnah took place.
The long-time debate over whether the Mishnah was originally redacted from
written or oral sources, and whether it was intended to be transmitted in written
or oral form, is too involved for us to enter here.43 In passing, it is worth noting
only that oral transmission somewhat more adequately accounts for the existence
of texts whose brevity makes them difficult for us to understand. In any case, it is
a better explanation for the Mishnah’s recurrent obscurity than the alternative—
namely, that their editor was incompetent.
Albeck and Epstein carried on their debate over whether the Mishnah was
intended as a code or an anthology, but now that debate has subsided, perhaps
because most contemporary scholars have felt that neither Albeck nor Epstein
produced a decisive argument for his position. Scholars today seem to assume a
priori that the Mishnah is one or the other but without considering the other
possibility. For Abraham Goldberg, the Mishnah is a textbook anthology; for Dov
Zlotnick and David Weiss Halivni, the Mishnah was intended as a code.
The Mishnah as Pedagogical Text

As was noted earlier, two theories have sought to show that the Mishnah was
originally composed as a pedagogical text of one sort or another. According to
Avraham Weiss, the Mishnah represents the material that Rabbi employed in his
lectures, a collection of his “lecture notes,” in other words. In this way Weiss
attempts to explain, or explain away, the various problems of the Mishnah’s order.
In the nature of the matter, a lecturer does not present the material, or the
variants, which serve as the basis for the lecture. On the other hand, it may occur
that in one circumstance or another he will present a particular source in one
version, and in another circumstance, when discussing another issue, he will cite
this material in another version. Likewise, he will present not only the material
that fits his position. It is probable that he will present that material in the form
it is in [even when he disagrees with it—Y. E.], and his own position he will
enunciate during his analysis. . . . In essence, the selection of material and its form
of presentation will certainly demonstrate the trend of his own thought and his
own position. From here [we can understand how] the early amoraic theory
[could] see in the Mishnah, as it were, a collection of Rabbi’s legal decisions,
that could be relied on for legal decisions, [and this] even though in essence the
Mishnah is really only a collection of sources used as the subject of analysis in
[Rabbi’s] lectures [italics added].44
More recently, Avraham Goldberg has argued a similar theory, but to the
exact opposite effect. Goldberg, who has produced detailed commentaries on a
number of the Mishnah’s tractates,45 proposes that the redactor had a precise set
of pedagogical rules according to which he presented the opinions in the Mishnah.
The Mishnah, according to Goldberg, more than being simply a collection of
halakhic opinions, is a “textbook of the Halakha.”46 Where Weiss sees disorder in
its structure, Goldberg sees order, with a strong pedagogical intent.
The Mishna consists of several layers of legal teaching corresponding to consec-

utive generations of teachers. Later layers often are a presentation of possible in-
terpretations to unspecified teachings given in an earlier layer. The chief aim of
the final editor was to present the gamut of possible interpretations, and not to
compile a definitive, canonical code of Pharasaic law. In particular, as we shall
see, the editor is interested in presenting the teachings of R. Akiva as they become
reflected in the interpretive teachings of his prime pupils.47
In essence, Goldberg’s theory is not so very different from Weiss’s view that
the Mishnah is a set of Rabbi’s lecture notes, except that he goes much further
than Weiss does in investigating the means by which the pedagogical goal was
reached. According to Goldberg, the Mishnah’s editor employed the following
principles in arranging his textbook:
1. The anonymous opinion is usually that which comes closest to the
generalized teaching of R. Akiva.
2. In an extended discussion, different points of view will be introduced
in the course of the discussion.
3. Ease of presentation determines the place where a certain opinion will
be introduced.
4. A single point of view will be taught where it serves most easily as a
starting point from which differing points of view may be apprehended.
5. Topical arrangement of subject matter often calls for a selection from
a variety of sources.
This last principle applies even if the differing points of view mentioned in
number 4 are not represented in the Mishnah itself but in Tosefta, as he suggests
in discussing this principle.48 What then becomes of the Mishnah as a “study book
of the Halakha”? Did the editor expect students of the halakhah to resort to Tosefta
as a supplementary resource? Given the vastly larger size of the Tosefta, and the
material independent of the Mishnah that it contains, this would be a cumbersome

enterprise. The editor should have incorporated the relevant toseftan material into
the Mishnah in accordance with the principles that Goldberg himself has laid
down! Indeed, the final principle (number 5) makes precisely this point, and thus
it conflicts somewhat with the preceding three principles.
The essential problem with Goldberg’s view of the Mishnah is that he views
the Mishnah in two different, not entirely consistent ways: first as a “textbook,”
and apparently an elementary one, of tannaitic halakhah; and second as a record
of the teaching of four successive generations beginning with the generation of
the Yavneans, who are responsible for “the primary, but very shortest layer of the
Mishnah . . . , comprising late Second Temple teachings as formulated by the first
Yavneh generation.”49 These separate views of the Mishnah conflict, because his-
torical survey and effective pedagogy do not necessarily coalesce. Thus, at one
point Goldberg states, “the truth is that the Mishnah can be properly understood
and interpreted only when the relationship between each layer remains clearly
recognizable. . . .”50 Elsewhere, however, he writes that, for pedagogical reasons,
“the editor will obviously seek the most striking opinion,” in accordance with
principle number 4, and from this Goldberg asserts that “differing views will not
be hard to fathom.”51 These separate conclusions are not entirely consistent.
Perhaps even more difficult to determine is how “the” editor managed to
juggle these principles, synchronic, diachronic, and pedagogical, all at once. It is
little wonder that Goldberg concedes that “it is very hard to find a single mishna
with all four [generational] layers”52 and that most often only two opinions or layers
are presented. How then is the range of opinion to be fathomed, especially when
it is often a representative position that is given pride of place and not, say, two
extreme positions? Indeed, given the problem of coordinating these various con-
flicting goals and editorial principles, one wonders if one overriding intention
guided the redactional activity that went into the Mishnah’s formation. Do these
conflicting goals represent the work of different compilers or redactional circles?
Did the final editor intend the Mishnah to be no more than a compilation of
sources, as Albeck suggested, without the active editorial intervention that Gold-
berg assumes took place?
Goldberg himself attempted to resolve some of these problems by adverting
to the historical context in which the Mishnah was composed to explain its literary
nature.
[The] contemporary Hellenistic climate where systematic and well-thought-out

programs and theories of education played important roles. On the other hand,
some of them may seem quite modern. Thus a good textbook of necessity needs
to be selective in the presentation of the material, in order to offer the student a
maximum of information in a minimum of text. Moreover, it would not have a
stereotyped approach to every issue, but rather employ a variety of patterns of
presentation, each in that context where it would be most effective.53
Goldberg never demonstrates how all this all fits into Hellenistic theories of
pedagogy. But if the features Goldberg cites—like stratification and the various
pedagogical principles he lists—can be said to fit the Mishnah as we now have it,
something else must have been at work that melded history and pedagogy. This
may have been something like Neusner’s scheme of halakhic evolution, since such
a scheme would allow for a development from simple to complex, as may be
required for pedagogical purposes. Goldberg, by insisting that R. Akiva’s disciples
were merely interpreting his views and not recasting or altering them, seems to
reject this approach. In a large sense, Goldberg’s scheme is merely an adaptation
of R. Yohanan’s principle that the major tannaitic compilations, as he and we
know them, were “all according to the opinion of R. Akiva.”54 Whether the solu-
tion works as an explanation of the Mishnah’s purpose and arrangement is another
question.
Thus, for a number of reasons, Goldberg’s scheme is unconvincing. But the
other “pedagogical” theory—that of Weiss, who argues that the Mishnah was con-
stituted from Rabbi’s “lecture notes”—is no less problematic. For one thing, Weiss,
by attempting to use the lecture-note theory to explain the Mishnah’s disordered
structure, makes it more difficult for himself to explain those not insignificant
instances of order that he himself finds in the Mishnah. Furthermore, Weiss at
times contradicts his own view of the Mishnah’s disorder by explaining difficulties
as the result not of a lack of order but of the combination of two differing and
well-conceived “proto-tractates.” For example, he argues that the differing amoraic
views of the meaning of the word maveh—one of “the fathers of damages” and a
major category of the Rabbinic tort system—was the result of the inclusion of two
large blocks of material now found together in Bava Qamma but originally separate
collections of categories of damages, one made up of what is now BQ1:4–3:5 and
the other BQ3:8–6:6. Each of these blocks had a separate view of the meaning of
the word maveh, and each, according to Weiss, was systematic and orderly in
itself.55 The two collections are, in Weiss’s opinion, parallel in their exposition of
the four “fathers of damages,” except that the first interprets the opaque category,
maveh, as referring to the damages done by a human being, while the second
collection interprets it as shen, “tooth.” If so, the ambiguity in 1:1 is built in, so to
speak, or rather we may say that the ambiguity gave rise to two complete “proto-
tractates” that were then combined. If one were to accept this type of explanation
in many cases, the difference between Albeck’s position and Weiss’s would be
minimal, while, in contrast, Goldberg seems to envision Rabbi as a far more active
redactor than does either Albeck or Weiss.
Roman, Persian, and Syriac Parallels

As we have seen, Goldberg suggests in passing that Hellenistic ideas of education
served as the Mishnah’s—that is, Rabbi’s—model.56 Unfortunately, he offers few
details about his suggestion, and there are both cultural and historical reasons to
question whether such influence or connection was possible. In the first place,
Hellenistic education was literary and cultural in the general sense, philosophical
in some sense, but not legal.57 For legal parallels one must look to Roman law,
and, in particular, to its classical period, which is, however, slightly earlier than
the mishnaic. Gaius’ Institutes, which was intended as an introductory textbook
of Roman law and eventually served as the preface to Justinian’s Code, was pub-
lished about 160 c.e., a generation before Rabbi edited the Mishnah. Further, the
actual impact of Gaius’s work is uncertain. Roman jurisconsults, certainly those
who were Rabbi’s contemporaries, resisted the systematization of Roman law58 and,
in his own time, Gaius was not particularly celebrated; while Justinian called him
Gaius nostra, we do not even know his patronymic. Further, Gaius lived and
taught in Rome, and although he may have had provincial connections (perhaps
to Asia Minor), it is not clear how the Rabbis would have known of his work.
Nevertheless, his approach to systematization of Roman law resembles at least
some tendencies manifested in the Mishnah; he and Rabbi lived approximately at
the same time and both were, generally speaking, members of the same cultural
world. As a result, a comparison of the Institutes and the Mishnah is not without
grounds. Even so, we must bear in mind that Gaius was concerned only with civil
and criminal law and not at all with religion or ritual per se. But this is true of
most law books that have survived from late antiquity, including the Syriac law
books produced by various Nestorian ecclesiastics of the seventh and eighth cen-
turies, such as those of the patriarchs Henanisho Mar Abba, and especially that of
the Persian archbishops Jesuboht and Simon. Jesuboht’s “Corpus Juris” actually
provides the closest parallel to the Mishnah, since it is not restricted to one subject
(e.g., inheritance or marriage law) as are the others. It contains sections on mar-
riage, inheritance and contracts and obligations, as well as an introductory “Insti-
tutiones.”59 This is true as well of the Sasanian law collection, Madayan i Hazar
Dadestan (“The Book of a Thousand Decisions”) of Farroxmard i Wahraman,
which dates to the beginning of the seventh century but clearly contains extracts
from earlier works.60
A number of scholars have recently investigated the connection between the
Rabbinic corpus and various Hellenistic late antique legal compositions. Lee Le-
vine offers an admirably balanced summary of the current consensus:
The timing of certain developments within rabbinic society, especially with regard
to internal organization and compilation of various corpora, both aggadic and
halakhic, has interesting parallels with what was transpiring at the time in Roman
and later Byzantine society. Is it coincidental, for instance, that the earliest Phar-
asaic schools of Hillel and Shammai crystallized at the time of Augustus, when
legal training was becoming formalized in Rome in the early Roman law schools
founded by Labeo and Capito? Or that R. Akiva and his colleagues began col-
lecting and organizing rabbinic traditions under Hadrian, when Julianus, Celsus
Pomponius, and others were actively involved in making similar compilations in
Rome? Or that Rabbi Judah the Prince compiled and edited his Mishnah, and
tannaitic midrashim were collected under the Severans, at a time when Gaius,
Papinianus, Paulus, and Ulpianus were likewise compiling codices and responsa
of Roman law and commenting on earlier material? The argument that these
recurring parallel activities in Roman and Jewish societies might be related is
more compelling when we realize that both Roman jurists and the rabbis centered
their activities in schools of higher learning, and that at least one of the most
famous Roman schools was located in Berytus, not far from the center of rabbinic
activity in the Galilee.61
Whether or not we posit any direct connection or influence between the Rabbinic
and the classical Roman legal enterprises,62 the synchronic juxtaposition of these
two phenomena is tantalizing. And still more important for our purposes is the
usefulness of the Roman, Syriac, and Persian law collections of late antiquity in
setting out the parameters of what an ancient or Late Antique legal genre would
consist of.63
We begin with the following lengthy excerpt from Gaius’s description of Ro-
man marriage:
108. Now let us examine those persons who are subordinate to us in marriage.
This also is a right peculiar to Roman citizens.
109. While it is customary for both men and women to be in power, only women
fall into marital subordination.
110. Formerly there used to be three methods by which they fell into subordi-
nation: by usage, by sharing of bread, and by contrived sale.
111. A woman used to fall into marital subordination by usage if she remained in
the married state for a continuous period of one year: for she was, as it were,
usucapted by a year’s possession and would pass into her husband’s kin in the
relationship of a daughter. The Twelve Tables therefore provided that if any
woman did not wish to become subordinate to her husband in this way, she
should each year absent herself for a period of three nights, and in this way
interrupt the usage of each year. But this whole legal state was in part repealed
by statute, in part blotted out through simple disuse.
112. Women fall into marital subordination through a certain sacrifice made to
Jupiter of the Grain, for which reason it is also called the sharing of the bread.
. . . This legal state is still found in our own times; for the higher priests, that is
the priests of Jupiter, of Mars, and of Quirinus, as also the Sacred Kings, are
chosen only if they have been born in marriage made by the sharing of bread,
and they themselves cannot hold priestly office without being married by the
sharing of the bread.
113. Women fall into marital subordination though contrived sale, on the other
hand, by means of mancipation, that is, by a sort of imaginary sale; for in the
presence of not less than five adult Roman citizens as witnesses, and also a scale-
holder, the man to whom the woman becomes subordinate ‘buys’ her. . . .
115a. Formerly a contrived sale used also to take place for the purpose of making
a will; for at one time women, with certain exceptions, had no right to make a
will unless they had made a contrived sale and been remancipated and manu-
mitted. But on the proposal of the Emperor Hadrian, the Senate remitted this
requirement of making a contrived sale. . . .
116. It remains for us to describe what persons are in bondage.
117. All children, whether male or female, who are in the power of their father
can be mancipated by him in the same way as slaves can.
118. The same rule applies to persons in marital subordination; for women can
be mancipated by the other parties to the contrived sale in the same way as
children by their father.64
Gaius continues by providing us with a detailed description of mancipation,

bronze scales and all.
Now while Gaius certainly used sources in compiling his Institutes—in this
short passage he refers to the Twelve Tables, to legislation of Hadrian, and to
senatorial decisions—he presents a summary of these sources rather than citing

the original texts themselves. In this respect his Institutes is really a textbook rather
than an anthology. Again, while he refers to, and even describes, practices that
have fallen into disuse, these do not take up a large part of the work. Compare,
however, the opening sections of Tractate Qiddushin in the Mishnah:
1. A woman is acquired [in marriage] in three ways and acquires herself in two.
She is acquired by money, by deed, or by intercourse. “By money”: Beth Sham-
mai maintain, a denar or the worth of a denar; Beth Hillel say, a perutah or the
worth of a perutah. And how much is a perutah? An eighth of an Italian isar.
And she acquires herself by divorce or by her husband’s death. A yevamah (i.e.,
a childless widow subject to levirate marriage) is acquired by intercourse, and
acquires herself by [the ceremony] of halitzah (as mandated in Deut 25:7–10) or
by the levir’s death.
2. A Hebrew slave is acquired by money and by deed, and acquires himself by
years (i.e., after six years of service, as mandated by Exod. 21:2), by the jubilee,
and by deduction from the purchase price. A Hebrew maidservant [is more priv-
ileged] in that she acquires herself by signs [of puberty]. [A slave] whose ear is
bored (i.e., one who refuses freedom at the end of six years of servitude; see Exod.
21:5–6) is acquired by boring, and acquires himself by the jubilee or his master’s
death.
3. A heathen slave is acquired by money, deed, or by hazaqah (i.e., taking pos-
session, by ordering him to do the master some personal service), and acquires
himself by money through the agency of others, and by deed. . . .
4. Large cattle are acquired by “pulling”; small cattle by lifting: this is the opinion
of R. Meir and R. Eliezer, but the sages rule: small cattle are acquired by
“pulling.”
5. Property which offers security (i.e., real estate) is acquired by money, by deed
or by hazaqah. [Property] which does not offer security (i.e., moveables) may be
acquired in conjunction with property which provides security by money, deed,
or hazaqah, and it obligates the property which provides security, to take an oath
concerning them.
There is no reference here to ancient practices or to the history of the Mishnah’s

laws. If the texts in the Mishnah derive from earlier sources, the editor does not
identify or even refer to them.
A more exact parallel to Gaius’s practice would be those mishnayot in which

obsolete practices or decisions of early courts are briefly described. These include,
most famously, the mishnayot that begin with the formulaic “at first” (of which
the Mishnah contains nearly two dozen65) and other forms as well.66 We do not
know if the reasons that motivated Gaius and Rabbi to include such references to
earlier practices were similar. The eternal character of a divine law might naturally
lead a compiler to include such matters so as to better define the interplay of
divine law and human legislation, whereas Gaius’ excursions may involve nothing
more than a certain antiquarian temperament on the part of the author. Even so,
a cursory comparison of the two passages indicates that whereas Gaius takes pains
to define and describe the practices he reviews (e.g., usage, sharing of bread,
mancipation, etc.)—presumably for the benefit of the student using the Institutes
as a textbook—the Mishnah assumes a level of legal knowledge that Gaius does
not (even if it is also concerned to define areas of dispute or minimum require-
ments). The number of bracketed comments appended to the translation gives an
indication of how much knowledge the Mishnah assumes on the part of its reader.
The Mishnah cannot, and did not, stand on its own as a “textbook of the Halakha,”
and it clearly was not meant as an introduction to the field for students of Rabbinic
law.
On the other hand, even though he occasionally notes that the two schools
are in dispute on an issue, Gaius seldom refers to disputes among the jurists.
196. Guardianship ends for boys when they reach puberty. Sabinus, Cassius and
others of our teachers certainly think that a boy shows he has reached puberty by
physical development: that is, he is capable of begetting. However, in the case of
those who cannot reach puberty such as eunuchs, regard must be had to the age
at which puberty is normally reached. The authorities of the other school think
that puberty should be reckoned in years: that is, they judge anyone who has
reached the age of fourteen as having reached puberty.67
Gaius clearly identifies himself as a Sabinian, and in opposition to the Proculians,

whom he calls “the authorities of the other school.” In contrast, the Mishnah
contains an infinitely greater number of disputes, but nowhere does its editor
explicitly identify his allegiance; indeed, this objective stance is maintained even
when the debates between the Pharisees and the Sadducees are reported, as in
Yadayim 8.
Roman law preserves several genres of legal collections that may be pertinent
to categorizing the Mishnah: textbooks such as the Institutes of Gaius, codes such
as Justinian’s, early collections such as the Twelve Tables, and responsa literature.
Sasanian law preserves one important survival; the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan,
which, while certainly not a code, is nonetheless a large collection of laws (com-
prising some fifty chapters in its two parts) on major areas of civil law.68 Yet none
of these contains the wealth of disputational material that the Mishnah does, even
if their authors register conflicting opinions and sometimes present a short history
of the law on a particular point. Other ancient collections, such as the ninth-
century Zoroastrian encyclopedia, the Denkard (“Acts of Religion”), contain—like
the Mishnah and even more like the Talmud—a variety of material, history and
legend, ritual, and a smidgen of civil law, but also do not contain disputational
material. Likewise, the Videvdat and the Pahlavi Vendidad (“Law Against De-
mons”)69 —the part of the Avesta that deals with purity laws—does not contain
such material. As we have seen, it is unlikely that a code would have been com-
posed in this way, and all these other ancient codes and legal books are testimony
to that fact. That the Mishnah was eventually viewed as authoritative does not
mean that it was originally intended to be a code, since, as far as we can tell, it
never was looked upon as the last word in legal decision making. Nor, as we have
seen, does it serve particularly well as a textbook.
On the other hand, all of this may be a matter of degree. The Mishnah
contains a registry of disputes but not all that much disputational material, espe-
cially compared with the talmuds or the midreshei halakhah. On the other hand,
Gaius, Justinian, and the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan do contain varying but not
insignificant amounts of divergent opinions—the reason being, perhaps, as Ma-
cuch notes in her introduction to the first volume of the Madayan,70 that
The author of the lawbook was not interested to explain simple relationships, nor
to provide some sort of definition for the legal terms he employs. Apparently, he
conceived of the work as a sort of aid to decision making for jurists, for he assumes
an exact knowledge of all of these legal institutions.71
There is, however, another significant difference between these works and the
Mishnah. All the other works have introductions. Justinian, as we have seen, ap-
propriated Gaius, and Jesuboht, in the thirteen chapters of Book One, provides
his law collection with an introduction reminiscent of Gaius that provides a frame-
work for understanding the means and purposes of law, both in a legal and reli-
gious context, and the place of law within an eschatological context, and that
contrasts human law with nomos, the ideal law. Possibly Jesuboht provided this
introduction in order to provide his flock with an understanding of the place of
“rendering up to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” on the one hand; he may also have
been influenced by Justinian’s appropriation of Gaius. Farroxmard also provides
something of an eschatological and doxological introduction to Madayan, but one
that does not take up any legal issues whatsoever. Generally, he does not discuss
basic rules or simple cases (although such rules or cases can be extracted from
the precedents he does provide). Nevertheless, as Macuch makes clear in her
introduction, the Madayan was certainly a collection of legal decsions that was
compiled for the guidance of jurists who were obligated to enforce the laws.
Historians of Roman law have emphasized the unique and unusual nature of
Gaius’s Institutiones. Roman jurists were not legal theorists in the larger sense nor
particularly interested in generalizations. As has been noted, Gaius was a not par-
ticularly successful law professor in his own time. It is therefore noteworthy that
Justinian’s committee chose precisely his textbook as a prologue to its own code.
It may be that the lack of alternatives forced this choice on them; there were not
many other such overviews of the law. Ironically, the uniqueness of Gaius’s work
makes the absence of such a prologue in the Mishnah, along with the paucity of
definitions of legal terms in it, more in line with general Roman practice and less
problematic in its own terms. In any case, it is clear that the inclusion of divergent
views and the lack of clear definitions are irrelevant to the question of whether a
particular work was intended as a code. Gaius composed a textbook, not necessarily
meant for legal decision making in the proximate sense, which was later appro-
priated into a code. Farroxmard compiled a collection (not unlike the Mishnah’s),
which was intended to be authoritative. Justinian’s Code, also intended as au-
thoritative, contained elements of both the authoritative code and the textbook.
Given the absence of a real parallel to Gaius’ Institutiones in Rabbinic literature,
or, for that matter, in Roman or Sasanian law, we may conclude that there is no
reason not to believe that Rabbi wished to provide a collection that could be used
for both study and decision making.
The Mishnah as Philosophy

The fifth and final view of the Mishnah that has been proposed by modern scholars
is as a philosophical treatise. The foremost proponent of this view has been Jacob
Neusner, who has also pursued what is certainly the most extensive contemporary
attempt to view the Mishnah in its own right and to define its characteristic traits
in their own context. That is, he avoids viewing the Mishnah through the lens of
other ancient Rabbinic (and non-Rabbinic) documents. By comparing the Mish-
nah’s and the Tosefta’s respective treatments of Seder Tohorot (Purities), Neusner
has carried out an exhaustive study of the forms and formulary patterns of that
Seder and its redaction. He summarizes his findings as follows:
Tosefta to Mishnah Seder Tohorot both correlates with, and presents a striking
contrast to, Mishnah. . . . Tosefta’s cognitive units (⫽ Mishnah-sections) are for-
mulated out of phase with [the] formal patterns characteristic of Mishnah. In
particular they ignore Mishnah’s stress on highly patterned syntactical formula-
tions, carefully grouped units of threes and fives, and disciplined declarative sen-
tences, one following the next in large-scale blocks of formal and conceptual
intermediate divisions (⫽ roughly, chapters). Indeed, it is in Tosefta that the
redactional formulations become fully apparent. Here, in the document generated
by Mishnah, we see little of Mishnah’s interest in imposing structure upon inter-
mediate units and formal patterns upon small ones. . . . When we eliminate To-
sefta’s cognitive units and intermediate divisions which cite or gloss Mishnah, we
are left with intermediate divisions and cognitive units which in the main form
a mass of mutually indistinguishable, generally unbalanced and unpatterned de-
clarative sentences.72
From this uniformity of language and style Neusner concludes that the Mishnah
was redacted by a small group of people over a short period of time; a longer
duration or a more heterogeneous group or groups of redactors could not sustain
such uniformity.73 “Despite its socially diverse foundations and categories of inter-
est, the Mishnah expresses itself in one mode of thought and expression and
through one manner of speaking.”74
Moreover, there is very little “history” to the Mishnah’s own composition.
History itself plays almost no role in the Mishnah. From the fact that its rules are
formulated in the present tense, Neusner concludes that “after all, what the Mish-
nah really wants is for nothing to happen. . . . It portrays a world fully perfected
and so fully at rest. . . . There is room only for a description of how things are: the
present tense, the sequence of completed statements and static problems.”75 And
again: “The whole corpus of prophecy and history is neglected by the Mishnah.
. . . When the philosophers [of the Mishnah] confronted the sizable heritage of
Israel and made the choice to ignore most of what had been done since the
formation of the Mosaic codes . . . , they made a stunning comment. . . . Their
judgment was that nothing of worth had happened from the time of Moses to
their own day.”76
Partly because of this lack of concern with history, Neusner speaks of the
Mishnah’s authors as “philosophers” and defines the Mishnah as “philosophy.” As

E. P. Sanders puts it in a trenchant review of Neusner’s work on the Mishnah,
Neusner proposes that the authors were philosophers and intended to construct a
metaphysical and anti-historical world view. . . . He makes the fundamental as-
sumption that the contents of the Mishnah tell us all that the authors want to
say “about their view of the world as they see it or as they want to see it” (p. 15).
. . . Since he assumes that the Mishnah is metaphysical philosophy, Neusner mar-
vels at the things which are not there and which would be there if it were ordinary
metaphysics. . . . But the things that are not there . . . are not there because they
are not subject to legal discussion.77
In other words, the Mishnah’s genre cannot of course be determined by a form-

critical study of its language. As Sanders points out, use of the present tense is
generally characteristic of legal and semi-legal writing, as is neglect of historical
data. Likewise, this accounts for its relative neglect of theology.78
Along the same line, Sanders argues, “laws characteristically do not give historical
preambles and eschatological conclusions. Prophecy is entirely missing.” As an
example of what the British Highway Code does not contain, he suggests the
following: “Once upon a time Britain had no Motorways, until the great minister
. . . arose, who built the M1, at which time there was only one. And now we look
forward to the time when all Britain will be paved and, besides Motorways, there
will only be slip roads.”79
Nevertheless, the inclusion in the Mishnah of large bodies of material—Qo-
dashim and Toharot—that were all but completely inapplicable in Rabbi’s time
points to its utopian character. G. Stemberger, in his revised edition of Strack’s
Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, concludes his discussion of this issue
with the following suggestion:
Given today’s knowledge, it is no longer possible unequivocally to determine

whether M[ishnah] was originally conceived as a collection, a teaching manual
or a law code. Indeed, this alternative probably arises only for modern readers;
what is more, it fails to account sufficiently for the utopianism of M[ishnah], its
idealized order of the perfect harmony of heaven and earth, and the underlying
philosophy. For in principle the ancient tradition is of course regarded as law
which must be transmitted in teaching—and thus the three concepts almost co-
incide.80
Both Sanders and Stemberger are essentially correct, but even their charac-
terizations of the Mishnah are not entirely accurate. Pace Stemberger, the Mish-
nah is hardly unique in containing elements of a code, a collection, and a teaching
manual. Further, some law codes do contain historical summaries, as we have
seen with Gaius, Justinian, and Madayan. As to the last of these, we may illustrate
its historiographical dimension with an example from its very beginning:
It is said: Until the reign of Wahram people were considered slaves whose fathers
were slaves, (and) not those whose mother was;81 in contrast, Soshans said: “The
child belongs to the father,” and now we say: “The mother.”82
Any number of parallels from the Mishnah come to mind,83 as do examples from
Gaius84 and Justinian.85 It should also be noted that any reference to an earlier
authority—a practice common to all these collections—is in a sense historical.
Sanders’s assumption that a philosophical work will not contain historical refer-
ences is itself something of a non sequitur. Such historical references are not
necessarily inappropriate in a law collection, a ritual text, or even a philosophical
work. The same is true of eschatological conclusions. In Farroxmard’s somewhat
rambling and repetitive introduction to Madayan, preserved in one manuscript
which at this point has suffered losses in transmission, we find the following as-
sertions. Because of the lacunae in the manuscript, and the loose syntax, it is
difficult to follow the arguments exactly, but the general drift is clear.
In the name of Ohrmazd, the lord of spiritual and earthly being [ . . . the
Good Religion] of Mazdanaysians. This book is [called] the Book of a Thousand
Decisions, in that it [shows] the greatness, goodness, and worth of people, aside
from the qualities which they by their [own] effort [as well as] the gift of the gods,
achieve in their own essence. The book is that instrument [of] efficacious power
that the creator, in [his] omniscience, in order to ordain the destruction of the
Lie, and the restoration to one’s own [domain], to ordain the organization of
creation, the non-opposition [to the good], the undying bliss, the ever-enduring
light, and to ordain [his] total sovereignty in the [eschatological] end of time, that
has endured to such an extent as an essential [ability]. For the sake of the exis-
tence of that nature of mankind is that achievement praiseworthy, on account of
which God created man. In the era of the [eschatological] end of time was the
“preservation of the existence” of wisdom, insight, power of discernment, and
understanding (perceived, taken advantage of?). . . .
As one may come to perceive, from the religion of the gods, through search-
ing and asking, to make one’s own person free of sin [is] the way to the realization
of one’s own proper function, of [Good] Thinking, Speech and business dealings,
keeping oneself [ritually] pure through integrity, I, Farrohmard i Wahraman, . . .
this highest well-being. . . .86
Whether this introductory statement (which, it should be noted, appears as a sep-

arate section after chapter 32 of 50) was intended by the compiler as part of his
work, or whether its placement is due to the vagaries of transmission, is not clear.
As it stands, however, it may argue against Sanders’s point that legal works do not
normally contain eschatological or philosophical discussions.
The essential question is the definition of “philosophical” in this context.
Neusner himself concedes that “the Mishnah’s is a philosophy in an odd and
peculiar idiom to be sure.” He goes on to assert, however, that, properly studied,
“it will emerge as a work of systematic thought on a sustaining program of issues
that, in the Mishnah’s authorship’s time and place, other philosophers addressed
and people in general [addressed] as philosophical.” When Neusner details his
somewhat idiosyncratic use of the term “philosophical,” however, it becomes
much less vulnerable (at least in part) to the criticism that Sanders mounts against
it. He writes that the philosophical issues addressed in the Mishnah include
the rules of classification and generalization, the issues of mixtures, the resolution
of doubts, the relationship of the actual to the potential (chicken, egg), the role
of attitude or intention in the assessment of an action and its consequences . . .
and the like—these abstract issues of general intelligibility turn out to form the
intellectual program of considerable portions of the Mishnah as well.87
Neusner insists that these concerns take the Mishnah beyond the usual range
of the term “philosophy of law” because they involve two additional criteria:
First, they are principles that can apply to a considerable range of specific topics.
Second, they are subject to generalization (“generalizable”) even beyond the lim-
its of the law, for instance, in matters of metaphysics or physics (as with mixtures
and connection), in matters of ethics (as with intentionality), in matters of the
fundaments of philosophical inquiry (as with the interplay of potential and actual,
which meant so much to Aristotle).88
Thus defined and circumscribed, Neusner may have a point, though if intention-
ality is a criterion, we may say that Farroxmard’s work also meets that requirement,
as would most law books. Implicit in nearly all manuals of ritual are principles
that parallel the Mishnah’s concern with mixtures and connection (e.g., sympa-
thetic magic) without being the least bit “philosophical.” To this last point, Neus-
ner would probably respond that what differentiates the Mishnah from nonphi-
losophical works is also its methodology, as in the matter of resolving issues of
doubt.89 On this point, too, however, jurisprudential systems have their own “rules
of statutory construction.”
The real problem with Neusner’s philosophical approach to the Mishnah is
that, in the end, categorizing the Mishnah as a philosophical work does not assist
us in understanding its immediate, social purpose, or its redactional history and
intent. It has always been read as a legal work of some type. No one, until Neusner,
ever thought of reading it as a philosophical work—not even Maimonides! But
can the form-critical differences that Neusner noted between the Mishnah and
the Tosefta aid us in defining the Mishnah nonetheless? Sanders’s critique of
Neusner on precisely that point appears sound. The matters of style that Neusner
adduced as characteristic of the Mishnah as a philosophical work are typical of
Tosefta as well. There may, however, be other differences which would help us
in defining the nature of the Mishnah more precisely.
Among these differences is the Tosefta’s inclusion of prooftexts to a far greater
degree than in the Mishnah, an observation that even a cursory examination of
both collections will confirm. This also accords with the much greater quantity
of nonlegal material incorporated into the Tosefta than within the Mishnah. To-
sefta’s redactor(s) clearly had a broader purpose in mind than did those of the
Mishnah. This point is also reflected in the comparative sizes of the two works:
Tosefta is about three times the size of the Mishnah. Its focus is also somewhat
different—for example, it contains a number of very detailed expositions of the
parameters of various ritual obligations, reminiscent of Maimonidean style, but
even more of Sefer Hahinnukh. In this respect, then, Tosefta resembles a code
more than does the Mishnah!
Perhaps most telling, however, is the fact that Tosefta does not systematically
make good on the Mishnah’s omissions. There is no tractate in the Tosefta on
phylacteries, on ritual fringes, on the laws of Hanukkah or Shavuot, nor does

Tosefta contain a detailed exposition of the Jewish calendar. To some extent, it
may be that omissions of this type mirror the difficulties of describing in words
rituals that are more easily transmitted mimetically. Nevertheless, one must inquire
as to why the Mishnah (and the Tosefta) concentrate on some matters and not on
others. To the extent that a clear rule cannot be formulated, we must accept the
possibility, at least as a working hypothesis, that, as Albeck insisted, the Mishnah
was not complete. In turn, since it now exists as a commentary on the Mishnah,
Tosefta too must be incomplete.
Both characteristics of the Mishnah—its excurses, on the one hand, and its
omissions on the other—detract from its usefulness as a code. But an incomplete
legal anthology also loses something of the usefulness of a complete register of
sources, perhaps even more so since we expect greater “coverage” in an anthology
than in a code, which should omit divergent sources. Even Albeck, who rejects
the view of the Mishnah as a code and instead considers it as an anthology of
sources, nevertheless feels compelled to explain its deficiencies as an anthology as
being a consequence of its premature circulation. Still, we expect more of a code
than from a collection of sources. A religious code that for some reason fails to
cover matters of daily ritual can hardly be said to have fulfilled its purpose.
In the end, therefore, the Mishnah’s manifest incompleteness remains a puz-
zle, whether we consider its redactors’ intention as having been to produce a code
or an anthology. Nevertheless, our examination of parallel collections in other
literatures of late antiquity has demonstrated that the division between a code or
an anthology was not as great as nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars imag-
ined. Nor was the division between a formal legal work—code or anthology—and
a study text. The difficulty in categorizing the Mishnah as one or the other is a
powerful example of how little these generic categories help us in defining the
singularity of a work like the Mishnah.
Notes
1. Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon, ed. B. M. Lewin (Haifa: n.p., 1921, repr. Jerusalem, Makor,
1972), p. 29. The translation follows both the “Spanish” and the “French” versions, without
one addition in the French version. See Margarete Schlueter, Auf Welche Weise wurde die
Mischna geschrieben? (Tuebingen: J. C. Mohr, 1993), p. 97, nn. 2 and 3. Most MSS have
leqateih, but O2198 has neqateih, “he took it,” which may have influenced Schlueter’s
preference for nahm R(abbi) sie auf as opposed to sammelte in translating the former. On
the question of the two versions, see Schlueter, pp. 24–30, and the literature there cited,
and on the various words R. Sherira employs to describe the process, my discussion in the
following paragraphs.
In this essay, “Rabbi” and “Rabbi Judah the Prince” are terms used to signify the
redactor or redactors of the Mishnah, without necessarily identifying the historical Rabbi
Judah as the sole or even necessarily the primary redactor. Even R. Sherira, who like his
contemporaries and successors, saw redaction in personal terms of nearer to modern ideas
of authorship than of selection and editing, describes his effort as the culmination of a
three-generations-long process, beginning with R. Akiva, continuing with R. Meir, and
ending (more or less) with Rabbi. I use brackets within ancient quoted material to indicate
restorations and parentheses to indicate explanations, other editorial interpolations, and
original language.
2. See Lewin, Iggeret Rav Sherira, pp. 23, 29; the second phrase occurs on p. 29.
3. See Schlueter, Auf Welche, pp. 376–372, and my comments in my review essay in
AJS Review 20 (1995):180–85.
4. On the matter of historicity, see Schlueter, Auf Welche, pp. 360–66, and see my
review in AJS Review 20 (1995): 180–85, and D. Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian
Babylonia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 35–43, Y. Gafni, Yehudei Bavel bi-Tqufat ha-
Talmud (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1990), pp. 239–45, and “Le-heqer ha-Khronologia ha-
Talmudit be-Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon,” Zion 52 (5747), pp. 1–24.
5. For habber as “formulate, fix,” see Shraga Abramson, “Ketivat ha-Mishnah (Al Daat
Geonim ve-Rishonim),” in Tarbut ve-Hevrah be-Toledot Yisrael bi-Ymei ha-Benayyim: Qo-
vetz Maamarim le-Zikhro shel Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sason, ed. R. Bonfil, et al. (Jerusalem:
Merkaz Shazar, 1989), pp. 27–52, but compare M. Friedman, “Al Terumat ha-Genizah le-
Heqer ha-Halakhah,” Madaei ha-Yahadut 38 (1993): 277–301. On the whole issue, see
Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 156–61. On the question of the exact relation of
some of these terms to the vexed question of whether Rabbi actually produced a written
text, see most recently my “Orality and the Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud,” Oral
Tradition 14/1 (1999): 52–99, and in particular, pp. 65–67, and see S. Lieberman, “The
Publication of the Mishnah,” Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological
Seminary, 1950), pp. 83–99; B. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and
Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Copenhagen: C.W.K.
Gleerup and Ejnar Munksgaard, 1961 (repr. by W. B. Eerdman’s, 1998, with a foreword by
Jacob Neusner); J. Neusner, The Memorized Torah: The Mnemonic System of the Mishnah
(Chico, Cal: Scholars Press, 1985); and J. Neusner, Oral Tradition in Judaism: The Case of
the Mishnah (New York: Garland, 1987), among many other contributions. See Martin S.
Jaffee, “Oral Tradition in the Writings of Rabbinic Oral Torah: On Theorizing Rabbinic
Orality,” Oral Tradition 14 (1999): 3–32, as well as Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, “The Fixing
of the Oral Mishnah and the Displacement of Meaning,” in the same issue, and Jaffee’s
new book, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200–
400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 55–83.
6. Lewin, Iggeret Rav Sherira, p. 23.
7. Lewin, p. 30, based on the statement in mEd 1:5.
8. S. Schechter, ed., Saadyana: Geniza Fragments of Writings of R. Saadya Gaon and
Others (Cambridge: Deighton and Bell, 1903), p. 5.
9. On the relation of R. Sherira’s Epistle to Seder Tannaim va-Amoraim, written about
a century earlier, see Brody, The Geonim, p. 278.
10. Eliezer Segal, “Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud,” Prooftexts 17
(1997): 33–61; the quote appears on p. 34.
11. This shows up in large and small ways; see my comments in “Nahmanides and
the Search for Omnisignificance,” Torah Umadda Journal 4 (1993):6–7, esp. n. 32.
12. See Stern’s introduction to this volume, p. 5.
13. Jacob Neusner’s rejection of source-critical methodologies should not be taken as
a rejection of the existence of “sources” in Rabbinic documents; his avoidance of such
methods is heuristic, since, as he often puts it, “we do not know what we cannot show.”
See, for example, his discussion of the redaction of Mishnah and Tosefta in The Tosefta:
Its Structure and Its Sources, Brown Judaic Studies 112 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), pp. 1–
8.
14. Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1980), p. 238.
15. Thus, bBer 2a accounts for the placement of the rules dealing with the evening
Shema before those of the morning Shema because of their respective placement in Deu-
teronomy 6:7.
16. See, for example, bNaz 2b.
17. See bYev 2b, 3a; B.Q. 17b; B.B. 108b; Zev 48a.
18. bSot 2a.
19. See Abraham Goldberg, “The Mishnah—A Study Book of Halakha,” in Shmuel
Safrai, ed., The Literature of the Sages, First Part (Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum
Testamentum), Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987, pp. 211–252; the observation quoted is on
pp. 233–234.
20. See Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 4, “Classification,” pp. 238–320. See most recently Haym
Soloveitchik, “Hirhurim al Miyyuno shel ha-Rambam be-Mishneh Torah: Beyot Amitiyyot
u-Medummot,” Maimonidean Studies 4 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2000),
pp. 107–15 (Hebrew numbering).
21. Kovetz Teshuvot ha-Rambam ve-Iggerotav, ed. A. Lichtenberg (Leipzig, 1859),
p. 26a, quoted in Twersky, Introduction, p. 242, n. 8.
22. Twersky, Introduction, p. 243–44.
23. Twersky, Introduction, p. 286.
24. From this point of view, Avraham Weiss’s view (at least at one stage in his life) of
the Mishnah as Rabbi’s “lecture notes” is a variation on the latter theme; it differs from
the view of the Mishnah as a collection chiefly in that it attempts to explain the Mishnah’s
lack of strict order, as will be discussed.
25. See Zechariah Frankel, Darkei ha-Mishnah (1859; repr. Tel Aviv, Sinai, 1959),
p. 228, esp. n. 6; the Bavli’s remark about R. Ashi is found at bB. B. 157b. Modern schol-
arship does not interpret the comment in this way; see Avraham Weiss, Hithavvut ha-
Talmud bi-Shelemuto (New York: Kohut, 1943), pp. 245–46.
26. Hanokh Albeck, Untersuchungen ueber die Redaktion der Mischna (Berlin: C. A.
Schweitschke & Sohn, 1923); a pale reflection of this work appears as part of his Mavo la-
Mishnah.
27. J. N. Epstein, Mevo’ot le-Safrut ha-Tannaim: Mishnah, Tosefta u-Midreshei-
Halakhah, ed. E. Z. Melamed (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1957).
28. See Albeck, Untersuchungen, pp. 14–61, for dozens of examples.
29. Albeck points, inter alia, to the enactments of Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai in mR.H.
4:1–4, or those of Yohanan the High Priest in mSot 9:6 and mM.S. 5:15.
30. mAr 2:1–6.
31. mMeg 1:4–11. Albeck, Mavo la-Mishnah (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 5727), pp. 88–
89, assembles a large number of such examples.
32. See his Mavo la-Mishnah, pp. 99–101.
33. See his discussion of this matter in his Mehqarim ba-Baraita ve-Tosefta ve-Yahasan
la-Talmud (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1969), pp. 180–84.
34. See Y. Kafih’s translation, Mishnah im Perush Rabbenu Moshe ben Maimon (Je-
rusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 5729), vol. I, c. 14b.
35. So the Bavli’s use of the phrase satam lan Tanna . . . at Bez 2a, Yeb 11b, Ket 43b
[satam lan Tanna ke-Rabbi], Qid 54b, Sanh 27b, Bek 11a, Tem 34a.
36. Albeck’s arguments are to be found in two places: in the chapter devoted to the
question of the sources of the Mishnah in his Mavo la-Mishnah, pp. 88–98, and in his
Untersuchungen, esp. pp. 78–88.
37. Albeck, Untersuchungen, pp. 107–8.
38. Epstein, Mevo’ot. It may not be without significance that Magnes, which ultimately
published not only Epstein’s lecture notes but also three volumes of his collected papers
(Mehqarim be-Safrut ha-Talmud uvi-Lshonot Shemiyot, also edited by E. Z. Melamed [1983–
1988], and which reprinted (along with Devir) his Perush ha-Geonim le-Seder Toharot (1981/
2), did not reprint this article in the three-volume collection.
39. See his article, “Tosefta Atiqta,” Tarbiz 62 (1993): 314–38.
40. I say “formally parallel” because Tosefta is generally arranged according to the
order of the Mishnah, and in this case the topics are roughly parallel. It is the discordance
between them that draws Friedman’s attention.
41. “Tosefta Atiqta,” pp. 320–21. The translation is mine.
42. See my Authority and Tradition (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1994), pp. 83–
86.
43. See the literature cited in n. 5.
44. Avraham Weiss, Diyyunim be-Bava Qamma (New York: Feldheim, 1966), pp. 29–
30.
45. See his commentaries on Mishnah Shabbat and Eruvin, Perush la-Mishnah: Ma-
sekhet Shabbat (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1976), and Perush la-Mishnah:
Masekhet Eruvin (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986).
46. See n. 19 for the volume; the article, “Ve-kulhu aliba deRabbi Aqiva,” Tarbiz 38
(1968/9): 231–54. Another article, Goldberg, “Darko shel R. Yehudah ha-Nasi be-Hibbur ha-
Mishnah,” Tarbiz 28 (1958/9):260–69 is also relevant.
47. “Ve-kulhu,” p. 214.
48. Ibid., p. 225.
49. Ibid., p. 216.
50. Ibid., p. 219.
51. Ibid., p. 226.
52. Ibid., p. 219.
53. Ibid., p. 223.
54. bSanh 86a, cited by Goldberg, p. 223; indeed, the title of his Tarbiz 38 article is
simply a reprise of this statement.
55. See A. Weiss, Al Hamishnah: [Osef Maamarim], (Ramat Gan: Bar Urian, n.d).,
pp. 1–15, esp. pp. 4–6, originally published as “Ha-Palugta be-Ferush ha-Millah Maveh be-
Mishnah, ba-Bavli, uvi-Yrushalmi,” Hatzofeh le-Hokhmat Yisrael (Budapest, 1926), pp. 144–
58.
56. Goldberg sees the fourth and final layer of the Mishnah as having been “formu-
lated under the aegis of R. Yehudah the Patriarch” (“Ve-kulhu,” p. 217).
57. See Martin Goodman, The Roman World: 44 BC–AD 180 (London: Routledge,
1997, pp. 149–56. Note in particular the following, from p. 154: “A cultured Greek speaker
[by the time of Augustus] would be expected to know Homer well and the plays of the
great tragedians, which ensured familiarity with the Greek myths. He or she could be
expected to have some acquaintance with Herodotus and Thucydides, and with the greatest
of the orators, such as Demosthenes and Aeschines.”
58. See Alan Watson, The Spirit of Roman Law (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia
Press, 1995), pp. 1–9, 201–03, 181–93, 117–45, and O. F. Robinson, The Sources of Roman
Law (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 102–27.
59. See Eduard Sachau, Syrische Rechtsbuecher, 3 vols. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1907–
1914). Jesuboht’s Corpus constitutes the largest section of the third volume and covers a
hundred pages of Syriac text.
60. See now the comprehensive edition of Maria Macuch, Rechtskasuistik und
Gerichtspraxis zu Beginn des siebenten Jahrhunderts in Iran: Die Rechtssammlung des Far-
rohmard i Wahraman (Iranica 1) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrossowitz, 1993) and Macuch, Das
Sasanidische Rechtsbuch “Matakdan i Hazar Datistan (Teil II) (Wiesbaden: Deutsche Mor-
genlaendische Gesellschaft-Franz Steiner, 1981). For a recent translation of the Russian
edition of A. G. Perikhanian, see Perikhanian, The Book of a Thousand Judgements (A
Sasanian Law-Book) (Costa Mesa, Cal: Mazda Publishers, 1997).
61. Lee I. Levine, Judaism & Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? The
Samuel & Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1998), pp. 134–35; see also the article on education and the appended bibliography
by Robert Kaster in G. W. Bowersock et al., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical
World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 421–24. For the later period,
see Catherine Hezser, “The Codification of Legal Knowledge in Antiquity: The Talmud
Yerushalmi and Roman Law Codes,” in Peter Schaefer, The Talmud Yerushalmi and
Graeco-Roman Culture, vol. II (Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck 1998), pp. 581–641. For the earlier
period, see Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981),
pp. 83–86.
Lest I be accused of an unheeding parallelomania, see Levine’s measured cautions on
pp. 112–13, though for a very different view on this point, see Louis H. Feldman, Jew &
Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
62. Or whether we may posit any connection, however remote, between that of the
redaction of the Bavli and various Sasanian law books, for that matter.
63. It is perhaps not inappropriate to note here Jacob Neusner as far back as 1969
called for the study of Madayan i hazar dadestan as “at least as interesting for comparative
purposes as Justinian’s Code.” See his History of the Jews in Babylonia, IV. The Age of
Shapur II (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), p. 432.
64. The Institutes of Gaius, trans. with an introduction by W. M. Gordon and O. F.
Robinson, with the Latin text of Seckel and Kuebler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1988), pp. 75, 77.
65. mShevi 4:1; M.S. 5:8; Bik 3:7; Sheq 1:2, 7:5; Yom 2:1; Suk 3:12; R.H. 2:1, 2:2, 2:5,
4:3, 4:4, 4:9; Ned 9:6, 11:12 (twice); Git 4:2 (twice), 6:5; Bek 1:7; Ar 9:4; Nid 10:6; T.Y. 4:5
(twice). It is perhaps noteworthy that the orders of Qodashim and Toharot, which might
be expected to contain a great deal of such material, contain nearly no such reports.
66. Thus, see mShab 1:4–8 or Yad 4:1–4. Sot 5:2–5, which are described as occurring
bo ba-yom, “on that day” that R. Gamaliel was deposed from being patriarch.
67. See Gordon and Robinson, Institutes, p. 121.
68. Judging from other collections, including the Syriac law books edited by Sachau
and the tenth-century Rivayat i Hemit Ashavahishtan, no major area of law is omitted from
the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan. However, this impression may be due to the paucity of
our sources. For a discussion of the sources of Farroxmard’s collection, see Macuch,
Rechtskasuistik, pp. 11–15. It is noteworthy, however, that only the Dadestan Namag would
seem to have been comprehensive in this regard. The other works Macuch lists on p. 14
are clearly partial, along the lines of the praetorian edicts of Roman law.
69. See Shaul Shaked, Wisdom of the Sasanian Sages (Denkard VI), Persian Heritage
Series 34 (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1979), and for an old and not altogether reliable trans-
lation, see Dinkard, ed. and trans. P. B. and D. P. Sanjara, 19 vols. (Bombay, completed in
1928).
70. That is, the most recently published volume.
71. Macuch, Rechtskasuistik, p. 2.
72. Jacob Neusner, The Tosefta, p. 201. This was first published in vol. 21 of his A
History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities: Volume 21: The Redaction and Formulation of the
Order of Purities in Mishnah and Tosefta (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), p. 235. See my reviews
of his work in “The Judaism of the Mishna: What Evidence?” Judaica Book News 12, no.
2 (1982): 17–25, and “Neusner’s Tosefta,” Jewish Quarterly Review 78, no. 1 (July 1987):130–
36.
73. J. Neusner, Purities, vol. 21, p. xiii.
74. J. Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 241.
75. Ibid., pp. 235–36.
76. Ibid., pp. 169–71.
77. E. P. Sanders, “Jacob Neusner and the Philosophy of the Mishnah,” in Sanders,
Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah: Five Studies (London: SCM Press, 1990), pp. 313–
14.
78. Ibid., pp. 314–17.
79. Ibid., p. 315.
80. H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans.
Markus Bockmuehl (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), p. 154.
81. I have simplified the syntax somewhat.
82. See Rechtskasuistik, pp. 22 and 24, and Macuch’s long discussion on pp. 27–31.
83. See, for example, the famous mishnah in B.M. 4:1 and the talmudic discussions
in both Bavli and Yerushalmi. The term ba-rishonah, “at first,” appears some eighteen times
in the Mishnah, introducing a rule or procedure that had been applied at one time and
was no longer the case (see mShiv 1:1; M.S. 3:7; Sheq 1:2, 7:5; Yom 2:1; Suk 3:12; R.H. 2:1,
2:2, 4:3, 4:4; Ned 9:6, 11:2; Git 4:2, 6:5; Bek 1:7; Ar 9:4; Nid 10:6; T.Y. 4:5); in a famous
case, an earlier rule is contrasted with the procedure followed by a later court (bet din shel
ahareihem). Conditions from the time of the “early prophets” (nevi’im rishonim) are intro-
duced at Yom 5:2. Many more such points are raised in various contexts; see, for example,
Martin Jaffee, “The Taqqanah in Rabbinic Literature: Jurisprudence and the Construction
of Rabbinic Memory, JJS 41 (1990):204–25.
84. See the quotation from I.111, reproduced previously.
85. See Hezser, “Codification of Legal Knowledge.”
86. Macuch, Rechtskasuistik, pp. 16. 18, 19, 21. Compare also Nina Garsoian’s trans-
lation of Anahit Perikhanian, The Book of a Thousand Judgements (New York: Bibliotheca
Persica, 1997), pp. 193, 195.
87. Jacob Neusner, The Philosophical Mishnah: Volume One: The Initial Probe, Brown
Judaic Studies 163 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), p. 1.
88. Ibid., p. 226.
89. Ibid.
5
eliezer segal
Anthological Dimensions of
the Babylonian Talmud
he Babylonian Talmud defies attempts to categorize it according to the stan-

Tdard literary genres of Western literature. Even when we take care to define
it on its own terms, the undertaking is likely to be frustrated by the realization
that the classification is susceptible to many different possibilities, depending on
the vantage from which it is approached. To complicate the efforts even further,
talmudic scholarship itself is often in disagreement over fundamental issues related
to the Talmud’s purpose and composition.
Let me begin by surveying the principal models that have been proposed as
frameworks for understanding the Talmud’s distinctive literary character, taking
note of the divergent scholarly approaches that have been applied to them.
The Talmud as Commentary

The fact that the Talmud is not an independent work but is arranged as a com-
mentary on an earlier work, the Mishnah, sets obvious limits to its contents. It has
no real structure of its own but follows the order of the Mishnah, adding comments
by later authorities or comparative material from earlier sources, provided that
these sources relate directly or indirectly to matters mentioned in the Mishnah.1
Nevertheless, it is immediately apparent that the Rabbinic conception of a com-
mentary is a much more flexible one than we are used to in the Western tradition.
The straightforward elucidation of the meaning and intention of the commented
texts is only one of the purposes of the Talmud’s commentary on the Mishnah,
and not necessarily the most prominent among them. The talmudic sugya tackles
an infinite spectrum of topics that bear only peripheral or indirect connections to
the Mishnah, including comparisons with (apparently) conflicting sources and
new applications of legal principles.
81
The Talmud as Legal Literature

Since legal literature knows its own distinctive literary forms,2 it is not necessary
to evaluate the Talmud according to the esthetic and formal criteria that would
be applied to more conventionally “literary” genres. In particular, a long-standing
dispute has focused on whether the Mishnah was intended to serve as a normative
codex or corpus iuris, or as digest or encyclopedia of sources for theoretical instruc-
tion. Though it would have to be reformulated,3 a corresponding argument could
be applied to the Talmud as well.
Viewing Talmud through this lens as a type of legal literature might allow us
to understand and appreciate heretofore inexplicable or unrecognized features. For
example, legal literature is universally renowned for its hairsplitting casuistry and
careful logical argumentation. Although we do not customarily value such dialec-
tic as literary activity, there is no prima facie reason not to do so. There is an
undeniable esthetic enjoyment involved in the experience of a beautifully crafted
mathematical theorem or scholarly thesis.4 The authors of the Talmud appear to
have been conscious of the esthetic dimension of their undertaking.
The Talmud as an Anthology

The Talmud assembles material from diverse schools and over many generations.
The sources preserved in the Talmud are distributed between the two major Jewish
population centers of Palestine and Babylonia. The citations and stories attributed
to Babylonian Rabbis appear to have undergone simultaneous redactions in several
different schools.5 This situation suggests the existence of synchronic parallel re-
dactions that were afterward combined into a unified Babylonian Talmud.6 Fur-
ther, the citation of traditions of Rabbis from successive generations suggests an
image of each generation adding its newer stratum to a literary heritage left by its
predecessors.7 Clearly, these two models for the Talmud’s evolution, one syn-
chronic, the other diachronic, are not mutually exclusive.
To appreciate the two preceding models, it is also important to understand
that the Talmud was studied orally and not set to writing until much later in the
history of its development. Whatever the original grounds for the Rabbis’ prohi-
bition against writing down the teachings of the Oral Tradition (referring, essen-
tially, to anything other than the Bible and Megillat taanit), it is clear that the
prohibition remained in force throughout the talmudic era,8 and the transmission
of the sources was through memorization. Other than some discernible effects on
the rhetorical character of talmudic expression, it is not immediately clear how
this fact affected the literary character of the Talmud. Although it is possible that
the Talmud’s redaction was carried out in writing, there is considerable evidence
to the contrary.9
Our understanding of the redactional process has been altered decisively by
recent scholarship. Until well into the present century, research into the study of
the Talmud’s redaction remained bound to an agenda that had been formulated
by Sherira and Maimonides, who had perceived the redaction of Rabbinic com-
pendia as the work of individuals. Basing themselves on questionable anecdotal
Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud 83
traditions, scholars continued to rehash old attempts to identify the Rav Ashi and
Ravina mentioned by the Talmud as “the end of instruction.”
Twentieth-century research has preferred to concentrate on careful analysis of
the contents and structures of individual sugyot.10 From a clearer understanding
of textual transmission, enriched by newly available geonic texts and manuscripts
from the Cairo Geniza, it has become evident that the text of the Talmud re-
mained fluid for centuries after the traditional dates of its redaction.11 A new
paradigm emerged that emphasized the distinction between formal statements in
Hebrew attributed to specific Rabbis, and anonymous Aramaic explanatory mate-
rials in which the dicta are embedded. According to the prevailing theory, the
anonymous Aramaic sections are the work of the Talmud’s redactors. Although
some scholars have reserved judgment on the precise chronological provenance
of these texts, allowing for the possibility of continuous redactions, the widespread
opinion is that they are the contribution of the saboraim, an obscure group of
Babylonian sages whom Sherira located between the talmudic and geonic eras
and whose activities had been hitherto perceived as confined to a few minor
additions to the Talmud text.12 In light of the vastness and importance of the
anonymous stratum, it would now appear that these saboraim should actually be
credited with shaping the Talmud into its present form.
A radically different formulation of the relationship between the redactors and
the individual traditions that make up the Talmud has been proposed by Jacob
Neusner.13 With respect to the issue of the Talmud’s composite nature, Neusner’s
most far-reaching assertions are the ones that deal with the relationships between
individual traditions, dicta and stories, and so on, and the works in which they are
contained. Beginning from the premise that the units were included only in order
to serve the agendas of the completed documents, and taking into account that
many of those units have no historically verifiable or recorded existence outside
those completed documents, Neusner arrives at the conclusion that any attempt
to deal with the units is futile and ultimately misleading. According to Neusner,
the focus of study must be the “document” as a whole—in the case of the Bab-
ylonian Talmud, for example, the entirety of the Talmud.
In response to this assertion, the following can be said: While there can be
no denying the importance of examining the incorporation of the units into their
respective “documents,”14 Neusner fails to convince that this is an either-or prop-
osition. The certainty that no attributed dictum is reliable is as dogmatic as the
certainty that all of them should be believed uncritically—and there seems to be
less plausibility to an approach that views the entire Talmud as no more than a
sixth-century work of fiction. At all events, philological method has long recog-
nized that the meanings of texts can be studied without prior commitment to their
historical veracity.15 Furthermore, in the specific instance of the Babylonian Tal-
mud, the many attempts by current talmudic research at interpreting attributed
dicta independently of their redacted, anonymous contexts have produced an im-
pressive and consistent body of evidence demonstrating that the original authors
of those dicta meant something different from what emerges from the context of
the redacted talmudic sugya. The original meanings of the dicta are frequently
found to correspond with the simple sense of the Mishnah, with the interpretations
of the Tosefta, or with the Palestinian Talmud.16 Furthermore, it seems entirely

inconceivable that the supposed authors of cogent and consistent documents
would have knowingly introduced into their works indications of discrepancies
between the whole and the parts.17
Finally, Neusner is less than persuasive in his assumption that the main agen-
das of the various documents, which dictated the criteria for inclusion of their
component materials, were ideological or theological. As we shall see, this view
largely runs counter to the common-sense reading of the documents themselves,
which are, after all, compendia of technical legal argumentation directed to spe-
cialized judges and jurists (in the case of the Talmud) or of Bible-based homiletics
(in the case of the aggadic midrash)—not of theology or philosophy.
Neusner himself contends that to posit a nonideological program for the pub-
lication of a religious work would relegate that work to triviality. But this argument
is no more compelling. Once we have accepted the fact that a given body of
tradition (such as halakhic argument or midrashic homiletics) was deemed valu-
able by the community that produced it, then the preservation of those traditions
can also be accepted as a fully legitimate purpose in its own right. It follows from
this that purely literary or functional considerations can provide adequate criteria
for the structuring of Rabbinic compendia. And despite Neusner’s arguments,
there is no reason to warrant an abandonment of investigations into the composite
structure of the Babylonian Talmud, or of any other rabbinic collection.
In the remainder of this essay, I wish to elaborate upon the anthological model
by considering some talmudic material that did not originate as Mishnah com-
mentary. It is this type of material that best highlights the anthological dimension
of the Talmud, and that we shall be focusing on in the present study.
Since all works in the Rabbinic corpus present themselves to us as collections
of opinions and dicta ascribed to several generations of Rabbis, it follows that the
redactors of each of these works were acting as anthologists when they assembled
the particular traditions that were to be included in a given compendium. This
applies not only to the final products, the compendia that were acknowledged by
posterity as completed works worthy of study and authoritative standing, but also
to whatever earlier collections might have been utilized by the redactors of later
works.
In most instances, modern Rabbinic scholarship regards that process of assem-
bling traditions as a creative one: the selected sources and traditions were not only
gathered together as they would be according to the conventional definitions of
the anthologizing process, not merely juxtaposed to one another in order to elicit
new associative meanings; but it would appear that the redactors took a more
dynamic role in rewording the received traditions, or in deconstructing them and
reassembling them into original literary creations.
The anthological character of the Talmud must also be understood from
within the context of amoraic literature in general. The surviving literature of the
amoraim suggests that the Rabbinic curricula of the time were more varied than
what came to be reflected in the overriding structures of the completed Palestinian
and Babylonian Talmuds. Although both Talmuds are organized as commentaries
on the Mishnah, giving the impression that the Mishnah was the sole subject of
amoraic study and that all other types of material were included by virtue of their
direct or indirect bearing on the exposition of the Mishnah, it is evident that much
of the material that came to be included in the Talmud did not originate in
Mishnah study but developed elsewhere. Allowing that some extraneous tannaitic
compilations (baraitot) might have been integrally connected to the elucidation
of the Mishnah,18 it is very hard to make such arguments convincingly with respect
to large “foreign bodies” whose links to the Talmud are indirect or nonexistent.
Some of my own research has focused on two such nonmishnaic components of
the Babylonian Talmud, namely, the anecdotal records of Rabbinic legal decisions
and court cases,19 and the units of aggadic midrash.20 With respect to both those
instances, it is likely that most of the material was originally collected and arranged
in separate venues (perhaps through the court system or synagogues, respectively)
and was incorporated into the Talmud at an advanced stage of its development.
The formal links that connect such passages to the main body of the Talmud are
rarely to the Mishnah or to its direct explanations, but usually to peripheral topics
that were introduced associatively in the course of the amoraic discussion. Similar
methods characterize the editorial inclusion of several other types of talmudic
passages, such as lists of practical legal decisions, anecdotal aggadah, and magical
recipes.21
Whereas the tannaitic era has bequeathed us a rich and multifaceted “library”
of distinct Oral Torah compendia, covering all conceivable permutations of the
fundamental categories of halakhah/aggadah and midrash/mishnah,22 the amoraic
era in the land of Israel, especially its earlier, “classical” phase, seems to have
produced only two genres of Rabbinic literature: the Talmud embodied the tra-
dition of scholastic halakhic discourse as applied to the Mishnah, whereas the
aggadic midrash (to books from the Pentateuch, “five Scrolls,” and special read-
ings) were principally related to the homiletical exposition of the Bible in the
synagogues. Whatever additional categories were considered worthy of preservation
had somehow to be connected to one or the other of these two genres.
The situation of Babylonian Oral Law literature was, of course, even more
limited. The single literary monument that was left of their religious learning was
the Babylonian Talmud,23 and it was into this work that the redactors chose to
include all that was to be preserved of the Babylonian Rabbis’ contributions to
Rabbinic scholarship. Underlying this decision was their conviction, probably self-
evident to them, that the intricacies of talmudic legal debate constituted the most
valuable form of religious discourse.
There are several indications that this description of the Talmud’s scope re-
flects a deliberate policy on the part of the Babylonian Jewish sages to produce a
veritable “encyclopedia” of the Oral Law. It is particularly discernible in their
treatment of materials for which no obvious bond can be found with the Mishnah
(or at least with those sections of it that were selected for inclusion in the Baby-
lonian Talmud).24 Thus, special mini-tractates, as it were, were incorporated into
artificially chosen locations in order to deal with topics like Hanukkah, mezuzah,
and tefillin, for which traditions existed but which had no natural home in the
Mishnah. Several scholars have observed how, when confronted with mishnayot
or baraitot from tractates that lack an amoraic commentary (e.g., Zeraim and
Toharot), the Talmud makes a point of assembling as much material as it can
find on the topic, well beyond the requirements of the current pericope.25
A similar pattern may be perceived in connection with biblical interpretations
and homiletical expositions. Unlike their Palestinian colleagues, the Babylonian
Rabbis never composed separate compendia of aggadic midrash, and consequently
they sought all manner of intricate and devious ways to justify linking their biblical
commentaries to the talmudic Mishnah commentary. With respect to the above
source types, as with other nonmishnaic components of the Talmud, we often find
that their formal connection to the larger body of the Talmud is not to the Mish-
nah, or even to the exposition of the Mishnah, but rather to extraneous issues and
sources that were themselves drawn in through circuitous chains of reasoning.
All this leads us to the view that the inclusion of these materials in the Talmud
was part of an overall redactional project belonging to the later strata of its literary
evolution. As such, it can be characterized as a sort of anthologizing, designed to
expand the scope of the Babylonian Talmud from its narrow definition, as a record
of the amoraic discussions of Rabbi Judah the Prince’s Mishnah, and to make it
a repository of the full heritage of Babylonian Rabbinic lore. If we adopt the
prevailing view of current talmudic scholarship, the lion’s share of the Talmud’s
anonymous Aramaic dialectical framework (the setama digmara) can be ascribed
to post-amoraic (saboraic or “stammaitic”) redactors, and the redactors themselves
were dynamic and creative anthologists. Only on rare occasions were the Talmud’s
editors satisfied merely with gathering materials and juxtaposing passages in ap-
propriate locations. Rather, they expended considerable imagination in creating
literary links to the host pericopes. In keeping with the dialectical character of
talmudic discourse, this was frequently done by invoking the external source, or
a portion of it, as a prooftext in a debate or in the clarification of a halakhic
question.
I will survey some representative passages from Ketubot in which the editors
have incorporated elements that do not relate directly to the local mishnah, and
presumably did not originate in the study of that mishnah. My principal interest
will be in reconstructing the process of the incorporation: I will be attempting to
determine where (i.e., in what institutional setting or literary context) the material
originated, why it was included in its current setting, and what literary techniques
the editors employed in order to connect it to the new setting.
Example 1: Transposition of Materials Relating to

Other Mishnayot (Ketubot 2a–3a)
The structure of the opening pericope of Ketubot is peculiar. Ostensibly, it comes
to elucidate the ruling in Mishnah 1:1 that
A virgin is married on Wednesday and a widow on Thursday.

Because on two days of the week, the courts convene in the towns: on Monday
and on Thursday.
For if he should have a charge to bring regarding her virginity, he would proceed
early to the court.
At the outset of the talmudic passage attached to that mishnah, we find the fol-
lowing passage:
Says Rav Joseph: Says Rav Judah: Says Samuel: For what reason did they say “A
virgin is married on Wednesday”?
Because we have learned in the Mishnah (Ketubot 5:2): If the time26 arrived and
they were not married, they are entitled to support from his property and from
terumah.27
Rav Joseph is thus reported as citing a tradition of Samuel that interpreted the
Mishnah (which assigns specific weekdays for the holding of weddings) in light of
Mishnah 5:2, where a twelve-month deadline was established for the betrothal
period (by which time, in other words, the man had to complete the marriage
ceremony), with the bridegroom-to-be becoming subject to various obligations if
he failed to meet that deadline. This leads the Talmud to a series of discussions
that would have been more plausibly attached to Mishnah 5:2 (57a–b in the Tal-
mud).
Our current pericope, then, is primarily concerned not with the elucidation
of the local mishnah, but with a quite unrelated matter, a lengthy examination of
the conditions under which an unavoidable delay would be accepted as a valid
reason for not fulfilling a time-defined obligation.28 This examination leads in turn
to a discussion, cited in two versions, that is based on a dictum of Rava, which
draws a comparison between cases of marriage and of divorce. According to the
first version, Rava states that, although unavoidable delay is taken into considera-
tion where it involves the postponement of a wedding, it is not accepted as an
excuse for nonfulfillment of a condition attached to a divorce. According to the
second version, Rava does not differentiate between the cases of marriage and
divorce and allows the plea in both cases. An identical series of tannaitic and
amoraic prooftexts is adduced for each version. As applied to the first version of
Rava’s statement, the texts are presented as attempts to identify the source on which
Rava based his ruling; all are rejected as incomplete, and the Talmud concludes
that Rava did not base his opinion on any source, but on logical considerations.
As applied to the second version, the same prooftexts are treated as contradictions
to Rava’s opinion, each of which is ultimately resolved.
It appears, then, that the main elements of this passage were indeed transposed
from an original location in chapter 5. Conversely, the talmudic commentary that
is currently attached to 5:2 deals with the exegetical roots of the twelve-month
deadline and with the issue of the fiancée’s rights to partake of terumah,29 but not
with any of the topics that are discussed in the opening pericope. This situation
indicates that the final redactors made a decision to expand the tractate’s opening
pericope at the expense of the pericope on 5:2, a practice that is consistent with
the acknowledged “saboraic” tendency to construct elaborate introductory passages
in which tannaitic and amoraic dicta from diverse parts of the tractate, or of the
Talmud, are woven into a complex dialectical fabric.30 Although the present pas-
sage, founded on attributed sayings of Samuel, Rav Joseph, Abaye,31 Rav Ahfi ai,32
and perhaps Rav Ashi,33 does not fully conform to that model, it is nonetheless
possible to discern features of the typical saboraic introductory pericope in the
redactors’ linking together of diverse sources and themes.
If the intention of the redactors had been merely to elucidate the local mish-
nah and to collect the relevant tannaitic and amoraic sources, the passage would
have been considerably more compact and focused, skipping over all the discus-
sion that now intervenes between Rav Joseph’s initial comment and the dictum
of Rav Samuel Bar Isaac at the bottom of folio 3a. However, by thus choosing to
divert the pericope away from a narrow interpretation of the prescribed dates for
weddings, as defined at the beginning of Ketubot 1:1, the redactors fashioned a
flexible framework that permitted them to assemble a diverse selection of sources
that would otherwise not have been included in the Talmud.
The editors, then, were guided by a wish to connect and include as many
sources as possible in the pericope. The product of such editorial activity can
legitimately be regarded as a modest form of an “anthology.”
In the discussion that follows these passages about the legal consequences of
unavoidable delays on the fulfillment of contractual conditions, some twelve tal-
mudic sources are adduced. In an appendix, I have listed these sources, and the
reader is invited to refer to them. The first source records an attempt by Rav Joseph
to reformulate the initial version of Samuel’s tradition that he had earlier traduced,
and following several other passages that respond to this reformulation, a pericope
is cited that relates a comment by Rava to M. Ketubot 5:2. Following this,
the Talmud records seven additional passages in its quest for a source for Rava’s
ruling, drawing these passages from various texts connected mainly to Mishnah
Gittin 7:7–8.
We see then, that by means of inventive manipulation of a brief original
pericope to M. Ketubot 1:1, which in its original form might well have consisted
of no more than Rav Joseph’s citation of Samuel’s dictum, the talmudic redactors
provided an intricate literary framework in which they were able to embed a
remarkable range of talmudic sources, including mishnayot, baraitot, amoraic
statements, and a case precedent. In most of the instances, the individual source
units had already been incorporated into composite pericopes prior to their being
utilized by the redactors of the present passage.
A number of different objectives were achieved by this tactic, not the least of
which was the desire to assemble and analyze all the known talmudic materials
that bear on the question of deadlines missed because of unavoidable delay. How-
ever, the beginning of Ketubot still strikes us as an implausible place in which to
situate such a discussion.34 Probably, the redactors were simply determined to have
Ketubot open with a suitably elaborate opening pericope.
Beyond this, however, one of the important objectives that guided the redac-
tors of the pericope was precisely their urge to “anthologize.” In the present con-
text, this meant to collect as much material as they could reasonably conjoin to
the text from the Mishnah. Characteristic of the organizational esthetics of the
Babylonian redactors is their preference for devising intricate paths that incorporate
the sources as part of the argumentation (e.g., as evidence for an objection, in
order to illustrate a halakhic principle, or to demonstrate a fine legal distinction

that resolves an apparent contradiction), rather than merely cataloging sources that
have a straightforward connection to the topic matter of the local mishnah. In this
example, which is typical of the more advanced (“saboraic”) stages of the redac-
tional process, the editors have enhanced the specific pericope but have not aug-
mented the total quantity of materials that are included in the Babylonian Talmud,
since all the components are being copied from other locations in the Talmud,
and all of them have natural affinities to topics raised by the Mishnah. Moreover,
it seems that the redactors of the pericope were making use of material that had
already been incorporated into composite passages in their previous locations. Nev-
ertheless, the understanding of the sources was substantially enriched by their
juxtaposition and by their inclusion in a novel setting.
Example 2: An Anthology of Aggadic Sayings

(Ketubot 5a)
As we saw, Mishnah Ketubot 1:1 stipulated that weddings of virgins should be
scheduled for Wednesdays so as to shorten the time between the couple’s first act
of intercourse and the traditional Thursday session of the court, in case a question
should arise concerning the bride’s virginity. In connection with this ruling, the
Talmud inquired anonymously (using the ibba’aya leho form) whether the Mish-
nah understood “Wednesday” literally, i.e., even before sundown, or if it actually
referred to the following evening, which would normally be considered part of
Thursday, but which would better satisfy the Mishnah’s concern for shortening
the interval before the convening of the court. In connection with this query, the
Talmud cites the following tradition:
Come and hear: For Bar Qappara teaches [de-tanei]:35

A virgin is married on Wednesday and has intercourse on Thursday, since that is
when the blessing was said for the fish.36
A widow is married on Thursday and had intercourse on Friday, since that is
when the blessing was said for humans.37
The Talmud proceeds to discuss in an anonymous passage the implications of Bar

Qappara’s teaching with respect to the question under discussion. In typical Rab-
binical fashion, they examine the validity of the arguments and their consistency
with other rulings. Now having introduced one teaching of Bar Qappara that has
obvious relevance to the interpretation of the Mishnah, the Talmud goes on to
cite additional traditions in his name that have no such relevance:38
Bar Qappara expounded [darash]: The deeds of the righteous are greater than
the creation of the heavens and the earth, for with regard to the creation of the
heavens and the earth it is written, “Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of
the earth, and my right hand hath spanned the heavens” (Isa. 48:13), whereas
concerning the deeds of the righteous it is written, “The place, O Lord, [which]
thou hast made for thee to dwell in, [in] the Sanctuary, O Lord, [which] thy
hands have established” (Exod. 15:17).
The Talmud appends to this tradition an objection raised by “a certain Bab-

ylonian, Rabbi Hfi iyya by name,” and a final resolution of the difficulty by Rav
Nahfi man bar Isaac. Afterward, it brings a third tradition of Bar Qappara:
Bar Qappara expounded: What is it that is written, “And thou shalt have a peg
upon thy weapon” (Deut. 23:14)? Do not read azenekha (“weapon”), but rather,
oznekha (“ears”), implying that if a person should hear anything improper, he
should insert his finger in his ears.
To this exposition the Talmud also attaches a number of related traditions, in the
names of Rabbi Eleazar, the tanna of the school of Rabbi Ishmael and an anon-
ymous baraita (tannu rabbanan).
As is true with several talmudic lists of aggadic dicta, it is not clear why these
particular items were grouped together. Evidently, they were so grouped in an
original list that was utilized by the pericope’s redactors. The mere fact of Bar
Qappara’s authorship does not provide a satisfactory criterion, since Rabbinic lit-
erature contains many other traditions introduced by the formula “Bar Qappara
expounded.” Nor are the three statements grouped together anywhere else in the
literature.
The first tradition is, however, cited in Palestinian sources in connection with
our mishnah in Ketubot:39
Bar Qappara says:40 Because in connection with them [i.e., Wednesday and
Thursday] a blessing is written.
But the blessing is written only in connection with the Thursday and the Friday,
on Thursday for the birds and the fish, on Friday for Adam and Eve.41
R. Yosé says: Bar Qappara’s reasoning is that42 Wednesday [means] the evening
of Thursday, and Thursday [means] the evening of Friday.43
A tradition similar to the second of the Talmud’s three homilies is found in

the Mekhiltas of R. Simeon ben Yohai44 and of Rabbi Ishmael,45 though without
the attribution to Bar Qappara:
“The sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established”—Beloved is the
Holy Temple before Him Who spoke and the universe came into being. For
when the Holy One created His universe, He created it by means of only one of
His hands, as it is said: “Yea, My hand hath laid the foundation of the earth.”
But when He came to construct the Holy Temple, as it were, it was with both
His hands, as it is said: “The sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have estab-
lished.”46
“The Lord shall reign”—When?47—You shall construct it with both your hands.
This is expressed in a parable. . . .
In spite of the striking general resemblance between the two traditions, it is evident
that Bar Qappara’s dictum is not identical to the passages in the Mekhiltas, and
the precise relationship between the two traditions remains obscure.48 Are they to
be viewed as two versions of a single tradition, or are we to suppose that Bar
Qappara was familiar with the Mekhilta’s homily in praise of the Temple, which
he was consciously expanding in a slightly different direction?
The third of Bar Qappara’s expositions, about insulating one’s ears against
inappropriate talk, appears to be unique to this pericope.
The obvious question that arises here is, how did these three disparate
traditions come to be linked together?49 There is no clear answer to the question,
but a number of possibilities can be considered.50 For example, we may note that
all three dicta have a common connection to the biblical Creation story, though
in the last instance, the connection is very indirect.51 The juxtaposition of Isaiah
48:13 and Exodus 15:7 in the second dictum suggests that it might have originated
in a proem structure (petihfi ta), according to which the homilist opens from a
passage in the Prophets or Hagiographa to conclude with the opening verse of the
day’s scriptural reading (usually from the Pentateuch). However, such a reconstruc-
tion involves some difficulties, seeing as none of the pentateuchal verses cited in
the passage are actually known to have introduced lection units in either the
annual (Babylonian) or triennial (Palestinian) cycles and hence would not have
served as appropriate proem verses.
In many similar instances in the Talmud, we have grounds for surmising that
the dicta were originally parts of a single homily.52 In principle, that premise is
applicable here. However, since no actual homily of that sort has been preserved
in the literature, any attempt at reconstructing such a lost homily would necessarily
involve us in unverifiable speculations. One likely possibility is that the dicta be-
longed to a wedding discourse that dwelled upon the creation of man and woman
as the culmination of Creation, and focused on the couple’s obligation to uphold
the purity and holiness of their marriage.
However we might choose to reconstruct the evolution of the pericope, there
is no escaping the fact that the straightforward elucidation of the Mishnah, no
matter how liberally we perceive such an elucidation, would not have required
the inclusion of any but the first dictum in the series. That all three are in fact
found in the Babylonian pericope, which is further enhanced by additional tal-
mudic materials, provides us with further evidence of the redactors’ concern for
turning their Talmud into a framework for anthologizing a broad and diverse
spectrum of Rabbinic oral tradition.
Example 3: Cases and Judicial Materials

(Ketubot 91b–93a)
Anecdotal traditions and case citations, virtually by definition, cannot have origi-
nated in a literary context. Insofar as they record actual events (or at least preserve
a “historical kernel”), we must accept that they arose in connection with the
random developments of actual life and only afterward were appended to the
literary works in which they are now found. In a previous study,53 I proposed as a
plausible working hypothesis that most of the cases involving Babylonian Rabbis
that came to be included in the Talmud had initially been recorded in court
archives, after which they were collected into straightforward lists arranged in ac-
cordance with a variety of different organizational criteria.54 Their incorporation
into the Talmud occurred at an advanced stage of its evolution, as is evidenced
by the facts that (a) many of them connect formally to the dicta of later amoraim;
and (b) relatively few of them are discussed or analyzed in the Talmud, and of
those almost all are dealt with only by the anonymous redactors or (in rare in-
stances) by amoraim from the fifth generation and later.
Ketubot 91b–93a contains a list of decisions and legal dicta by several Baby-
lonian amoraim. Although, as we shall see, the items in the list are heterogeneous,
the mnemonic siman that introduces them indicates that the Talmud’s redactors
viewed them as a single, integral collection.55
Of the nine items in the list, only the first three have the appearance of cases,
formulated according to the common hahu gavra (“a certain man”) pattern.56 The
remainder are theoretical halakhic dicta. However, closer inspection raises some
questions about whether even the first three ought to be perceived as actual cases
rather than theoretical formulations, since none of them contains the usual clause
“He came before [ata leqammeh] Rami bar H fi ama,” which would indicate beyond
question that the case had been adjudicated by the Rabbi in question. Although
it is not common for the attributed legal dicta of amoraim to be worded in Ara-
maic, there are exceptions to that rule, including some lists of halakhic rulings
that originated in contexts other than the amoraic interpretation of the Mishnah.57
The construction “Rami bar H fi ama considered saying, etc.” (according to which
the proposed verdict was refuted while still under consideration) seems more nat-
ural to an academic than to a judicial setting.58
Within the collection of nine items we may discern various smaller groupings
of two or more units that have some common features. The similarities relate to
their content,59 the identities of the presiding judges or sages,60 of the auxiliary or
junior scholars who question the original rulings,61 or of the participants in sub-
sequent discussions that focused on the original sources, etc.62 The presence of
such patterns suggests that the present collection evolved from a smaller original
list, to which additional units were later attached by virtue of associative affinities
to the original units.
In spite of its daunting heterogeneity, there are a number of general obser-
vations that can be made about the collection as a whole:
1. The items in it all deal with a similar theme: namely, the legal position
of those who acquire property (whether through purchase or inheri-
tance) vis-à-vis the creditors who wish to seize the properties in pay-
ment of debts incurred by the original owners.
2. This theme is not mentioned at all in the local mishnah.63 The formal
link to the mishnah is contained in the fact that it was cited by the
Rabbis who adjudicated the first two cases in the sequence. None of
the other units has any connection to the mishnah.64
3. These considerations support the conclusion that the collection did
not emerge from the study of the Mishnah. On the contrary, it evolved
in the domain of judicial institutions and was afterward incorporated
into the Babylonian Talmud’s commentary on the Mishnah. The Tal-
mud preserves many examples of materials that appear to have been
generated by the judiciary, or at least in a context of legal study that
was not directly related to the Mishnah. Such materials are frequently
collected into series of cases, halakhic rulings,65 or—as in the present

instance—combinations of both types. As with the other Rabbinic gen-
res described here, since no separate compendia were created in which
to collect them, the editors of the Babylonian Talmud sought ways in
which to embed them, through associations of form and content, into
the main body of the Talmud.
The limited observations I have made in this essay regarding the dynamics of the
Talmud’s redaction are consistent with the structural and historical models that
have emerged from recent work in Rabbinic philology. Talmudic scholarship in
the last generation has become increasingly aware of the fact that the redactional
process was a protracted one, extending over several centuries.66 Much of what is
conventionally characterized as belonging to the “redactional strata” is the result
of later students examining preliminary versions: comparing, contrasting, and re-
solving discrete traditions from their received text. Although in practice, it might
not always be possible to confidently assign particular passages to identifiable ed-
itorial stages, we should at least acknowledge the basic theoretical distinctions,
noting that large portions of the Talmud as we possess it do not reflect a unified
or systematic editorial policy but rather evolved unpredictably through the aca-
demic give-and-take of the beit midrash.67
The later phase of editorial activity, usually ascribed to the saboraim, involved
the comparison and rearrangement of materials that were already included as part
of the corpus68 and hence should not be perceived as an anthologizing activity. It
is to an earlier stage of redaction that we should ascribe the intentional and pro-
grammatic assembling of Rabbinic traditions that was evident in the examples
described earlier. Moreover, the most distinctive achievement of the Talmud’s
anthologizing program was directly associated not with its selection of texts for
inclusion—as one might imagine would be the case with most anthologies—but
rather with the skill and inventiveness with which the individual units were in-
corporated into the total work.
In the present article, I have focused upon instances where heterogeneous
elements were grafted onto the main trunk of the amoraic commentary on the
Mishnah. Although the techniques are more readily discernible in such examples,
it is clear that similar procedures were employed in other contexts as well, with a
view to combining the various classes of Rabbinic sources, dicta, and pericopes
from different schools or localities into unified literary entities—sugyot. As I have
noted elsewhere,
there appears to have existed “a general tendency among the redactors and for-
mulators of the Talmud (and we are thinking here of a process which continued
for centuries after the official sof horaah, and finds expression in variant readings
in manuscripts and medieval citations) not to leave unconnected units, but rather
to weave all the sources into a unified fabric.”69
If we limit the investigation of the Talmud’s anthological character to the
most limited criteria, it will focus on three areas of editorial activity: (a) the criteria
for exclusion and rejection; (b) the criteria for inclusion of additional traditions;
and (c) the manner of organization of the material.
As regards the first of these areas—namely, the selection process—in most

respects the surviving data prevent us from fully reconstructing what traditions
might have been rejected from the Talmud, and on what grounds. We have been
left with a final product, with no preliminary versions against which to compare
it.70 Of course, it is not unreasonable to assume that a more selective and exclusive
process of editing traditions was a primary concern during the amoraic era itself,
as individual schools favored specific authorities or halakhic positions.
The more advanced stages of the redaction, as exemplified in the passages
that were examined in this study, appear to have striven for the opposite result,
namely, the assembling of the greatest number of teachings of the previous gen-
erations. Perhaps this was done in the assurance that the winnowing of earlier
schools had successfully eliminated all the chaff. The dogged determination of
the later editors to juxtapose variant versions of the traditions attests to their desire
to broaden the corpus of talmudic sources beyond the commentaries to the cur-
ricular tractates from the Mishnah.
Yet the assertion that the Talmud’s editors may have been striving for com-
prehensiveness and inclusion does not mean that they intended to produce “little
more than a scrapbook, a compilation of this and that.”71 A measure of literary
Darwinism must have played its part in ensuring that the only traditions to survive
the channels of transmission were the ones that were able to withstand the rigorous
logical analysis and challenges of consistency to which traditions were subjected
as they were studied in the amoraic schools.72
Even so, the question of what it was that the editors were trying to collect is
not really as daunting as it may initially appear to be. No doubt what was ultimately
preserved represented what was supposed to be preserved, and the most direct way
to reconstruct the selection criteria of the Talmud is by summarizing what actually
came to be included in the final product. While the Talmud contains a sampling
of diverse genres of Rabbinic discourse, it is evident that preference was given to
scholarly dialectical argumentation in the area of halakhah, as exemplified in the
discussions surrounding the study of the Mishnah.73 As we have noted, the editors
took upon themselves the additional task of anthologizing other areas of Rabbinic
activity, such as biblical interpretation, legal decisions, and aggadah. In doing so,
it appears that their concern was more with structural appropriateness (i.e.,
whether the elements could be fit into the talmudic context)74 than with their
contents. All the examples that were analyzed in the present study remind us that
the standards of thematic and topical uniformity that guide our current classifi-
cation systems cannot be imposed upon the editors of Rabbinic collections. For
those editors, formal analogies or incidental citations of a common biblical verse
provided equally valid grounds for grouping texts together.75
The most successful undertakings in talmudic research are those that have
built upon this theoretical foundation. Because each unit of talmudic tradition
exists in at least two contexts—as it was originally intended by its tannaitic or
amoraic author, and as it functions in the context of the redacted sugya76—it
follows that a full appreciation of the Talmud must deal with both the parts and
the whole. Although we might initially be skeptical about the possibility of recov-
ering the pristine ipsissima verba of the talmudic Rabbis,77 an impressive body of
research has by now provided valid grounds for optimism: careful analysis of spe-
cific sugyot and tractates has indicated with remarkable consistency that the Tal-
mud’s editors refrained from tampering with the wording of the original (usually,
Hebrew) statements. Similarly, sophisticated typologies have been formulated for
distinguishing between “authorial” and editorial strata.78
Our readiness to classify the cited examples, and the Talmud as a whole, as
an anthology is obviously vulnerable to valid objections. The recognized literary
definition of “anthology” is a straightforward one, denoting a collection of sources
(in ancient literature it would usually consist of epigrams or poems) selected ac-
cording to some criterion, such as quality, genre, place, or time.79 The classic
anthologies of the past have tended to limit the editor’s involvement to selection
and arrangement or, at the most, the composing of introductions to the individual
selections or to the volume as a whole.
If the Talmud’s intricate and ingenious literary intertwining goes beyond the
typical borders of the anthological genre, perhaps the literary lexicon requires a
literary term that better expresses the kind of dynamic anthologizing that is ex-
emplified in the Talmud. Certainly, world literature knows of many other in-
stances of such works. Virtually all “higher criticism” or synoptic theories posit
analogous paradigms of redactors stitching together antecedent documents or oral
traditions so as to render the seams indiscernible to all but the most alert of
redactional critics.80 The Talmud may simply be more candid in owning up to its
composite origins and identifying its constituent baraitot, memras, and so on.81
It follows from this that when we come to define our scholarly objectives in
studying the Babylonian Talmud, the alternative topics need not be restricted to
either the individual parts or the whole.82 Indeed, one of the most fascinating areas
of Rabbinic study is the subtle and dynamic process by which the parts undergo
transformation through their incorporation into the whole. That process may be
the very nature of the anthologizing process that stands behind the Talmud, and
ultimately, by understanding that process in the Talmud, we may also learn some-
thing more about the possibilities of anthologizing in general.
Appendix: Talmudic Sources Cited in Ketubot 2b–3a

[1.83 “Says Rav Joseph: Lord of Abraham! He makes something which has been taught
dependent upon something which has not been taught!84 . . . Rather, if it was stated, it was
stated as follows.”85
The alleged logical difficulty that provoked Rav Joseph to reformulate the initial ver-
sion of Samuel’s tradition is unwarranted, since the two texts are clearly dealing with dif-
ferent questions. Mishnah 1:1 provides a reason (albeit an inadequate one)86 for the estab-
lishment of Wednesday as a preferred day for weddings; whereas Samuel is inquiring
“teleologically” about additional halakhic implications that result from the choice of a
specific day.87 Under the circumstances, it is conceivable that Rav Joseph’s objection and
the ensuing emendation of Samuel’s statement are all pseudepigraphic, the work of later
redactors, modeled after the similarly structured pericope in Shabbat 22a or Bava Batra
134b.]88
[2. Possibly: Tosefta Ketubot 1:1: “If so, then let her be married on Sunday!—Rather, in
order that he might make preparations all week, they ordained that he should marry her
on the Wednesday.”
As noted earlier (see previous item), it is not clear whether the Talmud is attributing
this passage to Samuel (according to Rav Joseph’s emendation), or proposing it as a new
synthetic reformulation, in which the pericope’s redactors combined Rav Joseph’s original
statement with the Tosefta and structural elements from Shabbat or Bava Batra.]
3. M. Ketubot 5:2, along with a talmudic discussion involving Rav Aha89 that might sub-
sequently have been excised from its original location.90
4. A pericope built around Rava’s comment to M. Ketubot 5:2.91
In its quest for a source for Rava’s ruling, the Talmud cites several additional talmudic
texts, all of which deal with cases in which a husband is prevented by uncontrollable
circumstances from fulfilling a condition attached to a divorce.
5. M. Gittin 7:8: “This is your divorce if I should die . . .” (with explanatory material that
is apparently copied from the pericope in Gittin 76b).
6. M. Gittin 7:7.
7. A baraita attached to M. Gittin 7:7: “But our Rabbis permitted her to remarry.” The
source is in Tosefta Gittin 5:9,92 though it is cited in other talmudic passages in which the
mishnah is cited.93
8. A brief talmudic passage related to the preceding: “Who are ‘our Rabbis’?—Says Rav
Judah: Says Samuel: The court which permitted oil.” The text is most likely being quoted
from Gittin 76b.94
9. The view of the tanna Rabbi Yosé, that the inclusion of a date on a document implies
its retroactivity. Here as well, the tradition is being cited from the talmudic pericope to M.
Gittin 7:7 (Gittin 76b).95
10. The continuation of M. Gittin 7:8: “From now if I do not come twelve months from
now.”
11. The case of “that man who said to them: If I do not come thirty days from now,” which
was adjudicated by Samuel. This case had already been cited in connection with the
appropriate mishnahs in Gittin.96
12. The discussion between Rav Ashi and Ravina about the conditions under which the
Rabbis might retroactively invalidate a betrothal was probably copied here from one of
several places in the Talmud where it also appears, most likely from Yevamot 110a.97
Notes
1. An extensive discussion on the broad possibilities of “commentary” in Rabbinic and

other literatures is contained in Baruch M. Bokser, Post Mishnaic Judaism in Transition:
Samuel on Berakhot and the Beginnings of Gemara (Chico, Cal., 1980). Cf. my review of
Bokser’s book in Tarbiz 51 (1982):315–18.
2. For a useful overview of the fundamental types of Western legal literature, including
some suggested equivalents in Jewish jurisprudence, see Menachem Elon, Jewish Law:
History, Sources, Principles, trans. from the Hebrew by B. Auerbach and M. J. Sykes (Phil-
adelphia, 1994), pp. 228–30, 1017–19 (where Elon surveys the principal scholarly opinions
concerning the codificatory purpose of the Mishnah) and 1057–58. Note in particular the
citation from Salmond on p. 1018, n. 3, which deals with the fine distinctions between
primary historical or legal sources of law, and literary sources, including commentaries and
textbooks.
3. The Talmud’s evident encouragement of argument for its own sake, its insistence
on arguing for and against all the recorded opinions, and its reluctance to disprove any of
the recorded opinions, attest to its generally non-codificatory purposes, which engendered
the need for the post-talmudic Codes literature. There are, however, a significant minority
of passages that are concerned primarily with practical decision making (and these are not
limited to the many interpolations from geonic sources).
4. This undoubtedly accounts in part for the appeal of the detective story and kindred
genres, including the ideal of “elegance” in computer code.
5. For purposes of the current question, it is not necessary to take a stand on the
precise institutional nature of these “schools”; see D. Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction in
Sasanian Babylonia (Leiden, 1975).
6. This theoretical model was explored with particular zeal by my late teacher E. S.
Rosenthal, who saw himself as continuing a program initiated by Israel Levy of Breslau.
7. The classic description of the Talmud’s gradual evolution “generation after gener-
ation” was formulated by R. Sherira in his Epistle. D. Rosenthal, “Early Redactions Em-
bedded in the Babylonian Talmud,” Mehfi qerei talmud 1 (1990): 155–204, contrasts this ap-
proach with that of Rashi, who rejects explicitly any redactional activity prior to Rav Ashi
and Ravina (in phraseology that bears an uncanny resemblance to Maimonides’ description
of Rabbi Judah the Prince’s role in compiling the Mishnah).
8. A concise survey of the literature and main arguments may be found in H. L. Strack
and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 35–
49. The most exhaustive collection of arguments in favor of the writing of the Oral Tradition
during the talmudic era is probably that of J. N. Epstein, Mavo lenosahfi Hamishnah [Intro-
duction to the Text of the Mishnah] (Jerusalem, 1964), pp. 692–705. In spite of his deter-
mination to assemble even the most dubious and indirect references to written sources,
Epstein acknowledges that such documents were rare exceptions and were not permitted
for use in the schools. The widespread claim (which still appears in most textbooks and
popular introductions) that Rabbi Judah the Prince rescinded the prohibition in publishing
the Mishnah has no basis in the ancient sources, nor is it found in the unabridged text
(the so-called French recension) of Sherira’s Epistle, or among the medieval Franco-
German commentators. Its main proponents were Saadia and Maimonides, whose readings
of the sources were presumably influenced by the need to defend the authority of the
tradition against the Karaites and Muslims in a culture that venerated written over unwritten
traditions.
9. E.g., the need for mnemonic abbreviations to organize units, and the testimony of
the geonim that as late as the eleventh century manuscripts of the Talmud could not be
used or cited in the Babylonian academies.
10. See the summary in Strack and Stemberger, pp. 219–27.
11. Ibid., p. 225:
As its history of redaction shows, BT was not edited by a specific editor or a group
of editors at a precisely datable time. Hence we cannot assume a uniform and
universally accepted BT text at any time. Not only is it impossible to draw a clear
boundary between redaction and text criticism, but the coexistence of two geonic
academies will also have prevented the standardization of the textual shape of
BT.
12. Ibid., p. 224. Halivni, in particular, has argued that he has yet to find a talmudic
passage whose reconstruction would require the positing of an amoraic setam.
13. A recent summary of Neusner’s views (written partly for my benefit), along with a
bibliography of his previous writings on the question, is included in his The Documentary
Foundation of Rabbinic Culture (Atlanta, 1995).
14. Neusner’s division into individual documents does not always seem consistent. On
what grounds, for example, must we treat Leviticus Rabbah and Pesiqta deRav Kahana, or
the individual halakhic midrashim from the “School of Rabbi Ishmael,” as separate docu-
ments, while we regard “Mishnah-Tosefta” or individual talmudic tractates as belonging to
single units?
15. This principle was applied to the domain of Rabbinic textual criticism in Saul
Lieberman’s oft-quoted distinction between “textual truth and historical truth”; see his re-
view of L. Finkelstein’s edition of the Sifrei to Deuteronomy, Kiryat sefer 14 (1937):323–24.
Neusner is guilty of similar credulousness when he accepts that the sixteenth-century print-
ings (or even their thirteenth-century prototypes) are faithful records of documents com-
posed in the fourth or fifth century.
16. As far as I can tell, Neusner makes no use of the Hebrew-language research that
makes up the bulk of current Rabbinic scholarship. One consequence of his limited re-
search is that he seems unaware of the liberties that scribes and commentators were allowed
to take with the setama digmara sections, which constitutes strong evidence against the
view that the Talmud text was revered as a canonical document. Such a consistent and
widespread phenomenon cannot be facilely written off as inconsequential. Until Neusner
produces detailed commentaries on specific passages that take into consideration the details
of text, redaction, and historical context, his arguments must be treated more as opinion
than as scholarship.
17. The closest analogy I can find for Neusner’s reasoning is the claim by some fun-
damentalists that God intentionally left fossils, complete with their Carbon-14 attributes,
when He created the world 5,000 years ago. Intentional pseudepigraphy and forgery never
fail to give themselves away through linguistic, chronological, or biographical bloopers (cf.
the case of the Zohar)—none of which is evident in significant proportions in talmudic
literature.
18. This could apply not only to collections like the Tosefta and analogous (no longer
extant) works that were explicitly devised as supplements to the Mishnah, but also to mid-
rashic passages that would have naturally and routinely been cited in connection with
relevant sections of the Mishnah.
19. Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud: The Evidence of the Tractate Neziqin
(Atlanta, 1990). See “Example 2” later in this article.
20. The Babylonian Esther Midrash: A Critical Commentary, 3 vols. (Atlanta, 1994).
21. In Case Citation, pp. 6–8, 220–21, I survey some of the traditional and modern
scholars who have addressed the question of the heterogeneity of the amoraic curriculum
and the incorporation of diverse materials into the Talmud-qua-Mishnah commentary.
22. I.e., Mishnah and halakhah converge in the Mishnah and Tosefta; midrash and
halakhah in the halakhic midrashim; Mishnah and aggadah in the tractate Avot; midrash
and aggadah in Seder olam or in the tannaitic midrashim in which the nonlegal material
far outweighs the legal (e.g., Sifré Deuteronomy).
23. The only possible exception that comes to mind is the Babylonian-Aramaic (“On-
kelos”) Targum.
24. The phenomenon is noted and described in Strack and Stemberger, p. 210. This
leads to the conclusion that “the overall character of BT is encyclopedic. Everything was
included which was taught in the rabbinic schools and considered worth preserving. . . .
Thus BT is less a thematically closed book than a national library of Babylonian Judaism
whose structure emulates M.” It seems to me that the “encyclopedia” model brings us
substantially closer to the “anthology” being explored in the present volume. For an anal-
ogous assessment of an aggadic compendium, see Marc Hirshman, “The Greek Fathers
and the Aggada on Ecclesiastes: Formats of Exegesis in Late Antiquity,” HUCA 59 (1988):
155–58. (Thanks to David Stern for directing me to this article.)
25. J. Sussman, Sugyot bavliyot lasedarim zeraim vetoharot [Babylonian sugyot to
the orders Zeraim and Toharot] (Diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1969); B. M.
Bokser, Samuel’s Commentary on the Mishnah: Its Nature, Forms, and Content (Leiden,
1975).
26. I.e., the time referred to in the preceding clause of the Mishnah there: “A virgin
is given twelve months from the time when her husband has proposed marriage to her, in
order to prepare her belongings. And the same period that is given to the woman is also
given to the man to prepare his belongings.”
27. Normally, only priests and their households may eat terumah. If the twelve-month
deadline has elapsed owing to the fiancé’s delay, the woman is treated as his wife for
purposes of entitlement to terumah (when the fiancé is a priest), or to support (in all cases),
even though the wedding has not actually taken place.
28. The instances that are considered include: (a) the groom fell ill; (b) the bride fell
ill; (c) the bride had her menstrual period. According to one version of the passage, all
three are accepted as legitimate causes of delay, exempting the husband from financial
obligations. A second version deals with each of the instances as a separate and distinct
problem, to which a collective solution is proposed by Rav Ahfi ai (discussed later).
29. If the fiancé is a kohen.
30. See the references to N. Brüll, A. Weiss, and others in Strack and Stemberger,
Introduction, p. 24.
31. Abaye is quoted as objecting to the initial formulation of his teacher Rav Joseph’s
tradition, on the grounds that the Mishnah contains an explicit reason for its ruling (because
of the days of the court sessions), and hence there would have been no need for Samuel
to seek an explanation in Mishnah 5:2. In consequence, a revised version of the tradition
is offered, in which Samuel is not giving a reason for Mishnah 1:1 but rather extending its
indirect implications. Thus, it is explained that Sunday was excluded by Rabbinic enact-
ment as a day for weddings, even though courts convene on Mondays, out of concern for
the bride’s presumed desire for an elaborate wedding celebration, in order to allow plenty
of time for preparations after the Sabbath. Because this delay is based on a Rabbinic or-
dinance, the groom is not held financially responsible if it should take him beyond the
twelve-month deadline.
32. Rav Ahfi ai claims to prove from a precise reading of the Mishnah’s wording that
the groom would be held responsible if the delay were caused by anything less than a
Rabbinic ordinance, as in the cases of illness and menstruation already discussed in con-
nection with the version of the passage that presented the issue as a question. The Rash-
bam’s attempt to argue on form-critical grounds that this Rav Ahfi ai is a post-talmudic figure
was justly refuted by his brother R. Jacob Tam (see Tosafot). It is possible that Rashbam’s
mention of Rav Ahfi a of Shabhfi a, the author of the She iltot, was inspired at least in part by
the fact that the structure of this inquiry conforms to that of a typical She ilta, branching
off as it does into various hypothetical possibilities until the normative solution is deter-
mined on the basis of a talmudic citation.
33. In the printed Talmuds, Rav Ashi refutes Rav Ahfi ai’s attempt at answering the above
question. However, his name is missing from several manuscripts, including two Geniza
fragments; see M. Hershler, ed., Masekhet ketubot im shinnuyei nushfi aot [The Babylonian
Talmud with Variant Readings: Tractate Ketubot] (Jerusalem, 1972–77), 1:4 lines 7–8, and
n. 5. Presumably, if the name were contained in the early French manuscripts, that fact
would have been adduced by Rashbam and R. Tam in connection with the identification
of R. Ahfi a (see later). Cf. H fi . Albeck, Mavo latalmudim [Introduction to the Talmud, Babli
and Yerushalmi], p. 514; J. Z. Dünner, H fi iddushei hariza″d [Novellae] (Jerusalem, 1983), ad
loc.
34. It would have been far more reasonable to attach it to the mishnayot in Ketubot
5:2 or Gittin chap. 5.
35. This is the reading in all witnesses (Hershler, Masekhet Ketubot, p. 21 line 14),
though the subsequent statements are introduced as “Bar Qappara expounded.”
36. Genesis 1:22.
37. Genesis 1:28.
38. Thus, Rashi: “It brings it here on account of Bar Qappara, who was quoted pre-
viously in connection with an aggadic tradition.”
39. TP Ketubot 1:1 (24d); the passage is also found with variants in Genesis Rabbah 8:
12 (p. 66).
There is a virtual consensus among modern Talmud scholars that Bar Qappara’s pos-
iting a different reason for the law in the Mishnah proves that the Mishnah of the Pales-
tinian Talmud, at least in its earliest strata, did not include the current rationale about
juxtaposing the wedding to the court sessions, the latter explanation being introduced there
by R. Eleazar. A similar implication was discerned in Samuel’s (unemended) tradition at
the beginning of the Babylonian tractate (see earlier) and in the fact that the Mishnah’s
explanation is included in the Tosefta (1:1, p. 56). See the discussions in H fi . Albeck’s Mish-
nah Commentary (3:345); Lieberman’s long commentary in Kiryat Sefer, p. 185; Halivni,
pp. 129–30 n. 4; and literature cited in these works.
While there is little room for doubt that tannaitic literature knew of several optional
explanations for the ancient customs that governed the days of weddings, the extension of
this situation to the amoraic era is at best circumstantial and is contradicted by the unan-
imous testimony of the Mishnah manuscripts, including those whose Palestinian traditions
are considered superior. The Tosefta’s practice of including and explaining long lemmas
from the Mishnah is well known, as is the Talmud’s inclusion of baraitot that dispute the
positions of the Mishnah. Bar Qappara, in particular, has been accused of maintaining a
conscious independence of the Mishnah (see S. Lieberman, Sifrei Zutta [New York, 1968],
pp. 11–13, 64, 114ff.). The most explicit of the proofs remains TP’s report about R. Eleazar
citing the Mishnah’s rationale for the Mishnah as his own, and the Talmud’s subsequent
adducing of a baraita in support of his—rather than the Mishnah’s—explanation. However,
Epstein (Introduction to the Text of the Mishnah, p. 294) is able to argue that this is merely
one of several instances in which R. Eleazar defends the version preserved in the Mishnah
against that of a baraita.
40. Genesis Rabbah does not cite this explanation in the name of Bar Qappara but
merely asks, “Why?” The attribution is attached only to the revised interpretation, repro-
duced here.
41. The explanatory comment “On Thursday . . . and Eve” is missing in Genesis Rab-
bah.
42. “R. Yosé . . . is that”—In Genesis Rabbah: “Bar Qappara says.”
43. The TP passage continues to examine the implications to Bar Qappara’s dictum
of the fact that Genesis 2:3 also contains a blessing. The pericope leads to a discussion of
the question of deflowering a virgin on the Sabbath. The subject of that passage is analogous
to the B. passage that commences immediately following the three expositions of Bar Qap-
para.
44. Mekhilta D’Rabbi Sim’on b. Jochai, ed. J. N. Epstein and E. Z. Melamed (Jeru-
salem, 1955), pp. 99–100.
45. Mechilta D’Rabbi Ismael, ed. H. S. Horovitz and I. A. Rabin (1930; repr. Jerusalem,
1970), Shirah 10, p. 150; Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, ed. J. Z. Lauterbach (Philadelphia),
1933), vol. 2, p. 29.
46. Cf. Aboth de Rabbi Nathan, end of chap. 1 (ed. Schechter, 4b): “An alternative
explanation: ‘And laid thine hand upon me’ (Ps. 139:5)—From this [it follows] that when
Adam and the Temple were created, they were created by means of both his hands. Whence
do we know that the Temple was constructed with both his hands?” See the editor’s notes
there with references to problems in the order of the passages. Rabbi Josiah Pinto (the “Rif”
to the Ein yaaqov), who was evidently unaware of the Mekhilta version, protested: “Seeing
as the works of the righteous are equated with the Temple, then it ought to have said ‘Great
is the Temple!’ ”
47. The text and translation are difficult to reconstruct. See the text-critical notes in
the respective editions. See also Midrash haggadol al hfi amishah hfi omshei torah: Sefer shemot
[Midrash Haggadol on the Pentateuch: Exodus], ed. M. Margulies (Jerusalem, 1956), p. 311.
48. The Mekhiltas stress a contrast between the Temple and the created universe,
whereas Bar Qappara speaks instead of “the deeds of the righteous.” Nor is it clear how
Bar Qappara read that theme into the biblical text. (Cf. Rashi’s suggestion that the midrash
is alluding to the fact that the sanctuaries were actually erected by righteous mortals, pre-
sumably with divine assistance. However, if that were true, there would be no symmetry
between the two elements of the comparison.) Maharsha refers us to the midrashic
traditions (which he reads through a kabbalistic framework) about how Bezalel and Aholiab
employed supernatural skills in fashioning the Tabernacle. Pinto emphasizes the role played
by the righteous King Solomon in the building of the Temple: “Once the Temple had
been erected by the righteous, it was a simple matter for the Holy One to establish it, since
the merit of the righteous established it in part, and the Holy One completes its establish-
ment. Nevertheless, he had to apply both hands to this task.” It strikes me as possible,
though admittedly contradicted by all the textual evidence, that the references to the works
of the righteous were introduced here mistakenly under the influence of the discussion
later on the theme of “Who shows the handiwork of the righteous” (expounding Ps. 19:2).
There, too, the plain sense of the grammatical object of the verse is diverted to refer to the
righteous.
49. There are many parallels and similarities between the opening pages of B. Ketubot
and the equivalent pericopes in the Palestinian Talmud. These would normally lead us to
suppose that the Babylonian editors were expanding upon material that had already un-
dergone a literary redaction in Palestine. Although this possibility is not to be ruled out
here, the fact is that both the Yerushalmi and Genesis Rabbah cite only the first tradition.
Thus, the issue is not where (in Palestine or Babylonia) the link was made, so much as
how and why.
50. This question is posed by Rabbi Jacob Reischer in his Iyyun yaaqov commentary
to the Ein yaaqov. He devises an ingenious, though unconvincing, explanation connected
to the linking of wedding days to the blessing of Adam and Eve, rather than that of fish.
51. It assumes that we read it in the light of R. Eleazar’s comment about why human
fingers were created with a peg shape.
52. I discuss several such examples in my The Babylonian Esther Midrash: A Critical
Commentary. See, e.g., 2:265–309; 3:121, 221–23.
53. Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud: The Evidence of Tractate Neziqin.
54. There, as here, I evaded the question of whether these collections were oral or
written. In favor of an oral model, we must note that the general halakhic prohibitions
against writing down Oral Torah appear to have been observed consistently throughout the
amoraic era, and that the Aramaic dialect in which the cases were preserved is substantially
identical to that of the rest of the Talmud, without the telltale signs of written texts (as
found, e.g., in legal documents or geonic writings). In favor of a written model of trans-
mission, we may observe simply how unlikely it seems that a formal mechanism for oral
collection of court decisions (parallel to the tannaim who were charged with the memo-
rization of baraitot) should have existed without that fact’s being mentioned anywhere in
our sources.
55. For textual variants, see Hershler, Masekhet ketubot 2:346, to lines 1–2. The siman
is found in several manuscripts, though the printed editions seem to preserve the most
complete version, and is supported by the readings of Halakhot pesuqqot, Halakhot gedolot,
and other geonic works. See E. Hildesheimer, Sefer halakhot gedolot (Jerusalem, 1980), 2:
278. Noteworthy is the reading of MS Vatican 130, in which the siman is subdivided into
two discrete units of six and three units.
56. On the distinction between the two main literary types of cases in B., see Stern,
Case Citation, pp. 14ff.
57. As noted by Rashbam to Bava Batra 150b (Case Citation, p. 89).
58. The structure is also found in item no. 4 in the sequence, adjudicated by Rami
bar Hfi ama, as well as in no. 2 (involving Rav Joseph and Abaye).
59. See later. Units nos. 1 and 2 are virtually identical but for the names of the par-
ticipating. Rabbis and the values of the disputed properties. Some of the traditional com-
mentators (see Shittah mequbbetset) expressed surprise that the Talmud should have in-
cluded two identical cases. For that reason, several of them (see Meiri, Nahfi manides, Ishbili,
Ditrani, etc.) considered the possibility that the two cases were dealing separately with
instances where the properties were acquired by a single purchaser, or by two separate
purchasers. Dünner (H fi iddushei) sees the two cases as variant traditions (lishana ahfi arina).
The MSS that read Rami bar H fi ama’s name, rather than Rav Joseph’s, in unit no. 2 are
clearly mistaken, since he would not have engaged in an exchange with Abaye. See Hersh-
ler, Masekhet ketubot 2:345 n. 44.
60. E.g., the prominence of Rami bar H fi ama in units nos. 1, 4, 5, and 6. Rami died
c. 350. For biographical overviews, see Albeck, Introduction to the Talmud, pp. 379–80;
Strack and Stemberger Introduction, p. 105. The other main participants are Rava, who
decides no. 7 (this reading is probably more reliable than “Rabbah” in the printed editions;
cf. Hershler, 2:352, n. 25), and Abaye in nos. 3, 8, and 9.
61. Rava fulfills this role in nos. 1, 4, and 5 (some texts have “Rav Dimi” in the latter;
see Hershler 2:344, line 7 and n. 24); Abaye in no. 2.
62. All but no. 4 have some discussion attached. In nos. 3,5,7, and 9, the comments
are anonymous (in the last two, variants are presented introduced by the ikka deamerei
formula). Each of the first two units is followed by an identical dispute between Ravina
and Rav Avira. Presumably, this is the sixth-generation student of Rava. This Rav Avira
appears in a dispute with Ravina on Bava Batra 131b. See Albeck, Introduction to the Talmud,
p. 416. On the identity of that Ravina see ibid., pp. 420–21.
63. On the other hand, the right of a creditor to collect from property sold subse-
quently to the contracting of the debt is an issue that crops up in many places in the
Mishnah, including Ketubot.
64. Cf. Dünner (H fi iddushei): “From here [no. 3] on, the cases were included here
only by virtue of two incidental similarities: (a) that they all begin with the formula “a
certain man,” and (b) that Rami bar H fi ama, Abaye, and Rava are all involved in the dis-
cussions.” As I noted here, the similarities in form and content are actually somewhat more
substantial.
65. A complex and methodologically instructive example of such a hybrid collection
is analyzed in Case Citation, pp. 94–113.
66. See earlier. Basic bibliographies for research into the related questions of the
development of the sugya and the contribution of the saboraim may be found in Strack
and Stemberger, pp. 221–23. Note in particular the contributions of A. Weiss, M. S. Feld-
blum, S. Friedman, Z. A. Steinfeld, and D. Weiss-Halivni. The apparent impossibility of
pinpointing the transition from redactional to textual history has been noted in many studies
by E. S. Rosenthal, S. Friedman, D. Rosenthal, and others.
67. In view of the length and complexity of the process that gave birth to the Baby-
lonian Talmud, it seems to make a singularly inappropriate candidate for the application
of Neusner’s documentary theory (see earlier), which presupposed a unified editorial policy.
Neusner seems to be reverting to a traditionalist religious view of a quasi-personified Tal-
mud, or at least to the simplistic nineteenth-century attempts to identify a particular “re-
dactor.”
68. See S. Friedman, “A Critical Study of Yevamot X with a Methodological Intro-
duction,” in H. Z. Dimitrovsky, ed., Texts and Studies: Analecta Judaica, vol. 1 (1977),
pp. 275–441.
69. Case Citation, p. 125.
70. Even if we were to assume that the Talmud’s redactors had before them the same
independent compendia of baraita, talmudic debates, or midrashic homilies that have come
down to us in the extant collections of halakhic midrash, Tosefta, Palestinian Talmud, or
classical aggadic midrash, it is hard to pinpoint essential differences between what is con-
tained in those sources and the material that was accepted for inclusion in the Babylonian
Talmud. The elimination of certain tractates from the final scope of the Talmud does not
seem to have been a direct reflection of the quality of those tractates’ contents so much as
it was a pragmatic way of dealing with the paucity of usable material—a situation that
presumably resulted in turn from those tractates’ exclusion from the academic curriculum
of the later amoraim. See Strack and Stemberger, pp. 209–10.
71. Formulations of this sort are employed frequently by J. Neusner in order to char-
acterize what he sees as the inevitable consequences that follow from rejection of his
“documentary” approach to Rabbinic literature. See earlier.
72. The typically laconic formulations in which the amoraim transmitted their teach-
ings, which may have been forced upon them by the requirements of memorization, must
have impelled them to pay meticulous attention to what should be included and what
excluded from the material to be handed down to future generations.
73. Neusner’s singling out of the theological element as constituting the main purpose
underlying the Talmud’s composition flies in the face of its obvious concern for the me-
chanics and theory of religious law.
74. Admittedly, some of the “acceptable” connective links are so ingeniously contrived
as to raise doubts about whether any unit could not have been provided with a link. In
two of the examples here, it was sufficient to establish a valid association with one item in
a series in order to justify the inclusion of the complete series.
75. The Rabbinic work that conforms best to Western notions of systematic organi-
zation, the Mishnah, contains precisely the same kinds of digressions that I have described,
in which a sequence of topically unrelated sources are inserted into a tractate because one
of the items in the list is relevant to the context (e.g., Megillah 1:4–11). See Hfi . Albeck,
Mevo hamishnah [Introduction to the Mishnah] (Jerusalem, 1967), pp. 88–99.
76. The “at least” qualification alludes to instances in which redacted pericopes were
utilized subsequently by even later redactors and introduced into newer contexts. Such
instances are not uncommon.
77. As is Neusner; see earlier.
78. The most complete of these is Shamma Friedman’s in “A Critical Study.”
79. See S. H. Steinberg, ed., Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Literature (London, 1953),
1:23–24.
80. One striking ancient parallel to the talmudic esthetic of anthologizing is a work
that in other respects belongs to a polarly different universe. I am referring to Ovid’s Met-
amorphoses, whose author has strung together a representative sample of the Greek and
Latin mythological heritage by means of an elaborately contrived sequence of associative
links. It is granted that Ovid’s work, carefully crafted by a single author, is not in itself an
anthology. Nevertheless, there are some striking literary similarities in the way the individual
units relate to one another and to their respective totalities.
Some of the classic controversies of Ovid criticism offer uncanny and instructive par-
allels to questions raised in talmudic literary scholarship. To cite just a few of the features
that enhance our appreciation of the Talmud’s literary form, I might refer to: difficulties
that confront scholars in their attempts to find thematic consistency in Ovid’s selection of
legends (see Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses [Chapel Hill, 1988],
p. 11; all the following page references are to Solodow), and the poem’s general impression
of “shapelessness” (13); lengthy digressions based on formal similarities frequently are often
interposed between units that logically belong together (14); like the Talmud’s redactors,
Ovid consistently eschews the presentation of separate units in favor of formal literary tran-
sitions (15), no matter how artificial those transitions sometimes appear (26); while the
juxtapositions of some legends can be justified on grounds of thematic similarities (16),
these similarities (including the metamorphoses themselves) can sometimes be merely in-
cidental or peripheral to the main purpose of the unit (28); like the Babylonian Talmud,
the Metamorphoses strives for comprehensiveness in its historical range, breadth of subject
matter, and its variety of literary genres (17–18), and its author frequently collates sources
belonging to different genres (24–25); in both collections, the resolve that was invested in
the fashioning of literary transitions between the units was felt to be as important as the
content of the units.
Indeed, to stretch the comparison only a little bit further, we might justly submit that
the relationship between the Talmud and a conventional anthology is equivalent to the
one that exists between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Bullfinch’s Mythology.
81. In this respect, it bears some resemblance to the maqamas or picaresque novels of
later generations, allowing always for the essential differences between single-author and
multi-author works. To a more limited degree, this is true of a medieval midrashic “an-
thology” like Rabbi David Adani’s Midrash hagadol, which so often exasperates modern
scholars with the liberties it takes in its presentation of the ancient sources (see Strack and
Stemberger, pp. 386–87).
82. The delimitation of the “whole” is open to varying interpretations. Scholarship has
been focused largely on the individual sugya, though other units can reasonably be used,
such as a chapter, tractate, or the entire Talmud. At this stage of scholarship, it would seem
that the more ambitious the scope, the less likelihood there is of reaching conclusions that
are both well-founded and meaningfully specific.
83. Sections are enclosed in square brackets when there exists an ambiguity about
their status as “talmudic sources.”
84. The formula davar telei bidla telei is found in tannaitic midrashic texts. See Sifré
Numbers 91 (p. 91); Deuteronomy 312 (p. 353) and 333 (p. 383).
85. Rashi insists that the “corrected version” of Samuel’s tradition on 2a (“Rather, if
it was stated, thus was it stated”) is being presented as the words of Rav Joseph himself.
There are several considerations that recommend this view, including the facts that Rava
appears to be responding to it, and that the emended tradition is formulated entirely in
Hebrew, after the manner of authentic amoraic traditions (cf. Dünner (H fi iddushei): “The
style of the emended dictum follows that of a baraita”). Neither of these factors constitutes
irrefutable proof, and Dünner has noted that the ruling that appears to be assumed by Rava
is, at any rate, challenged by later amoraim.
The textual evidence seems to suggest that it is the redactors who are citing the
emended version of Rav Joseph’s tradition, since the older texts, as attested by the medievals,
read “Rather, if it was stated, thus was it stated: Says Rav Joseph: Says Rav Judah: Says
Samuel” (see the evidence collected in Hershler’s edition, p. 2, n. 13). Most of the manu-
scripts have incorporated the emendation of Tosafot—often in a garbled form—and
therefore cannot be relied upon as proof for the original reading here. However, the i
itamar formula is a stereotyped one, and we should not attach too much weight to it.
A similar ambiguity attaches to the fact that the Talmud has Rava refer explicitly to
Rav Joseph’s emended version when he states either “And with regard to divorce it is not
so” (2b), or “it is so” (3a). Here, too, it is conceivable that Rava’s original statement did not
allude so explicitly to that tradition.
The central item of new content that was added in the “revised” version of Samuel’s
dictum, the statement about how “the Rabbis were concerned for the welfare of the daugh-
ters of Israel,” is being cited verbatim from the Tosefta Ketubot 1:1 (The Tosefta, ed. Saul
Lieberman [New York; 1967], Nashim, Ketuboth, p. 56) as found on folio 3b, a fact that
would also account for its Hebrew formulation. It is thus not entirely unreasonable to view
the revision as the “anonymous Talmud’s” typical creative rearrangement of existing ma-
terials. This possibility is strengthened by the questionable logic of the objection, and by
the possibility that the literary structure of the passage might have been copied from a
pericope elsewhere in the Talmud, as I will soon discuss.
We should also note that the tradition about Rav Joseph suffering from a memory loss,
though cited as a biographical “fact” by Albeck, Introduction, p. 293; Halivni, Meqorot um-
sorot—Seder nashim [Sources and Traditions—on Seder Nashim] (Tel Aviv, 1968), p. 131;
and others, is an invention of Rashi, based on a number of instances when Rav Joseph’s
traditions were challenged by Abaye (e.g., Eruvin 66b, 73a, 75b, 89b; Pesahfi im 13a).
86. It does explain why Sunday is not considered a legitimate day for weddings.
87. What is the rule when waiting for Wednesday prevents the groom from complying
with the twelve-month deadline? The artificiality of Rav Joseph’s objection was aptly noted
by the Tosafot ad loc.
88. Such a reconstruction was proposed by Halivni, though his objections against the
present form of the pericope are somewhat different. He notes that Bava Batra 134 has a
similar structure, but “in Shabbat it is smoother.” Apparently, he is alluding to the fact that
in Shabbat, there is a clearer delineation between “what was taught” (i.e., in a baraita) and
“what was not taught” (i.e., is found only in an amoraic dictum). At any rate, the question
is not entirely clear.
89. See earlier. The current version of the pericope in which Rav Ahfi a appears alludes
explicitly to the emended version of Rav Joseph’s tradition, particularly to the fact that the
delay mentioned there was in order to comply with a Rabbinic enactment. However, the
passage could make sense without that reference.
90. There does not seem to be a consistent redactional policy for such cases. The
Talmud sometimes leaves duplicated pericopes in the same tractate, and it is not obvious
why it chose not to do so in the present instance.
91. The principle “there is [no] plea of force majeur in connection with divorce,”
worded in Hebrew, has the earmarks of an allusion to a tannaitic or amoraic dictum. It is
found in Gittin 30a and 34a, but in both those passages it is part of an anonymous comment
attached to Samuel’s ruling in the case (later in the passage here) of the husband who was
prevented from keeping his thirty-day deadline. Rashi to Gittin 30a surmises plausibly that
the Talmud there is actually referring to the Ketubot passage here and its two opposing
versions of Rava’s comment.
92. The Tosefta, ed. Saul Lieberman (Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, 1973),
Nashim, Gittin, 267. See his discussion in Tsefta Ki-shutah (New York, 1973), part VIII,
881.
93. Gittin 72b, 76b; Avodah Zarah 37a; cf. Gittin 7:3 and parallels.
94. The passage, its historical dimensions and its implications vis-à-vis the text of M.
Avodah Zarah have been discussed at great length in the course of modern rabbinic schol-
arship, from the time of S. J. Rapaport. Some recent studies (containing references to earlier
works) include Lieberman, Tosefta kifshutah, loc. cit; David Rosenthal, Mishnah avodah
zarah—Mahadurah biqqortit [Mishnah Aboda Zara—A Critical Edition] (Diss., Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, 1980), pp. 166–74; Z. A. Steinfeld, “Gentile Products That May or
May Not Be Eaten,” Sinai 86 (1980): 83–84. The Babylonian and Palestinian sources (TP
Gittin 7:3 [48d]) agree in ascribing the enactment to Rabbi Judah Nesiah, the grandson of
the Mishnah’s redactor.
95. Rabbi Yosé’s position is stated in Mishnah Bava Batra 8:7 in connection with a
father’s ability to will his property to his son while retaining the rights of usufruct. However,
the explanation of Rabbi Yosé’s view on the grounds that the date implies retroactivity is
supplied by Tosefta Ketubot 8:4 (ed. Lieberman, The Tosefta, Ketuboth, p. 85; Tosefta kif-
shutah, p. 319). The reason is also cited in TP Gittin 7:3 (48d). Its primary location in the
Babylonian Talmud is in Bava Batra 136a, as is noted by Rashi here, and from there it
came to be cited in several pericopes that deal with posthumous fulfillment of conditions.
96. Its primary location in B. is Gittin 30a, where it is included in a sequence of
cases. Mishnah 3:6 there deals with an agent for delivery of a get who finds himself unable
to deliver the document, and the case brought immediately before this one in that talmudic
passage also involves the questions of agency and unavoidable delay in meeting a stipulated
deadline. The current case appears to have been attached to the previous one by virtue of
the fact that it also deals with delays, even though it has no tangible connection to the
issues of interrupted agency that are dealt with in the local mishnah. As I have demonstrated
elsewhere (Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud, esp. pp. 90–125, 215–16; and see later
here), this situation is entirely consistent with the manner in which cases were generally
incorporated into the Talmud, indicating that they were originally assembled into simple
collections and afterward attached to existing pericopes at a relatively advanced stage in
their redaction. The case is adduced by Rava in Gittin 34a.
97. David Halivni, Mekorot Umasorot: Be’urim Batalmud (Tel-Aviv, 1968), vol. 1, p. 530
note 2, aptly summarizes the question: “[The text] is found six times in the Talmud . . .
and it is unlikely that Rav Ashi would have failed to reply to Ravina’s question in all those
instances. Rather it is the Gemara that copied the question and answer from its original
location to the other places. Where did it originate? It would appear that it was in Yevamot
110a.” Halivni goes on to observe that Ravina’s argument does not constitute a strong ob-
jection if directed against the principle, “All who betroth do so subject to the approval of
the Rabbis,” and hence it probably did not originate in any of the passages where it is
appended to that principle. See also Shamma Friedman, “A Critical Study,” pp. 356–57,
and the extensive literature assembled in nn. 57–58 there. Friedman notes that in Yevamot
90b the conversation is evidently a later addition to a pericope that originated with a dispute
between Rabbah and Rav H fi isda. The discussion there deals with the validity of the divorce,
not the betrothal, as is stated in Ravina and Rav Ashi’s comments. In Yevamot 110a, by
contrast, Ravina and Rav Ashi are responding directly to a case (of the hava ovada type)
involving students of Rav, to which Rav Pappa had already commented. In Gittin 33a, Rav
Ashi and Ravina are directly interpreting a baraita (the same one that was cited as a proof-
text in Yevamot 90b); however, there too, the issue at hand is the annulment of the divorce,
not of the betrothal.
6
david stern
Anthology and Polysemy

in Classical Midrash
o feature of midrash has drawn more attention from modern readers than its
Nproclivity for multiple interpretation. The claim that biblical verses can be
read in more than one way seems to be a virtual axiom underlying ancient Rab-
binic exegesis, encoded in the oft-quoted Talmudic dictum, mikra ehad yotsei
lekamah te’amim, “one verse may have several meanings” (just as, the same passage
continues, “no two verses hold the same meaning”).1 Even if the precise meaning
of this statement has not always been absolutely clear, its applicability seems to
have been inscribed in nearly all surviving midrashic collections insofar as they
regularly record multiple interpretations. Indeed, no editorial feature of midrashic
literature seems to be more consistent than the use of davar aher, “another opin-
ion,” as a superscription for still another interpretation.
This habit of collecting multiple interpretations may be called the inherently
anthological element in midrash. The anthological element can be located on
virtually every plane of midrashic discourse—on the hermeneutical level (in po-
lysemy, as an exegetical axiom, as was just noted); on the micro-level of the various
rhetorical-literary forms in which midrashic traditions are actually recorded (and
that constitute virtual mini-anthologies of interpretations, as we shall see); and on
the macro-level of the various documents in which all these separate midrashic
traditions have been preserved. On each of these separate levels, midrash appears
to have been not only an effort of interpretation but a project of organizing and
preserving the multiple interpretive traditions of the past.
I am hardly the first to point this out. Scholars in the past have extensively
discussed the genres of the various midrashic collections and their identities as
literary documents. So, too, there has been extensive investigation of polysemous,
multiple interpretation in midrash and its hermeneutical significance, particularly
in the last several decades. The anthological character of the midrashic literary-
rhetorical forms has also been studied, though less extensively. As yet, however,
there has been no attempt to discuss these separate dimensions of midrashic an-
thologization in connection with each other, let alone assess their combined sig-
108
Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 109
nificance. This is the task I wish to undertake in this essay—not only so as to

understand the general phenomenon better but also in order to speculate upon
its function, that is, the purpose such anthology making may have served in Rab-
binic culture. Why, indeed, was the anthology, as it seems, the Rabbis’ literary
genre of choice? To answer this question, it is necessary first to survey the antho-
logical “question” on each of the separate planes I have identified. If only because
the anthological element can be seen most clearly when it manifests itself on the
largest scale, we shall begin with the documentary plane and then proceed to the
literary-rhetorical and, finally, to the hermeneutical.
Anthological Documents: The Case of the Literary Homily

At first glance, there is no reason to suppose that the various classical midrashic
collections are anything but anthologies. This is not to say that all midrashic
collections are identical, or that they are only anthologies. Scholars have tradition-
ally distinguished between two types of midrashic collections: the exegetical and
the homiletical.2 The former is organized basically according to the biblical text
itself; the midrashic comments are recorded simply by the order of the verses upon
which they comment, verse after verse, with no other discernible logic to their
selection. In contrast, the homiletical collection is divided into so-called chapters
(parashiyot); rather than interpret an entire section of the Torah, each chapter
devotes its comments solely to the first or the first several verses in the section,
and its comments often seem to be motivated as much by topical and thematic
concerns as as by the verses themselves. As we shall see, attempts have also been
made to attribute to the homiletical midrashim an even deeper literary unity and
coherence. Even so, there is no prima facie evidence to suggest that the basic
dynamic behind these works’ editing was ever more than anthological—that is,
more than an attempt on the editors’ parts to collect exegetical traditions in rec-
ognizable literary units that the editor preserved more or less in their original form
and without significant intervention (conceding the fact, to be sure, that in most
cases we have no way of knowing what the original form was).
In this respect, the midrashic collections are not in fact different from other
Rabbinic works, nearly all of which are multilayered works, preserving (and often
reworking) past traditions and, at least on the surface, not acknowledging their
editors’ intervention. To be sure, not all contemporary scholars would agree with
this characterization of Rabbinic texts. The greatest challenge to the “anthological”
approach to midrash (as well as to other works of Rabbinic literature) has come
from Jacob Neusner, who has argued that each separate work produced by the
Rabbis should be seen as a document in its own right with an inner integrity and
a coherent point of view all its own. Even if the document was compiled from
previously existing traditions, Neusner claims that the author responsible for the
document assembled his work with a plan and with an intelligible purpose so as
to create a “composition.”3 The only alternative, Neusner writes, is to view the
Rabbinic work as “a scrap book,” a “random and essentially promiscuous” literary
expression.4
There are many difficulties with Neusner’s documentary hypothesis, some of
which have been explored by other scholars.5 For our present concerns, the main
weakness of his argument is in his contention that a text must be either “a com-
position” or a “scrapbook.” This is a false opposition. There is, in fact, no reason
to dichotomize literary works so extremely. Even if it is not a monograph—that
is, an original work consciously and deliberately created by a single author—an
anthology of diverse works need not necessarily be, and usually isn’t, a “random,”
let alone a “promiscuous” text, a mere scrapbook of this and that. Indeed, the
opposition between “composition” and “scrapbook” is especially inappropriate in
the case of Rabbinic documents. In the first place, structure or organization in
any anthology can take place on at least two separate levels—either on the macro-
level of the collection-document as a whole, or on the macro-level of its consti-
tutive literary-rhetorical forms (to which we shall turn shortly)—and it is particu-
larly in the latter that structure is to be located in the case of Rabbinic texts.6
Moreover, even the rudimentary organization of an exegetical midrash—in which
interpretive opinions are listed sequentially by their lemmata or base verses—is,
after all, still a form of organization, and not to be dismissed as meaningless. And
finally, the very anthological form of the midrashic collection, with its proclivity
for preserving multiple interpretations, may sometimes disguise the presence of an
editorial hand that has consistently excluded an unnamed interpretive approach—
an approach, in other words, that could not, for ideological or political reasons,
be preserved. Such, for example, may have been the case with the cosmogonic
interpretations on the first chapters of Genesis as preserved in Bereishit Rabbah,
and so, too, certain Rabbinic exegeses of the Song of Songs as preserved in Shir
Hashirim Rabbah. Both these works, despite the variety of exegeses they preserve,
may have excluded certain esoteric interpretations that their Rabbinic editors
found objectionable or impossible.7
Virtually every Rabbinic text, including the various midrashic collections, is
in some fashion sui generis, and their anthological character takes on a somewhat
different expression in each case. Consider, for example, two early tannaitic col-
lections which are usually considered under the rubric of exegetical midrash. The
Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael is a collection of interpretations on Exodus 12:1–23:19—
that is, from the first commandment regarding Passover through the end of the
laws given on Mt. Sinai—with an addendum, as it were, on nine verses about the
Sabbath (Exod. 31:12–17 and 35:1–3). Yet while the collection is an “exegetical”
midrash inasmuch as its interpretations are listed by the sequence of verses, the
book as a whole is not in fact a mere running commentary on Exodus. Organized
into nine tractates (massekhtaot), the Mekhilta is, as J. Z. Lauterbach pointed out
a long time ago, “a collection of tractates dealing with certain events recorded or
topics treated in the book of Exodus.”8 It is not merely a commentary or collection
of interpretations on verses.
In contrast, Sifra, the tannaitic commentary on Leviticus, originally followed
the sections in the Torah literally word for word, as is already made clear in the
reference in Shir Hashirim Rabbah 6:8: “ ‘There are sixty wives and eighty con-
cubines’ (Song of Songs 6:8)—‘Sixty wives’ refers to the sixty tractates (massekh-
taot) in the Mishnah (literally, halakhot), ‘eighty conclubines’ to the eighty sec-
tions (parashiyot) in Sifra (literally, torah kohanim).”9 As Shlomo Naeh has shown,
these original eighty parashiyot correspond to the eighty sections (also known as
parashiyot) in the book of Leviticus, thereby making Sifra the first truly complete
exegetical midrash.10 While Mekhilta and Sifra are, then, both “anthologies,” and
even though both are usually described as “exegetical” midrashim—insofar as their
main procedure seems to be simply to list interpretations by the verses upon which
they comment—it is clear from their larger macro-organization and the titles of
their different divisions that their editors also created and organized them for
different purposes: in one case, to treat selected topics and sections of a book; in
the other, to follow a scriptural book through its entirety. Whether or not the latter
was a commentary in our sense of the term—that is, an ancillary text meant to
be read and studied alongside the primary core-text—is a separate question to
which I’ll return.11
Most scholarly debate about the literary identity of midrashic collections has
revolved, however, not around the exegetical but the homiletical collections, spe-
cifically the two amoraic works, Vayikra (Leviticus) Rabbah (henceforth VR) and
Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (henceforth PRK). As I have already noted, these mid-
rashim differ from the exegetical midrashim in several factors:
1. They are organized in “chapters” (parashiyot).
2. These chapters share a common shape—at their beginning, the chap-
ters open with at least one example and usually a group of passages in
the literary-rhetorical form of the petihta or proem (to which I shall
return). These multiple petihtaot are then followed by a series of mid-
rashic interpretations that are sometimes linked to the chapter’s open-
ing verse or two and sometimes to a topic raised by the opening verse;
and this series of interpretations typically culminates in a “happy end,”
the simana denehemta, literally “a token [or sign] of consolation.” This
conventional conclusion sometimes explicitly evokes the redemption
of Israel in the time-to-come but it may also consist solely of a kind
of blessing or a tying together of previous motifs in the chapter in such
a way as to effect a satisfying and optimistic point of closure.12
3. In interpreting the Torah section (which may or may not have corre-
sponded to the sections of the Torah that were read in synagogue in
one of the Palestinian triennial cycles), the homiletical midrashim gen-
erally limit their comments to the first verse in the section (and some-
times only to a phrase or two in that verse), or at most to the first
several verses in the Torah section—never, in other words, to the en-
tire reading (as does an exegetical midrash).
4. Finally, in the homiletical collections, this opening verse (or group of
verses) is often interpreted in a singularly figurative, nonliteral fashion,
and almost always, in a way that, initially, seems to have little to do
with its context in the larger Torah reading.
These distinctive features of the homiletical midrash have been a staple of
modern midrash scholarship virtually since its beginning, but their significance
continues to be a matter of scholarly debate.13 In two articles first published in
1971, the Israeli scholar Joseph Heinemann proposed a more radical explanation
for the homiletical midrash’s singular features.14 According to Heinemann, the

homiletical midrash represented a new literary genre in classical Hebrew literature,
one that he called the “literary homily.” The chapters in VR (or PRK) are not
mere anthologies of midrashic traditions, indeed not even exegesis in its traditional
sense; rather they constitute attempts by the anonymous editor to take “separate
and often heterogeneous parts” of past tradition—the many disparate biblical in-
terpretations and extrabiblical legends on specific verses and passages that had
originally been orally transmitted and that probably reached the editor in that
form—and to meld them together into a new “organic unity,” namely, the literary
homily, which is essentially a thematic composition. The organization of the lit-
erary homily in each chapter “is dictated by the inner logic of the theme and the
need to attain coherence and integration.” Even so, Heinemann acknowledged,
the anonymous editor’s most striking editorial habit was his tendency to emphasize
“contradictory or conflicting viewpoints” of the same theme or idea and thereby
to expose “the complexity of Torah.”15
The difficulty with Heinemann’s argument lies in his notion of the “organic
unity” of the chapters in VR. This difficulty is partly due to the problems inherent
in the notion of organic unity itself—an idea that was more fashionable in Heine-
mann’s time than it is today, some thirty years later—and partly because the so-
called literary homilies in VR are not usually as unified as they should be, a fact
that Heinemann himself admitted.16 In truth, there is no necessary reason to con-
sider the separate chapters in VR to be unified entities in any sense even if they
all tend to share a common organizational structure of petihtaot (usually multiple
examples, in a very few cases a single petihta) followed by a group of separate
exegetical traditions culminating in a simana denehemta. It is equally possible to
consider each chapter as simply having two halves—one of petihtaot, the other of
separate exegetical traditions leading to a conventional peroration. As I will argue
in greater detail later, the petihtaot may have served as source material for a
preacher who needed models to use in order to compose and preach his own
petihta in synagogue; the second half of the chapter may have furnished material
for a different type of sermon or for a teacher who needed to prepare a lesson for
students. The two halves of each chapter, in other words, did not necessarily have
anything to do with each other.
The question of unity aside, however, it nonetheless seems to me that Heine-
mann was correct in his basic intuition. There is something different about VR
and PRK, and what is different has to do with a certain shared feature, even a
kind of “coherence.” Rather than view this coherence as thematic, however, I
would propose that it is exegetical—that is, each chapter uses a more or less
common approach to the verse (or verses) that serve as the explicit subject of its
interpretations. The typical—one might even say universal—feature of the hom-
iletical midrashim is that the interpretations in each chapter not only focus almost
exclusively on the first or the first few verses in the Torah passage but also almost
deliberately ignore the remainder of the verses in the passage and their contents.
For example, VR 1, the first chapter in the midrash, has as its ostensible subject
the first chapter of Leviticus, a lengthy treatment of the laws of the burnt offering.
The midrash, however, limits all its interpretations in the chapter to the first phrase
in Leviticus 1:1, vayikra el moshe, “And He called to Moses,” and ignores all the
rest of Leviticus 1, hardly even alluding to the subject of sacrifices.17 So, too, VR
4—whose ostensible subject is the reading beginning with Leviticus 4:1, a series
of laws about sacrifices incurred “when a person unwittingly incurs guilt,” nefesh
ki teheta (Lev. 4:2)—limits virtually all its interpretations to the word nefesh, which
it reads not as “person” but as “soul” (which is the primary Rabbinic understanding
of the word’s meaning), and uses the phrase nefesh ki teheta as an occasion to
explore the relationship between the soul and sin.18 Or in VR 20, the chapter
entirely ignores the reading’s subject, the scapegoat offering, and instead devotes
its entirety to a treatment of Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron, whose deaths
are alluded to in the opening phrase of the first verse in the reading.
According to Heinemann, these chapters used Scripture merely as a pretext,
a peg upon which to hang, as it were, their thematic essays about, for example,
the uniqueness of Moses (in VR1) or the nature of the soul (in VR 4). In Heine-
mann’s view, in other words, there is nothing authentically exegetical about these
chapters. Their editor wanted to put together thematic “essays,” not biblical inter-
pretations, and he used “midrash” merely as a pretext. In contrast, I propose that
these chapters are exegetical compositions and that their exegetical content can
be identified on at least two levels. On the most obvious level, each chapter pre-
sents a series of interpretations that follow a common interpretive approach to the
chapter’s prooftext(s). Beyond these exegeses, however, the chapter as a whole may
also suggest an implied interpretation of the remainder of the Torah reading, or
at least some kind of response to that reading’s significance.
In a detailed study I have published on VR 1, I have argued that the book of
Leviticus posed a special problem for a Rabbi who wished to preach on the book
in the fourth or fifth century c.e., some 300 years after the destruction of the
Temple and nearly as many centuries after the last hope to rebuild the Temple
(in the time of Julian) had collapsed.19 The problem was, simply: What to do with
this book of the Bible? The vast majority of laws in Leviticus (especially in its first
half) deal with the Temple cult, and these sections had little if any practical import
or relevance for an audience in a fourth- or fifth-century synagogue. How could
a preacher make these readings from the Torah meaningful, let alone interesting?
As I have proposed, the solution that the Rabbis found—as reflected in the
exegeses found in VR—was to shift the burden of meaning away from the cultic
substance of the chapters in Leviticus and to locate it instead in some other aspect
of the scriptural passage. For example, VR 1, which deals exclusively with Leviticus
1:1 and ignores the remainder of the chapter (namely, the substance of what God
tells Moses, the laws of the burnt offering), uses its interpretations—and in partic-
ular its multiple exegeses of vayikra el moshe, “And God called to Moses”—to
reveal the type of revelation wherein God speaks to Moses (rather than its con-
tents); elsewhere I have called that type of revelation “the language of havivut,”
of “intimacy,” and through it, I have proposed, VR shifts the burden of the Torah’s
meaning from its content to its style. In VR 4, the midrash uses the first verse in
its reading to discuss “how a nefesh, a soul, might sin” (nefesh ki teheta); the result
is not so much an essay on the soul as an exploration of the reason why a person
is obligated to bring the sin offerings whose details the rest of the Torah chapter
goes on to delineate. In VR 16, the chapter is devoted to the section beginning

with Leviticus 14:2 ff., the laws of the metzorah, the so-called “leper”; this section
details the procedures through which a person stricken with tzara’at (leprosy)
ritually purifies himself through the cult. The midrash, however, deals with none
of these ritual procedures. Instead, it exploits an already well-established aetio-
logical interpretation that reads the word metzorah as an elision of motzi shem rah,
namely, the slanderer or gossip, and thus rereads the verse, zot tihyeh torat ha-
metzorah” (literally, “this is the law of the metzorah”) to mean in effect “this is
how one avoids tzara’at,” namely, by avoiding the sin of slander and gossip, whose
punishment is the skin disease.
What all this means, in short, is that VR (and its sister midrash, PRK) remain
exegetical compositions, but the singular features of the exegetical approach pur-
sued in each chapter—the habit of focusing on the opening verse(s) at the expense
of the rest of the readings, the unusually “spiritualized” or “quasi-allegorical” read-
ings of those verses, the implied responses to the contents of the remainder of the
weekly Torah readings—all reflect the historical dilemmas and practical problems
facing a Rabbi in the third or fourth or fifth century. Now by claiming that these
chapters adopt a common or shared exegetical approach to their prooftexts, I do
not mean to say that the exegeses they present are all identical or even that they
necessarily agree with each other. Quite the opposite; as Heinemann noted, the
various traditions preserved in each chapter not infrequently contradict each other.
What is “shared” or “common” among the different exegeses recorded in each
chapter is not substantive agreement on the meaning of a verse but a shared
impulse to place the exegetical “weight” or “burden” of meaning upon one ele-
ment in the Torah lection rather than upon another, and thereby to “read” the
larger Torah reading of which that verse is a part in its light.
For example, in VR 1, as I have already noted, the chapter deals largely with
the opening phrase, vayikra el moshe, but it reads that phrase variously as “He
[God] spoke only to Moses,” “He invited Moses,” “He named Moses,” “He held
a tête-à-tête with Moses,” “He screamed at Moses,” and “He spoke intimately with
Moses.” So too, in VR 4:5, in one of the most famous cruxes in all midrashic
literature, two contradictory views of the nefesh’s culpability and responsibility for
a person’s sinning are put forth: in one, the body and the soul share culpability
and are judged together; in the other, the soul is held more culpable precisely on
account of its heavenly origins.20 For the chapter’s editor, the substantive contra-
diction between the two traditions was not an issue, because he was trying to put
together not a unified thematic essay on the soul but rather an anthology of avail-
able traditions and interpretations that dealt with the soul and its character—in
respect to sinning, and in relation to God, to the human body, and to the corporate
body of the people Israel. The anthological impulse served the purpose of inspiring
the editor to collect traditions and exegeses that could support an interpretation
of the Torah reading in line with this exegetical and homiletical approach.21
In short, the kind of documentary organization found in the homiletical mid-
rashim, VR and PRK, is not so different from the organization of an “exegetical”
collection like Bereishit Rabbah. Both are primarily anthologies of earlier inter-
pretations. Indeed, if the original chapter divisions in Bereishit Rabbah accorded
with the weekly Torah readings, as Joseph Heinemann has argued, and if the
original chapters in Bereishit Rabbah all began with petihtaot, as do the chapters
in VR and PRK, then these various amoraic collections were in fact even more
similar in structure than has been previously supposed.22 The major difference in
midrashic collections would be not the distinction between the exegetical and
homiletical midrashim but that between those with petihtaot at their chapter be-
ginnings and those without petihtaot—namely, the difference between the tan-
naitic and the amoraic collections. Exactly what the presence of the petihtaot in
the amoraic collections may teach us is a question to which I will return. Before
doing so, however, let us turn to the petihta itself as the paradigmatic anthological
literary-rhetorical form in midrash.
Anthological Literary-Rhetorical Forms:

The Example of the Petihta
The distinctive literary-rhetorical forms of midrash are its most striking and iden-
tifiable feature—what sets midrash off from the many other different types of an-
cient Jewish biblical exegesis like Targum and the Re-Written Bible. The mid-
rashic forms not only record individual interpretive opinions, they also collect and
organize separate traditions and opinions into larger, more inclusive structures that
tend to make their own points in addition to those of the specific exegeses they
convey. In the tannaitic collections, the most prominent of these forms are the
several different types of exegetical lists and enumerations. In the amoraic collec-
tions, the most typical form is the petihta or proem. The exegetical enumeration
(and list) has been studied with exemplary clarity by W. Sibley Towner.23 In this
essay I will limit my discussion to the petihta.
In an influential and still debated article that appeared in 1971, Joseph Heine-
mann first proposed that the petihta owed its unusual shape to its Sitz im Leben
as a mini-sermon that was delivered immediately before the Torah reading.24 Un-
like most midrashic literary forms, which essentially follow upon the verse or scrip-
tural phrase that they interpret, the petihta typically ends with the verse that is its
real subject, the so-called lectionary verse (which is usually the first or close to
the first verse of a section of the Torah, which may or may not have been [de-
pending on the scholar] the beginning of the weekly Torah lection in the Pales-
tinian synagogue).25 The classical petihta begins, however, with another verse, the
so-called “remote” verse (or petihta verse), so called because it is usually taken
from an unrelated, “remote” location elsewhere in Scripture (most frequently from
the Writings, sometimes from one of the books of the Prophets, least frequently
from the Pentateuch). It is also remote in the sense of having little or no connec-
tion to the lectionary verse, at least not an obvious connection. From this “remote”
verse, the preacher evolves a chain of interpretations, often involving the quotation
and interpretation of still other verses along with additional rhetorical forms (like
parables and enumerations), building in the process an exegetical bridge that even-
tually culminates in the lectionary verse. At this conclusion, the lectionary verse
takes on a new meaning or sense.
Heinemann himself seems to have believed that the petihtaot preserved in
the existing collections were actual sermons that had once been delivered by
preachers in synagogues. This possibility now seems much less certain.26 It is
equally if not more likely that the petihtaot in the collections were literary crea-
tions of the editors of the collections. Further, it is possible that they were preserved
in the collection not only to record compositions that had once been delivered
but to provide would-be preachers or teachers with models of petihtaot that they
could then use to “work” up their own sermons. For our immediate purposes,
however, what is most important to note is not only that the petihta had the clear
and identifiable outer form or shell that Heinemann identified—the conventional
beginning and end—but that its inner structure, its contents, namely, the sub-
stance of the exegetical bridge between the petihta and lectionary verses, also
possessed its own structural conventions and rules of composition. These conven-
tions and rules are so obvious (once they are recognized) that they must have been
familiar to every preacher.
In an as yet uncompleted study in which I have been engaged for the past
several years, I have sought to analyze the inner structure of the petihta in order
to identify and describe those compositional rules and conventions. In an appendix
to this essay, I briefly describe the study and some of its provisional conclusions.
For our present concern with the topic of anthology, however, two examples of
typical petihtaot will suffice to make my point about the petihta’s anthological
character.
The first example is a petihta from VR 20:1, whose lectionary verse is Leviticus
14:1. I have laid out the translated text in outline form so as to give the reader a sense
of its highly organized structure and components. All quotations from Scripture are
in boldface, and all formulae and deliberately repeated phrases are italicized.
Rabbi Shimeon bar Abaye recited a petihta [that began]: “For the same is in
store for all: one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; [for the good, and
for the pure, and for the impure; for him who sacrifices and for him who does
not sacrifice; for the good man and for the sinner; for him who swears and for
him who fears oaths].” (Eccles. 9:2)
“The righteous”—this is Noah, “Noah was a righteous man” (Gen. 6:9).
Said R. Yohanan, the son of R. Eliezer the son of R. Yosi Hagelili: When
Noah left the ark, a snake bit him and a lion gave him a fracture, and he
was no longer fit to offer sacrifices, so Shem his son offered sacrifices in
his stead.
“And for the wicked”—this is Pharaoh Nekho.
When he wished to sit on the throne of Solomon, he did not know [how
to use] its mechanical contrivance, and a snake bit him and a lion gave
him a fracture.
This one died limping, and this one died limping. Is it not “one
fate for the righteous and for the wicked”?
“For the good”—this is Moses,
as it is said, “And when she saw that he was good” (Exod. 2:2).
R. Meir said: He was born circumcised.
“For the pure”—this is Aaron,
for he was busy with purifying Israel, as it is said, “In peace and in right-
eousness he walked with Me, and turned many away from sin” (Malachi
2:6).
“And for the impure”—these are the spies.
These [Moses and Aaron] spoke in praise of the land of Israel, and
these spoke in disparagement of the land of Israel.
These did not enter the land of Israel, and these did not enter the
land of Israel. Is it not “one fate for the good and for the pure
and for the impure”?
“For him who sacrifices”—this is Josiah,
“And Josiah donated to the people small cattle—lambs and goats” (II
Chron. 35:7).
“And for him who does not sacrifice”—this is Ahab,
who did away with sacrifices on the altar, for this is what is written, “And
Ahab killed sheep and oxen for sacrifices for him [Yehoshafat] in abun-
dance” (II Chron. 18:2)—he killed for sacrifices to him [Yehoshafat] and
not for sacrifices [to God].
This one died through arrows, and this one died through arrows. Is
it not “one fate for him who sacrifices and for him who does not
sacrifice”?
“For the good one as for the sinner”—the good one is David,
“So they sent and brought him, and he was ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed,
and a good one to look at (tov roi)” (I Sam. 16:12).
Said R. Yitzhak: Good at seeing the law (halakhah).27 Everyone who
looked at him recalled his learning.
“As for the sinner,”—this is Nebuchadnezzar,
“Redeem your sins through charity” (Dan. 4:24).
This one built the Temple and reigned for forty years, and this one
destroyed the Temple and reigned for forty years. Is it not “one
fate”?
“For him who swears”—this is Zedekiah,
“He also rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar, who made him take an oath
by God” (II Chron. 36:13).
“And for him who fears oaths”—this is Samson,
“Samson said to them, Swear to me that you will not attack me” (Judges
15:12).28
This one died by having his eyes picked out, and this one died by
having his eyes put out. Is it not “one fate” for all of them?
Another interpretation for “One fate for the righteous and for the wicked”—
“For the righteous”—this is Aaron,
about whom it is written, “In peace and in righteousness he walked with Me”
(Malachi 2:6).
“And for the wicked”—this is the followers of Korah,
about whom it is written, “Move away from the tents of those wicked
men” (Num. 16:26).
These went in to offer sacrifices out of dissension, and they came
out incinerated, and these went in to offer sacrifices without dis-
sension and came out incinerated.
This is what is written—“And after the deaths of the two
sons of Aaron” (Lev. 14:1).
As the reader will observe, the petihta parses its petihta verse, Ecclesiastes 9:
2, into separate phrases, and then, following the initial phrase in the verse, it
identifies each of the pairs of types of persons named in each successive phrase
who share the same fate as referring to specific figures from the Bible who Scripture
teaches us did in fact share the same fate. Thus, we are told, Noah and Pharaoh
Nekho both suffered the same end—both died limping after having been bitten
by a snake and having suffered a fracture at the hands of a lion—even though
one, Noah, was righteous while the other, Pharaoh Nekho, was wicked. The same
strategy is repeated for each of the five following pairs: Moses and Aaron, on the
one hand, and the spies, on the other; Josiah and Ahab; David and Nebuchad-
nezzar; Zedekiah and Samson; and finally, in a second interpretation of the first
phrase in the verse’s sequence, Aaron and Korah. The petihta’s return to the first
phrase appears to be a technique of closure, but there does not appear to be any
other logic underlying the sequence of the biblical figures treated. Each of them
appears to have been chosen solely for his appropriateness as an example of the
type named in the verse.
The petihta’s author clearly did not invent every midrash in the petihta. A
good number of the paired figures and the midrashim attached to them—Noah
and Pharaoh Nekho, and Moses and Aaron, for example—had independent ex-
istences long before this petihta.29 The petihta, in other words, seems to be an
anthology of various traditions about pairs of biblical figures who famously suffered
the same fate despite the fact that one was wicked (and therefore deserved his fate)
while the other was righteous (and did not). In terms of its overall message, the
petihta can be read in one of two ways: either as an even more radical expression
of cynicism than the original Ecclesiastes verse, or as a repeated demonstration of
the fact that a person’s righteousness or wickedness cannot be judged by his (or
her) fate. Each reading, in turn, casts the deaths of Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s
sons, in a very different light. According to the second alternative, their deaths
cannot be read as proof of their wickedness (since the righteous and the wicked
die the same deaths); according to the first possibility, their righteousness or wick-
edness had no effect on the fate they suffered.
Whichever of these interpretations one wishes to choose, however, the reader
will also notice that this anthology of examples is very carefully organized, with
each unit in the petihta following a nearly identical, patterned, and symmetrical
structure. Each interpretation of each biblical type begins in the same way (“ ‘the
biblical type’ is a given ‘biblical figure’ ”); nearly every identification is then fol-
lowed by a citation of a biblical prooftext; and after the figures in each pair are
identified, their identical fates are then spelled out in symmetrical statements
which are followed by the identical rhetorical question, “Is it not ‘one fate’ ” for
each of the figures in the pair? The phrase “one fate” is, needless to say, a quo-
tation from the opening petihta verse, mikreh ehad. For all the petihta’s cynicism,
and despite its implicit questioning of any providential justice in the universe or
to human existence (for the righteous and the wickedness share the same fate),
the highly organized structure of the petihta gives the impression of a strictly
ordered world in which everything has its proper place and articulation.
The next example offers an even more impressive illustration of how a petihta
can collect a large series of different exegeses in a highly organized and symmet-
rical structure of discourse that takes on a meaning that is significantly larger than
the sum of its parts. The petihta appears in Bereishit Rabbah 8:1 as a comment
on Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image. . . .”
Rabbi Yohanan recited a petihta (patah) [that began] “Before and behind
(ahor vekedem) You created me (tsaretani30); You lay upon me Your palm” (Ps.
139:5).
(1) Said R. Yohanan:
If man proves himself worthy, he enjoys two worlds,
as it is said, “Before and behind You created me”;
And if he does not, he will have to stand in judgement,
as it is said, “You lay upon me Your palm.”
(2) Said R. Jeremiah ben Leazar:

At the time the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man (adam harishon),
He created him an androgyne,
as it is said, “Male and female He created them [ . . . and called
them Man] (Gen.5:2).
(3) Said R. Samuel bar Nahman:

At the time the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man (adam harishon),
He created him two-countenanced (diprosophon), and sawed him in half, and
made a back on this side and a back on that side.
They challenged him (meteivin leih): But it is written: “And He took
one of his ribs (mitzalotav) [ . . . and fashioned the rib that He had
taken from the man into a woman]” (Gen. 2:21–22).
He answered: [Yes!] God took [her] from [Adam’s] side, just as you
say, “and for the other side (uletzeleh) of the Tabernacle” (Exod.
26:20).
(4) R. Tanhuma said in the name of R. Benayah and R. Berechiah said in the
name of R. Leazar:
An unformed mass (golem) He created him, and he was spread out from one
end of the world to the other end—“My unformed limbs (golmi) Your eyes
saw” (Ps. 139:16).
(5) R. Joshua said in the name of R. Nehemiah and R. Judah b. Simon said in
the name of R. Leazar:
Filling the entire world He created him.
From “east to west,” from where? From, as it is said, “Before and
behind You created me.”31
From “north to south,” from where? From, as it is said, “[ever since
God created man on earth] from one end of heaven to the other”
(Deut.4:32).
And from where [do we know] that He created him to fill even the
space of the universe? This is what Scripture teaches, “You lay upon
me Your palm”—just as you say, “Keep your fist away from me”
(Job 13:21).
(6) R. Leazar said:

[He created him] last (ahor) on the last day of creation and first (vekedem)
on the last day of creation.
This is the view of R. Leazar, for R. Leazar said: “Let the earth bring
forth every kind of living creature (nefesh hayah)” (Gen. 1:24)—[the
word nefesh means] the spirit [i.e., the soul] of the first man.32
(7) R. Shimeon ben Lakish said:

[He created him] last (ahor) on the last day of creation and first (vekedem)
on the first day of creation.
This is the view of R. Shimeon ben Lakish, for R. Shimeon ben Lakish
said, “And the spirit of God (ruah elohim) was hovering” (Gen. 1:
2)—this is the soul (ruho) of the first man, just as you say, “The spirit
(ruho) of the Lord shall alight upon him” (Isa. 11:2)33
(8) Said R. Nahman:

[He created him] last (ahor) of all the creatures and [He punished him] first
of all those to be punished [as in Gen. 7:23, “All existence on earth was
blotted out—man, cattle, creeping things, and birds of the sky. . . .”]
Said R. Samuel b. Tanhum:

So too man’s praising [God] comes only at the end (beahronah). This
is what it says—“Praise the Lord from the heavens”(Ps. 148:1), and
then the entire series [of heavenly creations are listed] until [the series
concludes with] “He established an order that shall never change,”
(Ps. 148: 6); and after that [comes] “Praise the Lord, O you who are
on the earth” (Ps. 148: 7), and only after [naming every earthly crea-
ture does it come to] “all kings and peoples of the earth” (Ps. 48:11).
Said R. Simlai:
Just as man’s praising [of God] came only after animals and wild beasts
and fowl, so too man’s creation came after animals and wild beasts
and fowl. At the beginning [of the fifth day, it says], “Let the waters
bring forth swarms of living creatures” (Gen. 1:20) and after all [the
creatures were created—] “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:
26).
Whereas the previous petihta from VR had taken a single verse, broken it up into
its constituent phrases, and interpreted each phrase sequentially according to a
single logic, this petihta offers some eight different interpretations for a single verse,
“Before and behind You created me and You lay upon me the palm of Your hand”
(or at the least for the first half of the verse). As I have tried to indicate in the
outline form of the translation (and the line spacing), these eight interpretations
are in fact divided into three pairs of interpretations (nos. 2 and 3; nos. 4 and 5;
nos. 6 and 7), with single interpretations (nos. 1 and 8) bracketing them. Further,
each of the middle three pairs of interpretation are, in fact, doublets—that is, the
second interpretation in each pair is a variant upon the first. Thus 2 and 3 both
offer versions of an Ur-Adam, who is either androgynous or two-sided (with each
side possessing a different gender); 4 and 5 offer different versions of an Ur-Adam
who is literally a microcosmos (filling the entire universe); and 6 and 7 offer
different chronologies for the creation of the soul and body of the Ur-Adam. Taken
together, these six interpretations offer a virtual encyclopedia of nearly every con-
ceivable view that existed in the ancient world concerning the creation of man,
the original human.34
In turn, the first and last interpretations in the petihta, numbers 1 and 8, do
not offer contrasting views so much of how the primordial Adam was created—
the facts of androgony, as it were—as of the purpose for which man was created
(along with corresponding understandings of man’s place in the order of creation,
a place that the different traditions in the petihta understand as related to man’s
deeds such as his praising of God). This difference also affects the purpose un-
derlying study. The three pairs of interpretation treat their scriptural prooftext—
Genesis 1:26 and its surrounding verses—as a subject worthy of study for what it
can teach us about the “facts” of cosmogony. In contrast, the theological approach
contained in the first and last interpretations offers a very different rationale for
why a Rabbi should study the opening chapters of Genesis—not to know how the
world was created but to understand the purpose for which the universe and man
exist. Both the cosmogonic and the teleological (or theological) approaches to the
reading of the opening chapters of Genesis are reflected in many other interpre-
tations preserved in Bereishit Rabbah.35 Indeed, as seen from within the context
of the entire section, this petihta is not only an anthology of Rabbinic views on
the creation of man specifically, but also a kind of microcosm of the entire Rab-
binic approach to the subject of cosmogony.
At the same time, the intrinsically anthological character of this petihta must
also be appreciated in conjunction with the highly organized and symmetrical
character of the petihta’s language and structure—even more striking in this pe-
tihta than in the previous one from VR. As in the translation of the latter, I have
italicized all symmetries in this petihta. In the VR petihta the symmetries were
constant throughout the composition. In this petihta in Bereishit Rabbah, in con-
trast, the powerful symmetries lie within each pair of exegeses (namely, between
nos. 2 and 3, 4 and 5, and 6 and 7) in which the two halves (or by-forms, since
they essentially state the same idea, slightly differently) repeatedly duplicate each
other’s language. The sole exception to this rule is that, in each of the three pairs,
the second interpretation of the two (namely, 3, 5, and 7) is always longer and has
an “extra” interpretation or tradition appended to it. In its entirety, then, this
petihta is extraordinarily highly organized and symmetrical; indeed, it is one of
the most organized and symmetrical petihtaot in all midrashic literature.
To be sure, it is not entirely clear precisely what purpose all this symmetry
and stereotyping in the petihta actually served. Was symmetry primarily an esthetic
criterion, or was it merely a device for organizing petihtaot in a kind of outline

form? As I have already suggested, these petihtaot may have been meant to serve
as models for preachers—that is, as models to be used and worked up by a
preacher however he wished so as to create his own petihta. If this were the case,
however, we might well ask whether a preacher was meant to use all eight inter-
pretations in his sermon, or whether the full panoply was more like a menu in a
restaurant from which the preacher was intended to pick and choose? Was it
understood, perhaps, that he would use only four or five interpretations in a pas-
sage but not all of them in a single sermon? Or was the petihta a “perfect” work
in its entirety that was intended to remain intact and whole?
We do not know the answers to these questions, but we can say with certainty
that the petihta as a literary-rhetorical form is not very different from other literary-
rhetorical forms of midrash in using highly stereotyped, even formulaic language
and highly organized structures of discourse. One sees this in the “controversy-
form,” so common in tannaitic midrashim, where the opinions of two Rabbis
whose interpretations diametrically disagree with each other nonetheless mirror
each other’s language. So, too, one finds comparably stereotyped and symmetrical
language in the enumeration form and in other types of exegetical lists, particularly
in what Towner has called their “regularized” forms. Equivalent stereotyping is
also found in the mashal’s highly formulaic narrative themes and diction; and
even in the exegetical narrative, the sippur hadarshani, though to a somewhat
lesser extent (if only because the sippur hadarshani is itself more amorphous and
difficult to categorize generically).36 Indeed, such a tendency toward highly ster-
eotyped, structured discourse seems to be typical of nearly all Rabbinic literature,
from the Mishnah through the Bavli.
Even so, the petihta uniquely combines the seemingly unregulated freedom
of anthological collection with the high degree of organization characteristic of
symmetrical discourse. When one analyzes a petihta like VR 20:1 or Bereishit
Rabbah 8:1, it is difficult to explain why certain opinions found their way into the
petihta while others did not. Did the author of the petihta deliberately exclude
any current views of the creation of man? Or was there a reason why he included
some interpretations in the petihta and left others out? We simply do not know.
In the case of the biblical figures in pairs cited in VR 20:1, it is not difficult to
imagine other figures taking the place of some of those used in the petihta; in
some cases the pairs may even seem unlikely despite their inclusion in the pe-
tihta.37 Again, what is the logic determining the choice of examples? Both these
questions touch upon the hermeneutics of anthologization. Yet in contrast to these
indeterminate realities, the highly organized and symmetrical nature of the pe-
tihta’s discourse—the language of its exegesis—lends a kind of structure and order
to the literary form that its hermeneutics do not provide. In this sense, the petihta’s
discourse, its language, may be said to be the source of its stability as a literary
form. Perhaps, indeed, the very stability of its language guarantees and grounds
the petihta’s hermeneutical freedom, its capacity for remaining so unregulated on
the interpretive plane. It is to this last dimension of the anthological habit—the
hermeneutical plane—that we now turn.
The Hermeneutics of Polysemy and the Making

of Anthologies
The first impression that most midrashic collections give is not dissimilar to that
given by the petihta—namely, that its contents are fairly unregulated; that to a
greater or lesser extent the editor chose to preserve nearly every possible interpre-
tation that came down to him from past tradition; and that the selection, if indeed
the anonymous editor did make a selection from earlier tradition, was done with-
out any easily discernible rhyme or reason. Even when a collection records criti-
cism of a specific exegesis, it also tends to preserve the exegesis being criticized—a
propensity that, if nothing else, makes it difficult to ascertain what was left out,
let alone censored.38
We know, however, that this impression is only partially true. As I’ve already
noted, it seems likely that in a few cases, as in the cosmogonic sections of Bereishit
Rabbah and possibly in parts of Shir Hashirim Rabbah, the Rabbinic collections
excluded certain esoteric traditions of interpretation that scholars today can recon-
struct from non-Rabbinic sources.39 Even so, these indications of editorial inter-
vention and selection only highlight the overall propensity of the collections and
their editors for preserving multiple interpretations, and only make that propensity
all the more puzzling. Where did this editorial habit come from?
Probably the most frequently cited rationale for why the editors of Rabbinic
literature preserved multiple interpretations in midrash—why, in other words,
these compositions are anthologies—is that they were simply putting into practice
an ideological belief about the nature of Scripture, namely, the hermeneutics of
polysemy. This axiomatic belief is documented in several well-known Rabbinic
statements such as the talmudic dictum in reference to Jeremiah 23:29 (“Behold,
My word is like fire—declares the Lord—and like a hammer that shatters rock”),
“Just as this hammer produces many sparks [when it strikes the rock], so a single
verse has several meanings.”40 So, too, the mishnaic/Rabbinic tendency to record
conflicting and even contradictory interpretations is often treated as the direct
reflection of a statement such as “These and these [i.e., the opinions of both the
Houses of Hillel and of Shammai] are the words of the living God.”41 Similarly,
multiple interpretations in midrash are justified through the oft repeated claim
that the Torah has “seventy aspects” or “faces” (panim).42 The anthological char-
acter of the midrashic collections is simply a reflection or product of all these
axiomatic beliefs.
Over the past twenty years, however, our understanding of those beliefs and
of the documentary practice they supposedly reflect has changed considerably. In
the first place, it is now commonly recognized that these various ideological state-
ments appear mainly in relatively “late” sources like the Babylonian Talmud, and
there they seem to be the outcome of editorial tendencies already crystallized in
much earlier Rabbinic documents. The “polysemous utopia” seemingly envisioned
in Rabbinic texts like B. Hagigah 3a-b—where “the disciples of the wise” sit “in
assemblies and study the Torah, some pronouncing unclean, others pronouncing
clean, some prohibiting and others permitting, some declaring unfit and others
declaring fit,” all of them agreeing to disagree—is in fact an editorial artifact, a
fantasy created by the editors and redactors of the final Rabbinic documents. In
historical actuality, there seems to be as much evidence if not more for Rabbinic
factionalism and sometimes even violent discord as there are testimonies for pacific
disputes.43
Yet if the various midrashic collections were not mere reflections of a Rabbinic
ideology of the polysemy of Torah, then why indeed did the Rabbis choose to use
the anthology as their primary literary form? We may begin to answer this question
by saying that the Rabbis’ anthological habit seems to have a very ancient pedigree
that can be traced back to earlier Israelite literature and its sacred “compromise-
texts.” In the Pentateuch, for example, separate documentary sources are effort-
lessly combined into a single composition as though their different agenda and
ideologies were compatible (which they eventually were made out to be). A num-
ber of narratives, like the creation of woman and the kidnapping of Joseph, are
preserved in multiple versions. So, too, are many laws. Similarly, in the New
Testament (another ancient text with a partly Palestinian pedigree), the four Gos-
pels, each with a different Christology, stand side by side.44
Yet even the invocation of these literary precedents highlights the difference
between them. Where the biblical precedents are literary compositions, the Rab-
binic documents are clear-cut anthologies of past traditions. Why did the Rabbis
so prefer the anthological genre over nearly every other literary type? And why for
midrash in particular?
To answer this question adequately, it would be helpful to know what function
a midrashic anthology could have served. Was it meant to be used as a commen-
tary, that is, as a text to be actually read and studied along with Scripture by a
student? Or was it, as I have already suggested, a source book for professionals,
that is, a manual for teachers or preachers for whom the collection was not a
document to be read in its own right as a full-fledged literary composition but
rather a repository of material to be consulted and extracted and turned into a
lesson or sermon? Are the texts that the collections preserve transcripts or reports
of previously delivered sermons? Or are they model texts possibly derived in part
from pieces of actual sermon material but largely composed by an editor?
Alas, we have almost no evidence for the literary history of these collections.
Comparable evidence from other ancient literatures or from other genres of an-
thologies is also scarce or less than enlightening. We know, for example, that
Origen’s sermons appear to have been written down by stenographers as he
preached them ex tempore, but the difference between Origen’s polished and well-
crafted sermons and the fragmentary, highly elliptical, and truly stenographic char-
acter of the midrashic collections is so great that the relevance of the one to the
other is virtually negligible.45
We have little knowledge of the literary history of other ancient Christian
sermon-texts, and even fewer attempts to make a comparative study of the frame-
works or formats of Jewish and Christian exegesis—namely, their shape as docu-
ments. In the single study that has directly broached the topic, Marc Hirshman
has sought to compare the midrash on Ecclesiastes, Koheleth Rabbah, with con-
temporary Greek commentators on the book.46 Hirshman identifies four different
types of compositions among the Christian fathers: the commentary (Olympia-
dorus), the homily (Gregory), the school lecture (Didymus), and the catena (or
Greek seira, namely, “expositions of earlier exegetes on the respective biblical
passages [which] are strung together without any personal opinion [of the editor
or author] being offered”). Hirshman’s example for an author of a catena is Pro-
copius of Gaza (died c. 538), who was the first author to compile extensive catena
commentaries. While the catena might seem to be the form closest to that of the
midrashic anthologies—both types string together earlier traditions of exegesis
without offering preferential judgments or comments—Hirshman argues that the
midrash is far more inclusive than Procopius’ catenae. In contrast to all the Chris-
tian genres, Hirshman argues that Koheleth Rabbah served its students primarily
as an “encyclopaedia” and used the scriptural verses (of Ecclesiastes) as a system
of rubrics to provide topical headings for various subjects and topics in the Rab-
binic curriculum. This use of Scripture as a pedagogical tool was analogous, Hirsh-
man argues, to the Roman educational practice of teaching specialized subjects,
like mathematics and music, “incidentally in the literature lesson as the subject
arose in the course of the ennaratio.”47 Koheleth Rabbah, it should be added, is a
relatively late compilation, probably edited in the sixth or seventh century c.e. By
this time, the Rabbis were very likely in control of the educational system in
Palestine and in need of “textbooks,” a fact that makes Hirshman’s proposal plau-
sible.
Hirshman’s encyclopedia is another type of “functional” genre that might have
served, with the preacher’s source book, as a type of “practical” anthology.48 Even
so, Hirshman’s recourse to an educational context as the Sitz im Leben for the
midrashic collection recalls one of the oldest and most frequently discussed ques-
tions in the history of midrash scholarship: the question as to whether certain
works or types of material derive from the academy or from the synagogue, the
Beit Midrash or the Beit Knesset.49 According to the former view, midrash was
primarily a product of the elite, of the Rabbis and their disciples; this theory is
easily argued in the case of midrash halakhah but, according to adherents of this
view, it is equally true of the aggadic material. In contrast, the view seeing the
synagogue as the Sitz im Leben of midrash tends to emphasize its more populist,
volkish, and folkloristic aspects, its appeal to a wide popular audience and its
rootedness in oral, popular traditions. While this view is obviously more applicable
to the aggadic material, it also argues for a more popular setting for some midrash
halakhah as well.
Recent scholarship on early Rabbinic history, however, has radically altered
the terms within which this traditional conceptualization must be framed. Two
separate though related developments in our knowledge of Jewish antiquity are
relevant here; both are closely connected to what one recent historian has called
the new and revisionist “minimalist” approach to Rabbinic history in contrast to
the traditional “maximalist” approach with which previous generations of Jewish
historians had depicted the development of Rabbinic Judaism.50
The difference between these two approaches might be summed up briefly
as follows. According to the “maximalist” approach, the Rabbinic period is essen-
tially a continuation of the Second Temple period, with the Rabbis inheriting the
mantle of the Pharisees, seeking to maintain—despite the changes in national,
social, and economic life—the coherence of the nation and its unity in the hope
of serving as the center for Jews throughout the world. In this view, the Rabbis
were the religious leaders of the nation, and their laws and prescriptions essentially
governed the behavior of Jews. The Rabbis’ preeminent religious and cultural
position is reflected in their literature, and that literature can be read as a descrip-
tion of Jewish life with even the disagreements among the Rabbis pointing to
deeper social and political conflicts among contemporary Jews.51
The minimalist view calls into question the very assumptions with which the
maximalists begin their work of historiography. Instead, it views the history of
Palestinian Jewry within the more general context of Roman imperial provincial
rule in the Near East. Basing themselves on a narrower, more “suspicious” reading
both of what the Rabbis say about themselves and of the available archaeological
and material evidence, the minimalists argue that the Rabbis were a class of self-
appointed religious experts who, at least in the first two or three centuries after
the destruction of the Temple, exerted little power or influence beyond their own
circles. Further, these circles themselves were very small. Indeed, according to the
estimate of one scholar (who himself was not in fact a minimalist), the number
of Rabbinic sages living in Palestine over the 150-year period between 225 and 375
c.e. numbered no more than 367, with an average of 50 to 70 sages active at any
one time.52 Admittedly, there was a significant rise in the power of the Rabbinic
class in the early third century, during the patriarchate of Rabbi Judah the Prince,
when the Rabbis began to establish a foothold in the urban centers of Palestine.
As an identifiable class, however, the Rabbis did not have recognized legal au-
thority until the fourth century. Further, at least in the view of some minimalists,
the Rabbis did not really succeed in establishing themselves as significant forces
in the religious institutions of Palestine Jewry until the sixth century. In the case
of the synagogue, for example, it was not until the third century at the earliest
that the Rabbis even began to play a significant role in its activities.53
For our present concerns with midrash and the history of its “literature”—
that is, the writing down of its traditions and their preservation in anthologies—
this new historiography of Rabbinic Judaism has several important implications.
In the first place, it suggests that the question as to whether the academy or the
synagogue was the site of origin for the Rabbis’ literary production is in a sense
misframed. Instead of asking where midrash originated, we would do better to
inquire for what audience and to whom this activity could have been addressed. If
the minimalist view is even only partially correct, it would appear that, until the
mid-third century, the impact and reach of the Rabbinic sages beyond their own
small number of teachers and students were so minimal that it is impossible to
conceive that what remains in the literature came from anywhere other than the
Rabbis’ own tiny circles; so far as we know, the sages had hardly any involvement
in synagogues. Indeed, given the fact that education in the circles of the early
Rabbis was essentially a matter of master–disciple relationships, even the desig-
nation of the term “academy” for their higher educational stratum seems too gran-
diose.54
If all this is correct, the origins of the material in the tannaitic collections
almost certainly lay in these tiny circles and probably not in any more popular
sphere. On the other hand, there can be little question that the formation of these
earliest collections as documents was part of the larger spurt of literary production
that began with and followed upon R. Judah’s patriarchate, including the “publi-
cation” of the Mishnah and, later, of the Tosefta. In whatever way the Mishnah
was “published”—whether it was in a memorized oral mode or in a written form—
this early codification of Rabbinic law was certainly connected in some way to the
increased prestige and role of the patriarchal office and of the Rabbinic class as
active participants in Jewish legal discourse in Palestine. One can safely assume
that the compilation of the tannaitic midrash anthologies must also have derived
from this larger literary and social matrix.55
Along parallel but different lines, the composition and publication of the
amoraic “homiletical” anthologies should be viewed within the context of the
increased involvement of the Rabbis in synagogue life in Palestine. From the third
century on—that is, from the beginning of the amoraic period—many sources
attest to the growing presence of sages in the synagogue. This fact is significant
because, as I have already remarked, the synagogue, unlike the academy, was not
initially under the Rabbis’ control or within their sphere of authority.56 In the third
century, however, this state of affairs began to change. Certain Rabbis, like R.
Yohanan in Sepphoris and R. Abbahu in Caesarea, became famous as preachers;
in Jerome’s oft quoted statement, even gentiles would say to each other, “Come,
let us listen to this or that Rabbi who expounds the divine law with such marvelous
eloquence.”57 We know too that there were itinerant preachers who traveled from
town to town and who were required to come up with sermons on the spot.58 The
synagogue was also used by the Rabbis as a site for the education of the young,
and it is possible that some of the material in the present collections (especially
the non-petihta sections of the amoraic midrashim) could have served as source
material for Rabbi-teachers.59
It is immaterial whether the petihtaot that have been preserved in the surviving
midrashic collections were once actually delivered in a synagogue, or whether
they were the independent literary creations of an editor; the practical difference
between the alternatives is historically trivial (since the first possibility would be
meaningful only if we could identify the date and place in which the sermon was
originally preached). Heinemann’s Sitz im Leben for the petihta as a mini-sermon
delivered before the Torah reading in the synagogue still seems the best expla-
nation for the literary-rhetorical form’s unusual shape, and it is this essentially
material question (namely, the origin of its shape) that is our basic concern. Is it
merely coincidental that the “sudden” rise of the petihta as the dominant literary-
rhetorical form in the amoraic collections correlates to the increased role amoraim
appear to have taken in Palestinian synagogues in the late third and fourth cen-
turies? Taken together, however circumstantially, these separate facts would seem
to indicate that the amoraic anthologies were indeed closely tied to the activity of
synagogue preaching. This is true not only of the clear-cut “homiletical” mid-
rashim like VR and PRK, but also of the “exegetical” midrash Bereishit Rabbah
(whose organization and chapter divisions, as Joseph Heinemann has shown, orig-
inally corresponded to the weekly Torah readings in the triennial Palestinian cycle,
and whose “chapters” were marked, as in VR and PRK, with multiple petihtaot,
thereby making Bereishit Rabbah much more similar to VR and PRK than has
previously been supposed).60 While our evidence suggests that preaching and
teaching were done orally, without the aid of written texts, it is not hard to imagine
the need that individual sages would have felt for preachers’ and teachers’ source
books, for collections from which they could draw raw material for sermons and
lessons. Such source books probably began as private notebooks kept by individual
Rabbis and must have slowly grown into the collections that we possess today.
Because these books were never more than private notebooks, the strictures against
writing down “Oral Torah” were not applied to them. In any case, we know that
actual books existed in use in Rabbinic culture—Sifra, for example.61 A famous
passage in B. Temura 14b describes the third-century sages R. Yohanan and R.
Shimeon ben Lakish studying a sifra deaggadeta, a book of aggadah with scriptural
interpretations in it, on a Sabbath afternoon, and there are several other references
to such books (though they are not always complimentary in tone).62
To the best of my knowledge, there is unfortunately no explicit reference to
preachers’ or teachers’ source books in Rabbinic literature, but we do know of the
existence of such books in the Middle Ages in the form of sermon collections and
florilegia.63 In fact, however, the Rabbis did not need to confess to the existence
of such books, for they were in essence the private tools of their trade. No one
other than preachers read these books, no one read them in place of sermons, and
what most people heard and doubtless related to each other were reports of spoken
sermons delivered in synagogues. So why mention the source books that were no
more than private notebooks in any case?
That the midrashic collections were originally source books for professionals,
anthologies to be used by preachers and teachers, and not texts to be read or
studied, probably best explains their origins as documents and their spare, laconic,
almost stenographic literary form. The highly stereotyped, symmetrical, and or-
ganized discourse of so many midrashic literary-rhetorical forms—the petihta, the
mashal, the regularized enumeration—all suggest an “outline form” rather than
an actually delivered sermon, while the telegraphed nature of so many midrashic
passages suggests that these were also not literary compositions meant as “finished”
texts. The most accurate description for the larger works containing such passages
is that of a trade manual compiled for professionals in the field.
To repeat: these books were not composed to be read in any ordinary sense
of the term. At some point, however—precisely when, we do not know—people
did begin to read and study these books. Our earliest evidence for this change in
how these books were perceived and appreciated (and eventually used) comes not
in the form of documentary evidence to the change but in the rewriting of their
contents to make them look less anthological and fragmented and more coherent
and continuous as exegetical narratives in their own right. This change first appears
in the “late” midrashim of the Tanhuma school, which, as scholars have shown,
consciously revise, and thereby “rewrite,” earlier midrashic traditions, smoothing
out their rough edges, eliminating the most frequent gaps and inconsistencies in
their atomistic interpretations, and seeking to find a more continuous interpretive
approach that can span the separate exegeses of an entire section or episode.
Whether or not the editors/composers of the Tanhuma collections actually read
Bereishit Rabbah (for example) in more or less its present form, they seem to have
been familiar with the text in one stage of its formation, and they “read” that text
rather than merely “used” it as a source book for sermons.64 At some later point,
students probably began to read the various midrashic collections as true com-
mentaries, that is, as supplementary texts to be read alongside the primary text,
Scriptures. Eventually the midrashic tradition was preserved for popular Jewish
culture by becoming subsumed in a genuine commentary, the first complete Jew-
ish commentary on the Bible, that of Rashi. By this point, however, the anthology
had yielded its role as the primary literary medium for the preservation and re-
cording of biblical exegesis to the commentary proper, and late antiquity in turn
had yielded to the Middle Ages.
Appendix: On the Composition of the Petihta

As was noted earlier,65 the late Joseph Heinemann proposed a form-critical explanation for
the petihta, or midrashic proem, and its unusual shape.66 In the body of this chapter I
summarized Heinemann’s proposal and his putative Sitz im Leben for the form’s original
setting, both of which seem to me convincing. Heinemann’s proposal, however, concen-
trated solely upon the literary-rhetorical form’s “shell,” its beginning and end. In an as yet
uncompleted study in which I have been engaged now for several years, I have been
studying the inner contents of the petihta, the “exegetical bridge” by means of which the
preacher connects the opening petihta verse to the concluding lectionary verse. The pri-
mary focus of the study is the types of harizah used in this exegetical bridge, harizah being
the technical term for the rules of exegesis according to which the preacher connects the
opening and closing verses.67 The study is based on analyses of approximately 400 petihtaot
preserved in the classical amoraic collections of Bereishit Rabbah, Vayikra Rabbah, and
Pesikta de-Rav Kahana.
Two assumptions underlie the study: first, it is possible to categorize all petihtaot
according to inner structure and their types of harizah; and second, these structures and
types of harizah constituted compositional conventions that were familiar to all preachers.
The following are the various types of petihtaot as based on their structures and methods
of harizah.
All petihtaot can be categorized as either simple or complex.
The Complex Petihta: The complex petihta uses an identifiable midrashic literary-
rhetorical form other than harizah as the primary bridge between the opening and closing
verses. That other literary form might be a parable (mashal), an anecdote or exemplum
(maaseh), an exegetical enumeration, or some other prominent literary form in midrash.
For example, in the following petihta on Genesis 1:6 (Bereishit Rabbah 4:1), the anonymous
author uses a simple “custom of the world” parable.
It is written, “He sets the rafters of his lofts in the waters” (Ps. 104:3). It is the
custom of the world that a king-of-flesh-and-blood builds a palace and makes the
roof out of stones and wood and dirt. But the Holy One, blessed be He, made
the roof for His world out of water! as it is said, “He sets the rafters (hamekareh)
of his loft in the waters”—“And God said, Let there be an expanse (raki’a) in
the midst of the water” (Gen. 1:6).
The word raki’a in Genesis 1:6 is interpreted as “roof” through a pun on the word hame-
kareh in Psalms 104:3, but the connection between the two verses is made via the parable.
The Simple Petihta: The simple petihta makes its connection solely through exegesis,
that is, harizah. There are three different modes of harizah and hence three different types
of simple petihtaot.
Type I: In this type, the opening petihta verse is “atomized,” or parsed into its smaller
phrases and segments, and each unit is then interpreted separately according to a single
thematic or interpretive logic. VR 20:1, translated earlier in the article, is a typical example
of this type; Ecclesiates 9:2 is atomized into its separate phrases, and then each phrase is
interpreted as referring to a different pair of wicked and righteous biblical figures.
The following petihta from Bereishit Rabbah 3:3, on Genesis 1:4, is a much briefer
example of the type:
R. Shimeon ben Yohai recited a petihta (patah):

“Joy to a man is a ready response, and a timely word is how good!” (Prov. 15:
23).
“Joy to a man”—this is the Holy One, blessed be He: “The Lord is a man of
war” (Exod. 15:3).
“is a ready response”—“And God said, Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3).
“and a timely word is how good”—“And God saw that the light was good”
(Gen. 1:4).
This petihta is virtually pure exegesis, indeed almost stenographic in its brevity. The only
nonscriptural insertion is the identification of the word “man” in Proverbs 15:23 as referring
to God, a deliberately shocking exegesis which is then confirmed through the citation of
Exodus 15:3.
Type II: In this type, the exegetical bridge is made not by dividing the opening petittha
verse up into smaller units but by interpreting the entire verse (or section of the verse)
three or more times. Bereishit Rabbah 8:1, translated earlier, is a typical example of this
type. The opening verse, and especially the opening phrase of that verse, “Before and
behind You created me; You lay upon me Your palm” (Psalms 139:5), is interpreted some
eight times. In many cases, this type of petihta also uses the petirah form, identifying the
verse as “speaking about” or “being applied to” a series of different Biblical figures. For a
typical example, see VR 1:4, where Psalms 89:2 is “applied to” Abraham, David, and Moses.
Type III: As in Type II, the entire verse is interpreted but in this type, there are always
only two interpretations, and the second interpretation always contrasts deliberately with
the first interpretation. The following example, from Bereishit Rabbah 60:1, is a petihta for
Genesis. 24:12.
It is written: “Who among you reveres the Lord, heeds the voice of his servant;
is the one who walks in darkness, and has no light; let him trust in the name
of the Lord and rely upon his God” (Isa. 50:10).
“Who among you reveres the Lord”—this is Abraham.
“heeds the voice of his servant”—[heeds the word of the Holy One, Blessed be
He, to His servant].
“is the one who walks in darkness”—from Mesopotamia and its environs.
“and has no light”—And who did light up [the path] for him? The Holy One,
blessed be He, lit up for him every place where he went.
“let him trust in the name of the Lord and rely upon his God”—“And You
found his heart true to You” (Neh. 9:8).
“Who among you reveres the Lord”—this is Eliezer.
“heeds the voice of his servant”—who was the servant of Abraham.
“is the one who walks in darkness”—at the time that he went to bring back
Rebecca.
“and has no light”—And who did light up [the path] for him? The Holy One,
blessed be He, lit it up for him with shooting stars and lightning.
“let him trust in the name of the Lord and rely upon his God”—“And he
said, ‘O Lord, God of my master Abraham, etc.” (Gen. 24:12).
The petihta interprets the entire verse twice, once in relation to Abraham, the other in
relation to Abraham’s servant, Eliezer. Inasmuch as one is the master and the other his
servant, the two biblical figures may be said to be opposites, and in a comparable sense
the two interpretations are also opposites, or two sides of a single coin. In its biblical context,
the subject of the petihta, its lectionary verse, is spoken by Eliezer, who recites the verse
as a prayer to God in which he invokes God as the God of his master Abraham. The
petihta’s audience would probably have assumed once they heard the preacher quote Isaiah
50:10 that he would apply the verse to Eliezer. Contrary to their expectations, though, he
first applies it to Abraham, who, we learn almost immediately, is God’s servant. Rhetorically,
the effect of this counterinterpretation, as it were, is to make the second, more predictable
interpretation (in reference to Eliezer) less predictable. For now we know that if Abraham
is Eliezer’s master, then God is Abraham’s master. When Abraham’s servant, Eliezer, then
addresses God as the God of his master Abraham, he is only placing himself in a natural
hierarchy, appealing to the master of his master. We now see both Eliezer and Abraham
in a new light, and we understand why Eliezer makes a point of invoking his master’s name
so as to remind God that not only is Abraham his—Eliezer’s—master; he is also God’s
servant.
As the reader will note, the two halves of this petihta are also strikingly symmetrical,
with the same phrases and constructions repeated in symmetrical positions in the two halves
of the petihta. This is the same phenomenon we saw in VR 20:1 and Bereishit Rabbah 8:
1, and it should now be clear that the different modes of harizah are not only different
techniques of exegesis but also different frameworks in which a preacher was able to or-
ganize a petihta and its micro-exegeses in symmetrical patterns. In this sense, one may
understand how these conventions and the rule of symmetry actually facilitated the com-
position of petihtaot. For once a preacher knew the rules of composition, and once he had
chosen his opening petihta verse and the mode of harizah that he would use (which clearly
was dictated in part by the verse he had chosen for his petihta verse, since some verses are
more naturally appropriate to one mode than to others), the task before him—to construct
an exegetical bridge to the lectionary verse—was clear.
There are several additional compositional rules that underlie the use of these different
types of conventions. First, different techniques of harizah are often employed in subordi-
nate sections in the same petihta. For example, a Type II petihta, which interprets its petihta
verse multiple times, will often use the atomization technique of Type I (parsing the verse
up into its component phrases and then interpreting each one separately but according to
a single consecutive logic) as a subordinated mode of exegesis in each of its individual
sections. So, too, Type I petihtaot sometimes use either Type II or Type III techniques of
multiple applications of a single phrase or word in each of their individual segments.
Second, one of the individual exegeses in the petihta will often beget a “loop” or digressive
interpretation. These loops often reenact in miniature the overall exegetical structure of
the larger petihta. Generally, these “loops” also come near the beginning of the petihta,
although in at least one document (PRK) they regularly come closer to its end. Third,
deviations from symmetry commonly come at the end of the petihta and are used for
purposes of closure.
In addition to being a compositional and organizational tool, then, symmetry may also
be an esthetic criterion of this highly architectonic form.68 Obviously, there are varying
degrees of symmetry, and some petihtaot are more symmetrical than others. It is a rare
petihta, however, that exhibits no clear signs of symmetry, just as there is almost no petihta
that is not constructed along the model of one of the types I have described. Which is to
say: If there is a1, there will be a2. In its use of symmetry and in its adherence to the
compositional types, the petihta thus receives its shape and its stability as an anthological
form.
Notes
I wish to thank Rachel Anisfeld, Jacob Elbaum, Marc Hirshman, Tammy Jacobowitz, Ta-
mar Kadari, and Burt Visotzky for reading and commenting upon earlier versions of this
essay.
1. Sanhedrin 34a; cf. Shabbat 88b, and my chapter on “Midrash and Hermeneutics”
in Midrash and Theory (Evanston, 1996), esp. pp. 17ff.
2. This distinction was already made by L. Zunz in Die Gottesdientlichen Vortrage der
Juden Historisch Entwickelt (2nd ed. 1892), translated to Hebrew as Haderashot Biyisrael
(Jerusalem, 1974), p. 79; and restated by Chanoch Albeck in his introduction to J. Theodor-
Ch. Albeck, Bereschit Rabba (Berlin, 1912–36; repr. with corrections, Jerusalem, 1965), vol.
3, part I, p. 1; and M. Margulies, Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah (Jerusalem, 1953–54), part V,
pp. ix–x. The exegetical midrashim are usually considered to include all the tannaitic (aka
halakhic) midrashim and the amoraic collections Bereishit (Genesis) Rabbah and Eikhah
(Lamentations) Rabbah. The classical homiletical midrashim are Vayikra (Leviticus) Rab-
bah and Pesikta de-Rav Kahana. The postclassical Tanhuma collections (Tanhuma itself,
Shemot Rabbah II, Bamidbar (Numbers) Rabbah, and Devarim (Deuteronomy) Rabbah)
combine features of both earlier types.
3. Neusner has worked out his “documentary hypothesis” in a slew of works, as is his
habit; for a clear and summary statement of his position, see Comparative Midrash:The
Plan and Program of Genesis and Leviticus Rabbah, Brown Judaic Series (Atlanta, 1986),
1–19. The references in the last sentence to “producers,” “authors,” and “editors” is mine;
Neusner tends to avoid the problem of naming the human agents responsible for the
production of the document by personifying the works themselves (as though they were
self-created).
4. Neusner, Comparative Midrash, 15.
5. See the essays in Shaye J. S. Cohen, ed., The Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Liter-
ature (Providence, 2000), esp. R. Goldenberg, “Is ‘The Talmud’ a Document?” pp. 3–10,
and Hans Jurgen Becker, “Texts and History: The Dynamic Relationship between Talmud
Yerushalmi and Genesis Rabbah,” pp. 145–58.
6. See Goldenberg, “Is ‘The Talmud,’ ” 7–8, who speaks directly about the “anterior”
documents that lie “behind,” such as Mishnah or the Bavli, and can no longer be recovered
as independent documents; his argument certainly includes the component literary forms
in such texts.
7. On Bereishit Rabbah, see Philip Alexander, “Pre-Emptive Exegesis: Genesis
Rabba’s Reading of the Story of Creation,” in JJS 43 (1992):230–45, and on the Song of
Songs, my forthcoming article, “Ancient Jewish Exegesis of the Song of Songs and the
Problem of Comparative Exegesis,” in Jewish Biblical Interpretation in a Comparative
Context, ed. Natalie Dohrmann and David Stern (University of Pennsylvania Press, forth-
coming).
8. J. Z. Lauterbach, “The Arrangement and the Division of the Mekilta,” HUCA 1
(1924):433. Compare Judah Goldin’s comments in The Song at the Sea (New Haven, Conn.,
1971), pp. 3–12, but note, too, the presence of the songlike passages in which the midrash
re-enacts Israel’s song to God with its own song, and the clear allusion at the Shirta’s very
conclusion to its beginning (see Goldin’s notes ad loc., p. 248).
9. Shir Hashirim Rabbah, ed. S. Dunsky (Jerusalem, 1980), p. 146
10. See Shlomo Naeh, “The Structure and Division of Torah Kohanim (B): Parashot,
Perakim, Halakhot,” Tarbiz 69 (1999):72–76; and “The Structure and Division of Torah
Kohanim (A):Megillot” Tarbiz 66 (1996):485–86. Naeh argues that there were two methods
of organizing halakhic midrashic texts in the ancient world: one, according to the order of
Scripture and its divisions (essentially sequentially, and into parashiyot); the other, hierar-
chically, corresponding to the way the texts were studied. The Sifra was originally organized
according to the first system; early on, however, the second system was superimposed upon
the first, thus creating a double organization of parashiyot and of perakim. As Naeh has
shown in the first part of his study, Sifra was first written down (probably in the Babylonian
Rabbinic period) in nine scrolls whose contents were determined neither by the parashiyot
or perakim but by simple considerations of length.
11. I have deliberately omitted from my discussion the question as to whether there
existed different schools of exegesis among the early tannaim (namely, the School of Rabbi
Akiva and that of R. Ishmael), and whether these schools were responsible for the editing
and redaction of different collections; on the history of scholarship on these schools, see
Jay M. Harris, How Do We Know This?: Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism
(Albany, N.Y., 1995), and H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and
Midrash (Minneapolis, 1996), pp. 247–51. Significantly, whatever terminological differences
may exist between collections from the supposed different “schools,” none of the parallel
collections have any significant organizational or structural differences. All are exegetical
and both tend to follow the same passages.
12. For this definition of the simana denehemta, see Margulies, Midrash Wayyikra
Rabbah (Jerusalem, 1953–54), part V, p. xii. The nature of the peroration is often misun-
derstood, partly because of its title, as necessarily requiring an explicit reference to the final
redemption. This is not the case.
13. Most of the features of the homiletical collection were already identified by J.
Theodor, “Zur Composition der agadischen Homilien,” MGWJ 28 (1879):271–78, 337–50,
408–18, 455–62; MGWJ 29 (1880):10–23; they are reiterated and expanded by Albeck, “Mid-
rash Vayyiqra Rabba,” (Hebrew) Louis Ginzberg Festschrift (New York, 1945), pp. 25–43.
After completing this article, I was fortunate to receive an extremely important new book
by Burton L. Visotzy, Golden Bells and Pomegranates (Tuebingen, 2003), the first book-
length study to be written about Vayikra Rabbah and a very significant advance in our
understanding of both VR and the homiletical midrash. Visotzky develops some of the
same ideas that I pursue in this article, albeit in different directions. Wherever possible at
this late stage in writing, I will refer to Visotzky’s suggestions; at the outset I should also
say that some of my contentions may require re-thinking in light of Visotzky’s arguments.
14. Joseph Heinemann, “The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba” (Hebrew), Hasi-
frut 8 (1969–71):809–34; “Profile of a Midrash: The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971):141–50. The latter is essentially an
abbreviated version of the earlier Hebrew article.
15. Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash,” 146; 150.
16. See, for example, the end of the “Art of Composition” (in Hasifrut) where Heine-
mann goes through the chapters in VR and assesses the relative unity of each. On organic
unity in the midrashic collections see also N. J. Cohen, “Scripture and Editing in the
Homiletic Midrashim,” AJS Review 6 (1981):1–20. The most trenchant criticism of Heine-
mann is in Jacob Neusner’s “Bibliographical Essay, Joseph Heinemann on Leviticus Rab-
bah,” in Neusner, Judaism and Scripture: The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah (Chicago, 1986):
130–36. Ironically, though not really surprisingly, given his documentary approach, Neusner
himself adopts a view of VR’s unity that in certain respects argues for an even stronger
coherence—a “logos of both intellect and aesthetics,” “a sustained syllogism” (7)—than did
Heinemann. According to Neusner, VR is the first Rabbinic document to be “organized
solely around large-scale theological themes” (10).
17. On this homily, see my chapter in Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis
and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill., 1996), pp. 55–71; the chapter is a revised
version of an article that first appeared as “Midrash and the Language of Exegesis,” in
Midrash and Literature, ed. by G. Hartman and S. Budick (New Haven, Conn., 1986),
pp. 105–24. The reader should note that over the years my views have changed considerably
about the “unity” of the chapters in the homiletical midrashim. In the article as it first
appeared in Midrash and Literature, I still accepted Heinemann’s basic contention that
there was some kind of unity even if not “organic” to the chapters. In the revised version
of the article in Midrah and Theory, I tried to back off from that contention. In the present
essay, I dispute the claim entirely although I do argue for a common exegetical approach
that informs many if not all the exegeses in the chapter.
18. See my article, “Vayikra Rabbah and My Life in Midrash,” Prooftexts 21
(2001):23–38.
19. See the articles cited in nn. 16 and 17.
20. On this contradiction in particular, see my article cited in n. 17.
21. One could cite virtually any other chapter in either VR or PRK as a similar ex-
ample of this anthological impulse. Just to give one additional example: VR 20 (⫽ PRK
26) deals with the Torah reading beginning with Leviticus 16:1, a verse that introduces the
account of the famous scapegoat ritual. This chapter also appears in Pesikta deRav Kahana
as the “sermon” for Yom Kippur, which is hardly surprising since the scapegoat ritual was
performed in the Temple on Yom Kippur and because Leviticus 16:1ff. was the Torah
reading for Yom Kippur. (According to J. Heinemann, “Chapters in Vayikra Rabbah
Whose Originality Is Disputed,” Tarbiz 37 [1968]:339–54, the chapter originated in PRK
and was later copied over to VR.) In any case, the chapter makes no allusion to the scape-
goat ritual but concentrates entirely on the opening verse of the reading, “The Lord spoke
to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who drew close to the presence of the
Lord . . . ,” and specifically on the phrase “after the death of the two sons of Aaron.” This
phrase alludes, of course, to the terrifying story told several chapters earlier in Leviticus
10:1–3 about how, at the conclusion of the joyous eight-day ceremony dedicating the sanc-
tuary, Aaron’s two sons Nadav and Avihu offered up a “strange fire” on the altar and were
immediately consumed by a divine fire. In what is one of the most astounding compo-
sitions in Rabbinic literature, the chapter collects what is in effect an anthology of dif-
fering interpretations and traditions about the deaths of Nadav and Avihu including var-
ious views as to the sins they commited that “justified” their deaths as punishment; a
highly cynical view that uses their deaths as “proof” of the claim that the the righteous
and the wicked suffer the same fate; and traditions that argue that their deaths took place
solely to ensure the atonement of others (implicitly equating them and their deaths to the
fate of martyrs). Needless to say, the chapter as a whole makes no effort to reconcile these
different, often contradictory views. What “unifies” them is the fact that they all serve the
common function of seeing Nadav and Avihu as implicit surrogates for the “scapegoat”
whose ritual could no longer be performed in the Temple; their deaths, in other words,
become the focal point of the anxiety over life and death that pervades the Yom Kippur
liturgy. On this chapter, and on Rabbinic traditions about Nadav and Avihu, see Avigdor
Shinan, “The Sins of Nadav and Avihu in Rabbinic Aggadah,” (Hebrew) Tarbiz 48 (1979):
201–14.
22. J. Heinemann, “Structure and Organization [Division] in Midrash Bereishit Rab-

bah,” Bar-Ilan 9 (1972):279–89.
23. W. Sibley Towner, Rabbinic “Enumeration of Scriptural Examples” (Leiden, 1973).
24. Joseph Heinemann, “The Proem in Aggadic Midrashim: A Form-Critical Study,”
Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971):100–122.
25. Heinemann assumed that the parashiyot in VR and PRK correlated with the Torah
readings as the Torah was read in one or the other triennial cycles as practiced in Pales-
tinian synagogues, although he also argued that the division was not uniform and had many
variants. This latter view has been called into question by some more recent studies; see,
for example, Shlomo Naeh, “Orders of Reading the Torah in Eretz Yisrael: A New Inquiry”
(Hebrew) Tarbiz 67 (1998):167–87.
26. See Richard S. Sarason, “The Petihtaot in Leviticus Rabbah: ‘Oral Homilies’ or
Redactional Constructions,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982):557–67.
27. See Margulies’s note ad loc., p. 443; the text is probably slightly defective. In Ko-
heleth R., R. Yitzhak adds: The word tov means “Torah.”
28. Margulies (ad loc.), p. 444, explains that Samson, by making the Philistines swear,
proved that he himself feared the power of oaths.
29. On this, see Margulies’s notes ad loc.; and Avigdor Shinan, “Letorat Hapetihta,”
Mehkerei Yerushalayim Besifrut Ivrit 1 (1981):133–43.
30. The word tsaretani literally means “hedged” or “fenced me in.” The midrash here
is based upon a “misreading” of the word through the “minor” addition of the tiny letter
yod to its beginning so as to make it read yetsaretani, “you created me.”
31. The Rabbis take kedem as “east” and ahor as its opposite.
32. In other words, man’s spirit was created at the beginning of the sixth day, and his
body at the end of that day.
33. Here, again, they take the word ruah as referring to the messiah’s soul to prove
that the same word in Genesis 1:2 referred not to God’s own spirit but to the spirit of the
messiah, namely, his soul which had already been created.
34. A serious study of Rabbinic androgony and cosmogony is an urgent desideratum;
for the present, see E. E. Urbach’s chapter on creation in HaZaL; Gary A. Anderson, The
Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville, 2001);
and G.M.G. Teugels, “The Creation of the Human in Rabbinic Interpretation,” in G. P.
Luttikhuizen, ed., The Creation of Man and Woman (Leiden, 2000), pp. 107–27. Louis
Ginzberg’s footnotes to his retelling of the Creation story in Legends of the Jews (Philadel-
phia, 1925), vol. 5:88–89, remain to this day a valuable bibliography of cross-references to
both Rabbinic views and their parallels in other ancient traditions, both ancient Near
Eastern and classical. The best-known part of the petihta, and the sole part that is usually
cited, is no. 3, in particular the exchange between Samuel b. Nahman and his anonymous
interlocutors over the question as to whether the word tsela means “rib” or “side,” and its
bearing upon the difference (or agreement) between the two Creation stories in Genesis 1
and 2. For a recent attempt to see the exchange as support of the claim that the Rabbis
did not necessarily privilege the “rib story” and its implied misogyny, see Daniel Boyarin,
Carnal Israel (Berkeley, Cal., 1993), pp. 42–46. In fact, if the passage is viewed within the
context of other ancient cosmogonic theories, the passage may hold a somewhat different,
and more surprising meaning. As is often noted, the “androgyne” theory of man’s creation
has an intriguing parallel in Aristophanes’ famous speech on the origins of love in Plato’s
Symposium (189d, 190d); in addition, Ginzberg cites a number of other parallels in ancient
literature (most of which, I must confess, I have not been able to locate). One does not
have to assume that the Rabbis knew the Aristophanes’ story (or Plato’s Symposium) first-
hand to suppose that they were familiar in one way or another with the “myth,” and indeed,
may have known it as one regnant “scientific” explanation for how the two genders came
into existence. Given this possibility, the debate between R. Samuel b. Nahman and his
interlocutors may have to be understood as being over the question, in effect: Which version
of the creation of woman is less implausible—the rib story or the androgyne myth? Signif-
icantly, Samuel b. Nahman opts not for the biblical rib story (which, it is clear from the
exchange, is the dominant interpretation for the word tsela ) but for the latter—probably
because it was widely known in the ancient world generally and was therefore a more
plausible “scientific” explanation.
35. See, for the present, Philip Alexander, “Pre-Emptive Exegesis: Genesis Rabba’s
Reading of the Story of Creation,” in JJS 43 (1992): 230–45; cf. as well Robert Hayward,
“Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan,” JJS 42 (1991).
36. On the exegetical enumeration, see Towner, Rabbinic “Enumeration of Scriptural
Examples”; on the mashal, see David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Exegesis and Narrative
in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 24–45; on the exegetical narrative,
Ophra Meir, Hasippur Hadarshani Bivreishit Rabbah (Tel Aviv, 1987).
37. See Shinan, “Letorah Hapetihta” (n. 29 of this essay).
38. See, for example, the interpretation of R. Meir in Bereishit Rabbah 36:1 about
God’s behavior during the flood, to which the Rabbis respond, “Enough, Meir!” Or the
similar exchange between Meir and the Rabbis in VR 5:1. Or the exchange between R.
Yosi ben Dormaskit and R. Judah in Sifre Deuteronomy, ed. L. Finkelstein (New York,
1969), p. 7. Or the famous exchange in B. Sanhedrin 67b between Akiva and Eliezer ben
Azariah on the giant frog in Exodus 8:2.
39. See the references in n. 7.
40. B. Sanhedrin 34a; cf. B. Shabbat 88b. For the midrash behind this interpretation,
see my rejoinder, “Literary Criticism or Literary Homilies? Susan Handelman and the
Contemporary Study of Midrash,” Prooftexts 5 (1985):102–3, n. 1.
41. B. Eruvin 13b.
42. Bamidbar Rabbah 13:15; cf. Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer o Midrah Shloshim u-Shtayim
Middot, ed. H. G. Enelow, p. 45. On the phrase, see Jacob Elbaum, Lehavin Divrei Ha-
khamim (Jerusalem, 2000), p. 93, n. 78, and the bibliography Elbaum cites there.
43. On the question of midrashic polysemy and its relation to modern critical notions
of indeterminacy as well as to ancient historical contexts, see my article “Midrash and
Indeterminacy,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1988):132–62; reprinted and somewhat revised in David
Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies
(Evanston, Ill., 1996), pp. 15–39. See also Catherine Hezser, “Social Fragmentation, Plu-
rality of Opinion, and Nonobservance of Halakhah: Rabbis and Community in Late Roman
Palestine,” in Jewish Studies Quarterly 1 (1993–94): 234–51, who makes much the same point
I do, though using very different evidence; I cannot help but note, however, that her
references to my article and her summary thereof on p. 249, n. 65, grotesquely misrepresent
what I say in the article. More recently, Daniel Boyarin in an article to be published in a
volume on the Yerushalmi and Greco-Roman culture, to be edited by Peter Schaefer, and
in Boyarin’s own forthcoming book, argues persuasively that the various ideological state-
ments in the passages I cite in the text (and that are typically cited as proof of the Rabbinic
ideology of polysemy) are all late Babylonian texts and reflect an ideology that first emerges
in the Bavli as part of a Rabbinic ideology of orthodoxy and heresy. I wish to thank Boyarin
for allowing me to read his manuscript.
44. Midrash and Theory, 33; for Ancient Near Eastern and other biblical parallels, see
Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay (Philadelphia, 1985), and es-
pecially Tigay’s article on Deuteronomy and Anthology in the Bible in this volume.
45. For Origen’s use of stenographers, see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VI, xxxvi,
trans. J.E.L. Oulton (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), vol. 2, pp. 89–91. On Origen and the redac-
tion of other early Christian sermons, see the helpful introduction by Mary B. Cunningham
and Pauline Allen to their edited book, Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian
and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden, 1998), pp. 1–20, and 11–12 in particular. See also Hughes
Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian
Church, vol. 1: The Biblical Period (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1998), pp. 312–13.
46. Marc Hirshman, “The Greek Fathers and the Aggada on Ecclesiastes: Formats
of Exegesis in Late Antiquity,” HUCA 59 (1988):137–65; cf. Emilien Lamirande, “Etude
bibliographique sur les Peres de l’Eglise et l’Aggadot,” Vigiliae Christianae 21 (1967): 1–
11.
47. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 1970), p. 371, cited and quoted in Hirsh-
man, “Greek Fathers,” 164. On the use of the Bible as a rubric for education, see the
references in my article “On Canonization in Rabbinic Judaism” in M. Finkelberg and G.
Stroumsa, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient
World (Leiden, 2003), pp. 227–52, esp. 237–40.
48. For another example of such a “functional genre,” see Visotzky in Golden Bells
and Pomegranates, pp. 23–40, who invokes the Hellenistic genre of the “miscellany” as a
possible precedent for VR. The literary models he invokes are those of Aelian’s Historical
Miscellany as well as the sketch drawn by Lucian in his satire, “How to Write History.”
Visotzky also makes the very interesting suggestion that the terms petihta and gufa (for the
two parts of the chapters in VR) may be paralleled by Lucian’s terms “proem” and “body”
for the two parts of the historical collection/miscellany he describes.
49. See, for example, Zunz, Haderashot Biyisrael, pp. 163–75; Saul Lieberman, Greek
in Jewish Palestine (New York, 1965) p. 161; Jonah Fraenkel, Darkhe Aggadah Vemidrash
(Jerusalem, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 16–44; Marc Hirshman, “The Preacher and His Public in Third-
Century Palestine,” JJS 42 (1991):108–14.
50. I borrow these terms specifically from Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish So-
ciety: 200 b.c.e. to 640 c.e. (Princeton, N.J.: 2001); see esp. 2–14 and throughout the book.
The other “minimalist” historians who have had an impact on my thinking in regard to
the question I discuss are Shaye Cohen, in his many articles and books; Lee I. Levine, The
Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (Jerusalem, 1985) and articles cited in
other footnotes; and Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in
Roman Palestine (Tuebingen, 1997). By “maximalist” historians, I refer specifically to the
major historians of the last century, including Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in
the Talmudic Age (Jerusalem, 1980); Michael Avi-Yonah, The Jews of Palestine (New York,
1976), Shmuel Safrai, in his many articles; not to mention still earlier figures like Graetz,
Zeitlin, Finkelstein, Halevi, and Weiss. Needless to say, the historical sketch I offer in the
next paragraph is radically simplified and truncated.
51. Schwartz, Imperialism, p. 6.
52. Albeck, Introduction to the Talmud, Babli and Yerushalmi (Tel Aviv, 1969),
pp. 669–81; cited in Levine, The Rabbinic Class, pp. 66–67. In contrast, as Levine notes,
other maximalist scholars like Hyman and Safrai estimated the number of sages in Palestine
as being between 2,000 and 3,400.
53. Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven,
Conn., 2000), pp. 460–61. See also Levine’s essay, “The Sages and the Synagogue in Late
Antiquity: The Evidence of the Galilee,” in Lee I. Levine, The Galilee in Late Antiquity
(New York, 1992), pp. 201–22. Schwartz’s view is even more radical: he does not see Rabbinic
involvement in the synagogue documented as truly significant until the rise of piyyut in
the sixth century (pp. 263–74).
54. On Rabbinic master–disciple circles, see Shaye J. D.Cohen, “Patriarchs and Scho-
larchs,” PAAJR 48 (1981):57–85; Martin Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tra-
dition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 b.c.e.–400 c.e. (New York, 2001).
55. The idea of the oral publication of the Mishnah was first broached by Saul Lie-
berman in Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York, 1950), pp. 83–99. See now, however,
Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tuebingen, 2001), pp. 427–28, who
strongly contests Lieberman’s theory.
56. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, pp. 469–70. For a general introduction to Rab-
binic preaching in the talmudic period, see Joseph Heinemann’s introduction to his col-
lection, Derashot Betsibur Bitekufat Hatalmud (Jerusalem, 1982), pp. 7–28.
57. Jerome, In Ezek. 33:33, quoted in Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, p. 462; on the
Rabbis in the synagogue, see Levine, pp. 458–63.
58. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, pp. 549–51. For an itinerant preacher, see VR 3:
6 for one example.
59. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, pp. 462–63.
60. For Bereishit Rabbah, see J. Heinemann, “Structure and Organization [Division]
in Midrash Bereishit Rabbah,” Bar-Ilan 9 (1972):279–89. The literature on PRK is relatively
sparse but two important, as yet unpublished studies deserve to be mentioned. Elsie Stern
is currently completing a monograph based on her University of Chicago dissertation in
which she studies the chapters in PRK devoted to the Sabbaths before and after Tisha B’av
(the telata depur’anita’ and the shiv’ata denehemta), and Jacob Elbaum, in an article to be
published in a festschrift for Jonah Fraenkel, has studied the chapter in PRK devoted to
Shabbat Shuvah (the Sabbath before Yom Kippur). In both cases, the chapters, which are
devoted primarily to exegeses of haftarot from the Prophets, are clearly not determined by
the Torah lectionary; in fact, these chapters in PRK are our earliest evidence for the ded-
ication of these special Sabbaths in the first place. So far as we know, the latter may even
be the “products” of the midrash (and its editors) rather than a reflection of an existing
liturgical practice. As Elbaum notes, several manuscripts preserve the eleven chapters for
the eleven special Sabbaths as a separate collection called Midrash Aftarot.
61. See Shlomo Naeh’s articles on Sifra (cited earlier in n. 10).
62. See as well the story in B. Berakhot 23a–b about R. Yohanan; in B. Sanhedrin
57b, the Babylonian Amora is mentioned as seeing a halakhah in a sifra de’aggadeta. For
other references to Palestinian Rabbis, see Strack and Stemberger, Introduction to the Tal-
mud and Midrash, p. 34.
63. The classic text on medieval sermon aids (primarily of the thirteenth century)
remains Richard A. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies
on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto, 1979), esp. pp. 3–92. See as well
Siegfried Wenzel, “Sermon Collections and Their Taxonomy,” in The Whole Book: Cul-
tural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. S. G. Nichols and S. Wenzel (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1996), pp. 7–22.
64. On these tendencies in Tanhuma and other “late” Rabbinic midrashic texts, see
Jacob Elbaum, “From Sermon to Story: The Transformation of the Akedah,” Prooftexts 6
(1986): 97–116; “Between Redaction and Rewriting—On the Nature of the Later Midrashic
Literature” (Hebrew), Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Section
3 (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 57–62. See as well Elbaum’s article on the Yalkutim in this volume.
65. See n.23.
66. This appendix summarizes a lecture I delivered on “Composition and Meaning
in the Petihta” at the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies, held in Jerusalem in
August 1997.
67. The term harizah, literally “stringing together,” is borrowed from the famous story
in Song of Songs Rabbah 1:52 (ed. Dunsky, p. 42), which describes flames descending from
heaven as Ben Azzai sits and studies (doreish), whereupon Akiva accuses Ben Azzai of
studying the esoteric “works of creation” and Ben Azzai denies it, saying he was only sitting
and “stringing together” (horeiz) words of Torah.
68. There is a clear parallel here to the esthetics of piyyut; on the topic, see pro temp,
Ezra Fleischer, Shirat Hakodesh Ha’ivrit Biyemei Habeinayim (Jerusalem, 1975) pp. 62–63.
I hope to explore this parallel in the future.
ii
THE MIDDLE AGES

7
joseph tabory
The Prayerbook (Siddur) as

an Anthology of Judaism
he prayerbook, or siddur, is certainly one of the most popular books among

TJews. If a member of the people of the book owns only one Jewish book, it
1
is most likely to be a siddur rather than a Bible. The siddur is perhaps the most
explicit example of an anthology in Judaism and may arguably be considered not
just an anthology of prayers but an anthology of Judaism—for the Jewish prayer-
book is a veritable museum of the Jewish people. It contains passages from almost
all periods of Jewish history, from the Bible to the Holocaust and the establishment
of the State of Israel, and mementos from many of the lands in which Jews lived.
In addition to its importance as a book of prayer, it may also serve as an anthology
of Jewish literature, as it contains representatives from almost all branches of this
literature. In addition to the prayers themselves and the extensive poetic selections
that serve as prayer, one can find in the prayerbook passages from the Bible,
tannaitic and amoraic literature, selections from mystical and devotional literature,
philosophical statements such as the creed that begins “I Believe,” together with
historical literature such as Megillat antiochus. One might say that if one were
required to choose one Jewish book to take to the proverbial desert island, it would
be hard to find a better choice than the prayerbook, an anthology of all of Jewish
life and literature.
However, in this discussion of the siddur we must be aware that there is no
standard edition of the siddur nor can there be one. When we refer to the siddur,
we refer not to a single book but to a genre of anthologies, whether printed or in
manuscript, that contain collections of Jewish prayers and other matter. Some of
these books try to be comprehensive, while others are avowedly selective. Thus
we find siddurim that include Kol bo or Otsar in their titles, implying that
they are meant to be comprehensive collections, and we also find siddurim (or
mahfi zorim) that include only select prayers for special occasions: prayerbooks for
the Sabbath; prayerbooks for holidays; prayerbooks that include only the weekday
evening services; prayerbooks for the table, which include blessings before and
after the meal, sometimes together with selections of poetry for singing at the
143
144 The Middle Ages
Sabbath meals; and prayerbooks with other selections.2 To understand the history
of this genre and of its contents, it would be well to begin with an understanding
of the anthological principles behind these creations.
It would seem that most anthologies can be ascribed to one of two motivations:
either what one might call a collective principle or what one might call a selective
principle. The former is present when one tries to collect scattered material to
create a corpus, frequently because the individual items are short and may easily
be disregarded and lost. This was apparently the motivation for creating the early
anthology of Greek epigrams and, hitting closer to home, the motivation attributed
by the Rabbis to those who collected the Twelve Prophets into one book of Latter
Prophets. This was apparently the motivation of Judah David Eisenstein, who may
well be described as “the master of anthologies.”3
The selective principle is evident when one is faced with a vast corpus of
material and it is thought that one cannot master it all. The anthologist believes
that it is his task to select from this unwieldy corpus representative material in
order to put a manageable composition before the reader. He may often select
what he considers its most important items and present his selection as an an-
thology meant to give the reader a taste for this type of literature and an intro-
duction to the corpus without it being necessary to study or read it all. However,
there are other selective principles, such as the desire to prepare a work for a
suitable occasion—for example, a prayerbook for the holidays. The corpus from
which the anthologist selects his material is not always a unified body. He may
have to select his material from a wide range of sources to create his anthology,
such as was done by the compilers of the classic midrashic anthologies Yalkut
shimoni and the Midrash hagadol.4 Thus the selective anthologist may also be
faced with problems of collection. After collecting and selecting their material,
both types of anthologists are faced with a common problem: how to arrange the
collected material. It is worth noting that Meleager, the earliest Western anthol-
ogist, did not use the term “anthology”5 but called his composition Garland, thus
expanding the metaphor of collecting flowers into creating a garland by intertwin-
ing the flowers into a pleasing whole composition.6 However, the organizing prin-
ciple of Meleager is not clear: a scholiast thought that his collection was arranged
alphabetically by the first line of each poem, but modern scholars think that his
collection was grouped by author and subject.7 These ideas must be kept in mind
as we examine the anthological aspects of Jewish liturgy.
This discussion of the siddur must begin with the geonic period, since the
siddur as a book was unknown before that time.8 What is generally considered the
first book of prayers, the so-called Order of the Hundred Blessings of R. Natronai
Gaon,9 is not even a book of prayers in the strictest sense. This work was composed
as a responsum to a community that requested a list of the hundred blessings that
one is required to recite every day. This list is, of course, an anthology of blessings
following the collective principle, an attempt to create a corpus of the hundred
blessings,10 but R. Natronai did not find it necessary to include the full text of all
these blessings. The gaon arranged the blessings according to the order of the day,
beginning with the morning. This point is of great significance for the understand-
ing of Jewish prayer, as it is well known that the calendrical day of the Jewish
The Prayerbook as Anthology of Judaism 145
calendar begins in the evening. In Rabbinic tradition, only in the Temple worship
was the day considered as beginning in the morning, and the organization of R.
Natronai’s anthology of blessings shows that he considered the “day” of blessings
to be concurrent with the “day” of the Temple. This pattern has been followed
by almost all prayerbooks.11
The oldest extant book that contains the full text of the prayers is known to
us as the Seder [of] R. Amram Gaon.12 This work was also composed as an an-
thology of prayers in response to a request from a Jewish community in Spain.13
The ages have not treated this work well. Not only is the original work, as issued
by R. Amram Gaon, lost in the shadows of history, even the nature of the original
request is not absolutely clear. In R. Amram’s preamble to his response, he reports
that they requested “the order of prayers and blessings for the whole year.” But
the Passover Haggadah included in the work begins, “and the order of Passover
that you asked about,” implying that this was a separate request and R. Amram
combined the answers to several requests in one work, much as R. Sherira Gaon
did in his work about the history of tradition. The work that is known today as
Seder R. Amram Gaon may be described as a collection of anthologies. It consists
of what be may considered two separate works: a compendium of the prayers
themselves and a compendium of laws and responsa that regulate the way people
are supposed to pray. Each of these compendiums may be considered an anthol-
ogy. I have already pointed out that the texts of prayers may consist of an answer
to several questions, and the collection of prayers, probably the first of its kind in
Jewish history, intends to present a comprehensive corpus of this literary genre.
The compendium of laws and responsa clearly betrays its anthological nature by
the inclusion of what seem to be complete responsa of various gaonim, in addition
to those of R. Amram. Some of the material included in this work is clearly post-R.
Amram, and thus we may wonder whether this description would be true of the
original work. Nevertheless, the work that has survived under this name may be
called a collection of anthologies or perhaps even an anthology of anthologies.14
Although there is great doubt whether the siddur of R. Amram is the actual
work that was sent by R. Amram to Spain, there is no real reason to doubt that
the general format of the work, including both prayers and the laws of prayer, was
the format of the original work. This format appears also in the siddur of Rav
Saadia Gaon, in works such as Mahfi zor vitry (although this work does not contain
a complete version of the prayers), and it has served as a general model for later
versions and editions of the prayerbook. The inclusion of a halakhic work on the
siddur, interspersed with the prayers as part of the siddur, has become such a
common feature of the siddur that almost no siddur is published today without
the inclusion of minimal instructions about the performance of the prayers. The
halakhic instructions, even when compiled specifically to be included in the
prayers and among them, have been considered separate works with their own
power for promoting the distribution of the siddur.15 One of the earliest compo-
sitions of this type was compiled in Italy in the twelfth century and was considered
such an important work that it was “deanthologized,” that is, it was extracted from
the siddur and distributed as a separate work, known as the Tanya.16
Among the anthologies of halakhic instructions included in the siddur, I
146 The Middle Ages
should mention the Maagelei tsedeq of Benjamin ben Meir Halevi, first published
in Salonika in 1548–49 and frequently afterward.17 This work is a potpourri of
instructions, comments on and explanations of the text, and edifying material
meant to impress the reader with the importance of praying properly. Its successor,
Hadrat qodesh, compiled by Isaac ben Yaakov Yozbel Halevi, was first published
in Venice in 1599–1600. Its anthological nature is a source of pride for the com-
piler. He writes in his introduction that the first part of his commentary, until the
blessing beginning Barukh sheamar, is based on the Maagelei tsedeq; the contin-
uation of the commentary for the weekday prayers is taken from the commentary
of R. Hirtz Trevitsh, printed in Tübingen in 1560; the commentary on the Yozrot
was that of Moses ben Yosef Bezalel Katz; and Halevi included material from
many other commentators. He also added an anthology of laws, customs, and
ethics, part of which was printed in the beginning of the book and part as an
appendix. The sources for this were Rabeinu Yonah, Maharil, R. Joseph Karo, R.
Moshe Isserlis, R. Isaac of Tyrnau, R. Abraham Klausner, and his own teacher,
R. Avigdor Zwiedel.
One of the more popular works created for the siddur was the Derekh hahfi ay-
yim of Rabbi Jacob Lorbeerbaum (c. 1760–1832), first published with the siddur in
1828. This work was considered so important that, thirty or forty years later, it was
also de-anthologized and published as a separate work.18 Modern siddurim are
often accompanied by other anthologies of halakhic works, such as that of the
Mishnah Berura.
The independent nature of these halakhic commentaries to the siddur is also
demonstrated by their migration from edition to edition. Publishers of prayerbooks
wished to include the traditional commentaries even though the particular com-
mentary was written for a different text from the one about to be published. Thus,
there was sometimes inconsistency between the text and the commentary, the
commentary actually explaining a text that was different from the printed version.19
The classical siddur Otsar hatefillot—published in Vilna by Rom—with its great
commentaries, was issued in two editions, one according to the Ashkenazic tra-
dition and one according to the Hasidic tradition, with the necessary changes
introduced into the commentary. Siddurim were occasionally published not so
much for the siddur itself but rather for the work that was attached to the end of
the siddur. I might mention in this context the Meqor haberakhot of Zeev Yavetz
and the Yesodei yeshurun of Gedalya Felder. A work on the sources of the prayer-
book, called Meqor hatefillot, by H. Friedman, was published in two editions, one
with the text of the siddur and one without it.
The prayerbook turned into an omnibus anthology and was the one indispen-
sable book in the Jewish library, even more basic to the Jew than the Bible. It
thus became a repository for other works that were thought to be indispensable
for a Jew.
Important additions to the daily prayerbook were blessings that were to be
said before eating and after meals, blessings recited at various occasions during
the day, and the blessings recited at various religious rituals, primarily those con-
nected with the life cycle. Although many of these blessings were included in the
list of the 100 blessings of Rav Natronai, they were not always thought to be an
integral part of the siddur. Nevertheless, publishers, in an attempt to make the

siddur a more complete prayerbook, included many of these blessings in the sid-
dur. There were two main traditions about where to include these blessings. The
Ashkenazi siddur often included such a compendium after the morning prayer,
in accordance with the order of the Tur.20 This arrangement followed the order
of the daily activity, because one ate after the morning prayer. But the siddur went
further than the Tur, because of its more limited options. The Tur was able to
relegate blessings and rituals connected with the life cycle to other books, but the
editors of the siddur did not have such an option, and they included these blessings
here.
In a different approach, many Sephardic siddurim included the blessings con-
nected with food as a supplement to the Grace after Meals, which itself appeared
after the Friday evening ceremony. The rationale for this is not quite clear, and
it gives the impression that the only time during the week that a formal meal,
requiring Grace, was eaten was on the Sabbath. The blessings for the life cycle
appeared in the Sephardic siddur as a separate work, Sefer toldot adam, which
contained the blessings for circumcision, redemption of the first born, and so on,
and a summary of the laws applicable to these occasions. This work was usually
attached to the end of the prayers, either after the prayers for Purim21 or at the
end of the volume.22
Other books of prayer were combined with the siddur. The Passover Hagga-
dah, which is a microcosm of the anthological aspects of the siddur,23 has been
incorporated into many siddurim.24 Perhaps the most noteworthy example of a
complete book attached to the siddur is the addition of the book of Psalms, which
has been printed at the end of the siddur in many editions. Chabad Hasidism has
gone even further and now publishes, together with the siddur and the attached
book of Psalms, its bible, the Tanya. This anthology is known as H fi TT, an abbre-
viation for these additions: Humash, Tehillim, Tanya.25
Some of the items added to the prayerbook were thought to be necessary
complements to specific prayers. Thus, calendars were added to the prayerbook
in order for one to know when the new month was to be blessed and when the
conjunction of the moon and the sun occurred.26 In a similar vein, modern pray-
erbooks often include calendars with the times of sunrise and sunset in order for
one to know the proper time for prayer. Another important supplement to the
siddur was the inclusion of the passages from the Bible read during the week. The
earliest edition known to me that included this was Amsterdam 1677, but today it
is almost impossible to publish a siddur without this addition. The case in point
was the first edition of the Rinat Yisrael siddur, which was originally published
without it. The publishers were forced to include this feature in subsequent edi-
tions, and they did so by photographing the reading from Roedelheim editions.27
Finally, I close this section with a description of a siddur that best exemplifies
the idea of the anthological prayerbook intended as a sort of vade mecum for the
Jew: the siddur called Minhfi at yerushalayim—Kol bo hashalem, published by
Rabbi Dworkes in Jerusalem in 1983. Here the anthological concept has created
an omnibus book. In addition to the prayers and an extensive anthology of the
laws applicable to them, the volume contains selected laws about the Sabbath,
148 The Middle Ages
including a map of Jerusalem so that one can know where it is permissible to

carry things on the Sabbath; the laws of mourning (about twenty-five pages!);
timetables for sunrise, sunset, and other times of halakhic importance during the
day, with separate tables for London and New York; the laws of mezuzah (forty-
five pages, including numerous diagrams); a seven-year calendar; and much
more.28
Although the trends in the history of the prayerbook that have been portrayed
until now consist totally of accretions to the prayerbook, I should point out that
prayerbooks have also omitted material. This is consistent with the selective prin-
ciple of anthology. This is most obvious in those prayerbooks that have been
created for special occasions, which obviously omit all prayers that are not relevant
to the occasion. However, prayerbooks also omit prayers that have fallen into dis-
use. The best-known example is much of the poetry that has commonly been used
in the synagogal ritual and that no longer appears in siddurim and mahfi zorim.
Some of the earlier forms of prayer have been replaced by forms that were con-
sidered more acceptable. For example, the poetic introduction to Barukh sheamar
in the Sephardic tradition was replaced by the parallel passage in the Ashkenazic
tradition. One can trace the history of this replacement in early printed siddurim,
which printed both traditions side by side, until later editions omitted the early
text completely. We may consider this an extension of the metaphor of flower
collecting in the sense that some of the flowers in the collection wither and die
and may be replaced by fresher flowers.29
The anthological tendencies found in the siddur may be considered expan-
sions of anthological tendencies found in the very creation of Jewish prayer. But
there is a significant difference between this type of anthology, which may be
unique in anthological literature, and the types of anthologies discussed previously.
Here we find new creations, which are considered distinct units, although they
were composed anthologically, that is, by selecting existing units rather than at-
tempting to create a new unit ab ovo. A number of prayers recited on various
liturgical occasions are nothing but anthologies of sentences from the Bible. We
may count among these the first chapter of the pesuqei dezimra, which appears in
print as if it were a separate chapter but is actually an anthology of biblical verses,30
and the collection of biblical passages that serves as the extended tahfi anun for
Mondays and Thursdays.31 The last blessing of the evening Shema, according to
the Ashkenazi tradition, is a collection of biblical sentences that has become
known as the “blessing of the pesuqim.”32 There are a number of other such
collections, such as the seventy-two biblical verses that are meant to represent the
seventy-two-letter name of God, but most of these other collections cannot be
documented as early creations. On the other hand, we may consider what is prob-
ably the earliest stratum of obligatory prayer, the reading of Shema, as an anthology
of chapters from the Bible. The anthological principle governing the selection of
the first two chapters of Shema is clear: the primary passages that were chosen are
the chapters that include the commandment to discuss the words of Torah when
lying down and when rising up (Deut. 6:9, 11:19).33 This, of course, is the same
principle that decreed that those passages should be included in the mezuzah, for
they also contain the commandment for writing the words of Torah on the door-
posts of the home.34 In addition, this principle also prescribed that the phylacteries
should contain the four passages in which the Torah mentions the obligation to
tie the words of Torah to one’s hand and between one’s eyes.35 The reason that
the third passage of Shema, the section whose main subject is the fringes required
on garments, was included in the Shema is not clear. The only thing that we can
say about it is that at the time of the tannaim, it was not considered an integral
part of the Shema: it was included in the reading only in the morning and not
in the evening (Berakhot 2:1). It would thus seem possible that its recital was
originally connected with putting on the tallit, which was done in the morning.
We can thus understand the true significance of the inclusion of the Ten Com-
mandments as part of the daily Torah reading.36 This was clearly meant to be an
indication of the centrality of the Ten Commandments in the Torah tradition,
and it supplied very real ammunition for those heretics who wished to reject the
rest of the Torah.37
An anthology of the complete Bible, including the Prophets and the Writings,
is the basis of the special blessings of the Amidah for Rosh Hashanah.38 The
Mishnah prescribes that one should recite in each blessing ten verses (from the
Bible) that relate to the subject of that blessing (Rosh Hashanah 4:6).39 The Mish-
nah mentions only verses from the Bible and from the Prophets, but the Tosefta
states specifically that verses from the Writings are also to be included in this
anthology.40 Discoveries in the Geniza show that this was also the pattern for the
Amidah of the holiday,41 thus implying that the very basis of the Amidah for
holidays was an anthology of biblical verses.
A further ancient anthology of passages from the Bible is the Kedushah. Isaiah
reported that the Seraphs, the fiery servants of God, praised Him with “Holy, Holy,
Holy! The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!” (Isa. 6:2), whereas
Ezekiel reported that His angelic servants declared, “Blessed is the presence of the
Lord, in His place” (Ezek. 3:12). Although Rabbinic tradition presented different
ways of reconciling the apparent contradiction between the two reports,42 the mys-
tical understanding of these visions—that the two groups of angels were two parts
of a heavenly choir that was singing praises to God, and that a third group of
God’s servants, the people of Israel, was a third participant in this choir—was the
image that was accepted into the prayerbook.43 The biblical verse recited by the
people of Israel was a verse that referred to the kingdom of God. However, not
all versions of the Kedushah used the same verse. The standard Kedushah of the
Amidah used Psalms 146:10 while the qedushah desidra used a verse taken from
the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15:18), and this same verse appears in the blessing after
the Shema, apparently to complete the angelic Kedushah found in the first blessing
of the Shema. Understanding the Kedushah as an anthology may shed some light
on the problem of the expanded Kedushah, used today only in the Musaf prayer,44
which includes the Shema. Since it was possible to utilize various biblical passages
for the expression of God’s kingdom by the people of Israel, the recital of the
Shema should certainly be acceptable—and even desirable since it was the key
statement of the acceptance of His kingdom. Therefore, it is possible that the
Shema was originally an alternative statement of His kingdom in the Kedushah,
but in accordance with the tendency to adopt all alternatives as necessary parts of
150 The Middle Ages
the tradition, it was included with the passage from Psalms as an expression of the
kingdom of God.45
The creation of the Kedushah illustrates an important aspect of Jewish antho-
logical thought. The collective principle of anthology seems to be more important
in Jewish prayer than the selective principle. In other words, Jewish prayer tended
to create a complete anthology, omitting nothing.46 This principle was stated
clearly in the Babylonian Talmud by R. Pappa, who said, “Therefore we shall say
them both,” and it extended even to cases in which the choices were mutually
contradictory.47 The principle was even applied to cases in which the choices were
more than just two. Rav Hamnuna declared, “Let us say them all” (BT Berakhot
11a).
We now turn to another type of anthological prayer: prayers that are anthol-
ogies of blessings. We may count among these the most basic prayer of Judaism,
the Amidah. Although a Rabbinic tradition claimed that the Amidah had been
instituted by the members of the Great Assembly, the Rabbis admitted that this
earlier tradition had been forgotten and the creation of an Amidah of eighteen
blessings was an act of Shimon Hapaquli,48 under the direction of Rabban Gamliel
of Yavneh, shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple. Scholarly opinion
is divided today about the nature of this creation. Joseph Heinemann has argued
that Shimon Hapaquli was essentially an anthologist—he collected groups of bless-
ings that had been in common use toward the end of the Second Temple period
and created from them a new collection. Recently Ezra Fleischer mounted a
monumental attack on this theory and claimed that the Amidah of eighteen bless-
ings was a new creation ab ovo.49 However, Fleischer admitted that there were
collections of blessings prior to the work of Shimon Hapaquli and that Shimon
utilized these collections in creating the Amidah. Thus Shimon Hapaquli remains
an anthologist, although there is also a consensus that his anthological work con-
sisted not only of collecting the earlier works but also of editing and improving
them according to his conceptions. In this, Jewish tradition followed his pattern,
continuously reworking ancient tradition. The collection of these blessings was
much more than an anthology because the requirement that they be said while
standing, emphasizing the direct contact between God and the person who was
praying, gave the total unit an importance and significance that these blessings
did not have in earlier times.50 In addition, the number of blessings in the an-
thology, eighteen, quickly became a ritual number. This is evidenced by the fact
that when it became necessary to add another blessing, shortly after the enactment
of the eighteen blessings, the Palestinian tradition deemed it necessary to combine
two other blessings into one, in order to retain the sum of eighteen blessings.51
The three blessings associated with the reading of the Shema may also be
considered an anthology. It is true that the second and third blessings, Ahava,
which directly preceded the Shema, and Emet veyatsiv or Emet veemunah, which
immediately followed it,52 were apparently always connected with the Shema.
Ahava served as thanksgiving to God for granting the Torah before reading the
chapters from the Torah that were part of the Shema, while Emet veyatsiv or Emet
veemunah served as a declaration affirming the Shema. However, the final blessing
is actually a composite one, including—in addition to the general affirmation of
the Shema—a blessing thanking God for the redemption from Egypt. Although
later theology considered this blessing a parallel to the third chapter of Shema,
consideration of the evening Shema shows that this is not historically correct. The
addition of this blessing to the evening Shema was a point of discussion after the
destruction of the Temple, and we know that at that time the third chapter of
Shema was not recited during the evening. More significant in this context is the
first blessing, known as the blessing of the lights, which was a praise of God said
at the change of day, morning and evening, and which originally had nothing to
do with Shema. This is demonstrated by the fact that the priests of the Temple,
who prayed before the first light, apparently omitted this blessing.53 Nevertheless,
the whole became more than the sum of its parts. This collection was considered
a unified entity, called Yotser after the beginning of the first blessing, as evidenced
in the tannaitic halakhah limiting talk between the various blessings (Berakhot 2:1).
A third type of anthology found in the liturgy is an anthology of passages
selected for learning, and this type follows the selective principle. The earliest
such selection is found in the passages selected for reading after the morning
Torah blessings. Although the Talmud required one to recite a blessing before
studying the Torah, the blessings included in the prayerbook were not a daily
requirement in talmudic times. According to the Talmud, the blessing Ahavat
olam or Ahavah rabbah,54 recited before the reading of the Shema, was considered
the blessing for Torah study. Only one who studied Torah before reciting the
Shema was required to make a separate blessing for Torah study. This ruling
continued until the later gaonic period. Maimonides maintained the ruling that
the morning blessings for studying Torah were required only for those who got
up to study before reading the Shema (Prayer 7:11). Nevertheless, a popular custom
developed of studying selected passages before prayer in order to be able to recite
these blessings. However, the Talmud had discussed whether one was required to
recite these blessings before reading from the Oral Law, the Mishnah, and mid-
rash/Talmud,55 or perhaps the blessing was required only before reading passages
from the Bible. Naturally, the custom developed of reciting selected passages from
all these branches of Jewish learning, thus creating an anthology of Jewish learn-
ing.
Two variant traditions developed. The first one, mentioned already in the so-
called Seder Rav Natronai Gaon and generally adopted in the Sephardi siddurim,
selected passages that related to the Temple sacrifices. The passage from the Torah
was Numbers 28:1–8, which prescribed the daily sacrifice; the passage from the
Mishnah was the fifth chapter of tractate Zevahim, which gave general instructions
for all the Temple sacrifices; and the midrashic/talmudic passage selected was the
introduction to the Sifra, the midrash to the book of Leviticus, whose main subject
is sacrifices.
The second tradition was found in French sources and was generally adopted
among Ashkenazim. According to this tradition, the biblical passage was the
priestly blessing, while the passage from the Mishnah was the first mishnah of the
tractate Peah. The midrashic/talmudic passage was the continuation of the mish-
nah of Peah, which had been expanded and conflated on the basis of the talmudic
discussion of this mishnah in BT Shabbat 127a–b. The principle behind this an-
152 The Middle Ages
thology of passages was apparently to collect passages that dealt with the impor-
tance of Torah study. Both these traditions tried to create representative antholo-
gies, in which selected passages stood for the whole. The all-inclusive anthological
principle eventually determined that both anthologies would be used by all
traditions.
A later anthology of this type, which was meant to be an addition to the liturgy
at the end of the morning prayer, was the Seder maarakhah of Rabbi Elijah the
Elder. This order was fashioned after the manner of the maamadot that were held
in the Second Temple. They included—in addition to the passages from the
Torah, from the Prophets, and from the Writings that were part of the Second
Temple liturgy—passages from the Mishnah and Talmud. Although this Seder
was apparently never wide-spread, parts of it have been incorporated into the morn-
ing order of service in almost all communities.56
A later anthology, also meant to be recited and studied after the morning
prayer, was the H fi oq leyisrael. The original anthology, compiled by R. Yitshfi ak
Baruch and first printed in Egypt in 1740, included passages from the Torah,
Prophets, Writings, Mishnah, Gemara, and Zohar, to be studied, recited, or read
for every day of the year. This anthology was expanded by Rabbi H. Y. D. Azulai
(HIDA), who added selected passages from ethical works and halakhot, called Yosef
lehfi oq. This anthology became standard fare for many, no doubt because of the
influence of the Hida.57 However, it was usually published as an appendix to the
Bible and never became part of the prayerbook.
A similar type of anthology was the tiqqunim, orders of study for special nights
of the year—the last night of Passover and the night of Shavuot. The order of
study followed the same principle of collecting passages that were thought relevant
to the particular day, from almost all branches of Jewish literature. Later editions
of the tiqqun for Shavuot, under the influence of the mystics, changed this pattern.
They selected the opening and closing sentences of the books of the Bible and
the books of Oral Law, as if to say that the whole Torah had been studied on the
night of Shavuot, the night preceding the reenactment of the Sinaitic reception
of the Torah.
What is clear is that the anthological principle is a basic force in the creation
of prayer, if not the basic force. It is very likely that this force is inherent in a
religion and culture that continuously faces the challenge of adapting traditional
life to changing circumstances. Entirely new creations are considered a break in
tradition, while new creations that are essentially anthologies of older material
serve as a valid method of renewal within tradition. This is well illustrated in the
attempts to create a liturgy for Yom haatsmaut. The early institutors of the ritual
took bits and pieces from the liturgy of the holidays to create a new liturgy. Al-
though their opponents considered this ritual a parody, its authors were really
following the traditional methods for creating liturgy. It was an expansion of this
methodology that made the siddur not merely a book of prayer for organized prayer
services but an anthology that would cover every religious occasion in life and its
pertinent halakhot. Thus we may consider the literary genre of the siddur as a
true anthology of Jewish life.
Notes
This essay was written while I was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I wish to thank the Institute and its director, Dr. David
Shulman, for their kindness and hospitality. I wish to thank my colleagues at the Institute,
Dr. Esther G. Chazon and Dr. Stefan Reif, who carefully read a draft of this paper and
gave me a lot of helpful criticism, advice, and suggestions. Special thanks are extended to
David Stern for his advice and help in revising earlier versions of this essay.
1. An estimate of this can be derived from the index of Isaiah Vinograd, Thesaurus of
the Hebrew Book, part 1 (Jerusalem, 1995). The index of editions of biblical books occupies
five pages (pp. 329–33) while the index of editions of prayerbooks is over thirteen pages
(pp. 343–56). It is difficult to discuss definitive statistics, since we do not know the number
of copies printed in each edition, but these facts do contribute to creating an impression.
See also my introduction to the facsimile edition of the Siddur of Hanau 1628 [Hebrew]
(Ramat Gan), 1994, pp. 5–7.
2. The sociological significance of these various prayerbooks is greater than their sig-
nificance for the history of prayer. Thus, the evening prayerbooks show that the persons
who are praying are frequently not in their normal home bases at the time of these prayers,
but they do succeed in gathering together a quorum for prayer. The collections of Sabbath
prayers show the existence of communities in which the number of congregants on Sabbath
is much greater than the number of daily congregants, and thus it was considered advisable
to prepare a siddur for the Sabbath. Sociologists may also learn from the existence of these
siddurim that the synagogue is expected to supply the congregants with siddurim rather
than expecting them to bring their personal siddurim to the synagogue. It is interesting to
note that some of the prayerbooks that contain only table blessings, often published for use
at wedding meals, contain both Sephardic and Ashkenazic versions, implying the frequency
of intermarriage with a measure of tolerance and recognition of the legitimacy of both
versions.
3. For a list of some of his anthologies, see A. M. Haberman, “Eisenstein, Judah
David,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. 6, pp. 552–53.
4. A better example of the use of a broad range of sources is the anthology of aggadic
literature by Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews. However, this cannot be used as an
example in our context because Ginzberg was trying to create a comprehensive anthology
rather than a selective work. It is interesting to note that his work served as the basis for a
selective anthology, the one-volume Legends of the Bible.
5. The term “anthology” came into use only in the Byzantine period, several hundred
years later. See Gilbert Highet, “Anthology,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L. Ham-
mond and H. H. Scullard (Oxford, 1970), p. 67. Macrobius—one of those classical authors
who used the literary form of the symposium for their anthologies—in the beginning of
his Saturnalia compared his work to that of a bee, which collects pollen from many flowers
but produces honey that is far superior to a mere collection of pollen.
6. Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology, from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford, 1993),
p. 5.
7. Highet, “Anthology,” p. 67.
8. It may well be that there were no other Jewish books in existence, besides the Bible,
until that period. Nevertheless, people may have had written notes of various traditions that
were not considered “books.” For a survey of the remains of written prayers before the
154 The Middle Ages
gaonic period, see Stefan C. Reif, “Codicological Aspects of Jewish Liturgical History,”
Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75, no. 3 (1993):119.
9. The best edition of this responsum is in Teshuvot rav natronai bar hilai gaon, ed.
Robert Brody (Jerusalem, 5754), pp. 106–7.
10. The later Rabbis who created lists of the hundred blessings in accordance with
their local customs thought that the number was typological. Although we might think that
100 was the minimal number of blessings that one was to recite during the day, these
Rabbis were careful to point out why certain blessings were not to be numbered among
the 100, and the total number was an exact one, at least on ordinary weekdays.
11. The major exception to this order is the siddur of Rav Saadia Gaon. Although Rav
Saadia also begins with the morning prayer, his arrangement is based on logical grounds
rather than practical considerations. I may just mention that the morning blessings, with
which most siddurim begin, appear in his siddur after the daily prayer, since they are not
strictly “prayer,” but rather incidental blessings. A number of prayerbooks follow the prac-
tical, chronological order, but they do not begin with the morning prayers. The most
notable examples of this are the prayerbooks for Sabbath and holidays, which open with
the evening prayer that begins the holy day, and later kabbalistic siddurim, which include
the tiqqun hfi atsot, which was said at midnight but appears in the siddur before the morning
prayers. However, this latter example is not really an exception, since the kabbalists thought
of arising from one’s sleep for tiqqun hfi atsot, and thus the midnight prayer was really the
beginning of the liturgical day. This followed a pattern also found in the Temple, in which,
on the Day of Atonement, the day’s work began at midnight to facilitate the successful
completion of the appointed tasks before sundown of the next day.
12. The most important scholarly edition of this work is that of Daniel Goldschmidt
(Jerusalem, 1971). Another edition of the first part was published by David Hedegärd, Seder
R. Amram Gaon (Lund, 1951). See the review by Goldschmidt, Kiryat sefer 29 (1953–54):
71–75. The section on Sabbath prayers was published by Tryggve Kronholm (Lund, 1974).
See the review by Stefan Reif, JSS 23 (Spring 1978):119–22. None of these editions can be
considered critical editions in the sense of an attempt to restore the original work sent by
Rav Amram to Spain, and it is doubtful whether this can be done.
13. We are not sure whether this siddur was sent to Christian Spain, perhaps to Bar-
celona (see S. Assaf, Tequfat hageonim vesifrutah [Jerusalem, 1956], p. 180), or to Muslim
Spain (Gerson D. Cohen, The Book of Tradition [Sefer haqabbalah] [Philadelphia, 1967],
p. 53).
14. Most of this paragraph is based on Robert Brody, “The Enigma of Seder Rav
Amram” [Hebrew] in Knesset Ezra: Literature and Life in the Synagogue: Studies Presented
to Ezra Fleischer, ed. S. Elizur et al. (Jerusalem, 1994), pp. 21–34.
15. Manuscript prayerbooks often have complete halakhic works inscribed in the mar-
gins. A manuscript of the prayerbook found in Hattstatt, apparently written in the sixteenth
century, had the Sefer mitsvot qatan of R. Isaac of Corbeil in the margin, together with
several minhagim books. See Moses Ginsburger, “Ein Siddurhandschrift in Hattstatt,” Ma-
gazin für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 19 (1892):110–32.
16. See Israel Zvi Feintuch, “Tanya rabbati” [Hebrew], in Versions and Traditions in
the Talmud (Ramat Gan, 1985), pp. 65–76.
17. See M. Benayahu, “The Complete Mahzor for the Whole Year According to the
Minhag of the Ashkenazim and the Siddur of the Ashkenazim Savionetta 1567” [He-
brew], in Hebrew Printing at Cremona: Its History and Bibliography (Jerusalem, 1971),
pp. 141–78. This commentary was considered halakhically important and was often re-
ferred to by R. Abraham Gombiner in his commentary to the Shulhfi an arukh, entitled
“Magen avraham.”
18. Ephraim Kupfer, “Lorbeerbaum, Jacob ben Jacob Moses,” Encyclopaedia Judaica,
1972, vol. 11, pp. 492–93. This work was published separately (with notes by R. Abraham
Lovat) and called Netiv hahfi ayyim (Vilna, 1887; repr. Brooklyn, N.Y., 1990). The purpose
of the notes was to mark all the places where the traditional instructions of Rabbi Lor-
beerbaum were in conflict with the decision of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
19. Aaron Mirsky, “Variants between the Commentary and the Text in Siddurim”
[Hebrew], Kiryat sefer 54 (1979):195–200.
20. The Shulhfi an arukh, of course, also followed the order of the Tur. For the prec-
edents for this order, see Chaim Tchernowitz, Toledoth haposkim, vol. 2 (New York, 1947),
pp. 199–203.
21. See the siddur printed in Florence, 1736.
22. Amsterdam, 1765.
23. The Haggadah also contains passages from a broad range of literature: Bible, Tal-
mud, Rabbinic literature, liturgical poetry, and folk literature. Historically, these passages
range from biblical times to modern selections, reflecting modern historical events and
contemporary views.
24. The Passover Haggadah was included already in the siddurim of Rav Amram and
Rav Saadia. Many of the later siddurim have not incorporated the complete text of the
Haggadah but only the part that was traditionally said on the Sabbath before Passover.
25. A catchier acronym would be TTTT, which could stand for Tefillah, Torah, Te-
hillim, Tanya. However, the acronym chosen was apparently based on Genesis 35:5.
26. The earliest evidence for this known to me is the calendar for the years from 1511
to 1528 found at the end of the Rothschild Miscellany. The dates of this calendar are of
particular interest, since it has been assumed that the Miscellany was commissioned about
1470. Although a great part of the Miscellany consists of liturgical works, the Miscellany is
not considered a prayerbook. In a true prayerbook of that period, the Rothschild Mahzor—a
manuscript written according to the Italian rite in 1492, six years after the first printing of
this rite—we find rules for the calculation of the calendar, Christian as well as Jewish. See
M. Schmelzer, The Rothschild Mahzor (New York, 1983), p. 27.
27. A siddur published for Oriental communities, Shaarei tsiyyon hashalem (Jerusa-
lem, 1990), also used the Roedelheim edition for the Torah reading.
28. There is a resemblance in this collection to the Rothschild Miscellany, although
the Miscellany is not considered a siddur—even though it contains a complete siddur—
and Minhfi at yerushalayim is explicitly a siddur.
29. One of the extreme examples of the creation of an open-ended anthology is the
publication of a loose-leaf siddur, meant to enable the community to add new readings but
also permitting the assigning of earlier selections to the wastebasket. See Allen S. Maller,
“Prayer Book and Self-Revelation to God in Judaism,” Journal of Dharma 9:3 (1984):216–
29. David Stern informs me that there is another siddur, entitled P’nei or, which was
published in loose-leaf form, not to enable a continuous process of selection but simply to
enable rearrangement of the material in accordance with the wishes of the participants.
30. Anthologies of biblical passages for liturgical purposes are found already in Qum-
ran. See M. Goshen-Gottstein, “The Psalms Scroll (11 Q Ps a),” Textus 5 (1966):22–33. It is
possible that the biblical book of Chronicles itself contains anthologies of passages in Psalms
for liturgical purposes. See Moshe Weinfeld, “Traces of Qedushat yotser and Pesuqei de-
zimra in the Qumran Literature” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 45 (1976):24.
31. According to a legend transmitted by R. Abraham ben Nathan of Lunel, the ex-
panded tehfi inah is in itself an anthology of anthologies. It is a collection of tehfi inot written
by three different individuals. See Sefer hamanhig (Jerusalem, 1978), p. 102, and the liter-
ature in the note to line 88.
156 The Middle Ages
32. For the history of this blessing, see N. Wieder, “The Blessing of the Pesuqim”
[Hebrew], Sinai 76 (1975):126–33.
33. This reason was mentioned in the Sifrei (Deut. 34, pp. 60–61) and by Palestinian
amoraim (PT Berakhot 1:3 3c). However, at a very early date these passages were considered
as reflecting basic Jewish principles: the recognition of the kingdom of God and the ac-
ceptance of the Torah (Berakhot 2:2). The unit took on a significance of which the whole
was greater than the parts. See Israel Knohl, “A Parasha Concerned with Accepting the
Kingdom of Heaven” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 53 (1984):11–31; Reuven Kimelman, “The Shema
and Its Rhetoric: The Case for the Shema Being More than Creation, Revelation, and
Redemption,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2 (1992):111–56. Cf. E. E. Urbach,
“The Place of the Ten Commandments in Ritual and Prayer” [Hebrew], in The Ten Com-
mandments as Reflected in Tradition and Literature Throughout the Ages, ed. Ben-Zion
Segal (Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 129–30; Yitshak D. Gilat, Studies in the Development of the
Halakha [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan, 1992), pp. 285–86.
34. Urbach, “The Place of the Ten Commandments,” p. 130. This is also followed by
the Samaritans, who, however, inscribe these passages on the doorpost itself rather than on
a piece of parchment attached to the doorpost.
35. It has been suggested that the early phylacteries contained the four biblical passages
that constituted the early Shema: the Ten Commandments and the three surviving passages.
According to this theory, the Ten Commandments and the passage that dealt with the
fringes were eliminated and replaced with the passages referring to the commandment
about the phylacteries. See A. M. Haberman, “The Phylacteries in Antiquity” [Hebrew],
Erets Yisrael 3 (1954):174–75.
36. We have no way of knowing whether the Ten Commandments were originally
part of the daily Torah reading, whether they were added to the passages of Shema, or
whether they were, by themselves, the original reading to which the passages of Shema
were later added (cf. E. E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs [Hebrew] [Je-
rusalem, 1969], pp. 15–16). It should be noted that the Ten Commandments were never
part of the evening reading, but this may mean that the evening recital was instituted after
the elimination of the Ten Commandments from this ritual. The fact that the unit was
known as “Shema,” even though the Shema itself was actually the second passage—being
preceded by the Ten Commandments—is not significant, since the earlier sources often
use the term “reading” rather than “Shema” (Cf. Gilat, “Studies,” pp. 285–86; Reuven
Hammer, “What Did They Bless? A Study of Mishnah Tamid 5.1,” JQR 81 [1991]:310).
37. See Geza Vermes, “The Decalogue and the Minim,” in In Memoriam Paul Kahle,
ed. Matthew Black and Georg Fohrer, Beiheft zur ZAW 103 (Berlin, 1968), pp. 232–40; repr.
in G. Vermes, Post-Biblical Studies (Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity) (Leiden, 1975),
pp. 169–77; Urbach, “The Place of the Ten Commandments,” pp. 130–40.
38. See J. Tabory, “On the Place of the Malkhuyos Blessing in the New Year Prayer”
[Hebrew], Tarbiz 48 (1979):8–11.
39. See Eliezer Eliner, “Die Auswahl und Anordnung der Pesukim von ‘Malchiot’ in
der Synagoge,” Jüdische Schule Zürich: Festschrift (Jerusalem, 1980), pp. 53–55.
40. For a further discussion of this point, see J. Tabory, Jewish Festivals in the Time
of the Mishnah and Talmud [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 19962), p. 234.
41. See I. Elbogen, “Die Tefilla für die Festtage,” MGWJ 55 (1911):426–46, 586–99;
58 (1914): 323–25.
42. Another tradition, found in Seder eliyahu rabbah (chap. 6, ed. Friedmann, p. 34)
and preserved in some editions of Vayiqra rabbah (2:8, ed. Margoliot, p. 47), claims that
the angels of Isaiah praised God during the day whereas the angels of Ezekiel praised Him
during the night. The Babylonian Talmud claims that there was really only one vision,
which was reported differently by the two prophets because of their own subjective differ-
ences (H fi agigah 13b).
43. This is not meant to say that there was a disagreement between the mystics and
the Rabbis. See Lawrence A. Hoffman, “Censoring In and Censoring Out: A Function of
Liturgical Language,” in Ancient Synagogues: The State of Research, ed. J. Gutmann
(Chico, Cal., 1981), pp. 19–37. For the precedents of the idea of a heavenly choir, see M.
Weinfeld, “The Heavenly Praise in Unison,” in Meqor Hajjim: Festschrift für Georg Molin
zu seinem 75. Geburtstag, ed. Irmtraut Seybold (Graz, 1983), pp. 427–37.
44. This was the standard form of the Kedushah used by the Palestinian Jews in the
Byzantine period.
45. It is worth pointing out that, according to Rabbi Yohanan ben Nuri, the blessing
of Malkhuyot on Rosh Hashanah should be added to the Kedushah. Cf. Joseph Heinemann,
“Kedushah and ‘Malkhut’ in the Reading of Shema and in the Kedushah of the Amidah,”
in Studies in Jewish Liturgy (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 12–21. Heinemann considers the expanded
Kedushah a macrocosm of the entire Shema reading, including its blessings.
46. See J. J. Petuchowski, “Some Laws of Jewish Liturgical Development,” Judaism
34 (1985):312–26.
47. The passages in which this statement appears are collected and analyzed by Y.
Efrati, “The Advantage of the Integrative System for the Study of the Talmud” [Hebrew],
Bisdei hfi emed 20 (1976):74–82, 174–79, 242–49, 288–92, 366–71.
48. There is some doubt about the meaning of the term “Paquli”: some think it is a
designation of his occupation—that of a flax worker—and others think it is derived from
the name of his home.
49. E. Fleischer, “On the Beginnings of Obligatory Jewish Prayer” [Hebrew], Tarbiz
59 (1990):397–441. Cf. Stefan Reif, “On the Earliest Development of Jewish Prayer” [He-
brew], Tarbiz 60 (1991):677–81; Fleischer, Tarbiz 60:683–88; M. Z. Fuks, “Response to Two
Revolutionaries” [Hebrew], Sinai 114 (1994):164–70.
50. See Uri Ehrlich, “Modes of Prayer and Their Significance in the Time of the
Mishnah and the Talmud” [Hebrew] (Diss., Hebrew University, 1993).
51. The Babylonian tradition did not have a problem with this, and the Amidah of
this tradition, in use today, has nineteen blessings although it is frequently referred to as
the Eighteen Blessings. For a comparison of the Palestinian versions of the Amidah with
those of the Babylonians, as found in the Geniza, see Yehezkel Luger, “The Weekday
Amidah Based on the Geniza” [Hebrew] (Ph.D. diss., Bar Ilan University, 1992). Some
scholars are of the opinion that the early Amidah consisted of seventeen blessings and that
it was only after adding the blessing against the minnim that the number reached eighteen.
According to this theory, it was the Babylonians who changed the original number by
dividing the blessing that referred to Jerusalem and the house of David into two separate
elements. However, the fact that this blessing in the Palestinian tradition is the only one
with a double ending would seem to imply that this is really a combination of two earlier
blessings.
52. I do not claim that the actual text is ancient. See Stefan Reif, “Liturgical Diffi-
culties and Geniza Manuscripts,” in Studies in Judaism and Islam Presented to S. D. Goitein
(Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 99–122.
53. Mishnah Tamid 5:1. The Mishnah actually states that the priest recited only one
blessing before the Shema, without specifying which blessing was said. Statements found
in both Talmuds report that the blessing recited was Ahavah and the blessing of the lights
was omitted. However, the Babylonian Talmud gives a conflicting opinion according to
which it was the second blessing that was omitted. Hammer (“What Did They Bless?” n.
36, pp. 313–23) suggests that the whole talmudic discussion is an anachronism: the blessing
158 The Middle Ages
recited before the reading of the Shema in the Temple was entirely different from the
blessings before the Shema of the later tradition.
54. See I. Ta-Shma, “Ahavat Olam and Ahavah Rabbah—Two Versions of the Bless-
ing Preceding the Shema” [Hebrew], in Rabbi Mordechai Breuer Festschrift, ed. Moshe
Ahrend et al. (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 601–11.
55. “Talmud,” in this context, did not refer, of course, to the redacted compilations
of commentaries on the Mishnah and related subjects known to us today as Talmud. What
is meant here is more the method of study by which earlier sources were analyzed. For a
discussion of the various branches of study, see Abraham Rosenthal, “Torah sheal peh
vetorah misinai—halakhah umaaseh,” in Mehfi qerei Talmud: Talmudic Studies Dedicated
to the Memory of Professor Eliezer Shimshon Rosenthal, vol. 2, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher and
David Rosenthal (Jerusalem, 1993), p. 463, n. 48. See also David Weiss Halivni, Midrash,
Mishna and Gemara (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
56. For the history of this order, see I. Ta-Shma, “Meqorah umqomah shel tefillat
aleinu leshabeahfi besiddur hatefillah: Seder hamaamadot ushelat siyyum hatefillah,” in
Sefer zikkaron leefrayim talmag’ (Haifa, 1993), pp. 85–93.
57. See M. Benayahu, Rabbi H fi ayyim Yosef David Azulai [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1959),
pp. 148–49.
8
jacob elbaum
Yalqut Shim oni and the

Medieval Midrashic
Anthology
alqut—literally, a collection—is the common name in the Middle Ages for an

Yanthology of midrash, or rabbinic scriptural interpretation. The term yalqut,
taken from the title of one such collection, yalqut shim oni (which scholars
through the ages have often simply called Yalqut), would indeed seem to be an
appropriate name for these works. They are, after all, collections of midrashic
tradition as it was preserved in the various collections made during the so-called
classical or canonical period of midrash during the Byzantine period in the land
of Israel. At first glance, these works also appear absolutely different in character
from the classical canon of midrash. The singular literary genres of “authentic”
midrash from the classical period, which had retained some vitality even in the
collections edited at a relatively late date, no longer appear in their pure form in
the yalqutim but are adulterated by disparate elements. So, too, in the yalqutim,
the crystalline literary editing and original formulation of classical midrash give
way to mere technical arrangement, which seems to have involved nothing more
than a hackneyed conglomeration of passages from various sources.
The sketch in the preceding paragraph, which more or less encapsulates the
standard scholarly view, is based upon certain assumptions and beliefs that need
to be reexamined. The first of these is the belief that the appearance of the
yalqutim coincided with the close of the original period of midrashic creativity.
This classical period culminated in the redaction of Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus
Rabbah, and Lamentations Rabbah, among other works, between 400 and 500
c.e. By then, so the argument goes, midrashic creativity had run its course and
exhausted its powers of originality; where it continued to be composed, it did so
by force of inertia until the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century,
after which it steadily deteriorated through the geonic period. There may also have
been a pervasive sense among those persons involved with midrash that, just as
the Mishnah had been succeeded by the Talmud, and just as the Talmud had
been “closed” and completed, so too midrashic tradition had reached closure and
there no longer existed free license to add new midrashic material, even what
159
160 The Middle Ages
circulated but had not already been set down in writing. Stagnation inevitably
leads to regression. Some scholars would argue that this was evident even in the
later anthologists’ mode of presentation of the ancient sages’ sayings, in which
everything was apparently perceived as equivalent and passages were lumped to-
gether without regard for their sources’ varying levels of diction or their charac-
teristic terminology. Old and new were mixed indiscriminately. The anthologists’
only touchstone, according to this view, was the detection of some link between
an utterance of the sages and the biblical text, the sole purpose here being to
associate the sages’ comments with the biblical texts, often verse by verse, as com-
prehensively as possible.
This linear history of midrashic literature is difficult to accept for many rea-
sons. First, it is based upon certain uninspected assumptions about the nature and
life span of aggadic midrash, and, no less so, about anthological literature in gen-
eral. Without trying to present a comprehensive history of midrash in general, one
might nonetheless question whether even the “classical” midrashim like Genesis
Rabbah were intentionally edited with a program and plan rather than being mere
collections artificially linking opinion to opinion according to the text of the book
of Genesis. Perhaps the only thing that truly separates a work like Genesis Rabbah
from the later yalqutim is that the former’s sources are mostly anonymous (and as
a result, its contents may appear more original), while the sources of the yalqutim
are usually known and sometimes explicitly acknowledged by their editors (and
therefore, in the view of certain modern midrash scholars, they are of no impor-
tance beyond being “witnesses to textual variants”). Let me add that my comments
on Genesis Rabbah were made solely for the sake of argument; I personally believe
there was some kind of plan to its editing. Yet the possibility I broached surely
applies to at least some of the midrashim collected under the title Midrash Rabbah.
This famous collection of midrashim is itself in its entirety an “anthology” or
“yalqut of midrashim,” whose editing is largely inconsistent.1 As we know, some
of its constituent midrashim (and in some cases the separate parts of the same
“midrash”) were composed even later than some of the yalqutim. Indeed, some
parts of Midrash Rabbah from some of its most important sections were drawn
from the yalqutim.
Another difficulty in demarcating strict boundaries between midrashic litera-
ture and the later medieval anthologies can be seen in M. D. Herr’s attempt to
periodize the history of midrashic literature in his entry “midrash” in the Ency-
clopaedia Judaica. Herr lists, among the midrashic works of the “Late Period”
(1000–1200 c.e.), the work of R. Tobias ben R. Eliezer (eleventh century), Leqahfi
tov (even though Herr himself calls it an anthology), as well as the “midrashim”
based on the composition of R. Moses Hadarshan (who lived and worked in the
same century). As the “Period of the Yalqutim (anthologies),” Herr designates
only the era that followed (1200–1550). Within this category, he first mentions
Yalqut shim oni, then Midrash hagadol (both of the thirteenth century), Yalqut
makhiri (at the earliest, according to the view of some scholars, the second half of
the thirteenth century), Ein ya aqov, and Haggadot hatalmud (in that order,
though it should be reversed, because R. Jacob ibn H fi abib, whose Ein ya aqov
was printed in Constantinople in 5276/1516, the year of his death, was himself fa-
Yalqut Shimoni and the Medieval Midrashic Anthology 161
miliar with Haggadot hatalmud, which had been printed in Constantinople in

5271/1511).
The difficulty here is obvious. How did Herr distinguish between earlier and
later personages—between R. Tobias or R. Moses Hadarshan and their successors?
Indeed, it should be stated that medieval scholars generally call R. Moses Hadar-
shan’s composition a “midrash,” and those who came after him sometimes mistook
his words to be those of the classical sages. The same held true, it seems, for his
homiletical interpretations, which were his own innovations (according to our best
knowledge of midrashic literature).2 There are, moreover, collections gleaned from
his work that everyone termed midrash—possibly because they were ignorant of
their sources. These include Midrash aggadah and Numbers Rabbah (the first
sections of which, Bemidbar and Naso, were based on material from “R. Moses’
midrash”)3 and finally, Genesis rabbati, also called Genesis Rabbah or Bereshit
rabbah magna in Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fidei. The same applies to Leqahfi tov;
it was considered by many to be a stock midrash.4
There is, of course, a certain justification to Herr’s attempt to periodize in
light of his fundamental assumption that Yalqut shim oni, the work of R. Simeon
Hadarshan (“Our Rabbi, Simeon, Foremost of the Preachers, may his memory be
a blessing, from the holy community, Frankfurt,” as inscribed on the title page of
the anthology’s second printing, Venice 5326/1566) was the most important of the
yalqutim and should therefore be given the distinction of opening the era of the
yalqutim.5 One consequence of this distinction, however, is that it ignores such
earlier works in the genre as those mentioned before, as well as Pitron torah, which
may be dated to the ninth century (also absent from Herr’s listing).6 Moreover, by
grouping Yalqut shim oni with the others, Herr blurs its singularity. No other an-
thology, before or after, attempted to present a similar kind of summa of midrashic
tradition: that is, no other work ever attempted to quote the sages’ commentaries
on all the books of the Bible solely by following the order of the original verses.
Another ostensible point of distinction often made between a “midrash” and
an “anthology” or yalqut is that while the midrashic collections tend to be anon-
ymous, the editors of the yalqutim tend to specify their names. The obvious draw-
back to this claim is that unambiguous attribution says nothing about the nature
of the materials in the work. Taking credit for producing or editing a book is
largely a matter of cultural convention, and this convention was simply not nor-
mative in any way in ancient Jewish literature. The decision whether to identify
one’s authorship or role depends on the author’s own perception of the link be-
tween his writings and his sources. But the marks of the anonymous authors of
Pirqei derabbi eli ezer or Seder eliyahu on their respective works are no less prom-
inent than those of the compilers of Leqahfi tov, Yalqut makhiri, and Yalqut shim oni
on their works. Attention must be paid to developments within midrashic literature
itself. The methods that a midrashic editor used to determine the shape of his
work changed with time. For better or for worse, the redactors of the later mid-
rashim changed and revised the words of their predecessors; it was no slip on my
part that I called the compilers of Pirqei derabbi eli ezer and Seder eliyahu “au-
thors.” These two compositions are different from other midrashim. As Meir Ish
Shalom (Friedmann) famously wrote in describing the uniqueness of Seder eli-
162 The Middle Ages
yahu, “All the Rabbahs and the Pesiqtot and the Tanhfi umot are nothing but
yalqutim [arranged] according to either the order of the writings or the commen-
taries to the portions,” but Seder eliyahu, he added, “has an author . . . who does
not merely cobble [texts] together [emphasis added]; rather, he wrote his compo-
sition in a distinctive style and order; his writings are not just pearls strung on a
thread but links in a continuous chain.”7 Were the editor of Midrash Proverbs
known, his work would undoubtedly be labeled a yalqut or anthology. The manner
in which sources are mined in this work, the omission of the names of the sages,
the addition of bits of old aggadah in new combinations and of explanations for
ancient statements—all these familiar criteria would easily lead scholars to cate-
gorize the work as an anthology. Characteristically (and rightly, it seems), Ish
Shalom would have associated it with Seder eliyahu.
As regards terminology, it is also the case that even the most distinguished
modern scholars have indiscriminately used the terms “midrash” and “anthology.”
In his famous article “The Legends of the Jews—East and West,” L. Ginzberg,
surely one of the preeminent authorities in this century on Rabbinic aggadah and
midrash, considered both the aforementioned Pirqei derabbi eliezer and H fi ibbur
yafeh mehayeshuah (the work of R. Nissim of Qairawan, d. 1062) as Rabbinical
anthologies. Their common denominator was that both were influenced by Mus-
lim literature—the latter linguistically, the former in its organization and structure;
he describes Pirqei derabbi eliezer as “a grouping written according to the pattern
of Arab anthologies based on tales from the sacred writings.”8 Ginzberg’s associa-
tion of the term “midrash” with the genre of anthology has deep roots. Nearly all
medieval scholars also used the term “midrash” to denote what we would call an
“anthology.” The term yalqut, once adopted to designate the anthological literature
of the midrash, was reserved for, at most, two such compositions: Yalqut shimoni9
and Yalqut hamakhiri (both of which were composed, as was noted earlier, at
approximately the same time, although there is no sign that the anthologist of
Yalqut hamakhiri ever saw its predecessor).10 Furthermore, Yemenite Jewish lit-
erature is well known to have been replete with what we call anthologies (of which
Herr cites only Midrash hagadol, which is admittedly the most important of them
all). Almost without exception, though, these works are called by the term “mid-
rash,” and it appears that they were regarded as such.11 Midrash hagadol was
described by its author, R. David Ha’adani, without a trace of self-consciousness,
as “the midrash of the five books of the Torah,” and there existed other such
compositions, including Midrash hahfi efets of R. Zechariah the Physician (whose
writing ended in the year 1427) and Midrash habeur of R. Said ben David Dha-
mari (written in 1441). Indeed, R. Nethanel ben Isaiah, author of the Yemenite
yalqut Maor haafelah (composed in 1328–29),12 generally refers to it as a “collec-
tion” (majmua ) or “composition,” but those who follow him call it a “homiletical
interpretation” (derash) or “midrash.” In either case, it seems that these Yemenite
works were never called by the term yalqut. Abraham Joseph Wertheimer, in
choosing to title the fifteenth-century work that he published from a manuscript
Yalqut midreshei teiman (Jerusalem, 5748/1988), evidently did not share the view
of the works’ own compilers!
I have gone into these terminological minutiae not only to clarify the termi-
nological facts but also because they can help us understand how the anthologists
saw their work not only as similar to but as a continuation of the classical midrashic
compilations. That is to say, they did not view their works as belated or second-
tier compilations, of lesser stature than the classical midrashim, nor was this esti-
mation shared by the earliest readers of the yalqutim either in Central Europe or
elsewhere. For these readers, the term “midrash” (as the name of a composition
or collection of homiletical interpretations on a biblical book) simply denoted a
collection of homiletical interpretations, and nothing more. The term carried no
value judgment, nor did it characterize how its materials were used; the term
“midrash” was, in any case, a consciously rehabilitated term, and it is doubtful if
it was used in this sense before the Middle Ages.13 This being the case, it is hardly
surprising that many works that we would probably not choose to include under
the rubric of midrash, such as Midrash aseret hadibberot, were called “mid-
rashim.” Indeed, the contributor who wrote the entry on this particular “midrash”
in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Joseph Dan, speculates on why it was called by this
term.14 Modern sensibilities distinguish it from “midrash” per se, but terminolog-
ical usage has simply changed. At one time, it was sufficient for a work to be
loosely based on the verses of the Ten Commandments for it to be called a “mid-
rash,” and we could speculate further about several other “smaller midrashim” in
light of their content and form. The scholar who wishes to find striking differences
between Midrash yonah and the compilation of homiletic interpretations on the
book of Jonah in Yalqut shimoni will not have an easy task.
From my preceding remarks, it might appear that there is no distinction be-
tween “midrashim” and yalqutim, particularly because I have shown how the two
terms are often used as synonyms. Nevertheless, it is possible to differentiate be-
tween them. Just as some types should not be separated, so, too, others should not
be joined. Let me briefly set out some features that tend to distinguish the yalqutim
from the classical works of midrash.
First, the anthologies show a tendency to collect together ancient midrashic
materials, regardless of their sources or different genres. Some anthologists (like
R. Jacob Sikili in his Talmud torah, by his own attestation) quoted their sources
verbatim; others chose to abridge and rework the original material. Second, in
some anthologies there is a clear desire to blend halakhic and aggadic sayings; in
others, to set forth midrashic traditions, and next to them, a commentary. Indeed,
modern scholars have often used this last practice as a way of distinguishing be-
tween a midrash and an anthology, so that a work that contains a blend of hom-
iletical interpretations and biblical commentary (particular peshat or plain-sense
exegesis) is called an “anthology.”15 Third, another type of work that is often called
an “anthology” is one with an ethical, moralizing orientation. To this group be-
long, for example, the two works called Menorat hamaor (one by R. Israel al-
Nakawa and the other by R. Isaac Aboab), as well as R. Jacob Ibn H fi abib’s Ein
yaaqov. At first glance, the latter seems to be merely a collection of talmudic
aggadot, presented in their original sequence, alongside of which is the compiler’s
commentary (that is, the commentary of the “author”). The moralistic purpose of
164 The Middle Ages
Ein yaaqov can be ascertained from the author’s introductions and the indices
he appended to it (the latter were omitted from the accepted printings, thereby
occluding this central purpose of the compilation).16
These three distinguishing features of the yalqutim, as opposed to those of
midrash—the mixing of aggadah and halakhah, the blending of homiletical in-
terpretation and commentary, and the making of collections with an ethical pur-
pose—are not, however, necessary conditions for the genre. The proof of this fact
is Yalqut shimoni itself, the one work that serves as a representative model for the
medieval anthology. Yalqut shimoni lacks all three of the previous features. Thus,
while it quotes halakhic traditions, especially where the biblical context is ha-
lakhic, its intent is assuredly not to intermingle words of Scripture with halakhah
and aggadah throughout. The latter sort of commentary, which is to be found in
Leqahfi tov and other works, is not present in Yalqut shimoni, and any reader can
easily see that Yalqut shimoni does not discuss ethical issues except insofar as they
appear in the ancient midrashim. The primary model for the compiler of Yalqut
shimoni was unquestionably Genesis Rabbah. Precisely this sheer heterogeneity
confounds attempts to bundle all the anthologies neatly together. What they have
in common is an attempt to excerpt the ancient texts in a new and changed way.
These changes need not lie within the quoted texts themselves; they can manifest
themselves in their arrangement and in the juxtaposition of homiletical interpre-
tations from various sources. This is true of Yalqut shimoni, although abridgments
were made there too, especially in the narrative sections.17 Such is also the case
with Midrash hagadol, except that its compiler chose to expand rather than abridge
his sources. In some anthologies, the modifications are more extensive and include
linguistic substitutions (especially when it comes to difficult technical, foreign, or
even Aramaic expressions); omissions of the names of the original authors; text
abridgments; and paraphrasing. Some anthologists felt free to add commentary to
the words of the midrashim, as well as numerological and acrostical material either
from extramidrashic sources or of their own devising.18 Indeed, even those who
were careful to transmit the words of the sages in their original form did not refrain
from contemporizing the material. R. Simeon Hadarshan quotes Rashi (et al.) in
Yalqut shimoni, and in Midrash hagadol, R. David Ha’adani adds the sayings of
the geonim as well as excerpts from the halakhic texts of R. Yitshfi ak Alfasi and
Maimonides.
Having shown where the midrashim and the anthologies share features and
differ from each other, we come now to the question of why these anthologies
were compiled in the first place. The reasons must be manifold, since the an-
thologies did not emerge from a single academy, nor were they the products of a
single cultural center or period. I will merely mention some possibilities. (1) Some
compilers apparently responded to a felt lack of available books, either because
such books were too expensive or because they were scarce; obviously, I am speak-
ing of the period before the invention of the printing press. Thus, compilers as-
pired to amass, in one all-inclusive collection, a kind of encyclopedia of traditions
that they considered most worthy of preservation and study and that previously
had been scattered among many books. (2) The anthologies may also testify to a
desire to restore midrash to its former glory and to return it to its rightful place
alongside the literature of biblical commentary. The latter literature had developed
as a genre of its own and thereby distanced the general populace from the classical
tradition of midrash. (3) In connection with this last point, there may have been
a polemical motivation as well. There are reasons to suggest that the return to the
midrash via the anthological literature (especially what followed the sequence of
biblical verses) may have stemmed from the fact that the genre of biblical com-
mentary had distanced itself from this kind of presentation as the result of doctrinal
controversy, as with the Karaites. The previously mentioned Leqahfi tov is an ex-
ample of this case. (4) Another impetus to the writing of anthologies was surely
their capacity for serving as sources for sermons—that is, basic material that could
be used for public homilies, whose delivery was a popular occupation. This is
apparently the reason for the great number of Yemenite anthologies in comparison
with the number of similar compositions elsewhere in the Diaspora. (5) Finally,
the Middle Ages witnessed a large-scale tendency toward anthologization in gen-
eral. This was the case in the sphere of halakhah, and the practice of collecting
aggadah can be seen as a kind of response to the latter. An examination of the
previously cited introduction to Ein yaaqov shows that R. Jacob ibn H fi abib tried
to model his work on the compositions of R. Isaac Alfasi and R. Asher ben Yehfi iel.19
Indeed, there is no doubt that the principal motivation for the creation of the
anthologies was the ancient desire and habit of collecting traditions. It was not
just the urge to collect, however, that created these works but a desire to make a
new (or at least complete) connection between Rabbinic tradition and Scripture.
This is what appears to have motivated R. Simeon Hadarshan, the compiler of
Yalqut shimoni (insofar as we know anything about his motives). R. Makhir b. R.
Abba Mari explicitly attests to this very intention in his introduction to Yalqut
hamakhiri to Psalms:
The main purpose of my plans and my goal was to benefit others like myself, so
that even the learned might find occasional satisfaction in it, for the midrashim
and aggadot are scattered and dispersed all over. Most are not to be found in their
right place, and since they are occupied in their diligent study of the laws of what
is prohibited and what is permitted, students will not find quickly the midrashim
they seek after for the verses as they need them. May this book be for them a
means to reach the trove of their thoughts and intentions.20
Remarks similar to these, as well as testimony to the far-reaching objective of the

act of compilation, are also found in the anthology Talmud torah (1366), whose
title and goals are explained by its author, R. Jacob Sikili:
And since I included in this book all halakhic and aggadic traditions and state-
ments that were expounded and cited in all the midrashim and the two Talmuds
and the Sifrei and the Sifrah,21 I called this work Talmud torah. This title is
appropriate and correct, for it instructs man in the knowledge to understand and
teach, and on its basis the principles of the mitzvot and their halakhot, in their
general rules and particulars, as well as their reasons and details, will all be clar-
ified. The reader will have no further need of the words of other commentators,
be they little or great, because the study of Torah [Talmud torah] is greater than
them all.22
166 The Middle Ages
The work was entitled Talmud torah (rather than Yalqut talmud torah, as it was
occasionally referred to by scholars) not only because “the study of Torah is greater
than them all,” but also because it is a kind of Mishneh torah in the field of
exegesis, meant to obviate the need for the words of further exegetes.
Indeed, some compilers of anthologies were not content solely to collect hom-
iletical interpretations but included biblical exegeses as well, undoubtedly in order
to make their works all-inclusive, as described before. These expansive anthologies
have been called by different scholars midreshei habeurim or midreshei haperushim
(in both cases, “the midrashim of exegeses”), to distinguish them from midreshei
hayalqutim (“midrashim of the anthologies”).23 To this group belong Leqahfi tov,
which Zunz described as “half commentary and half aggadah,” as well as Midrash
aggadah and the “midrashim” of the thirteenth-century sage R. Samuel ben Nis-
sim of Sanut, including the anthology that Buber titled Midrash genesis zuta but
R. Samuel himself called Midrash genesis.
The statements of R. Makhir and R. Jacob Sikili, and Zunz’s brief description
of Leqahfi tov raise two central issues that must be considered in the study of
medieval midrashic anthologies.
1. Anthologies are rarely treated as works in their own right, principally be-
cause the production of an anthology is, on the face of it, a mere technical feat—
the gathering, organizing, and ordering of extant material, and these acts are usu-
ally not considered sufficiently creative or even important enough to warrant rec-
ognition. So, too, the work of a “learned man who collects [sources] from every-
where”—in the words of the fifteenth-century Yemenite sage H fi oter ben Solomon
(Dhamari Mansur Suleiman), compiler of Ner hasekhalim (or Or hasekhalim)—
does not usually command respect because “collecting [sources] from everywhere”
may at best attest to naiveté, and at worst to an inability to discriminate between
what is valuable and what is not.24 Nevertheless, it is important to delve into the
inner construction of each anthology, if only on the chance that such investigation
will reveal an ideological core or stance that makes the anthology more than
merely a vehicle by which a speaker from the past is made to address the present.
If such is the case, the anthological production is not mere technical work, in
which there is “naught to distinguish, praise, or marvel at, since even schoolchil-
dren can do it, and no one in the land cannot,” to quote the words of the an-
thologist of Yalqut hamakhiri in the introduction cited earlier. This is not neces-
sarily a complicated matter. We can, it seems to me, fairly easily reveal the
principles guiding an anthologist as he shapes his anthology in both its overall and
specific dimensions. Despite the general absence of explanatory prefaces to an-
thologies, it is not difficult through study and analysis to ascertain the underlying
principles by which the anthologist mined the corpus of his sources. If I have
spoken little about these principles with respect to the anthologies I have discussed,
it is because past scholarship, when it has paid any attention to these works, has
almost exclusively concentrated upon the question of “sources,” and then only in
order to work backward from the anthologies to learn more about their sources in
the classical midrashim and their variants.
To be sure, the contribution of anthologies in general to the identification of
lost works has been of great significance. But what is usually found in anthologies
serves only to confirm what is already known. If a version of a text preserved in

an anthology differs from the known versions, it is not necessarily a reflection of
another textual tradition; the changes may have been the work of the anthologist
himself. In contrast, inquiry into the texts themselves, as they emerge from their
presence in the anthologies, may be a subject of greater importance. This is what
gives the anthologies a value beyond mere copyists’ handiwork and justifies distin-
guishing between the different anthologies as works in their own right.
To illustrate this last point, let me comment briefly on one small matter
relating to Yalqut shimoni. In general, arguments from silence or absence lead
only to conjectures. Nevertheless, it is surely significant that the anthologist of
Yalqut shimoni overlooked and omitted all references to works of ancient esoteric
literature like the Heikhalot and the merkabah tradition, even though he was un-
doubtedly familiar with them. Except for an allusion to a midrash from the Al-
phabet of Rabbi Akiva, there is not a single mention of this extensive literature in
his entire wide-ranging anthology. This obviously reflects the fact that even though
all anthologies are compilatory texts, not all acts of compilation are to be measured
by the same standard. Every compilation is accompanied by processes of selection,
classification, and appraisal, and each of these processes is distinct; taken together,
they are also distinct from the craft practiced by the scribe-copyist. All this should
be a commonplace in the study of anthological literature; yet only rarely do schol-
ars address such questions as: Did the compiler, in sequencing his texts, follow
the order of importance of the midrashim from which he culled them?25 Or did
he present them in an order corresponding to the degree of eminence of the
speaker (if the speaker was, for example, a tanna or an amora—that is, according
to the anthologist’s hierarchical perception of the sages involved)? Or did he use
an order based on the proximity of the homiletical interpretation to what the
compiler presumed was its “simple meaning”? Perhaps he ordered the texts ac-
cording to some external principle (such as length or brevity)? Or did he try to
construct a conceptual problem that he saw raised in the biblical text, or according
to other such matters? Even more difficult to pursue is the detailed analysis of
what was omitted from the anthologies, and why—whether its cause was a response
to heretics or to detractors from within the community or outside it, or to other
entirely different causes. It is worth investigating, for example, whether the wide-
spread tendency in the Yemenite midrashim to divert their contents in the direc-
tion of philosophical topics has parallels in the non-Yemenite anthologies. Are
there grounds for comparison between such anthologies and midrash Maor
haafela, in which the author’s goal of doctrinal guidance is plainly evident (fol-
lowing Maimonides, he involves himself in philosophical discussions)? Here we
must take into account J. Tubi’s trenchant claim26 that, except for Midrash Ha-
gadol and Midrash Lamentations (whose precise character has not yet been clar-
ified), the works that fall under the rubric of “Yemenite midrashim” are essentially
books of commentaries and that, “in the linguistic tradition of Yemenite Jewry,
the word ‘midrash’ is used in the sense of a commentary on Scripture, the Pen-
tateuch in particular.”27 Moreover, according to Tubi, two factors remove these
Yemenite works from the domain of “midrashic literature”: first, their language,
which is mostly Arabo-Judaic (although sayings of the sages are quoted in Hebrew,
168 The Middle Ages
as was the widespread custom in Arabo-Judaic philosophical literature); second,

their content, with its strong link to the allegorical philosophical commentary
tradition.28 These criteria undoubtedly demand further clarification.29 In any case,
a rigorous examination of different anthologies along such lines would, in my
opinion, lead to extremely interesting conclusions about their methods. They
would not seem quite so blurred and undefined as they do at present.
2. The anthologists’ utilization of aggadic and midrashic literature raises the
question of how “closed” this literature was, in their view. This question is a
complex one and should by no means be examined exclusively along this axis.
The work of copyists and printers should also be studied. Nonetheless, the work
of the compilers suggests that, in their view, aggadah and midrash were in the
category of a “possible interpretation” that did not rule out other opinions, and
thus they did not hesitate to add their own, and others’. The Yemenite anthologists
whom I mentioned occasionally put Maimonides’ words into midrashic formula-
tions, which then became part of their “midrash.” Nor was this “midrashizing”
restricted to the writings of Maimonides; the same was done to exegetical and
homiletical passages, which were easily added (in these and in the anthologies in
general) to the sayings of the midrashim. Joining them to the original midrashic
utterances made them all into a kind of midrash.30
All these examples suggest that, in the views of the anthologists, midrash re-
mained a vital tradition; this suggestion is further confirmed by the flexible use by
later authors (not just Yemenites) of the term “midrash,” a matter I have already
discussed extensively. On the other hand, it is possible that the very blending of
old and new paved the way for the reduced stature of midrash, a view that emerges
from the remarks of some authorities. Such is the upshot, for example, of R.
Abraham Ibn Ezra’s criticism of Leqahfi tov in the foreword to his Perush hakatsar
of the Torah, in which he disapproves of the exegetical methods of midrash.31 So,
too, in the introduction to his commentary to Lamentations, he offers the gener-
alization that “of the midrashim . . . some are as fine as silk, others as coarse as
sacks.” Paradoxically, while the anthologies relate to midrashic tradition as though
to an “open” text, the anthologies themselves are “closed” insofar as they bear their
authors’ signatures. Furthermore, some authorities actually “close” midrashic tra-
dition with these works. This, as I mentioned earlier, was apparently the intention
of R. Jacob Sikili in his Talmud torah, and even if it was not the intention of the
anthologist of Yalqut shimoni, from a practical and functional perspective that
work effected the “closing” of midrash. The fact is that, after it became widespread
(in the wake of its printing), Yalqut shimoni came to be, in the hands of many,
the primary medium through which midrashim were cited. I refer not only to
those midrashim that were lost, their contents known to us solely through their
citation in this anthology. For many later authors who refer to midrashic sayings,
we do not know whether they saw the actual midrashim themselves or whether
they consigned to paper a reconstruction based on what they saw in the notations
of the anthologist of the Yalqut. This question arises particularly when the later
citations merely transmit the contents of the midrashic sayings, not its language
verbatim.32
Yet the anthologies did not succeed in fully “closing” midrashic tradition. Nor,
for that matter, did the rise of printing, for the printers themselves often added to
the midrashim as they saw fit. This is a phenomenon known from the Mantua
edition of Midrash Tanhfi uma (5323/1563) and the additions to it by R. Ezra of Fano
to the earlier Constantinople printing (5282/1522), among them both tanhfi umaic
and nontanhfi umaic sections. The same phenomenon occurred with other mid-
rashim, such as Midrash Psalms, whose contents on Psalm 119 ff. are not original;
likewise, every commentary cited therein on Psalms 112–37 was copied from Yalqut
shimoni. Even in the case of Genesis Rabbah, the printers mingled diverse ele-
ments in it, interweaving sections from the Tanhfi uma and from other sources. All
this goes to show that the later authorities who served as printers and proofreaders
in the Hebrew printing houses did not regard the midrashim they worked with as
closed texts.33 Here is yet another manifestation of the same paradox I discussed
above: the very act of printing gave final shape to certain works, and occasionally
without inner justification. The aforementioned Mantua edition of Midrash tan-
hfi uma determined the shape of the midrash; the numerous later editions all fol-
lowed it. Such was the case as well with Seder eliyahu; its later printers followed
the exemplar not of the Venice 5358/1598 edition, but of R. Samuel Heida’s Prague
5436/1676 edition, which was, according to its printer, fixed with the aid of the
providential spirit that descended upon him. Indeed, having shown how open
midrash remained even at this late date, we may ask again how completely even
the editors of the classical midrash collections viewed their work as completed and
sealed acts. Once again, it is obvious that a simplistic comparison will not be
sufficient, but there is reason to speculate that many of the early editors did not
regard what passed through their hands as closed works to which no one was
allowed to add or subtract material. A fine example of this view is provided by the
various recensions of the Tanhfi uma, among them those included in the Midrash
Rabbah, but this is a separate discussion.
I can bring this discussion full circle with a few final comments on the tran-
sition from midrash to yalqut and on what seems to be the decline of the latter
genre. As I remarked at the beginning of this essay, if one reads the existing
scholarship, one receives the impression of a sharp, clear transition between mid-
rashic creativity and the period of the anthologies. This picture is mistaken because
it derives from some less than cautious transferences of characteristics unique to
classical midrash to all midrashic literature. The result is the habit of trying to fit
all midrashic literature into the procrustean bed that sharply divides the entire
tradition into “exegetical” and “homiletical” midrash when, in fact, this distinction
applies only to the contrast between Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah or
Pesiqta derav kahana. These types of organization, when they are found mixed
together in the anthologies, are construed as characteristic of the broken forms by
which the anthological genre is defined. Even experts lose sight of the fact that
this kind of mixture was already present in midrashic literature after its classical
period (which concluded no later than the seventh century). So, too, the use of
the “adaptation of ancient midrashic materials” as a criterion for defining anthol-
ogies. Here again, scholars overlook the fact that such adaptations had been made
for a long time and that they clearly characterized the Tanhfi uma tradition, inter
alia.34 And so, too, other supposedly clear defining characteristics that scholars
170 The Middle Ages
offer to define the anthological genre actually abound in midrashic literature from
the so-called interim period of aggadic creativity (from 640 until the end of the
tenth century).35
Still, it is not unreasonable to try to define a beginning for the anthological
period. Even if we cannot offer a firm determination, and the genre’s initial chan-
nels of diffusion remain unclear, it is not too much to suppose an Eastern con-
nection. Some evidence for this may come from the work Pitron torah (which
should perhaps be seen as the oldest extant anthology) and from Leqahfi tov, which
originated in Byzantium. Viewing from this perspective, it may also be possible
for us to question anew the accepted Western orientation of the works of R. Moses
Hadarshan. In mentioning these three compositions, my intention is not to suggest
that the literature of the anthologies directly evolved in a chain from these works.
Any attempt at this stage to present a “genealogical tree” for this literature would
be contrived. Nonetheless, it can be stated unequivocally that, from the time the
anthologies emerged, the genre lived an intensive life for hundreds of years—
indeed, until the coming of print. At that point, the genre began to diminish,
apparently because midrashim now became readily available and the need for the
anthology vanished. Yemen, however, again followed its own path. There, the
creation of the midrashim continued energetically until at least the seventeenth
century.36
It is perhaps more accurate to speak not of the decline of the genre but of its
conversion and integration into a more encompassing genre, namely, aggadic com-
mentary in works like Ein yaaqov, including the booklet appended to it on the
aggadot of the Palestinian Talmud, already mentioned here several times; Zikhron
torat moshe of R. Moses ben Joseph Figo (Constantinople, 5313–14/1543–44); R.
Jacob Luzzatto’s Kaftor vaferahfi (Basel, 5741/1581); and R. Samuel Jaffe Ashkenazi’s
Yefe mareh (Venice, 5350/1590).37 In this context, it is also worth asking whether
such non-Hebraic compositions as Tsenah urenah or Meam loez belong to the
anthological genre; these works are not customarily mentioned by scholars working
in the field.38 On the other hand, even if we wish to delimit the anthological genre
rather than broaden it by adding works of aggadic commentary and compilations
in translation, it should be remembered that creativity in this sphere reemerges at
specific cultural junctures, and that is certainly not happenstance. Take, for ex-
ample, the case of Yalqut reuveni of R. Reuven Hacohen, first printed during the
author’s lifetime in Prague in 5420/1660, which united the worlds of kabbalah and
midrash. Certain well-defined reasons can be adduced for the revival of the genre
in the modern period when many new anthologies were composed: I. B. Levner’s
Kol aggadot yisrael, M. J. Berdyczewski’s Mimekor yisrael, Hfi . N. Bialik’s and Y. H
fi.
Rawnitzki’s Sefer haaggadah, E. E. Halevy’s Yalqut haaggadah, and L. Ginzberg’s
Legends of the Jews, as well as R. Baruch Halevi Epstein’s Torah temimah and
R. M. M. Kasher’s Torah shelemah and Yalqut sinai. These works (and still others)
can shed light on their predecessors; it is not too much to suppose that like literary
phenomena are nurtured by like causes.
In conclusion, as difficult as it may be to locate the precise beginning of the
midrashic-aggadic anthological tradition, it is no less difficult to determine its
conclusion, especially if we include in the genre its capacity to assume multiform

and renovated guises. Nevertheless, if indeed the midrashic anthology was meant
primarily to be a literary medium in the manuscript age for the transmission of
classical texts of aggadic literature when they were rare, scattered, and not widely
available, it is also the case that the anthologizing of these texts was a positive
response both to a felt personal need (as in the gathering of the ancient Megillot
hasetarim) and to the compilers’ desire to impart to the masses the essence of
rabbinic aggadic tradition, which they regarded as something that could lead peo-
ple “to recognize He who spoke and the world came into being.” The labor of
anthological collection did not end once “iron pen and lead” were set into mo-
tion—that is, with the introduction of the printing press—when the words of the
sages became readily available to all in their own form. Still, time marches on.
Nothing remains static. Things past are viewed through the lens of the present,
and they inevitably alter their image. New developments are forced into existence
by the vicissitudes of historical circumstances, spiritual interests, the languages
serving the author and his audience, and other such factors. Literature, after all,
evolves from within as well as in response to its environment.
Notes
1. On the work of joining sections, done in Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, until the completion of the text, Devarim rabbah shel benei sefarad [Deuteronomy
Rabbah of the sons of Spain], i.e., the Lieberman edition of Deuteronomy Rabbah, see
M. B. Lerner’s important article “New Light on the Spanish Recension of Deuteronomy
Rabbah [1]: The Evolution of Ed. Lieberman” [Hebrew], Teudah 11 (Studies in the Aggadic
Midrashim in Memory of Zvi Meir Rabinowitz, Tel Aviv, 1996): 107–45. This phenomenon
of “building” midrash, like that of creating what I have termed an “anthology of midrashim”
(a good example of which is Midrash hfi akhamim; see H. Albeck, Mavo umaftehfi ot livreshit
rabbah [Introduction and indices to Genesis Rabbah] [Jerusalem, 1965], p. 115), merits its
own discussion. I will not enter into it, although in theory and in practice, lines of similarity
can be found between their modus operandi and those of the compilers of the yalqutim,
as well as in the manner of treating the homiletic interpretations that constitute the works.
2. Rashi, however, called the composition yesod, which he uses to mean “book.” Un-
like many of his day and later, Rashi distinguished clearly between midrash and what was
not midrash.
3. On the acceptance of Numbers Rabbah, see H. Mack, “Numbers Rabbah: Its Date,
Location, and Circulation” [Hebrew], Teudah 11 (supra, n. 1):91–105.
4. Abraham ben Azriel acknowledges Leqahfi tov by name in his Arugat habosem, but
he also refers to it simply as a “midrash.” Moreover, he attributes statements to the Mek-
hiltah and to Genesis Rabbah that do not originate there but in Leqahfi tov. See E. E.
Urbach, Arugat habosem, 4 vols. (Jerusalem, 1963), 4:175; see also S. Buber’s introduction
to Midrash leqahfi tov (Vilna, 1880), pp. 58–59. Furthermore, Leqahfi tov’s title in its first
printed edition (Venice, 5306/1546), Pesiqta zutarta, contributed to its mistaken reputation
as a stock midrash (R. Azariah del Rossi even thought the yalqut was based on an earlier
172 The Middle Ages
midrash to which R. Tobias merely added; see Meor einayim, “Imrei binah,” chap. 19.
What concerns us is the widespread phenomenon of offering citations via the yalqutim
while attributing words to their sources (see later notes). For more on the method of quoting
midrash in Arugat habosem, see Urbach, Arugat habosem, pp. 168–69.
5. It was first printed in Salonika in two parts: on the Prophets and Hagiographa in
5281/1521; on the Pentateuch in 5286–87/1526–27.
6. See E. E. Urbach, Sefer pitron torah (Jerusalem, 1978), introduction and esp. pp. 28–
33.
7. Seder eliyahu (Vienna, 5664), introduction, p. 102.
8. L. Ginzberg, Al halakhah veaggadah [On halakhah and aggadah] (Tel Aviv, 1960),
pp. 261–62; and cf. Ish Shalom’s remarks on Pirqei derabbi eliezer, Seder eliyahu, ff.
9. This title may not even have been the original one. In the colophon to the oldest
manuscript of Yalqut shimoni (Oxford: Bodleian, 2637), written in 1308, the copyist, Ka-
lonymus ben R. Jacob, calls the composition “a book . . . [whose author] is R. Simeon
Hadarshan of blessed memory.” In any case, the transitional stages in the meaning of the
term yalqut, from its biblical sense as “a shepherd’s sack” (I Sam. 17:40; see Targum Jon-
athan, Rashi’s and Radak’s commentaries to the verse) to its medieval usage as a collection
into which excerpts from many books are gathered, remains to be clarified; see further,
n. 13.
10. On this and on the difference between them with regard to their use of sources,
see S. Buber, introduction to the Makhiri to Psalms (Berdichev, 1900), pp. 12–13.
11. For further discussion, see n. 27. For a fuller list of Yemenite midrashim and
biblical anthologies, see M. B. Lerner, “The Case as It Is and as It Should Be in the
Publication of the Midrash Hagadol” [Hebrew], Peamim 10 (1982):110; cf. M. M. Kasher,
Torah sheleimah 1 (Jerusalem, 1969), pp. 10ff., who includes among anthologies both Rashi’s
commentary to the Torah and R. H fi ezekiah ben Manoahfi ’s commentary on the Pentateuch,
Hfi izzequni. For the most recent survey of “Yemenite midrashim,” see Y. Ratzaby, Toratan
shelivnei teiman [Yemenite Jewish Literature: Authors and Their Writings] (Kiryat Ono,
1995), pp. 102–15.
12. Some consider it the first Yemenite “midrash.” They date Midrash hagadol to the
fourteenth century; see Ratzaby, Toratan, p. 102.
13. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, in his dictionary under the entry “midrash,” notes one ancient
appearance of this meaning in Avot derabbi natan, version A, chap. 18 (Schechter 67), but
this seems to be a misreading of the source. In any case, M. Margolies (Leviticus Rabbah,
introduction, p. xxvi, nn. 78–79; and p. xxvii, n. 47) notes that the term “midrash” as a title
for midrashim is a late usage that replaces the earlier term “haggadah” or “aggadah.” Either
way, we must look up the dictionary meanings of terms used in the world of midrashim,
anthologies, and similar works. These terms includes perush and perushim (singular and
plural forms for “commentary”), which often serve to denote collections of commentaries
but also works sometimes called yalqutim; see, for example, the terms used by the author
of Sekhel tov to describe his work; “foundation” (yesod); “booklet” (kunteres); “compilations”
(liqutim); “book” (sefer); and, of course, midrash, which also serves as an appellative for the
sayings of commentators, and not only in traditional Yemenite usage (see n. 27 here). The
scribe of R. Shemaiah Hashoshani’s commentary called it “the midrash founded by Rabbi
Shemaiah”; see also R. I. Aboab, Menorat hamaor (Mosad Harav Kook edition), p. 21. To
the best of my knowledge, the terms “notebooks” (mahfi barot) and “collections” (asuppot)
did not serve to designate midrashic anthologies in the Middle Ages (the book Haasuppot
of R. Eliyahu bar Isaac of Carcassone, a student of R. Eliezer of Worms, is a book of
halakhah). Indeed, Sephardi authors spoke of “masters of collections” (baalei asuppot) and
Rabbi Abraham ben Ezra, in his remarks on Ecclesiastes 12:11, defined them as those who
“gather from many books and compose notebooks.” To characterize the genre of antholog-
ical literature accurately, we must also consider its relationship to the literature of the
maftehfi ot (“indices”) to Rabbinic aggadah, homiletic interpretations, and so on, as well as
its links to the literature of the commentaries to aggadah, which themselves were based on
compilations. See my concluding remarks.
14. On this work (also known as Haggadah shel shavuot), see E. Yassif, Sippur haam
ha ivri [The Hebrew folktale] (Jerusalem, 1994), chap. 5, passim. Yassif correctly included,
as part of the discussion, the H fi ibbur yafeh mehayeshuah and Sefer hamaasim.
15. See Buber’s vacillations regarding R. Menahem ben R. Solomon’s Sekhel tov (Italy,
1139) until he decides to call it a “midrash”; Sekhel tov to Genesis and Exodus (Berlin,
1900), pp. xiv–xvi.
16. In this regard, Ein yaaqov differs from the work Haggadot hatalmud, which he
rejected (and which has often been overlooked by scholars who have surveyed the field of
anthologies). Still, the two works share an aspect, which also sets them apart from other
anthologies: they require a defined corpus from which to begin, and they then try to extract
from it what they called aggadah. The parameters they used are themselves a matter for
further research. See, for example, the statements of R. Samuel Jaffe Ashkenazi (Yefeh toar
[Venice, 5350/1590], introduction, 2b), who complained against the collection of aggadot
from the Palestinian Talmud in Ein yaaqov that its author “did not record one in a
thousand . . . and what is more, there are errors of deletion and insertion, because he did
not have at hand the book of the Palestinian [Talmud], but only one misleading booklet,
as he wrote in his introduction.”
17. The anthologist of Yalqut shimoni often abridges material, even when he quotes
talmudic discussions and cuts to the conclusions. This entire matter can now be discussed
in light of the books of Dov Hyman, Meqorot yalqut shimoni to Prophets and Hagiographa
(Jerusalem, 1965) and to Pentateuch (Jerusalem, 1974); cf. Yalqut shimoni to the Penta-
teuch, ed. D. Hyman and I. Shiloni (Jerusalem, 1973–92).
18. See, for example, Buber’s remarks on R. Tobias b. R. Eliezer, Leqahfi tov, intro-
duction, pp. 28, 31.
19. On the tendency to eclecticism in the realm of biblical commentary, see S. Japhet,
“The Nature and Distribution of Medieval Compilatory Commentaries in Light of Rabbi
Joseph Kara’s Commentary on the Book of Job,” in M. Fishbane, ed., The Midrashic Imag-
ination (New York, 1993), pp. 98–130. It is possible to use the literature of biblical com-
mentary to illuminate that of the midrashic anthologies, and vice versa. On a similar ten-
dency, as manifested in a collection of folk narratives/exempla, see Yassif, Sippur haam
haivri.
20. S. Buber edition (Berdichev, 1900), p. 3. The introduction is restated in similar
language in Yalqut hamakhiri to the Twelve Minor Prophets and to Isaiah.
21. R. Jacob notes that he culled his material from 234 works, and he lists them.
22. S. A. Poznansky, “The Yalqut Talmud Torah of R. Jacob b. R. H fi ananel Siqili”
[Hebrew], Hatsofeh meerets hagar 3:1 (5673/1913):5. The writing of the work was completed,
it seems, in Damascus.
23. See E. Horowitz’s critique of D. Hyman’s “The Sources of the Yalqut Shimeoni”
[Hebrew], Hadarom 24 (1967):216–20. If we accept this definition, we may include in this
category the anthology of R. Judah Lirma, Tsintsenet haman, discovered by M. Kahana in
the Firkovich collection in Leningrad (“Midrash Preserved in the Leningrad and Moscow
Libraries” [Hebrew], Asufot 6 [1992]; see ibid., pp. 62–67). Among other things, Kahana
quoted lengthy excerpts from the introduction to Tsintsenet haman, and there is cause to
compare them with the introductions of Hamakhiri and R. Jacob Sikili, portions of which
have been cited here. R. Judah Lirma writes, inter alia, of his intention to quote the sayings
174 The Middle Ages
of sages whose “books are not to be found, [and with whom] most people are not familiar,
for they are dispersed at the ends of the earth.”
24. See S. Lieberman, Midreshei teiman [Yemenite midrashim], 2d. ed. (Jerusalem,
1992), p. 39; and see ibid., pp. 18–22, his remarks on this midrash.
25. On this matter, see R. Jacob Sikili: Poznansky (supra, n. 22), p. 6; and on the
preference shown by the compiler of Midrash hagadol for Genesis Rabbah as the basic text
for Midrash hagadol to Genesis, see J. Tubi, Hamidrash hagadol—meqorotav umivnehu
[The sources and construction of the midrash hagadol] (Doctoral Diss., The Hebrew Uni-
versity, Jerusalem, 1994), p. 287ff.
26. See Midrash hahfi efets, M. Havatselet edition (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 489–91.
27. Ibid., p. 489. Tubi notes in his remarks that the redactor of Midrash hahfi efets called
(inter alia) the commentaries of Rashi and H fi izzequni, “Rashi’s midrash” and “Hfi izzequni’s
midrash”; see my citation of Rabbi Kasher in n. 11.
28. Ibid., p. 490.
29. For example, the position of Yalqut midreshei teiman, constructed along the lines
of Midrash hagadol (a rough generalization), and written in Hebrew, must be clarified in
Tubi’s system. On midrash and commentary in the Yemenite midrashim, see Lieberman,
Midreshei teiman, pp. 6, 10.
30. The compiler of Sekhel tov cites the Sheiltot under the heading, “so said our
Rabbis”; see Buber, introduction, p. xxx. Perhaps this is connected to the phenomenon that
the term H fi aZaL (hfi akhameinu zikhronam livrakhah, “our Sages of blessed memory”) and
others like it were not used exclusively in the Middle Ages to refer to the sages of the
Talmud and midrash.
31. Compare his remarks in the introduction to the long commentary in Derekh has-
helishit with his remarks in Derekh harevi it to the short commentary. See my book, Lehavin
divrei hfi akhamim: mivhfi ar divrei mavo laaggadah velamidrash mishel hfi akhamei yemei ha-
beinayim (Jerusalem, 2000).
32. See, for example, M. Ish Shalom (Seder eliyahu, introduction, pp. 87–88), on quo-
tations from Seder eliyahu as it appeared in Reshit hfi okhmah of R. Elijah de Vidas by way
of the Yalqut. Many certainly regarded the Yalqut as highly as did S. Y. Agnon, who wrote:
“First and foremost is the book Yalqut shim’oni [Simeon’s compilation], by Rabbi Shim’on
the Greatest of the expounders. All who seek to know the Torah, its interpretations, its
allusions, its elaborations, and its secrets will find this book edifying” (Present at Sinai,
trans. M. Swirsky [Philadelphia, 1994], p. 9). Indeed, the quoting of midrashic sayings by
way of the anthologies was prevalent enough a practice as early as ancient times; see M. B.
Lerner, “Concerning the Source of a Quotation in the Epistle of R. Solomon b. Judah and
Studies in Midrash shir hashirim” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 52 (1983):581–90.
33. The great diversity of manuscripts assuredly had an impact here. There were
copyists who shortened and added as they wished, as is obvious from the manuscripts to
any midrash. I will mention as a generic example the Paris manuscript (Arles, 1291) of
the rabbah midrashim (which include Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, and five por-
tions of Numbers Rabbah). The printers of Midrash Rabbah in Constantinople (5272/
1512), apparently on their own initiative, appended to Leviticus Rabbah three sections
from Seder eliyahu, chap. 6, at the end of its portions A, B, and C. See also M. Kahana,
“Genesis Rabbah MS Vatican 60 and Its Parallels” [Hebrew], Teudah 11 (supra, n. 1):17–
60.
34. See, for example, Lieberman in the introduction to his edition of Deuteronomy
Rabbah, and my article “From Sermon to Story: The Transformation of the Akedah,”
Prooftexts 6 (1986):97–116.
35. For now, see my article “Between Redaction and Rewriting—On the Nature of
the Later Midrashic Literature” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of
Jewish Studies, section 3 (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 57–62.
36. Among them Midrash hfi emdat hayamim, attributed to R. Shalem Shabazzi of the
seventeenth century. The work was first printed in Jerusalem in the year 5645/1885 by the
traveler R. Jacob Sappir. On this, see Lieberman, Midreshei teiman, pp. 32–39; Ratzaby,
Toratan, p. 53.
37. See on this supra, n. 13, and my remarks there on the matter of “indices” to
aggadah.
38. On the question of the linguistic criterion, see earlier, near n. 29.
9
eli yassif
The Hebrew Narrative

Anthology in the
Middle Ages
he history of the Hebrew story in the Middle Ages corresponds, to a great

Textent, to that of the literary anthology. In turn, the evolution of the Hebrew
1
tale in the Middle Ages is linked to what was arguably the most important cultural
phenomenon of the early Jewish Middle Ages, namely, the “separation of disci-
plines.” Talmudic literature, central to the literary activity of the preceding pe-
riod—and, to a great extent, of the Middle Ages as well—is an all-encompassing
creation. This one composition incorporates most of the period’s cultural com-
ponents: scriptural commentary and medicine, law and astronomy, linguistics and
historiography, prayer and liturgical poetry, botany and agronomy, all in the course
of a single, unbroken, and largely undifferentiated discussion. By the height of the
geonic period (eighth and ninth centuries), a tendency had evolved to create
special works on law and Hebrew grammar, Jewish philosophy and hermeneutics,
liturgical poetry, and Jewish history.2 This important cultural phenomenon was
undoubtedly connected to the parallel development in Arab culture of the first
centuries of Islam. Arab scholars in Iraq and Persia, the lands in which the phe-
nomenon first manifested itself in Jewish culture, distinguished between separate
branches of knowledge, defined the various subjects, and devised special works in
the different branches.3 The question of who influenced whom is of no conse-
quence here. Jewish culture may have borrowed the norms of the ruling culture,
or perhaps Jewish culture’s internal needs led to the creation of new modes of
expression, which influenced Muslim culture. Like any complex cultural phenom-
enon, it was undoubtedly the result of a number of interlocking factors, and only
the particular confluence of an encompassing cultural atmosphere with the spe-
cific needs of the Jewish world of that time can explain its appearance.
Hebrew literature’s first literary anthologies were the product of that time and
phenomenon. Although the collections of medieval Hebrew tales, with a few ex-
ceptions, were anonymously composed, scholarship has proven that two of the
earliest—Midrash aseret hadibberot (Midrash on the Ten Commandments) and
The Alphabet of Ben Sira—date from the eighth and ninth centuries and origi-
176
The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages 177
nated in the cultural expanse of Iraq-Persia. The prominent characteristic of these

anthologies, in keeping with the separation of disciplines, is that they contain
stories alone. This is not an insignificant matter: at a time when the Talmud and
the midrash constituted the exclusive literary model, such an esthetic decision (to
contain only narrative material) was culturally and socially audacious. Indeed, the
independence that the Hebrew tale strived for in the Middle Ages was not realized
quickly. Until later in the Middle Ages (the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries),
production of midrashic anthologies such as Yalqut shimoni, Midrash hagadol,
Yalqut hamakhiri, and Yalqut reuveni continued, zealously preserving the literary
frameworks of the past.4 These traditional midrashic anthologies did not carry
forward the endeavor to create new literary frameworks, which would establish
new contexts for the period’s Hebrew literary creativity. This task fell to the two
collections of tales aforementioned, the Midrash aseret hadibberot and The Al-
phabet of Ben Sira.
Midrash aseret hadibberot epitomizes the transitional stage. It preserves the
classic pattern of the midrash: biblical verse, its homiletic interpretation, an ex-
emplary tale, and a “circular” conclusion with the opening words of the midrash
and the verse. Yet all of these are formal features, a kind of midrashic veneer over
a collection of folktales. Although the tales are offered ostensibly to exemplify the
scriptural commandments, the homiletic portion of Midrash aseret hadibberot is
minimized. It has already been noted that the connection between the opening
commandment and the tales that follow is often tenuous and forced, making it
seem as though the editor-author sought to justify the multitude of tales by tacking
them on to biblical verses.5 His artistic efforts focused more on the development
of the tales than on emphasizing their exemplary features, a significant departure
from the way stories are employed in Rabbinic literature.
Moreover, while all the composition’s homiletic passages connecting the com-
mandments to the tales originated in Rabbinic literature, most of the tales them-
selves, in the various formulae of Midrash aseret hadibberot, are fresh, appearing
here for the first time in Hebrew literature. This suggests that the anthologist
sought new and original narrative material while relying on haphazard, uninspired
selections from Rabbinic literature for the homiletical-didactic portion. His dual
loyalty is therein exposed: on the one hand, he cannot divorce himself from the
literary norms of the preceding period; on the other, he wants to give expression
to new literary trends that focus on the tale itself instead of on its homiletic context.
The composition’s formal-midrashic framework made possible its acceptance by
the period’s Jewish culture. Its form, however, more closely resembles that of the
framework grouping (see later) than classic midrash, giving it the latitude for a
wider variety of tales and the development of their plots than anything that had
been accepted earlier in the period.
This clashing of orientations, so prominent in Midrash aseret hadibberot, is
muted by the time of The Alphabet of Ben Sira. Unlike the earlier compiler, who
maintained the traditional midrashic forms even when he filled them with basi-
cally new contents, the authorial hand behind the Alphabet’s composition has
given up even this formal allegiance. This author selected the literary pattern of
the framework tale—Ben Sira as an infant of five is called to Nebuchadnezzar’s
178 The Middle Ages
court, where he answers the ruler’s questions and riddles in story form—in order
to bind together the fundamentally new narrative material. This being the case,
Midrash aseret hadibberot and The Alphabet of Ben Sira can be viewed as two
sequential stages in the development of the Hebrew anthology of the Middle Ages.
The first still feels duty-bound to preserve the normative midrashic pattern, al-
though the material it presents to the Hebrew reader is fundamentally new. The
second is more daring and revolutionary—as is its narrative content—and forgoes
completely the literary norms prevalent in the earlier Hebrew literature. It presents
the narrative material as part of a new literary pattern, apparently intended for an
audience of readers other than Torah scholars and study-hall devotees.
The transition described here, from the anthology with a midrashic construc-
tion to one with a framework construction, is not the end stage of development
for anthologies in the Hebrew literature of the Middle Ages. Another anthological
construction was a collection of tales without any formal editorial framework. Ex-
amples include: the collection of tales from the early thirteenth century preserved
in an Oxford manuscript; the cycle of Yemenite folktales, also, it seems, dating
from the thirteenth century, published by Gaster; and the collections dating from
the late Middle Ages, such as the collections of tales in the Jerusalem Mss., and
the various editions of the Mayse-bukh, in Hebrew and Yiddish.6 Almost paradox-
ically, it is precisely those amorphous anthologies of tales, with no editorial hand
or narrative framework to bind them together, which indicate a more developed
literary phase. In these anthologies, the cultural objective of “separation of disci-
plines” has already been completely achieved: each story is independent, free of
any ideational, exegetical, or literary ties to the other tales in the anthology, col-
lected together solely on the basis of their narrative character. In other words, in
these anthologies the literary text is not beholden for its existence to any external
factor, such as an idea or context, and it exists only on the strength of its own
merits. This is the great difference between story cycles in Rabbinic literature and
narrative anthologies of the Middle Ages: The former were created in order to
reinforce a position or illustrate the legal or ideological issues into whose context
they are woven, and the ties between the cycles’ tales are ideational, exegetic, or
associative.7 In contrast, the narrative anthologies of the Middle Ages demonstrate
near total independence: they appear as distinct compositions, and their constit-
uent narrative texts are gathered without ideational or other intent. Each text can
stand alone; the justification for its existence and narrative development is un-
questionably literary. It seems to me that this is an important cultural development
toward educating the audience of readers of literary works that the reading of
literature is self-justifying; it need not rely on other motives such as education,
ethics, or religious precepts.
Alongside the framework anthologies and those containing independent tales,
the Hebrew literature of the Middle Ages developed another type—the chrono-
logical anthology. To this category belong such works as the Chronicles of Moses,
Midrash vayissau (The wars of Jacob’s sons), The Scroll of Ahimaaz, Shevet ye-
hudah, Shalshelet haqabbalah, and Divrei yosef. These anthologies are generally
constructed from a collection of independent texts, the great majority of which
belong to the genre of historical legend, culled from various written and oral
sources and arranged by editors in chronological order, as historical documenta-
tion of an individual hero (Moses, Jacob), a family (Ahimaaz), a community
(Shevet yehudah, Divrei yosef), or the history of Jewish tradition (Shalshelet ha-
qabbalah).
The generic division mentioned here, between the framework anthology and
the chronological one, interestingly coincides with the geographical divide be-
tween east and west. That is to say, most of the framework anthologies, especially
those dating from the start of the period, were the product of the eastern Jewish
communities—Babylonia, Persia, north Africa—whereas the chronological an-
thologies came out of Europe. Although by the close of the Middle Ages the
eastern communities had also produced chronological compositions (such as Di-
vrei yosef), whereas independent story groupings, such as those of the Oxford
manuscript and the Mayse-bukh, had been compiled in Europe, for the most part
the generic models were distributed along geographical-cultural lines. This distri-
bution may indicate outside influence on the creation of the anthology in Jewish
literature: one salient formal characteristic of narrative traditions among eastern
peoples is its inclusion in a framework. The Arabian Nights, The Tales of Sendebar,
and Kalila wa-dimnah were vastly influential examples of eastern, framework-
bound anthologies.8 European literature of the early Middle Ages was, conversely,
characterized by rich and developed historiographical writing, beginning with the
historiography of families, tribes, regions, and kingdoms, and on to world histories.9
There seems to be further evidence of this phenomenon in that Jews living under
Islamic rule were familiar with such compositions as The Tales of Sendebar and
Kalila wa-dimnah, which had been translated into Hebrew. The Book of Josippon
and the Romance of Alexander the Great appeared in Europe in Hebrew and thus
became part of Jewish culture of the time.
A historiographical composition, according to its definition, cannot be con-
sidered an anthology. It is ordered chronologically and uses all existing documen-
tation and evidence to present as complete a historical picture as possible of the
period or event it treats. On the face of it, nothing is more antithetical to this
definition than the anthology, whose editor collects texts, usually literary ones,
according to his own preexisting taste and ideology, as representative examples of
broader cultural elements. In the Middle Ages, however, the perception of histor-
ical writing and the attitude to literary sources were fundamentally different from
these principles, which are derived from modern perceptions.10 Indeed, the most
important, encompassing, and paradigmatic anthological work to come out of the
Jewish culture of the period belongs to this category. This is the chronological
anthology of Eleazar ben-Asher Halevi, Sefer hazikhronot (SZ, The Book of Mem-
ory) from the first half of the fourteenth century, consisting of some 400 manuscript
pages, in the Bodleian Library, and as yet unpublished in its entirety.11 A detailed
analysis of SZ’s composition and construction may more clearly define the concept
of anthology as perceived by medieval Jewish culture, the principles guiding the
collection, selection, and editing of its components, and the ideational and social
basis underlying such a literary endeavor.
180 The Middle Ages
We can begin by describing the composition and its author. An unpretentious Jew
by the name of Eleazar ben-Asher Halevi, who professes to be neither rabbi nor
scholar, writes a will in the early fourteenth century. In it he bequeaths to his
children a single item, admonishing them neither to sell it nor to let it out of the
family’s hands, but to safeguard it as something precious and irreplaceable. The
legacy is a single volume in which he invested all his energies and wealth, copying
it out with his own hand, which he calls Sefer hazikhronot.
Accounting to his children for the content of this priceless property, Eleazar
Halevi says: “For I have seen many scrolls of the external books [sfarim hahfi i-
tsonim], dispersed and scattered about . . . I have set them down in writing for
admirers of parables and poetical style [melitsa] . . . though I know that most men
will not approve; in their hearts they will question how I could have invested so
much time and effort in such a book, on what seems to them mere parables.”12
Toward the end of the will, he apologizes again: “though I knew those that follow
me will accuse me and mock me in saying: what an ignoramus, to write a book
and put so much effort into a book of parables like these . . . to compose a book
of parables like this.” Eleazar uses two generic terms here: “external books” and
“parables.” It is not difficult to ascertain his intent in using the first term. By
“dispersed and scattered about,” he meant unknown books, or works not studied
in Jewish educational institutions. His reference is apparently to the noncanonical
works of the period’s Jewish literature. Moreover, since this composition includes
the largest collection of apocryphal texts translated into Hebrew, he may have
been referring to them when he said, “external,” which was also the talmudic
sages’ term for them.13
The technical term appearing over and over in the course of the will is mashal
(parable). In biblical Hebrew, this concept had various meanings, beginning with
proverb and rhetorical language and ending with a complex tale. The term had
the same variety of meanings in the Rabbinic period and on into the Middle
Ages.14 The Latin parallel is fabula, which for medieval culture denoted all types
of tales—from comic stories by way of animal tales to historical stories and ex-
empla.15 Eleazar Halevi uses the term in this sense, giving us an indication of the
literary homogeneity he perceived in the plentiful material he gathered for his
composition. He labels all the varieties of literary types as “parable” and in so
doing apparently distinguishes the narrative texts from the canonical texts such as
legal rulings, responsa, liturgical poetry, and so on. As Salo W. Baron put it, SZ
is composed of “tracts loosely connected with one another,”16 as the work includes
a wide range of literary types, subjects, and narrative patterns that differ enormously
from one another. What Baron stated negatively, I construe as positive: Sefer ha-
zikhronot is the greatest, most encompassing, and diverse literary anthology of the
Jewish Middle Ages that we know of. It embraces nearly all the period’s known
literary types: midrashic story, historical tale, local legends, hagiography, novellas,
women’s stories, parables, comic tales, martyrological narratives, miraculous rescue
of a community, tales of war and heroism, journey tales, and foundation legends.
Yet Eleazar also states in his will, “I wrote them in a book . . . [they] will see,
comprehend, and know the truth of some of the acts committed beneath the sky,
and some of the trials and tribulations to find our fathers in their exile . . . lest
their descendants forget. Therefore I named the book The Book of Memory . . . as
I have collected in this book, The Book of Memory, all that has happened and all
that has been done from the creation of the world until today.”17 Eleazar’s chosen
title for his book is very significant, echoing as it does the verse from the Scroll
of Esther (6:1): “On that night the king could not sleep, so he commanded the
book of memory of the chronicles to be brought; and they were read before the
king.” In other words, the conceptual identification of the term “book of memory”
with “chronicles”—the Hebrew equivalent of the word “history”—indicates, from
another perspective, the character and function of the composition. Indeed, as
Eleazar Halevi said, Sefer hazikhronot opens with the creation of the world, covers
the prominent events in Jewish history such as the Exodus, the period of the
judges, the Second Temple, the Destruction and Exile, the gezerot tatnav (that is,
the massacres of 1096), and concludes with the End of Days and the coming of
the Messiah. From this perspective, the work is constructed according to a purely
chronological principle, establishing an encompassing historical picture of the
world and the Jewish people.
What follows from this description is that Sefer hazikhronot carries an internal,
essential contradiction between its character as a literary anthology and its con-
struction and orientation as a historical work. Literary texts have a narrative-
entertainment orientation or are, in R. Eleazar’s words, “for admirers of parables
and poetical style . . . who have no other pursuit.” He also asks, “for who would
spend money on scribes for such a book?” and uses words such as “leisure” and
“broad-spiritedness” to describe the disposition suited to its reading. In other words,
before us is a self-proclaimed example of recreational reading in Hebrew literature
of the Middle Ages.18 Yet Eleazar Halevi defines the composition as a historical
book with a didactic function: “So that they will ponder, see, comprehend, and
know the truth of some of the acts committed beneath the sky, and some of the
trials and tribulations to find our fathers in their exile . . . lest their descendants
forget.” In other words, intrinsic to the author-editor’s perception and orientation
is that same duality we discerned regarding the nature of the texts included in
Sefer hazikhronot and their overall construction.
The duality of literary nature and historical orientation in SZ becomes very
clear when examined against the background of the time and place in which it
was compiled. In the 100 years between 1250 and 1350, a genre of historical writing
known as “universal history” developed, mostly in Germany and the surrounding
area. This genre included such titles as Weltchronik, Chronikon mundi, Historia
univeralis, Summa istoriarum, Memoriale historiarum,19 all of which echo the title
Sefer hazikhronot (“Book of Memory,” or “Chronicles”). Students of the genre in
Christian culture have defined it as a history of the world from its creation until
the author’s time, and sometimes on to the end of time and the Second Coming.
For example, Aron Gurevich writes:
The Middle Ages saw the efflorescence of the Encyclopaedias, the Summae, the
Specula. All of these exhibit that same obsession with comprehensiveness which
we find in medieval universal histories, which claim to tell the story of mankind
from Adam to the moment of their writing—or even beyond that to the end of
the world and the Day of Judgment.20
182 The Middle Ages
It indeed seems that no other Jewish work of the period so precisely corresponds
to these notions of European historiography: there is a single universal history and,
as Jacques Le Goff has noted, “that history has a beginning and an end.”21 So,
too, Eleazar Halevi bracketed his chronicle between these two temporal mo-
ments—the beginning and end of history—basing himself on authoritative Jewish
documents like the midrash, which “documented” the process of the Creation and
the visionary books that describe in detail the End of Days and the time of the
Messiah.
It may be possible to find more than a circumstantial connection between
this genre of European historiography and Sefer hazikhronot. One of the longest
and strangest tales to appear in SZ concerns Virgil the Necromancer. Eleazar
Halevi inserts this tale among those of Titus and his punishment for desecrating
the Temple. It is an erotic-magic novella about the sorcerer’s attempt to seduce
the wife of a Roman nobleman, and how he punishes her for rejecting him by
humiliating her before all the denizens of Rome.22 The tale is told here with detail
and polish, and it bears consideration that this was perhaps a translation from one
of the European languages. The first complete known version of the story appears
in the book of Jansen Enikel of Vienna, Weltchroniken, in the year 1280, one of
the first and most popular universal histories.23 This link between SZ’s inclusion
of so alien a tale, and the European work preceding it by not too many years (a
work that was one of the foundations of the historiographical genre, written in
Eleazar Halevi’s language—medieval German—and whose version of the tale is
similar) is not necessarily an accident. It may indicate that Eleazar Halevi’s histo-
riographical conception, as well as the literary techniques he employs, were influ-
enced directly by a similar work of European literature.
Earlier chronicles and annals, or various sorts of literary works, were the pri-
mary raw materials from which the European universal histories were composed.
In other words, the duality of SZ was not atypical for the culture of the time and
place. Eleazar Halevi was not alone in recognizing the possibility of employing
literary texts in historical writing, provided they bore the “authority” of time (that
is, they came first, and as such, were reliable) or of personality (having been written
by, or about, a credible individual); this was a common notion underpinning the
period’s historical writing. As Gurevich writes,
quotations and borrowings, set phrases and clichés, were a natural way of express-
ing oneself in an age when authority was everything and originality nothing. . . .
As a rule, the historian saw himself as continuing the work of his predecessors;
since, strictly speaking, there is only one universal history which cannot be re-
written anew: it can only be continued.24
Eleazar Halevi’s statements, quoted earlier, do signify that he viewed all the ma-
terials he collected for his work as just such historical “authorities,” as sources for
understanding the history of the world and of the Jews. For him, even an erotic
novella such as that concerning Virgil the Necromancer had positive historical
value.
The same orientation is manifested in the literary act itself: alongside such
explicitly historical texts as Josippon and the Hebrew Chronicles of the Crusaders
there appear the mythological tales of Romulus and Remus, Apollonian rites, the
wit and wisdom of the Jerusalemites, and more of the like. The text’s authority
derives not from its nature, but from its source. It then stands to reason that had
R. Eleazar penned an original historical text, based on the testimony of his own
eyes and ears, he would have accorded it less importance than an entertaining
novella like Virgil the Necromancer, which he had found in an authoritative
historical work. In other words, in Sefer hazikhronot, as in other universal histories,
the sum outweighs its parts in importance: each of the dozens of texts included
here is known from previous sources, some with the most dubious documentary
credibility, and so in and of themselves devoid of historical value. But any one of
them inserted into an encompassing chronological conception, Jewish and uni-
versal, and thereby assimilated into it from a literary perspective, becomes a com-
ponent in the overall historical journey.
This issue puts the act of editing at the center of historical-literary writing:
Eleazar did not write any of the compositions himself, but he is the individual
primarily responsible for its overall composition. And as the work’s historical mean-
ing and cultural role are, as aforementioned, the products of the sum, not its parts,
questions pertaining to the work’s editorial conception, the selection of the com-
ponents, and the manner of their treatment become key literary and historical
questions. Interestingly enough, R. Eleazar sees his literary role in a similar light:
For I have seen many scrolls of the external books, dispersed and scattered about
. . . I have set them down in writing for admirers of parables and poetical style
. . . I said [I would] faithfully collect and join them in one book . . . as I have
collected in this book, The Book of Memory, all that has happened and all that
has been done from the creation of the world until today as is written in this
book and which I found and wrote and assembled into one tent to become one
book . . . and much have I troubled and toiled to couple each item to its neighbor
and position it as a pearl into the mounting and as clasps into the loops.25
In other words, Eleazar regards the brunt of literary endeavor to be the gathering
of scattered, unfamiliar works, and their “coupling,” as he put it, into a single
textual entity. The allusion is to the building of the Tabernacle as described in
Exodus 26:11: “and put the clasps into the loops, and couple the tent together, that
it may be one” (we must not forget that Eleazar was, after all, a Levite!). By
alluding to this verse and by using its language, Eleazar raised his literary endeavor
to a virtually sacred level.
Contesting Eleazar Halevi’s principal claim of unity and coupling is the crit-
icism of those modern historians who have discussed Sefer hazikhronot. They fault
Halevi for using “tracts loosely connected with one another” (Baron), and though
they describe SZ as “a rich anthology of texts of historical character,” they also
note that its author “did not succeed in integrating them into a unified work.”26
First, it should be emphasized that most modern historians, if they even mention
SZ (and most do not),27 do so perfunctorily, and moreover they rely on Gaster’s
translation into English, which is fragmented and imprecise, and do not bother
to look at Eleazar Halevi’s own manuscript. Before deprecating Eleazar Halevi on
the basis of our anachronistic notions of “tracts loosely connected with one an-
184 The Middle Ages
other,” and what constitutes a “unified work,” we should identify what Eleazar
himself meant when he spoke of “clasps and loops” to couple together separate
books, as a pearl is set into its mounting. Beside its “technical” literary value, this
question has, more important, a cognitive aspect: how did people of the Middle
Ages perceive the links between historical events, and how did they grasp the
structure of chronological continuity within Jewish history and in the broader
context of general history?
The first and most prominent characteristic of the work of editing chronolog-
ically is the sequencing—the editor’s ordering of texts. The placement of texts
from different periods and sources alongside or within others is particularly sig-
nificant in a historical chronicle, the basis of whose organization is the passage of
time. In midrash, too, verses are taken from various books of the Bible, belonging
to different periods, and even more so in the midrashic compilations of the Middle
Ages, which cull texts from earlier and later sources and place them alongside
each other without distinction. But the organizing principle of the midrash is the
link to biblical verses and their interpretation, and as such, they do not require
any “clasps and loops” to couple them together under one tent.
Let me illustrate the placement of separate works in a single chronological
sequence with SZ’s first chapter—“The Creation.”28 It opens with sections copied
from Pirqei derabbi eliezer, describing the creation of the world according to the
order of the days of the week, until the point where Adam is created and his
children born. Here ends the midrashic excerpt; the text continues with material
extracted from Sefer yezirat havalad (The creation of the child). This work con-
cludes with a description of death and the ensuing decomposition of the body,
and from here Eleazar proceeds directly to copy Masekhet hfi ibbut haqever (Treatise
on suffering in the grave), describing, as its title implies, the agonies of the corpse
in its grave, and concluding with the types of people that “Gehenna devours.”
Eleazar now advances to the work Seder gehinnom, which describes the travels of
Joshua ben Levi in Paradise and Gehenna. This concluded, Eleazar writes, “Let
us return to the matter of the first man” and retells Adam’s fathering of children
by Lilith and Eve, from an unknown source. Since he was dealing with the prog-
eny of the first man, Eleazar copies Midrash shamhazzai veazael, two sons of
God who married human women and stayed in this world. From here he pro-
gresses to excerpts from the Second Temple period’s Biblical Antiquities, attributed
to Philo,29 and apparently translated from Latin to Hebrew in the Chronicles of
Jerahmeel, one of SZ’s main sources. He continues copying, generation by gen-
eration, until he reaches Abraham, where Maaseh avraham, a relatively short
midrash from the Middle Ages, is rendered in full. From here, the chronology
moves on to Jacob and his offspring via another medieval work—Midrash vayissa
or Milhamot benei yaakov—which details the wars of Jacob and his sons against
the Canaanites after Dina’s incident in Shekhem, in the style of medieval tales of
knights. After this comes The Testament of Naftali, a translated and reworked
medieval version of The Testaments of the Patriarchs from the Second Temple
period. Eleazar Halevi’s choice of The Testament of Naftali over all the other
testaments in the book is typical: only this one boasts tales of battle and bravery,
similar to those recounted in Midrash vayissa. In other words, the “clasps and
loops” coupling the texts are not only chronological-associative, but generic as
well: tales of war and courage. The Testament of Naftali concludes with two
dreams linked to Joseph, which portray him in an especially negative light, as
prideful and arrogant toward his brothers. Immediately afterward comes the tale
of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, offering a detailed picture of his exemplary modesty
and righteousness. Here, too, it seems on the face of it that the placement of this
story immediately after The Testament of Naftali is a combination of “tracts loosely
connected with one another,” as Baron put it. However, insight into Eleazar’s
motives can explain this editorial decision: since the earlier passage concluded
with a negative image of “Joseph the Righteous Man,” Eleazar feels duty-bound
to give equal weight to a normatively correct perspective of the tzaddik to his
readers. He therefore inserts the story of Potiphar’s wife here, so that Joseph’s image
is not tarnished by a final, unfavorable portrayal in the chronicle.
Eleazar Halevi’s editorial effort was indeed comparable to the artisan’s setting
of a pearl in its mounting. Culling dozens of works from various sources and
periods and linking them together with chronological, associative, generic, and
ideational “loops and clasps” required considerable skill and craftsmanship. At any
rate, that is how he, as a fourteenth-century man, perceived the editorial craft.
Though the modern reader may view SZ as a collection of “tracts loosely con-
nected with one another,” we cannot accuse Eleazar Halevi of ignorance of edi-
torial practice for, as we shall see, this is precisely what he considered to be his
chief skill. Therein lay the medieval perception of the treatment of literary and
historical documents, and it is up to us to seek out and apprehend the underlying
logic.
One of the most amorphous chapters from an anthological, editorial perspec-
tive is the one concerning the departure into exile. If we wish to understand the
underlying logic, this is precisely the kind of material we must examine. After
recounting the destruction of the Temple as per Josippon, SZ presents Josephus’s
testimony on Jesus.30 Following this, he tells three tales involving Titus: the de-
parture of captive Jewish sages in a ship bound for Europe, their sale into slavery,
the establishment of communities in southern Italy and France, and the prayer
Vehu rahfi um, written to commemorate the event. Afterward comes the legend of
Titus and the gnat, and finally the erotic novella mentioned earlier of Virgil the
Necromancer, which also takes place, in Eleazar’s opinion, in the days of Titus.
After this come legends of the fall of Bethar, Zechariah’s blood, and the sins of
the Jerusalemites. Baron’s and Shulvas’s accusations of loosely connected tracts
and lack of fusion are more on target in this chapter than anywhere else. Yet this
very disorder, so glaring to the modern reader, may yield a better understanding
of the editorial conception of SZ.
Eleazar Halevi ends the previous chapter with the largest extract from any
work to appear in SZ, that from The Book of Josippon. It crescendos to the har-
rowing and tragic destruction of the Temple and the loss of national political
existence—a circumstance expected to continue until the messianic age. From
this crossroads extends the new era in the life of the Jewish people: departure into
exile and life amid the Christian peoples (Eleazar’s reference group). Josephus’s
testimony on Jesus, the Testimonium Flavianum, signals the inception of a com-
186 The Middle Ages
plicated relationship between Jews and Christians, the hard kernel of the European
Diaspora. Here, then, is the reason for what seems, on the face of it, to be un-
necessary backtracking to the preceding period of the Great Revolt and the de-
struction of the Temple. No disruption of chronological order, this is rather a
logical and correct insertion in the eyes of a denizen of the Middle Ages. Imme-
diately afterward comes the legend of Vehu rahfi um, describing the dispersal of the
Jewish sages among the European communities and the establishment of Torah
centers. This segment belongs to the same chronological sequence, to the same
“seam” joining the Destruction to the founding of an established, culturally de-
veloped European Diaspora, home to Eleazar and his readers.31
Of course, from his medieval vantage point Eleazar had to acknowledge not
only the suffering of his brethren, but also the punishment of those who caused
it. Two of the tales concerning Titus—the legend of the gnat (Titus’s personal
punishment for causing the Destruction), and the story of the sorcerer in Rome
who caused harsh civil wars and devastation (the collective punishment)—belong
to the perception of past punishments as a harbinger of what would befall the
nations in the End of Days.
The last texts of this chapter, concerning Zechariah’s blood and the sins of
the Jerusalemites, describe events that preceded the Destruction. Eleazar Halevi
seems to have had two reasons for “coupling” these episodes nonchronologically.
First, he found these legends in other sources, in midrash, and was averse to
inserting them earlier and breaking the flow of the story from Josippon. Second,
and perhaps more important, midrashic legends of the Destruction focus less on
historical events than on their ethical causes. It is as if Eleazar were saying to his
readers: the terrible events of which you read just now were not happenstance but
the direct consequence of these serious transgressions. In other words, these texts,
seemingly out of order, were deliberately placed to make a point: their goal is to
give meaning to the horrific destruction and make of it a historical lesson for
future generations.
One of the longest and most impressive chapters in SZ is the one Eleazar
Halevi calls the “Book of Massacres.” Most of it consists of extensive extracts from
two works, Eliezer ben Nathan’s Chronicles of the First Crusade, and Sefer zekhirah
(Book of Reminiscence) of R. Ephraim of Bonn.32 Between these two, Eleazar
sandwiches the story of Amnon of Mainz, whom he sees as belonging to the same
martyrological circle of the Crusades. But especially interesting is the fact that the
entire chapter opens with Asarah harugei malkhut (The ten martyrs), which,
chronologically speaking, belongs to a much earlier chapter.33 Eleazar’s decision
to include this piece in the “Book of Massacres” instead of in the section covering
the Rabbinic period, as would be chronologically indicated, shows that the subject
and ideas took priority over chronology as an organizing principle. Thus the mar-
tyrs of the 1096 massacres are presented as the successors of the Ten Martyrs.
Some of the characters in the Chronicles discuss this very continuity, but SZ gives
the argument (that the Ten Martyrs were forerunners of the martyrs of the Cru-
sades) a formal literary framework by putting them in the same chapter.
No less interesting is what immediately follows the “Book of Massacres.” SZ’s
last chapter is devoted to the End of Days and the messianic age. As has been
mentioned, this is typical for universal histories, which choose to end in the fore-
seen future (i.e., the return of the Messiah) as a fitting conclusion to the history
that the work as a whole treated. Thus, actual historical survey in SZ stops at the
close of the twelfth century, that is, more than 100 years before Eleazar Halevi’s
time. Why here? Why didn’t Eleazar bring it up to date as did, for example, Jansen
Enikel in his world history, cited earlier, which included documents and testimony
relating to Vienna’s contemporary history? There can be several answers. One is
that Eleazar could not find any works on more current events. Another possible
explanation is that he did not consider any of the more contemporary events to
approach the Destruction or the Crusades in power—thus they were not worthy
of documentation to be “a remembrance for coming generations,” and he stopped.
And there may be yet a deeper reason. The principal works included in the last
chapter on the End of Days are the Book of Zerubbabel and Otot haqets (Signs
of the End of Days). The description of the wars of Armilus and Gog and Magog,
said to bring great suffering and devastation upon the kingdoms of the nations in
preparation for the messianic age, is central to both works. Countless gentile dead,
the ruin of the mighty kingdoms, blood in every place and shape will characterize
the age. One quotation from Otot haqets will suffice: “[This is] the third sign: the
Almighty sends dew of blood and it will seem to the nations [of the world] like
water and they will drink of it and die.” It can be stated that on a deeper, perhaps
unconscious level, the wars of the End of Days are the ultimate punishment for
the “Book of Massacres” perpetrated by the nations against the Jewish people: the
non-Jewish blood to flow like water in the End of Days avenges the rivers of Jewish
blood that SZ recounted in such detail only in the stories of the massacres. Perhaps
here lies further evidence of Israel Yuval’s argument of a connection between the
descriptions of blood, tortures, and mass suicides during the Crusades and the
anticipation of divine vengeance against the gentile nations.34
Until this point, we have focused on chronological sequence as the main
technique of forming the “loops and clasps” that join the anthology’s dozens of
separate works into “one tent.” Another salient technique is deconstruction,
namely, the dismantling of entire compositions and their reassembly in a new
sequence. This was the rule, for example, for the broad example we looked at
earlier concerning the creation of the world. The basic text is Pirqei derabbi
eliezer, but SZ excerpts it selectively and intersperses among its disconnected parts
small works such as Sefer yezirat havalad, H fi ibbut haqever, Seder gan eden, Seder
gehinnom (Paradise and hell), and Biblical Antiquities. Thus, the original mid-
rashic construction of Pirqei derabbi eliezer is transformed into a chronicle, based
no longer on verses and midrash, but on the historical story of the creation of the
world and human life. In any case, Eleazar Halevi (and likewise, perhaps, Jerah-
meel, upon which much of SZ is based) did not feel much of an obligation to
preserve the entirety of the work he copied, and he made masterful use of it
according to the needs of the chronological anthology and his own perception of
its forward movement.
SZ’s primary source is undeniably the Book of Josippon. To retell the Creation
tale and the dispersion of Noah’s sons after the Flood, Eleazar copies from the
beginning of Josippon.35 Once Josippon moves on to cover topics not relevant to
188 The Middle Ages
his chronological perception, however, R. Eleazar states: “[U]ntil this point, the
words of Josippon, and what is written afterward, beginning with ‘And it came to
pass when God scattered’ I will write [in the section] concerning Esau and the
Edomite kings.”36 He then moves to accounts of other genealogies that he found
in other sources, and continues his saga of the Jewish people—Abraham, the tribal
wars, Joseph’s deeds. At this point, after inserting various passages from many other
works, he says, “here too it seems right to me to go back to the Book of Josippon,
to the place where I left off, in the generations of the sons of Noah, as the Josippon
began to tell of Adam, Shet, and Enosh and explained the names of the families
descended from Yefet and the borders of their lands, to Kittim and Dodanim as I
wrote above in the generations of the descendants of Noah. And this is what he
wrote afterward and, since it belongs here, I wrote it here.”37 And here he copies
Josippon’s tales of the abduction of the Sabine women, the myth of Tzefo ben
Eliphaz, the foundation myths of Rome and its first rulers. The reason for the
deconstruction of Josippon and the pasting of its parts next to other works is, in
Eleazar’s words, that the parts “belong here,” that is, since he believed all these
events pertaining to the history of the nations took place during the 400 years of
Egyptian servitude, he slips them in between the stories of Joseph and the Exodus.
Indeed, when he encounters events that divert him from what he perceives as the
proper course of things, he says: “Until here, the language of the Josippon. And
afterward the Josippon wrote [of] the kingdoms of Darius and Cyrus and the Book
of the Maccabees and the kingdoms of the Second Temple until the Destruction.
And I will write of this in its proper place with God’s help, all as is found written
in the Book of Josippon until their conclusion,”38 and he continues with the story
of the Exodus. SZ is studded with such editorial remarks, which illuminate Elea-
zar’s clear awareness of his editorial undertaking, and the priority he gives a par-
ticular chronological perception over loyalty to the ancient works available to him.
Perhaps more than anything else they reveal his historiographical perception,
which regards sources as documents composed of independent units, which he
could separate and rearrange according to another historical and editorial concep-
tion. In other words, Eleazar was not guilty of belittling the editorial craft or of
connecting “tracts loosely . . . with one another” out of neglect. Instead, the op-
posite is true; he regarded the available sources as eclectic and, as such, felt free
to cut and paste them with the aid of those “loops and clasps”—the main tools in
the realization of his historical perception.
Another literary phenomenon, similar to the last two in that it is likely to leave
an impression of slipshod and disorderly editing, is repetition. Eleazar Halevi re-
tells a number of tales in the course of his story: the legend of Raban Johanan
ben Zakkai’s escape from Jerusalem is recounted in an extract copied from Mid-
rash Lamentations Rabbah (12, 3), and again later in the excerpt taken from Seder
olam raba;39 the tale of the Septuagint is told in the context of Second Temple
stories, and then again in a Rabbinic framework,40 to list some examples. These
repetitions lend themselves to a simple technical explanation: they stem from the
copying of compositions containing different versions of the same tale, conse-
quently, tales Eleazar already told are recopied. The anthological nature of the
work can hardly prevent such phenomena as repetition and doubling. Still, when
these repetitions occur with respect to encompassing texts that claim a central
portion of SZ, and when the various versions have different and contradictory
orientations, mere technical explanations do not suffice.
The story of the Destruction is the first instance of this phenomenon. It can
be said without hesitation that this is SZ’s central story: it stands at the crossroads
of Jewish history, as does the Incarnation for Christian history. It splits the histor-
ical horizon of SZ into “before” and “after”: all history of the past took place prior
to that point, whereas the events of the present—the Diaspora, the establishment
of centers of Torah scholarship, the wanderings and persecutions—came “after,”
the direct result of that devastation. Indeed, the two primary bodies of texts relating
to the Destruction, which are the longest unbroken excerpts in the work, are from
the Book of Josippon and Midrash Lamentations Rabbah,41 and both recount the
same episode. Differences between the Josippon/Josephus version of the tale of the
Destruction and that of Midrash Lamentations Rabbah exist on almost all possible
levels: the historical story versus midrash; an eyewitness to the event who penned
his impressions some years afterward as opposed to legends crystallized over hun-
dreds of years following; the professional historian with military training and ex-
perience in contrast to sages of the study hall; a Hellenistic author writing in Greek
for a Roman audience juxtaposed with the compilers of the midrash, writing
mostly in Aramaic for broad sectors of the Jewish people. And, of course, we cannot
dismiss the dissimilar orientations of the two narratives of the Destruction: whereas
the former tells a historical tale with apologetic tendencies, Lamentations Rabbah
seeks to tell an ethical tale with didactic intent. The Josippon version describes
the zealots’ internecine struggles and their battles with the Romans, the political
forces active in that arena, the disposition of forces and their logistical situation,
the technical details of the conquest and the destruction. The chapter copied in
SZ from Lamentations Rabbah begins with the legend of Zechariah’s blood, doc-
umenting the sins of the Jerusalemites, continues with a description of their wick-
edness and the wantonness of their daughters, and goes on to detail, by means of
the appropriate verses, the punishments for these transgressions. Afterward the
editor collects the martyrological tales from the midrash—among them the infants
drowned at sea, the children of Zadok the Priest, the mother and her seven sons—
to show how the reproof was carried through. Neither the passage from Lamen-
tations Rabbah nor that from Josippon is quoted in the original order; they are
thoroughly deconstructed. As a result, the conceptual pattern woven herein can
be seen as the work of Eleazar Halevi, although its foundations originated in these
two sources.
Is it possible that Eleazar failed to sense the differences between the two texts?
Even if he did, how could he overlook the fact that they both told the story of
the same event, and that copying both in the chronology would be redundant?
Answering these questions draws us to the status of the texts in Jewish culture.
Eleazar Halevi declared in his will-cum-introduction his intention to gather in this
work the scattered and dispersed external books, those that had not been graced
with interest, that were defined as noncanonical literature. The Book of Josippon
was still part of this category at the time. But what was Midrash Lamentations
Rabbah, an inalienable, uncontested part of the Jewish canon, doing here? There
190 The Middle Ages
is no escaping the supposition that Eleazar copied the story of the Destruction
from the Book of Josippon, knowing of another narrative describing the event, one
accepted by devout Jews. Offering only the noncanonical version of the story
would have been tantamount to challenging the normative Jewish narrative and
contesting its version of the course of events. Had Eleazar not included the passage
from Lamentations Rabbah, he might have been accused of asserting, for instance,
that the causes of the Destruction were political, social, and military, as Josephus
maintained, and not theological as per the “official” Jewish version. Copying the
passage from Lamentations Rabbah after the one from the Josippon was intended
to communicate that he had not forsaken the traditional narrative in favor of those
external books, rather that he had laid them side by side, as two different per-
spectives of a key event in Jewish history.
Still more pronounced is the second example, which proves retroactively that
the repetitions reflect a pluralistic perception (if I may use an anachronistic term
for the sake of convenience) of the Jewish narrative, and not mere technical and
haphazard copying. I refer to SZ’s concluding chapter, which deals with the End
of Days and the messianic age. In the “Book of Massacres”—tales of the Cru-
sades—Eleazar Halevi inserts a passage from chapter 12 of “Hilkhot melakhim”
from Mishneh Torah, then he copies all of Ephraim of Bonn’s Sefer zekhirah and
reaches the concluding chapter of SZ—the End of Days and the messianic age.
Here he copies the famous works of the redemption—The Book of Zerubabbel,
Otot haqets, Simanei hamashiahfi (Signs of the Messiah), H fi ishuvei haqets (Calcu-
lations of the End), and the descriptions of Gan eden vehagehinnom in the End
of Days. In this case, the phenomenon can in no way be described as one of
repetition or replication, because these two groups of texts simply cannot lie par-
allel. In Maimonides’ words, opening the passage:
Let no one think that in the days of the Messiah any of the laws of nature will
be set aside, or any innovation be introduced into creation. The world will follow
its normal course. The word of Isaiah: “and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid (11,6)” are to be understood figura-
tively. . . . No one should ever occupy himself with the legendary themes or spend
much time on midrashic statements bearing on this and like subjects. He should
not deem them of prime importance, since they lead neither to the fear of God
nor to the love of Him.42
In other words, Maimonides’ statements cancel out all the works SZ copies here,
and even forbid having anything to do with them: Eleazar Halevi quotes these
statements before copying in full those works strictly proscribed by Maimonides.
This leaves us in the dark as to the position of the compiler of SZ; it may have
been restorative or apocalyptic, but for us it neither adds nor detracts: Eleazar
offers both as part of the narrative of the Jewish end of history: it seems we have
no sharper, more important debate, with regard to the Jewish present as well, than
this question, and SZ chooses to present to the reader the clearest and most ex-
treme manifestations of both sides. Here, too, he does not strive for harmonization
but presents each approach individually, in its original expression, without inter-
vention or emendation. Again, the critics might well conclude: “tracts loosely
connected with one another,” what does Maimonides’ codification of the laws
pertaining to the Messiah have to do with the Book of Zerubabbel? The distinction
of a superior anthology is its success in presenting the diverse, and especially
contradictory manifestations of the subject, each faithful to its original form. This,
likewise, is what sets apart a great universal history, which bars no options but
presents, side by side and intermixed, the various outlooks on the past and future:
the Jewish narrative alongside the general narrative; opposing scenarios for the
development of history—restoration of the past or its utter destruction in favor of
the establishment of another world. The historical chronicle thus makes impressive
use of the literary text’s strength—which separates it fundamentally from historical
documentary—complexity, and polyphonality. The Jewish history emerging from
SZ follows not one but several tracks: not solely the books of Genesis and Judges,
but a narrative from the book of Biblical Antiquities as well; the normative tale of
the Destruction as shaped by the canonic midrash is joined by another narrative,
different, provided by Josippon/Josephus; the rationalistic, prescriptive narrative of
the greatest Rabbinic authority stands not alone but in the company of another,
anti-authoritarian scenario of the end of Jewish history as depicted in the treatises
on the redemption.
I do not claim that Eleazar Halevi, unsophisticated as he was, demonstrated
an inflammatory pluralistic stand at the height of the Middle Ages. To do so would
be to attribute wholly anachronistic positions to a man whose frame of reference
did not support such concepts. My argument is literary, not ideological (I mean
by this pairing of terms to emphasize not their dichotomy, which is, of course,
nonexistent, but the technical aspect of selection and editing of literary texts, as
opposed to those external ideological considerations that led to the selection and
interpretation of the texts). Eleazar Halevi viewed all the texts, the noncanonical
ones in particular, as we saw in his will, as inalienable Jewish property, and he
felt obliged to copy them down for future generations regardless of their content
or expressed religious stances. He copied the commentaries on the redemption
not because their ideological positions appealed to him, but because he felt it
imperative that they be preserved for future generations. This unbiased approach
to the texts, stemming from a quintessentially literary-technical perception, was
responsible for the composite, pluralistic world picture of the historical narrative
of SZ, even if the editor himself did not have this specific objective in mind.
Here is medieval anthological creation at its most refined, representing the
culmination of the innovative approaches to form and content initiated at the start
of the Middle Ages with Midrash aseret hadibberot and The Alphabet of Ben Sira.
SZ embodies the tendency toward historiographical creation in Ashkenazi culture,
along with the influences of eastern collections of tales. Above all, it exhibits the
complex artistry of selecting and editing texts, preserving for each its original form
and independence, while striving to create an anthological composition with as-
sociative, generic, ideational, and historical links. The aim of examining “the an-
thological art” of the hand behind Sefer hazikhronot was not limited to understand-
ing the construction of one anthological composition. I also tried to comprehend
the medieval Jewish attitude toward the period’s literary canon, as well as the
literary and ideological bonds between various works, those principal historical
192 The Middle Ages
narratives that shaped the historical consciousness of the period’s Jewish society.
Eleazar Halevi, a Jewish intellectual of the fourteenth century, made masterful
use of various anthological techniques in his laudable struggle for expression, cre-
ativity, and originality.
A glance forward may illuminate Eleazar Halevi’s historical anthology as a
forerunner of the orientations of the great twentieth-century Jewish anthologies. It
is as if the primary goals of the principal modern anthologies were first formed
there: the sweeping perception, from the creation of the world until the end of
days in Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (1909–28); the portrait of Jewish
history via citation of Rabbinic sources in fragmented and deconstructive manner,
as in the anthology of H fi . N. Bialik and Y. J. Ravnitzky, Sefer haaggadah (1908–
31); the use of noncanonical sources and the pluralism deriving from the expres-
sion of different versions of the same tale or event, as in M. J. Bin Gorion (Ber-
dyczewski), Mimeqor yisrael (1939–45); and the historiographic anthology of B. Z.
Dinur (Dinaburg), Yisrael bagolah (1959–72), which attempts to reconstruct Jewish
history by means of citation of sources only, without the intervention or interpre-
tation of a historian. In these respects, Sefer hazikhronot was the pioneer of an-
thological writing in Jewish literature, even if its goals and worldview were fun-
damentally different from those of twentieth-century Jewish anthologists.
Notes
1. J. Dan. Hasipur haivri bimei habenayim [The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages]
(Jerusalem, 1974), pp. 1–32; E. Yassif, “Hebrew Prose in the East—Its Formation in the
Middle Ages and Transition to Modern Times” [Hebrew], Peamim 26 (1986):53–70.
2. M. Steinschneider, Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century
(London, 1857), pp. 59ff.; J. Dan, Torat hasod shel hfi asidut ashkenaz [The Esoteric Theology
of Ashkenazi Hasidism] (Jerusalem, 1968), pp. 9–12; E. Fleischer, “A New Study of the Old
Hebrew Fable Literature” [Hebrew], Biqoret ufarshanut 11–12 (1978):19–24.
3. Avner Giladi, Baghdad—A Window to Islamic Culture in the Middle Ages [Hebrew]
(Tel Aviv, 1981), pp. 53–54, esp. on the catalogic composition of Muhammad ibn Elnadim
of the tenth century, who summarized these developments in the earlier Muslim sciences.
4. L. Zunz, Homily in Judaism and Its Historical Development [Hebrew] (Jerusalem,
1954), pp. 141–50, 176–92; Steinschneider, Jewish Literature, pp. 28–53; A. Jellinek ed., Beit
hamidrash [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1967); J. Elbaum, “On the Character of Late Midrashic
Literature” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, division
C (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 57–62.
5. D. Noy, “Jewish and International Tale Types in the Midrash of the Ten Com-
mandments” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the Fourth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jeru-
salem, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 353–55; J. Dan, The Hebrew Story, pp. 79–85; E. Yassif, “The Man
Who Never Swore an Oath: From Jewish to Israeli Oikotype,” Fabula 27 (1987):216–36.
For a partial English translation of these texts, see David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, eds.,
Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia,
1980).
6. J. Dan, “The National Library Manuscript No. 8⬚3182” [Hebrew], Kiryat sefer 51
(1976):492–93; S. Zfatman, “The Mayse-Bukh: An Old Yiddish Literary Genre” [Hebrew],

Hasifrut 28 (1979):126–52; E. Yassif, “Sefer hamaasim” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 53 (1984):409–30.
7. E. Yassif, “The Cycle of Tales in Rabbinic Literature” [Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies
in Hebrew Literature 12 (1990):103–46; Shulamit Valler, Nashim venashiyut besipurei hatal-
mud [Women and Womanhood in the Stories of the Babylonian Talmud] (Tel Aviv, 1993),
pp. 16–23.
8. E. Yassif, “Pseudo Ben-Sira and the Medieval Tradition of the ‘Wisdom Ques-
tions,’ ” Fabula 23 (1983):48–63.
9. Scholarship on the subject is vast; recent studies include: B. Guenee, Histoire et
Culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 1980); D. Hay, Annalists and Historians:
Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1977); W.
Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (a.d. 550–800) (Princeton, N.J., 1988); M. J.
Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge,
1990); J. Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the
Past (Cambridge, 1992).
10. L. Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); W. Nelson,
Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); G.
Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,”
Speculum 65 (1990): 59–86; I. Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom,” Prooftexts 2 (1982):
40–52; R. Chazan, “The Timebound and the Timeless: Medieval Jewish Narration of
Events,” History and Memory 6 (1994):5–34.
11. Bodleian manuscript Heb.d.11; A. Neubauer and A. Cowley, Catalogue of the He-
brew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1906), vol. 2, pp. 208–15. On the man-
uscript and the compositions included in it, see Neubauer, Medieval Hebrew Chroniclers
(London, 1887), pp. xix–xxi; idem, “Jerahmeel Ben Shlomo,” Jewish Quarterly Review 11
(1899):364–86 (One major source of Sefer hazikhronot was an earlier compilation known
as The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, composed by an eleventh- or twelfth-century Italian scholar
and poet. The text itself was lost and is known only from the large quotations made from
it in SZ. This is why some authors confused the two compositions.) The first part of the
anthology was translated by Moses Gaster and published with an introduction and notes as
The Chronicles of Jerahmeel (London, 1899). The second edition of Gaster’s translation
(New York, 1971) has a preface by H. Schwarzbaum (pp. 1–124), which includes a full
bibliography and sources; E. Yassif, “Theory and Practice in the Formation of Hebrew
Narratives in the Middle Ages” [Hebrew], Kiryat sefer 62 (1988–89):887–906.
12. All references to this work will be to Bodleian Heb.d.11 or to my forthcoming
critical edition—Sefer hazikhronot. This quotation is from p. 7a of the former.
13. See Numbers Rabbah 14:14; ibid., 15:18; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 12:13; Pesiqta Rabbati,
chap. 3, and “Sefarim hitsonim ugenuzim” [Hebrew], Encyclopedia Biblica (Jerusalem,
1968), vol. 5, pp. 1104–5.
14. Compare: “Mashal” [Hebrew], Encyclopedia Biblica, vol. 5, pp. 548–53; E. Ben-
Yehuda, “Mashal” [Hebrew], Thesaurus of the Hebrew Language (Tel Aviv, 1948), vol. 7,
pp. 3386–89. On the development of the genre in Hebrew literature, see D. Stern, Parables
in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
15. “[F]abula . . . appears to include everything that is ‘mere invention,’ ” E. R. Cur-
tius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), p. 452; J. Chance,
ed., The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France
and England (Gainesville, Fla., 1990).
16. S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, 1958), vol. 6,
pp. 195–97.
17. Bodleian Heb.d.11, p. 7a.
194 The Middle Ages
18. In European literature: G. Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1982); in Arabic literature: D. Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian
Nights (Leiden, 1992), pp. 1 ff.; and in Hebrew literature: Yassif, “Theory and Practice.”
19. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1975), pp. 195–98; K. H.
Krueger, Die Universal-chroniken ([Typologie des sources du moyen age Occidental, no.
16] Turnhout, 1985); E. Schulin, ed., Universalgeschichte (Cologne, 1974); A. Borst, Medi-
eval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics and Artists in the Middle Ages, trans. E. Hansen (Cam-
bridge, 1991), pp. 63–71.
20. A. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (London,
1985), p. 289.
21. J. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400–1500, trans. J. Barrow (Oxford, 1988), p. 166.
22. The story was published from this manuscript by D. Flusser, “Virgil the Necro-
mancer in an Old Hebrew Story” [Hebrew], Memorial Book for Umberto Nahon, ed. R.
Bonfil et al. (Jerusalem, 1978), pp. 168–75. On the history of this unusual story in European
literature, see D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages (New York, 1895), pp. 325–39; J. W.
Spargo, Studies in Virgilian Legends (Cambridge, Mass, 1934), pp. 136–206.
23. Ph. Strauch, ed., Jansen Enikels Werke (Zurich, 1972), vol. 3, and his introduction
to Enikel’s work and its influence on European historiography. The story about Virgil
appears here on pp. 470–72, lines 24139–224.
24. Gurevich, Categories, p. 128.
26. M. Shulvas, “The Knowledge of History and Historical Literature in the Ashkenazi
Culture of the Middle Ages” [Hebrew], H fi anoch Albeck Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem, 1963),
p. 495.
27. For example: A. Grabois, Les Sources Hebraiques Medievales ([Typologie des
sources du moyen age Occidental, no. 50] Turnhout, 1987), and Y. H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor:
Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982).
28. My forthcoming edition: Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 1.
29. G. Kisch, ed., Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Notre Dame, 1949);
M. R. James, trans., The Biblical Antiquities of Philo (London, 1917); L. Cohn, “Pseudo
Philo und Jerahmeel,” Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstag Jacob Guttmans (Leipzig,
1915), pp. 173–85.
30. D. Flusser, ed., Sefer yosifon [The Josippon] (Jerusalem, 1978), pp. 439–42; idem,
“Josephus’s Testimony on Jesus” [Hebrew], Jewish Sources in Early Christianity (Tel Aviv,
1979), pp. 72–80.
31. A. Neubauer, “The Early Settlement of the Jews in Southern Italy,” Jewish Quar-
terly Review 4 (1892):616–20; G. D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” Proceedings
of the American Academy of Jewish Research 29 (1960–61):75–94.
32. Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 14. The Jewish chronicles of the persecutions were pub-
lished by A. Neubauer and M. Stern, eds., Hebräische Berichte der Judenverfolgungen wäh-
rend der Kreuzzüge (Berlin, 1892); A. M. Haberman, ed., Sefer gezeirot ashkenaz vetsarfat
[Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1971); S. Eidelberg, trans. and ed., The Jews and the Crusaders: The
Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusaders (Madison, 1977).
33. For the sources of this composition, see S. Krauss, “ Asara harugei malkhut” [He-
brew], Hashiloahfi 44 (1925):10–22, 106–17, 221–33, and the recent synoptical edition: G. Reeg,
Die Geschichte von den zehn Martyren (Tübingen, 1985).
34. I. J. Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish
Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations” [Hebrew], Zion 58 (1993):33–90.
35. Bodleian Heb.d.11, pp. 26a–26b; Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 4, sec. 3.
36. Bodleian Heb.d.11, p. 26b.

38. Bodleian Heb.d.11, p. 36b.
39. Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 12, sec. 3, and chap. 13, sec. 1.
40. Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 9, sec. 4, and chap. 13, sec. 2.
41. Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 8, sec. 7–chap. 12.
42. For the full text and its interpretation, see Isadore Twersky, Halakhah vehagut:
Qavei yesod bemishnato shel harambam [Law and Philosophy: Perspectives on Maimonides’
Teaching] (Tel Aviv, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 188–99. The English translation is from The Code
of Maimonides: The Book of Judges (book 14), trans. A. M. Hershman (New Haven, Conn.,
1949), pp. 240–41.
10
marc bregman
Midrash Rabbah and the

Medieval Collector
Mentality
idrash Rabbah is one of the most popular and best-known works of midrashic
Mliterature. This is particularly true in the English-speaking world, where the
1
Soncino translation —sometimes titled simply “The Midrash”2—may be found on
the shelves of nearly every library that includes Jewish books. It is therefore sur-
prising how little has been written about when, where, and why this important
collection of midrashic works came together as a literary anthology, despite the
extensive research that has been published on the history of Rabbinic literature.3
As currently printed and marketed, Midrash Rabbah seems to be a relatively
homogeneous midrashic commentary on ten books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ec-
clesiastes, and Esther (variously arranged in different editions). However, as we
shall see, Midrash Rabbah is in fact an anthology of discrete and generically
different midrashic compositions whose textual and intellectual history is far more
complex than first meets the eye.
Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch was first published in Constantinople in
1512. This was followed by the publication of Midrash to the Five Scrolls (Song of
Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther).4 These two compilations
were first published together as a single work, titled Midrash Rabbah, in Venice
in 1545. In this form, as a midrashic compilation to the Pentateuch and Five
Scrolls, Midrash Rabbah has been reprinted and republished frequently until our
own day.5
Since the seminal study of the history of midrashic literature by Zunz in the
early nineteenth century,6 it has been well known (at least to critical scholarship)
that the separate midrashic works that make up Midrash Rabbah were composed
at different times and places and belong to a variety of distinct midrashic genres.
Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, and Lamentations Rabbah belong to the clas-
sical aggadic midrashim that were compiled in Palestine from the late fourth until
the early sixth centuries.7 The second part of Exodus Rabbah (chapters 15–52), the
second part of Numbers Rabbah (chapters 15–23), and Deuteronomy Rabbah be-
196
Midrash Rabbah and the Medieval Collector Mentality 197
long to the Tanhuma-Yelamdenu midrashim, a distinct genre of midrashic liter-

ature that evolved in Palestine, Babylonia, and Europe over an even longer period
of time—beginning, I believe, already in the fifth century.8 The first part of Exodus
Rabbah was compiled apparently in the tenth century.9 The first part of Numbers
Rabbah—a product of the school of Rabbi Moshe Hadarshan—was compiled
apparently in the twelfth century in Provence.10 The separate histories of each of
the Rabbah midrashim to the Five Scrolls is even more complex. Suffice it to say
that these works were edited at different times from the beginning of the early
sixth century until the twelfth or thirteenth century.11
The name “Midrash Rabbah” seems at first glance to mean something like
“The Great Midrash,” which would certainly be appropriate for a midrashic work
of this magnitude.12 However, historically it seems clear that the name “Rabbah”
was first applied separately to Genesis Rabbah,13 gradually became attached to
other individual Rabbah midrashim,14 and only at the end of this process was
applied to the entire anthology of works we know as Midrash Rabbah.
The evolution of this title reflects the way that Midrash Rabbah itself gradually
evolved as an anthology composed of separate midrashic works. An examination
of the manuscript evidence reveals that the various Rabbah midrashim and other
midrashic works were joined together in a surprising variety of combinations.15
First, we should note the existence of another midrashic anthology, Midrash
Hakhamim, which contains separate midrashic works on each of the five penta-
teuchal books: an abbreviated version of Genesis Rabbah, the Mekhilta to Exodus,
the Sifra on Leviticus, and the Sifre to Numbers and Deuteronomy. Midrash
Hakhamim survives in only one known manuscript, written on paper in a relatively
late Sephardi script.16 The importance of this work for our discussion of the evo-
lution of Midrash Rabbah is in the way Midrash Hakhamim represents an alternate
compilation of separate midrashic works to the pentateuchal books, incorporating
together the best-known aggadic midrash to Genesis and the best-known works of
halakhic midrash to the remaining four books of the Pentateuch,17 which contain
halakhah according to the Rabbis. By contrast, Midrash Rabbah stands out more
clearly as a compilation specifically—and perhaps intentionally—of midrash ag-
gadah.
Further along the road to the emergence of Midrash Rabbah as we know it,
we find in a British Library manuscript (Add. 27169/340) Genesis Rabbah in its
entirety followed by Leviticus Rabbah in its entirety and nothing more. It is inter-
esting to note that we find here together the two earliest separate works found in
Midrash Rabbah. It is difficult to date this manuscript precisely, but it is written
on parchment, and various additions in the body of the text suggest that it was
copied from a manuscript that was written prior to the year 1000.18
A Paris manuscript (Bibliothèque Nationale 149) contains Genesis Rabbah and
Leviticus Rabbah, together with the first five chapters of Numbers Rabbah and a
small part of Esther Rabbah (3:4).19 It is interesting to note that we have here the
earliest parts of Midrash Rabbah copied together with the latest part, the first
chapters of Numbers Rabbah. This manuscript was written at the end of the thir-
teenth century. Significantly, the scribe refers to each individual work as a “rab-
bah”—for example, between the first two separate midrashic works, he writes
198 The Middle Ages
hbr tyXarb qyls followed by hbr arqyw lyxta (“End of Genesis Rabbah”/“I will
begin Leviticus Rabbah”).
When we look at the important manuscript fragments recovered from the
Cairo Geniza, we find, for example, a relatively extensive text of seven leaves that
contains material from Leviticus Rabbah (34:4–5) followed immediately (on the
same page) by material from Deuteronomy Rabbah (the printed version) (5:5–6:
2).20 While it is clear that the author-editor of this text was excerpting material, it
seems to me that he was doing so from a larger text that contained together at
least these two Rabbah midrashim (or some closely related recension).
In my work on the manuscript resources of the Tanhuma-Yelamdenu mid-
rashim,21 I managed to reconstuct the remains of a single manuscript from eight
Geniza fragments that preserve part of Leviticus Rabbah followed by Tanhuma-
Yelamdenu midrash to Numbers and Deuteronomy different from what has come
down to us in Numbers Rabbah and Deuteronomy Rabbah or the two versions of
the Tanhuma.
We do, however, sometimes find parts of the Tanhuma copied together with
parts of Midrash Rabbah. For example, a manuscript in the Angelica collection
(Or. 61) in Rome, written in a fifteenth-century Italian script, contains the Tan-
huma (printed version) to Genesis and Exodus, lacks any material to Leviticus,
but continues with the first part of Numbers Rabbah (chapters 1–14), followed by
Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version).22
In contrast to the preceding examples, Midrash Rabbah to the Torah stands
out as the realization of several different anthological aspirations: (1) the desire to
create a compilation of complete midrashic texts to the five books of Moses, which
we find expressed in Midrash Hakhamim and its precursors; (2) the desire to create
a compilation of exclusively aggadic midrash to the pentateuchal books expressed
in the other examples.
The tendency to collect Rabbah midrashim with other works together in one
compilation is perhaps best illustrated by the monumental codex found in the De
Rossi collection (1240) in Parma.23 This Ashkenazi manuscript, written in 1270,
contains no fewer than thirteen separate works, including Pesiqta Rabbati, Tan-
huma (Buber version), Song of Songs Rabbah, Midrash on Proverbs, Otiyot de-
Rabbi Akivah, part of Lamentations Rabbah, and Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed
version).24 As we shall see, the distinction between the two versions of Deuteronomy
Rabbah is an important factor in the final composition of Midrash Rabbah as we
know it.
We come very close to the Midrash Rabbah known to us from the printed
edition in a group of manuscripts, each of which includes the Rabbah midrashim
to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. However, in all of them, we find
not the printed version of Deuteronomy Rabbah,25 but the Lieberman version.26
In the introduction to his edition,27 Lieberman demonstrated that this different
recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah circulated primarily in Sephardi culture. In-
deed, all the manuscripts of Midrash Rabbah that contain the Lieberman version
of Deuteronomy Rabbah were written on paper in Spain or North Africa in the
fifteenth century.28 These manuscripts form such a close-knit group as to suggest
that the production of manuscripts of this version of Midrash Rabbah was localized
in one or more places in the fifteenth-century Sephardi world.
The first printers of Midrash Rabbah in Constantinople in the early sixteenth
century adopted a similar format of Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch. How-
ever, it seems clear that they did not publish Midrash Rabbah on the basis of a
single manuscript,29 but rather they took textual traditions from several manuscripts
in compiling at least some of the different Rabbah midrashim.30 It is interesting
to note that only in Midrash Rabbah to the book of Genesis they seem to have
used a specifically Sephardi text-type.31 However, in the books of Exodus, Leviticus,
and Numbers they seem to have used non-Sephardi text-types.32 And significantly,
in the book of Deuteronomy, they went even further afield, by incorporating a
different recension of the midrash to Deuteronomy.33 In so doing, they made this
recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah the one we today refer to as “the printed ver-
sion,” to distinguish it from the recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah published by
Lieberman.
In effect, Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch known to us from the printed
editions (which contains the “printed version” of Deuteronomy Rabbah), seems to
have achieved final form only when it was first printed in Constantinople in 1512.34
However, from citations, it is clear that a monumental anthology of Rabbah mid-
rashim to the Pentateuch already existed centuries before.
In thirteenth-century Spain, Nahfi manides (d. 1270) made use of all the Rabbah
midrashim to the Pentateuch, which he seems to have had together in one discrete
work that he referred to as Midrash Rabbah.35 Nahfi manides was a Sephardi, so it
is not surprising that he had before him the Sephardi recension of Deuteronomy
Rabbah (Lieberman version). He cites this work as “Rabbah,”36 just as he cites
from other Rabbah midrashim by the name “Rabbah.” From this we may deduce
that a midrashic anthology to the Pentateuch known as Midrash Rabbah—similar
to the fifteenth-century Sephardi manuscripts of Midrash Rabbah already de-
scribed—was available by the second half of the thirteenth century in Spain.37
Why did such a monumental anthology of midrash aggadah to the Pentateuch
come together in the medieval period, probably in Spain? To answer this question,
we need to contextualize this “literary event” into its surrounding intellectual cli-
mate. A key component of literary culture in this period is what might be described
as the “medieval collector mentality.”
The medieval period as a whole was, it seems, marked by a kind of “antho-
logical avidity.” In Christian culture, this is the period of the compilation of the
great summae and other florilegia.38 In secular European culture, we have the
compilation of vernacular anthologies, by such figures as Chrétien de Troyes.39 In
Islamic culture, we have beginning already in about the ninth century the com-
pilation of classical collections of Hadith (legal traditions) and the Tafsir com-
mentaries on the Quran.40 In secular culture, we have anthologies of Arabic po-
etry,41 and the compilation of great story collections, such as the so-called
Thousand Tales, which eventually became the famous Thousand and One
Nights.42
In medieval Jewish culture, we have the compilation of the yalqutim (verse-
200 The Middle Ages
by-verse collections of midrashic traditions)43 and the medieval compilatory com-

mentaries.44 And we have many collections of narrative material: the so-called
Exempla of the Rabbis edited by Gaster,45 the Gests of Alexander of Macedon,
Mishlei sendebar, Mishlei shualim of Rabbi Berechiah ben Natronai Hanakdan,
Sefer hashaashu im of Joseph ben Meir Zabara, the H fi ibbur yafeh mehayeshuah
of Nissim ben Yaakov ibn Shahin,46 and the Sefer hazikhronot compiled by Eleazar
ben-Asher Halevi.47
The medieval Jewish collector mentality may be further concretized in an-
other way. In Mishnah Avot (4:1), we learn: ~da lkm dmwlh ?~kx whzya, “Who is
wise? He who learns from every person.” However, a medieval variant has a sig-
nificantly different description of the archetypal wise person: @samh ?~kx whzya
~wqm lkm, “Who is wise? He who collects from every place.”48 Literary collecting
indeed seems to have been a medieval Jewish passion.
However, for the purpose of this investigation, it is important to define as
precisely as possible the kind of literary collecting that resulted in the compilation
of Midrash Rabbah. This is so because nearly all midrashic and talmudic works
can be considered “collections”—literary compilations of what were once inde-
pendent oral and literary traditions, some anonymous and some cited in the names
of rabbinic sages. Midrash Rabbah can be described as a medieval midrashic
anthology most correctly if we define “anthology” in a somewhat more restrictive
way than usual—as a “composition of compositions.” Each individual Rabbah
midrash that makes up Midrash Rabbah is already in its own right a midrashic
composition that has undergone its own discrete editorial evolution. The compiler
of Midrash Rabbah created a kind of “metacomposition” of these separate mid-
rashic compositions by bringing them together in one compilation, apparently
without much other redactional intervention on his part.
It is also important to recall that Midrash Rabbah is demonstratively a collec-
tion of midrash aggadah. In medieval Judaism, aggadah was commonly defined
in a highly amorphous way, as everything not in the realm of halakhah.49 How-
ever, an earlier midrashic tradition describes aggadah in a more imaginative way:
hdgal twqxwc ~ynp, “Aggadah has a laughing face.”50 The compilation of Midrash
Rabbah in the medieval period served to give the amorphous and playfully enig-
matic “face” of aggadah a far better defined physiognomy than it ever had before.
If the emerging physiognomy of midrash aggadah was Midrash Rabbah to the
Pentateuch, then its full form was the later compilation of the entire Midrash
Rabbah, combining the Rabbah midrashim to the Five Books of the Torah and
the Five Scrolls. The evolution of this format also has a history, going back at least
to Midrash Leqahfi Tov, written by Toviah ben Eliezer, who lived in the Balkans
at the end of the eleventh century. This work is an individually authored midrashic
commentary, not only to the Pentateuch but also to the Five Scrolls.51 We see
here that the idea of a midrashic composition on the Pentateuch and Five Scrolls
had reached fruition as early as the eleventh century, despite the fact that a com-
plete Midrash Rabbah to both the Pentateuch and the Five Scrolls as we know it
seems to have come together only in the mid-sixteenth century. It should be noted
that this compositional format represents a work ideally suited to the needs of the
synagogue, for it contains midrashic material on all the biblical books read aloud
during the annual liturgical cycle; the Pentateuch on the Shabbatot and the Five
Scrolls read on the various holidays—Song of Songs on Passover, Ruth on Sha-
vuot, Lamentations on Tisha b’Av, Ecclesiastes on Sukkot (except for some Se-
phardi communities), and Esther on Purim. To complete this kind of midrashic
compilation, we have another kind of liturgically organized midrashic anthology—
the Pesiqta,52 which contains midrashic material to the Torah readings for the
holidays and the haftarah readings for special Shabbatot.53 It may well be that the
primary purpose for the composition of Midrash Rabbah was to serve the needs
of rank-and-file Jews who read the halakhically assigned biblical lections in syna-
gogue throughout the year. A midrashic anthology of this sort supplies, in effect,
a kind of homiletical-exegetical companion volume to those parts of Scripture read
in the synagogue.
In conclusion, note that the compilation of Midrash Rabbah as an anthology
of aggadic midrash to the most frequently read biblical books in Jewish culture
does not seem to have created a “canon,” in the commonly accepted sense of the
word as implying some kind of authoritative body of literature.54 It is important to
note that medieval Jewish scholars do not seem to regard the individual Rabbah
midrashim or Midrash Rabbah in its entirety as having any kind of special au-
thority by virtue of its being in this collection of works. The reason for this perhaps
surprising lack of “authoritative canonicity” would seem to be the essentially non-
authoritative and open-ended nature of midrash aggadah.55 It does, however, seem
useful to apply to Midrash Rabbah the notion of an “accessible canon,”56 in the
sense of a group of works that attain a kind of corporate identity by becoming
readily accessible to a particular readership community. In light of its subsequent
popularity, the compilation of Midrash Rabbah in the Middle Ages may be said
to have created a particular midrashic readership community—a community we
join in our day by becoming its readers.
Notes
Prooftexts 17 (1997):63–16. Reprinted by permission from The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Earlier drafts of this essay were presented at the workshop on the anthological imagi-
nation in Jewish literature, Tel Aviv University, June 7, 1995 (in Hebrew), at the first Eu-
ropean Association for Jewish Studies Summer Colloquium on Medieval Jewish Bible Ex-
egesis, Yarnton Manor, Oxford, July 15–19, 1996 (in English), and in the Jewish Studies
Colloquium at UCLA, November 21, 1996. I am grateful to the participants at these pres-
entations for their comments, and particularly to Professors David Stern, Albert van der
Heide, M. B. Lerner, Yaakov Elman, David Ellenson, and especially Chaim Milikowsky
for helping me to clarify a number of points.
1. Midrash Rabbah, translated into English under the editorship of H. Freedman and
Maurice Simon (London, 1939), in 10 volumes, has been reprinted several times and has
recently become available on CD-ROM in a bilingual edition with English subject index,
by arrangement with Davka Software of Chicago.
202 The Middle Ages
2. Barry Holtz, Back to the Sources: Reading the Classical Jewish Texts (New York,
1984), p. 178, bewails this fact: “Unfortunately for non-Hebrew readers, when the Soncino
Press published its English translation of the best-known midrashic text, Midrash Rabbah,
they called the set The Midrash.”
3. The best available handbook of rabbinic literature, Günter Stemberger, Introduction
to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. and ed. Markus Bockmuehl, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1996),
mentions Midrash Rabbah only in passing in its highly informative entries on some of the
individual Rabbah midrashim. The Encyclopaedia Judaica has no separate entry for Mid-
rash Rabbah, though it does have entries for nearly every major and minor midrashic work,
including the separate Rabbah midrashim. Significantly, modern introductions to Midrash
Rabbah tend not to deal with this specific work as a compilation; rather, they tend to serve
as platforms for the discussion of midrash in general. See the forward to the Soncino edition
of Midrash Rabbah by I. Epstein, and the introductions to their respective editions of
Midrash Rabbah by Halevy (Tel Aviv, 1956–63) and Mirkin (1957–67), and the introductions
to Midrash rabbah hamevoar (Jerusalem, 1983–93).
4. It was widely accepted that the Pesaro edition of 1520 was the first edition of Midrash
to the Five Scrolls. However, M. B. Lerner, “The First Edition of ‘Midrash to the Five
Scrolls,’ ” in The A. M. Habermann Memorial Volume, ed. Zvi Malachi [Hebrew] (Lod,
1983), pp. 289–311, has demonstrated that the first edition is actually the one published from
a manuscript (similar to MS Oxford 164) in Constantinople, apparently in 1514, and the
Pesaro edition is in fact copied from it. The midrash on Lamentations in this compilation
was referred to as Ekhah rabbati (apparently on the basis of the expression rabbati am in
Lam. 1:1); see Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, p. 284. But the mid-
rashic works to the Five Scrolls contained in this compilation were not referred to as
“Rabbah,” individually or collectively, until the Venice edition, in which they were pub-
lished together with Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch. Note that Stemberger, Introduction
to the Talmud and Midrash, p. 315, refers to these midrashic works on the Five Scrolls as
“The So-Called Rabbot.” The first printings of Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch and
Midrash to the Five Scrolls were part of a general program of publication of midrashic
literature undertaken by Contantinople printers in the early part of the sixteenth century.
See Abraham Yaari, Hadefus haivri bekushta (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 20; Lerner, pp. 294–95.
5. The numerous editions are listed in Bet Eked Sepharim Bibliographic Lexicon (n.d.)
covering the years 1474–1950, pp. 560–61, entry 783, and in Bet Eked Sepharim Hehfi adash
Bibliographical Lexicon New Series (Tsefat, 1976), covering the years 1950–75, p. 120, entries
1123–33. A recent vocalized edition, Midrash rabbah hamevoar (Jerusalem, 1983–93), re-
ceived generally positive reviews in the Israeli religious press: see Hamodia, March 30,
1990, and January 11, 1991; Yated neeman, April 6, 1990.
6. Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden historische entwickelt, first
published by the author in 1832; supplemented by H fi anokh Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael
(Jerusalem, 1954). At the end of his discussion of the earliest Rabbah midrashim (chap. 10,
Haderashot, p. 80), Zunz notes that Midrash Rabbah is made up of separate works com-
posed at different times. At the end of his discussion of the latest Rabbah midrash, Numbers
Rabbah, part 1 (chap. 14, p. 127), he adds, “without a doubt” from the thirteenth century
the various Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch began to be copied together in one
volume.
7. See Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 276–91.
8. See Marc Bregman, “Stratigraphic Analysis of a Selected Pericope from the
Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Midrashim” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the Tenth Congress of Jewish
Studies, Division C, vol. 1: Jewish Thought and Literature (Jerusalem, 1990), pp. 117–124;
“Early Sources and Traditions in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Midrashim” [Hebrew], Tar-
biz 60 (1991): [Hebrew] 269–74; The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature—Studies in the
Evolution of the Versions (Diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991) [Hebrew with
English abstract]; The Sign of the Serpent and the Plague of Blood (Tübingen, 1997); Oxford
Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (New York, 1997), s.v. Tanhuma-Yelammedenu. Compare
Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 303–7.
9. See Avigdor Shinan, Midrash Shemot Rabbah, Chapters I–XIV: A Critical Edition
[Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1984), introduction, pp. 19 ff. Shinan notes that the place of compo-
sition cannot be determined. See also Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature,
pp. 156–57, noting parallels to midrashic material from the school of Rabbi Moshe Hadar-
shan, which may suggest contact with early medieval European Jewish culture.
10. See Hannanel Mack, “Prolegomena and Example of an Edition of Midrash Be-
midbar Rabbah Part I” [Hebrew] (Diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991) [He-
brew]; Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 309–11; and Marc Bregman
in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, s.v. Numbers Rabbah.
11. See Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 315–21.
12. See Zunz-Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, p. 80.
13. See Zunz-Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, pp. 76–78; Albeck, introduction to the
Theodor-Albeck ed. of Genesis Rabbah, 2d ed. (Jerusalem, 1965), vol. 3, pp. 93–94; Stem-
berger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 276–77. The name Bereshit Rabba
(with a final alef, or Rabbah with a final hei) is already found in geonic literature. Another
early name for this work, Midrash livreshit deRabbi Oshaya Rabba, with several variants,
after the first sage mentioned in the work, may have been abbreviated to Bereshit Rabbah.
Early scholars, including apparently Maimonides (Introduction to Mishneh Torah), believed
that this Rabbi Hoshaya (or Oshaya) was the author or compiler of Genesis Rabbah. Zunz-
Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, p. 78, suggests that the word Rabbah was added to Bereshit
to indicate that this work was “The Great Genesis,” a midrashic commentary far larger
than the biblical book on which it is based. I. H. Weiss, Dor dor vedorshav (Vilna, 1871–
83), part 3, p. 253, suggests that Bereshit Rabbah was so named to distinguish it from an
earlier and less extensive midrashic work to Genesis. J. Theodor, in MGWJ 38 (1984):518,
suggests that Bereshit Rabbah originally applied only to the more extensive part of the work
(chaps. 1–29).
14. See Albeck, introduction to the Theodor-Albeck ed. of Genesis Rabbah, p. 94.
Albeck goes on there to develop the idea suggested by Zunz concerning the name Bereshit
Rabbah (see the previous note) to suggest that all the Rabbah midrashim (Shemot Rabbah,
etc.) were given the appellation Rabbah (“great, large”) to distinguish them from the smaller
biblical books (Shemot, etc.) to which they served as expansive midrashic interpretations.
A. A. Halevy, introduction to Genesis Rabbah in his edition of Midrash Rabbah, vol. 1,
p. 37, suggests that the appellation Rabbah distinguishes each of the Rabbah midrashim
from smaller midrashic works (mostly now lost) referred to as zuta, plural zutot (“lesser,
minor, small”) to the same biblical books; and that Midrash Rabbah is a collective name
applied to the compilation of individual Rabbah midrashim. The division of works into
Rabba and Zuta is already attested from talmudic times; Ketubot 106a mentions a Seder
Eliyahu Rabba and a Seder Eliyahu Zuta.
15. The following examples are far from an exhaustive survey, which would be beyond
the scope of this study.
16. See Albeck, introduction to Genesis Rabbah, p. 115. Chaim Milikowsky (personal
communications, 1996) points out that “Midrash H fi akhamim, inasmuch as it does not follow
its base text slavishly, shows that its compiler had a higher degree of self-consciousness as
author and/or redactor than did the compiler who put all of the texts of Midrash Rabbah
into one volume.”
204 The Middle Ages
17. M. B. Lerner, in Teuda 1 (1980):44 n. 28, has suggested that the combination of
Genesis Rabbah and the halakhic midrashim was already known in geonic times, being re-
flected in Halakhot Gedolot (ed. Hildesheimer, pp. 633–34): yXrdm h[bdaw synhb trwt
~yrpws. In discussion, Prof. Lerner has mentioned that he thinks this combination may
reflect a “geonic curriculum,” a kind of semiofficial syllabus of midrashic works especially
authorized for study of each of the books of the Pentateuch.
18. See Albeck, introduction to Genesis Rabbah, pp. 108–10; Margulies, introduction
to his ed. of Leviticus Rabbah, pp. xxxiv.
19. Albeck, p. 105; Margulies, p. xxxv; Hannanel Mack, “Prolegomena,” pp. 244–45.
20. Published by Meir Zvi Weiss, “Seridim mehagenizah,” Hatsofeh lehfi okhmat yisrael
13 (Budapest, 1929):105–19. According to Weiss, the text was in the Kaufmann collection in
Budapest, but my attempts to receive a photographic copy have not so far been successful
despite the generous assistance of the late Chief Rabbi Schreiber of Budapest.
21. Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Midrashim, p. 82 (on Oxford-Bodleian E.75
folios 7 and 8) and the other MSS referred to there.
22. Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, pp. 24–25.
23. See Stefan C. Reif, “Codicological Aspects of Jewish Liturgical History,” Bulletin
of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75:3 (Autumn 1993) [Artefact and Text:
The Re-Creation of Jewish Literature in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, ed. Philip S. Al-
exander and Alexander Samely]:125: “The twelfth to the sixteenth centuries were the years
in which the bound codex reached the apogée of its elegance, usefulness and influence.”
This technological evolution, which permitted the compilation of such a monumental
codex as MS De Rossi 1240, may also have permitted the compilation of such monumental
compilations as the codices of Midrash Rabbah discussed here later.
24. See N. J. Cohen, “The Manuscripts and Editions of the Midrash Pesikta Rabbati—
A Prolegomenon to a Scientific Edition” (Diss., Hebrew Union College, 1977), pp. 1–19;
Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, p. 41.
25. Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) survives in one complete manuscript copy
(MS Parma 1240) and five incomplete or fragmentary copies in addition to the printed
editions. See Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, pp. 49–51. A critical edition
of this version of Deuteronomy Rabbah was undertaken by Rabbi Chaim Luban but never
completed; see Bregman, p. 284 n. 7. According to Lieberman, in the introduction to Deu-
teronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version), p. xiii, Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) is a
recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah that circulated among Ashkenazi and French Jews.
26. Midrash Debarim Rabbah, ed. Saul Lieberman (first published in 1940, rev. 2d
ed. 1965, rev. 3d ed. 1974, cited later). This version of Deuteronomy Rabbah is preserved in
four relatively complete manuscript copies: MSS Oxford 147, Oxford 2335, Rome Angelica
61, and Munich 229.2. MS Epstein, as described by Schwarz (see n. 28) contained a nearly
complete copy of Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version). Other MSS (Sasson 920,
Jerusalem National Library 24⬚ 5977) each preserve two leaves of this work. A Geniza
fragment (London British Library Or. 10.797 Gaster Collection) preserves the beginning of
Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) copied out as a separate work (recto is blank).
See Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, pp. 51–54. Compare M. B. Lerner,
“New Light on the Spanish Recension of Deuteronomy Rabba [1] The Evolution of Ed.
Lieberman,” Teudah 11 (1996) (Meir Rabinowitz Memorial Volume):107–45. Parts of what
eventually became known as Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) were published in
the nineteenth century by S. Buber and A. Epstein; see Lieberman, p. v–vi. On the earlier
publication of parts of this text from MS Munich 229 by N. Rabinowitz, see Bregman, The
Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, p. 52. It is important to note that the version of Deuter-
onomy Rabbah published by Lieberman preserves a different recension (i.e., an essen-
tially different literary work, but of the same midrashic genre) of Tanhuma-Yelammedenu
midrash to Deuteronomy only in some sections; see Lieberman, p. xi, n. 3. Other sections
of Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) replicate the same recension found in Deu-
teronomy Rabbah (printed version)—see Lieberman, p. 83, n. 9; p. 116, n. 2, and the text
found in Tanhuma (printed version) to Deuteronomy, see Lieberman, p. 125, n. 4. At the
conclusion of the introduction to his edition of Deuteronomy Rabbah, p. xxiii, Lieberman
states that both versions of Deuteronomy Rabbah are among the “oldest recensions of Tan-
huma” (i.e., Tanhuma-Yelammedenu midrashim, see note 8 here). Buber’s claim that there
was an alternate recension of a midrashic work to the whole of the book of Deuteronomy
Rabbah is refuted by Lieberman, pp. viff. Compare Lerner, “New Light.” Because Deuter-
onomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) contains alternate recension material that circulated
in Sephardi culture, added to material from Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) and
Tanhuma, it is far less uniform, as a literary work, than Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed
version) (see n. 33 here).
27. Pp. xi–xxi.
28. Meir Benayahu, in Tarbiz 43 (1973–74):445, n. 136, remarked: “It seems that until
now all the Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch have not been discovered together in
one codex except in Sephardi manuscripts.” This general observation remains unchallenged
in light of subsequent research. On MSS Jerusalem National Library 24⬚ 5977 (Spitzer),
Oxford 147, Oxford 2335, Sasson 920 (Sephardi fifteenth century), see Shinan, in the intro-
duction to his edition of Exodus Rabbah, pp. 25–26. See also his brief descriptions of MSS
New York (JTS) 1672* 5014, and Jerusalem National Library 8⬚ 554, which are incomplete
but may originally have been MSS of Midrash Rabbah. A manuscript once owned by
Avraham Epstein but now for the most part lost also seems to have originally included all
of Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch; see A. Z. Schwarz, Die hebräischen Handscriften in
Österreich, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1931), pp. 11–13, no. 26. On the rediscovery of part of this man-
uscript after World War II in Poland and its transfer to the Warsaw Jewish Historical
Institute, see Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, p. 49; compare Mack, “Pro-
legomena,” pp. 251–52. Margulies, in the introduction to his edition of Leviticus Rabbah,
p. xxxvi, identifies the two fifteenth-century Sephardi MSS of Midrash Rabbah (Oxford 147,
Oxford 2335) and MS Jerusalem 8⬚ 515, which apparently also at one time included Midrash
Rabbah to the entire Pentateuch, as belonging to the same text-type. These three MSS are
written on paper that even bears the same watermark; see Bregman, The Tanhuma-
Yelammedenu Literature, pp. 45–47. Milikowsky (see n. 16) has informed me that according
to the noted paleographer Edna Angel, the two Oxford MSS 147 and 2335 and another
fifteenth-century Sephardi MS of Midrash Rabbah (Jerusalem National Library 24⬚ 5977)
“were all written in the same workshop,” and that MS Oxford 147 and MS Jerusalem
National Library 24⬚ 5977 “were written by the same scribe.”
29. On the general affinity between early Hebrew printing and manuscripts, see Mal-
achi Beit-Arié in Essays and Studies in Librarianship Presented to Curt David Wormann
(Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 27–39.
30. This has been noted by editors of the individual Rabbah midrashim. See Albeck,
in his introduction to Genesis Rabbah, p. 128; Shinan, in the introduction to his edition of
Exodus Rabbah, p. 27; Margulies, in the introduction to his edition of Leviticus Rabbah,
p. xxxvii. Compare Hannanel Mack, “The Reworking of a Midrash by Printers in Istanbul
in 1512” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 52 (1992):37–45, and his “Prolegomena,” pp. 256–58, who argues
that the Constantinople printers used only one manuscript of Numbers Rabbah, Milikowsky,
in Alei sefer 12 (1986):40, states that printers of the 1517 Constantinople edition of Seder
Olam also mixed textual traditions from various manuscripts.
31. Albeck, in his introduction to Genesis Rabbah p. 137, notes that the textual tradition
206 The Middle Ages
of the printed edition is related to the two Sephardi manuscripts (a MS Oxford 147, and
20
a MS Oxford 2335).
32. Shinan, in the introduction to his edition of Exodus Rabbah, p. 27, notes that one
of the manuscripts used by the Constantinople printers of Midrash Rabbah was similar to
MS Paris 187/15, which was copied in Italy in the beginning of the sixteenth century (see
Shinan, p. 26). Margulies, in the introduction to his edition of Leviticus Rabbah, p. xxxvii,
notes that the Constantinople edition of this Rabbah midrash is most similar to MS Paris
149, which was written in Arles in 1291 (see Margulies, p. xxxv). Mack, “Reworking,” p. 45,
notes that the printed edition of Numbers Rabbah is similar to the older Provençal-Italian
text-type rather than to the Sephardi one; see also his “Prolegomena,” p. 256. Though the
Constantinople printers were of the Spanish exile, what they brought from Spain to Turkey
seems to have been primarily the format of Midrash Rabbah as an anthology of Rabbah
midrashim to the Pentateuch. However, the actual textual resources they used apparently
came mostly not from Spain but from elsewhere, such as Italy and southern France, perhaps
brought by Ashkenazi immigrants who came to Turkey in the mid-fifteenth century. This
specific conclusion runs counter to the generalization made by Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky,
“Structure, Organisation and Spiritual Life of the Sephardi Communities in the Ottoman
Empire from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Sephardi Heritage, vol. 2, The
Western Sephardim (Grendon, Northants, 1989), p. 330: “printing houses were set up im-
mediately after the Spanish exile in Constantinople. . . . These printing houses printed
much of the works on Torah by the Spanish sages of the Middle Ages, thus saving from
total loss the many manuscripts that the Spanish exiles brought with them.”
33. Because we do not know what textual resources the Constantinople printers had
at their disposal, it is not possible to determine with certainty if their incorporation of a
different recension of the midrash to Deuteronomy resulted from an intentional editorial
decision. But two considerations suggest that such speculation may be justified. As was
noted by Albeck in his introduction to Genesis Rabbah, p. 128, the Constantinople printers
of Midrash Rabbah seem to have made a careful study of the work they were editing. And
as was noted by Norman Cohen, “Structure and Editing in the Homiletic Midrashim,”
Association of Jewish Studies Review 6 (1981):6, Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) ex-
hibits a fixed ordering of homiletical units, more like the earlier homiletical midrashim
Leviticus Rabbah and Pesiqta deRav Kahana than the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu midrashim.
This stands in particular contrast to the lack of redactional uniformity found in Deuteron-
omy Rabbah (Lieberman version) (see n. 26 here). It may well be that the Constantinople
printers exercised sound literary judgment in selecting the more structurally uniform re-
cension of Deuteronomy Rabbah that they incorporated into Midrash Rabbah and in so
doing functioned as careful and conscientious anthologizers.
34. The flexibility of the contents of what eventually evolved into Midrash Rabbah as
we know it illustrates the “open book” typical of medieval Jewish literary culture. See Israel
M. Ta-Shma, “The ‘Open’ Book in Medieval Hebrew Literature: The Problem of Author-
ized Editions,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75:3 (Autumn
1993) [Artefact and Text: The Re-Creation of Jewish Literature in Medieval Hebrew Man-
uscripts, ed. Philip S. Alexander and Alexander Samely]:15–24.
35. See Zunz-Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, p. 345, n. 123. Using the Bar-Ilan Responsa
Project CD-ROM database of Rabbinic texts, I was able to locate ten passages in his Torah
commentary where Nahfi manides cites from Exodus Rabbah and Numbers Rabbah as “Mid-
rash Rabbah.” See, for example, his commentary to Exodus 7:3, where he cites Exodus
Rabbah 5:6 as coming from Midrash Rabbah. Sporadic references to “Midrash Rabbah”
(no more than one per author) in pre-sixteenth-century works, I regard as unreliable because
these may be the result of later accretions to texts for which we generally have no critical
editions. See, for example, Pseudo-Rashi to 1 Chronicles 27:33.
36. In his novellae to Baba Batra 100b, Nahfi manides cites from what he found
abr ~yrbd hla tdghb, which we find in Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version), p. 32
(see n. 7 and Lieberman’s introduction, p. vii).
37. Marc Saperstein, Decoding the Rabbis: A Thirteenth-Century Commentary on the
Aggadah (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp. 21–22, has suggested that in the thirteenth century
in Provence, Rabbi Isaac ben Yedaiah wrote a commentary to the entire Midrash Rabbah
on the Pentateuch. Unfortunately, what survives in manuscript is only part of his commen-
tary to Leviticus Rabbah and the first part of Numbers Rabbah with cross-references to other
parts of the work, such as Genesis Rabbah. As we have seen, the various Rabbah midrashim
were sometimes copied together in collections not containing all the Rabbah midrashim
to the five pentateuchal books. For this reason, what survives of this commentary does not
provide sufficient evidence that Midrash Rabbah to the entire Pentateuch was available in
thirteenth-century Provence as a complete midrashic anthology to the Pentateuch. Signif-
icantly, Rabbi David ben Samuel Kokhavi (Estella) (Provence, late thirteenth–early four-
teenth century), in the introduction to his Sefer Habatim, lists all five Rabbah midrashim
to the Pentateuch, but only as separate midrashic works: wnydyb acmnw . . . hbr tyXadb
hlaw hbr ygys rbrmb hbr arqyw hbr twmX hlaw hrwth yrps raXm ~yrxa ~yXrrm
hbr ~yrbd; see Mack, “Prolegomena,” p. 212. Yedaiah Hapenini Bedersi, who lived in Prov-
ence at about the same time, wrote a philosophical commentary on yrpsw amwxntw hbr
twXrdm; see Meir Benayahu, Tarbiz 42 (1972–73): 457. Because this commentary has never
been published, it is difficult to determine whether Yedaiah had the Rabbah midrashim as
separate works or as a discrete anthology.
38. See Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer (New York, 1982), vol. 1,
pp. 317–20, s.v. “anthologies.”
39. See Sandra Hindman, Sealed in Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood in the Il-
luminated Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes (Chicago, 1994), pp. 3–4. See p. 1 for the
suggestion that Chrétien, who worked during the 1170s, may have been a converted Jew
from the great French talmudic center in Troyes, which would account for his odd first
name. My thanks to my colleague Prof. Susan Einbinder, Hebrew Union College in Cin-
cinnati, for having called my attention to Hindman’s book.
40. See The Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden, 1934), s.v. “Hadith,” “Tafsir.” See also
Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2d ed. (New York, 1964), vol. 6,
p. 165, for a comparison of Quranic exegesis to midrash, and particularly concerning Mid-
rash Rabbah; see his n. 14.
41. See R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge, 1956), index,
p. 489, s.v. “Anthologies of Poetry.”
42. See Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Leiden, 1955), pp. 1–11; The
Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy (New York, 1990), pp. xi–xiii. For evidence of
Jewish familiarity in the twelfth century with Alf Laila wa-Laila, see S. D. Goitein in JAOS
78 (1958):301–2, and S. D. Goitein and Paula Sanders, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 6
cumulative indices (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 11, s.v. “Arabian Nights.”
43. See Jacob Elbaum’s essay on the yalqutim, chapter 8 in this volume.
44. See Sara Japhet, “The Nature and Distribution of Medieval Compilatory Com-
mentaries in the Light of Rabbi Joseph Kara’s Commentary on the Book of Job,” in The
Midrashic Imagination, ed. Michael Fishbane (Albany, N.Y., 1993), pp. 98–130; “Hizkuni’s
Commentary on the Pentateuch—Its Genre and Purpose” [Hebrew], Rabbi Mordechai
Breuer Festschrift: Collected Papers in Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 91–111.
208 The Middle Ages
45. See Philip S. Alexander, “Gaster’s Exempla of the Rabbis: A Reappraisal,” in
Rashi 1040–1990: Hommage à Ephraim E. Urbach, ed. G. Sed-Rajna (Paris, 1993), pp. 793–
805.
46. See An Elegant Composition Concerning Relief after Adversity, ed. William Brinner
(New Haven, Conn., 1977).
47. See the essay by Eli Yassif, Chapter 9 in this volume. For a survey and categori-
zation of medieval aggadic collections, see Alexander, “Gaster’s Exempla of the Rabbis,”
pp. 802–5, and particularly his comment (p. 803): “Aggadic collections are popular in char-
acter. They are meant for edification: they could be read in private on Shabbat, or quarried
by the darshanim for sermon illustrations.”
48. Notes on a Hitherto Unknown Exegetical, Theological and Philosophical Commen-
tary to the Pentateuch Composed by Aboo Manzur Al-Dhamari, ed. Alexander Kohut (New
York, n.d.), p. 47.
49. See Joseph Heinemann, “The Nature of the Aggadah,” in Midrash and Literature,
ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven, Conn., 1985), p. 42, citing
Mevo hatalmud, ascribed to Shmuel Hanagid. Heinemann’s essay was originally published
in his book Aggadah and Its Development [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1974), see p. 7.
50. See Pesiqta Rabbati, chap. 21, ed. Friedmann, 101a–b and parallels.
51. See Zunz-Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, pp. 145–46; Salo W. Baron, A Social and
Religious History of the Jews, 2d ed. (New York, 1964), vol. 6, pp. 173–75; Stemberger,
Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 356–57.
52. See Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 291–96 on Pesiqta
deRav Kahana, and pp. 296–302 on Pesiqta Rabbati.
53. On these special haftarot, see Lewis Barth, “ ‘The Three of Rebuke and the Seven
of Consolation’ Sermons in Pesikta and de-Rav Kahana,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982):
503–15.
54. On canonization and authority, see Frank Kermode, “Institutional Control of In-
terpretation,” in The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 168–
84; see also Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago, 1984), and Lucia Re,
“(De)constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the Scene of Modern Italian
Poetry,” The Modern Language Review 87:3 (July 1992):585–602. On the formation of the
biblical canon, see James A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Crit-
icism (Philadelphia, 1984), and Frank Kermode, “The Canon,” in The Literary Guide to
the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). On the problem-
atic issue of the canonization of Rabbinic literature, see Jacob Neusner, Canon and Con-
nection (Lanham, Md., 1987). Compare the brief, but to my mind more helpful, comments
by David Stern, “Sacred Text and Canon,” Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed.
Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York, 1987), pp. 841–47, who emphasizes
the complexity of the question of canon in nonhalakhic literature (pp. 845ff.).
55. See, for example, the statement “one may not invoke aggadah as support [for a
certain view]”; see Judah Goldin, “Freedom and Restraint of the Haggadah,” in Studies in
Midrash and Related Literature (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 252–68, and David Stern, “Midrash
and Indeterminacy,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988), revised in his recent book Midrash
and Theory: Ancient Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill., 1996),
“Midrash and Hermeneutics: Polysemy vs. Indeterminacy,” pp. 15–38. On the general na-
ture of midrash aggadah, see Y. Heinemann, Darkhei haaggadah, 3d ed. (Jerusalem, 1974).
56. For this expression, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the
Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 215–16.
iii
THE MODERN PERIOD

11
zipora kagan
Homo Anthologicus
Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the
Anthological Genre
“To be both source and progeny”

Berdyczewski
o figure in modern Hebrew literature has been more closely identified with
N the anthological enterprise than Micha Joseph Berdyczewski, later known as
Bin-Gorion (1865–1921). In the course of his life, Berdyczewski, in addition to being
a writer of fiction, a folklorist, essayist, critic, and scholar, compiled five multivol-
ume anthologies and seems to have discovered in the anthological form a fitting
embodiment of what he considered the nature of modern Jewish existence. In-
deed, so central and fundamental a role did the compilation of anthologies play
in his life that it would be no exaggeration to call Berdyczewski homo anthologicus.
Micha Joseph Berdyczewski was born on July 27, 1865, in the village of Med-
zibezh in Podolia, a district in the Ukraine (Little Russia). Most of his childhood
and youth were spent in Dubova, where his father served as the community’s
rabbi. His mother died when he was eleven, and this traumatic experience shad-
owed Berdyczewski all his life, serving as the subject of several of his stories. In
1882, at the age of seventeen, the young iluy (prodigy) married a rich man’s
daughter, but after he was discovered reading maskilic texts, his father-in-law forced
him to divorce his wife (whom Berdyczewski had grown to love). The trauma of
this episode was later given poignant esthetic expression in his story “Meever
lanahar” (Across the River, 1899). In 1882 Berdyczewski entered the Volozhin
yeshiva. In that same year, he published his first article, “Toldot yeshivat ets
hfi ayyim.”1
In 1888 he married for a second time, only to be divorced within a year. In
1890 he visited Odessa, where he became acquainted with the most important
Hebrew writers. At the end of the year, he left Poland, first for Germany, where
he enrolled in Breslau University, and later for Switzerland, where in 1896 he
received a doctorate in philosophy from Berne University for a dissertation entitled
Über den Zusammenhand zwischen Ethik und Aesthetik (On the connection be-
tween ethics and aesthetics).2 In 1902 he married Rachel Ramburg, who also be-
211
212 The Modern Period
came his main literary collaborator. They lived in Breslau until 1911, then moved
to Berlin, where they lived for the next ten years. Berdyczewski died on November
18, 1921.
Throughout these years, Berdyczewski devoted considerable energy to various
anthological projects, most of them collections of aggadah. For him, the antho-
logical activity was not only the mere assembling of a collection, but the making
of a literary genre with both historical and philosophical dimensions that represents
the unique structure of Jewish existence: “This work of mine is objective toladatic
poetics,” he wrote on October 1, 1904, to A. L. Ben-Avigdor, to whom he sent the
manuscript of H fi ayyei moshe (The Life of Moses), which itself belongs to the
anthological genre.
By toladatic—an adjectival form I have invented for the purposes of this ar-
ticle, derived from the Hebrew toladati, the term Berdyczewski himself used—
Berdyczewski meant a historically dynamic rather than static memory, namely, the
summation of all deeds, desires, feelings, and visions that had accumulated over
generations in the life of the Jewish people, a nation that Berdyczewski called a
toladatic folk. It is clear why literature without such a “toladatic mark” was dis-
qualified from his purview, since “true and whole recognition of ourselves and
the quality of ourselves deepens on the knowledge of our tolada” (Berdyczewski,
1914). Tolada is a major category and term in all aspects of Berdyczewski’s writ-
ing—from philosophy and literature, to criticism and scholarship.3
Between 1903 and 1905, Berdyczewski was occupied in preparing two anthol-
ogies: a compilation called Matam (Mishnah, Talmud, midrash) and a collection
of Hasidic texts entitled Liqutei reshit hahfi asidut (Extracts from the Origins of
Hasidism). The latter project was never completed, though parts of it survive in
manuscript form in the Berdyczewski archive.4 In any case, Berdyczewski’s pre-
occupation with anthology making is evident in the entries he made during this
period—especially from July to November 1905—in his private diary (Chroniq),5
which include many references and descriptions of anthological projects: “I have
started a new plan: to arrange talmudic proverbs. Some of it I have already done,
but I should also have collected disputations in talmudic literature and prayers”
(July 22, 1905).6 Or, as he wrote on August 10, 1905: “I have collected masses of
legends.”7 At that time, as Berdyczewski noted in his diary, he had begun to collect
and arrange talmudic texts containing disputes with “idol worshipers, Christians,
and sectarians mentioned in talmudic literature.”8 As in the Hasidic anthology
mentioned earlier, only some parts of this work survive in manuscript.
Whether or not they were completed, however, all these projects attest to the
centrality of the anthology in all spheres of Berdyczewski’s work. His aggadic col-
lections, in German as well as in Hebrew, include different types of anthologies,
and they reflect his self-conception as both a philosopher of history and a narrator.
In the first role, Berdyczewski approached the aggadic collections as a historian
of culture, collecting different versions of stories and traditions, comparing their
details, and assembling them in carefully designed arrangements. In the second
role, that of writer, he treated each version of a particular story as an autonomous,
unique work. In both roles, however, Berdyczewski collected his material from a
Homo Anthologicus 213
wide range of sources—from canonical and noncanonical texts, from those central
to the tradition and from those marginal to it, and from both authoritative and
unorthodox works. To understand the nature of these different types of anthologies,
it will be helpful to review briefly Berdyczewski’s five large anthologies, three of
which were composed in Hebrew, and two in German. I will treat the Hebrew
and the German works separately and begin with the former.
Hfi ayye moshe ish haelohim (The Life of Moses,

the Man of God)
Prepared in 1903–4, this work9 was Berdyczewski’s first anthology in the domain
of biblical literature, and in it, his revolutionary cultural and poetic spirit are
already conspicuous. Each section of H fi ayyei moshe is a mosaic composed of entire
or partial verses from the Pentateuch and fashioned into a new composition. To
connect the verse fragments, Berdyczewski had to delete words or make other kinds
of linguistic modifications (e.g., inflect verbs, make pronouns possessive). His cul-
tural daring is evident in the freedom with which he changed the biblical original
and rearranged Scripture into a new order. As a scholar of the biblical era, Ber-
dyczewski identified his project with contemporary critical approaches in biblical
scholarship, which were also struggling to pose new questions about the authorship
of the Bible and about the history of Israel in antiquity. In taking this approach,
Berdyczewski relied primarily on the traditional commentaries in the Rabbinic
and medieval literature to the Bible and Talmud, as he did in his biblical research
Sinai ugrizim.10
Berdyczewski divided H fi ayyei moshe into seven books: (1) Sefer toladot (Book
of History), a historical and geographical history of the Israelites from Abraham to
Moses, from the time of Moses’ birth to the Exodus; (2) Sefer habrit (Book of the
Covenant), which focused upon the covenant at Mount Sinai and the giving of
the Ten Commandments, namely, the historical moment that consolidated the
twelve tribes into a single nation through their common acceptance of monothe-
istic faith; (3) Sefer hamishkan vimei hamerivah (Book of the Sanctuary and the
Days of Strife), an account of the problematic transition undergone by the “gen-
eration of the wilderness” from being a tribe of slaves to an independent people;
(4) Sefer hamilhfi amot (Book of Wars), on the victorious wars waged by the newly
constituted nation against its enemies, its conquest of territory for settlement, and
the building of a society ruled by the laws of the Torah; (5) Sefer hamishpatim
(Book of Judgments), consisting of laws governing individual and communal be-
havior according to the moral codes established by Moses, the emissary of the God
of Israel (but in an order different from that in the biblical original); (6) Sefer
devarim (Book of Words), on Moses’ last words and death; the transfer of the
mantle of authority to Joshua, and the transition of Israel from its wilderness period
to its normalization as a nation; and (7) Sefer yehoshua (Book of Joshua), which
relates the story of the conquest of the land and the renewal of the covenant
between God and His people on Mount Gerizim.
Berdyczewski completed H fi ayyei moshe in 1904 and sent the manuscript to
Ben-Avigdor, his publisher, and to Bialik, who on October 19, 1904, responded
with respect to what he recognized was a daring literary act, the creation of a new
and revolutionary literary consciousness that was ahead of its time:
It seems to me that your intention is worthy, but I greatly doubt that the time is
ripe for it, or that you are the man capable of accomplishing this deed. Such
things are done by generations, not by individuals. . . . In principle, I agree with
this, but at the present time you will find no audience among the people, and
the idea will appear premature, an object of derision and outrage. . . . Things like
this must be done with caution, in a manner unsensed by the eye and heart of
the people. . . . In truth, Ish haelohim is the creation of the folk. In any event,
the people do everything and are made by themselves. Both are the words of the
living God.11
Berdyczewski’s answer to Bialik (on November 3, 1904) can be taken as relat-
ing to all his anthological works:
You can see the division of the submitted material into earlier and later [material],
and the scope of every matter accords with both its scholarly and poetic arrange-
ment. By scholarly, I wish to denote merely that each of my arrangements is
constructed on critical as well as traditional criticism, namely, I have endeavored
to find for every change and new order some authority among Talmud sages, and
I permitted myself no move without being able to defend it from that source. By
“poetic,” I mean my effort to provide a backbone to all the visions and statements
through the type of the man Moses as the main subject for all sections. (H fi ayyei
moshe, pp. 117–18)
Meotsar haaggadah and Tsefunot veaggadot

Meotsar haaggadah,12 published by Ahisefer in Berlin in 1914, was the first of the
two comprehensive anthologies of aggadah published by Berdyczewski. Meotsar
haaggadah, on which Berdyczewski labored for close to a decade (1906–14), con-
tains 533 legends. The other one, Tsefunot veaggadot,13 an expanded edition that
appeared under a new title, contains 783 legends.
Meotsar haaggadah is divided into two parts. The first, Minni qedem (From
Antiquity), includes legends and tales of the lives of the ancient Hebrews from the
creation of the world to the talmudic age; the second part, Aggadot am (Folktales),
consists of legends and traditions from the lives of the Jews scattered throughout
the Diaspora from the Middle Ages to modern times.
The title page of Meotsar haaggadah articulates both Berdyczewski’s work
method and the dual roles he saw for himself in creating these anthologies. It
reads: “Collected and prepared [vehekhinan] by Bin-Gorion and made ready for
the press by Micha Joseph Berdyczewski.” The fact that he used both his given
name and his nom de plume suggests how differently he saw his two roles as
editor and publisher; the word hekhin was understood already in the Bible as a
creative act also involving study.14 Presumably, the choice of the term vehekhinan
was tantamount to a declaration by its editor that Meotsar haaggadah was not
simply an act of compilation but one of creativity as well.
The key to that creativity can be seen partly in the differences, in content as
well as in language, between the aggadic texts as Berdyczewski recorded them in
Mimeqor yisrael—verbatim, in their original language—and the rewritten form in
which they appear in Meotsar haagadah and Tsefunot veaggadot. The latter work
is a fusion of the original aggadic text, which bears the seal of folk literature as
transmitted from generation to generation, and the personal, subjective creativity
of an individual author’s voice: that is, a fusion of folk tradition and literature.
Meotsar haaggadah and Tsefunot veaggadot reflect a toladatic memory that is
not a static but a dynamic one, and that imparts an intricate and relevant meaning
to the texts that is dictated by the “editor’s” position midway between past and
present, between the original aggadah as created by tradition and the newly re-
written composition of the individual author.
To grasp Berdyczewski’s conception of the “poetic construction” of Tsefunot
veaggadot, which he regarded as his masterpiece,15 one need only read an example
of the type of aggadah he presented in the anthology. Consider the legend of the
tanna R. Eliezer Horkenos as he adapted it from its talmudic and midrashic
sources: After years of trial and anguish, the tanna’s greatness is recognized by all,
including his father. In most versions of the legend, the tale concludes with the
hero winning his reward in Torah, greatness, and wealth. Thus, the version of
Avot derabbi natan (version 1, chap. 6), in Bereshit Rabbah (chap. 42), and in
Tanhfi uma (Buber’s edition, chap. 91); another version, preserved in Avot derabbi
natan (version 2, chap. 13) and in Pirqei derabbi eliezer (chaps. 1–2), takes an
extreme, idealistic approach wherein Eliezer ben Horkenos rejects the possessions
offered to him by his father as a bribe to stop studying Torah. That is, he who
chooses the kingdom of spirituality must turn his back on the kingdom of matter;
there is no room here for compromise. Characteristically, this is the version Ber-
dyczewski records in Tsefunot veaggadot. The first passage in this version—about
the beginnings of R. Eliezer ben Horkenos—is not in the Talmud but in the
midrashim, in contrast to the other passages describing the circumstances of the
tanna’s death, which originate in the Talmud (Baba Metsia, 59b; Sanhedrin, 88a).
Berdyczewski’s connecting sentences at the beginning and the end of the passages
both expand upon and deepen the aggadic elements found in the sources; they
build upon them a new-old literary reality woven around the figure of the Talmud
scholar who has lived his life mainly in isolation—from his family, his friends,
even his pupils. In a world dominated by the principle of ahfi arei rabim lehatot
(going with the crowd), a figure like R. Eliezer was doomed to live a solitary life.
“This sage was a lonely figure, separated from his colleagues all his life; and his
wisdom was buried with him,” as Berdyczewski states at the conclusion of his
version.
The dispute between R. Eliezer and the sages is highlighted in all the tal-
mudic and midrashic accounts, but the talmudic sources tend to stress the rec-
onciliation between the tanna and his opponents, albeit only at the time of his
death. In Tsefunot veaggadot, however, there is no room for compromise. The
tanna’s life course was determined from the root of his soul: his was a principled
and uncompromising stance, derived from the certainty of the rightness of his
halakhic decisions, and this stance brought him into conflict with the other sages
throughout his life, even at the time of his death.16
The anthology Meotsar haaggadah (and Tsefunot veaggadot) represents a
merger of two distinct cultural disciplines: folk tradition and true written literature.
Into the warp of the folktales of all generations, Berdyczewski wove his own weft,
the “children of my spirit,” as he called them, and in this way he created “new
yet old” constructions, a narrative that presents the idea and the method of his
entire oeuvre. In other words, the inclusion of young writers of modern times was
a component of equal worth in the creative output of the generations to the place
occupied by the age-old voices of tradition.
Berdyczewski’s anthologies in German—Der Born Judas (The Spring of Judah)

and Die Sagen der Juden (Legends of the Jews)—were, like all his literary works,
acts of recovery and restoration, attempts to return the treasures of aggadah to the
Jewish people. But with the German anthologies, Berdyczewski had another goal
in mind as well: to restore to world literature itself the legends of Israel and the
Jewish folktale. By compiling a classic collection of these legends and folktales,
Berdyczewski wished to place the legends of Israel among the other great collec-
tions of folk legends that were considered to be the timeless assets of the nations
of the world. A living Jewish culture, in Berdyczewski’s view, was one that held a
complex dialogue with two distinct partners—with the roots of its own culture, on
the one side, and with the cultural world in which it was situated, on the other.
The legends in the two anthologies were translated by Rachel Bin-Gorion,
Berdyczewski’s wife, who took great pains to remain faithful to the original text
without embellishing or sermonizing over it. When it first appeared, the translation
was received to great acclaim, with critics expressing enthusiastic approval and
stressing the spiritual depth of the legends and tales that had been translated.17
Die Sagen der Juden zur Bibel

This anthology18 consists of five volumes; three of them were published during
Berdyczewski’s lifetime. All the volumes contain ancient myths and aggadot, mid-
rashim, fables, tales, and stories, all linked to biblical stories. Berdyczewski col-
lected the material from hundreds of sources, some of which were easily accessible
and others highly arcane, from printed books and from manuscripts, and from
every layer of Jewish literature, from Talmud and midrash to kabbalah. In setting
forth material from earlier and later times, he was careful to point out the plethora
of versions of a single story or text, a feature of the tradition that he considered a
major factor in aggadic literature. In Die Sagen, Berdyczewski kept to his sources
and did not alter the text other than to translate it into German.
Der Born Judas

This anthology19 contains about a thousand fictional tales that were copied and
printed over a millennium, from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of modern
times. Berdyczewski sought out these stories from dozens, if not hundreds, of books
and collections, including banned and apocryphal sources. He compiled much of

the material from ethical and religious treatises and books of customs, kabbalah,
and natural science, and he gathered, copied, assembled, and arranged the ma-
terial according to chronological, thematic, and, at times, poetic criteria. This
collection, too, is distinguished by its artistic and scholarly editing: adherence to
the version of the sources (in translation), the addition of references for every
aggadah and story, with notes and an index at the collection’s end.
In the introduction to Der Born Judas, Berdyczewski wrote:
Besides myth, aggadot, and the teachings that are interspersed throughout Jewish
literature and that determine the life and hopes of the people, a special sphere
may be defined that encompasses legends and tales, fables, and stories. The goal
of this initial book is to elaborate this field. To the many great and famous an-
thologies of Märchen and legend, to such works as The Wise Man and the Fool,
A Thousand and One Nights, and the Gestum Romanorum, let us add a new
collection that, though it has its own form, may complement the others. Spiritual
matters, which were the daily bread and water of their times, outlive their era. In
the folk literature and in the religious stories of the ancients, we are bequeathed
a lavish heritage.
Mimeqor yisrael (From the Fount of Israel)

The preparation of this work,20 Berdyczewski’s best-known anthology, occupied
him for most of his life, even though it was published only after his death. The
collection of the material underwent several stages, from the comprehensive se-
lection of the stories in their original Hebrew in preparation for their appearance
in German translation, to the compilation and arrangement of the material for
publication in a book that was originally known as Sefer hamaasiyot (The Book
of Tales). With Berdyczewski’s sudden death in 1921 at the age of fifty-six, however,
the texts were left unpublished in an archive. Only in 1939 did Emmanuel Bin-
Gorion, Berdyczewski’s son, publish them as a collection, under the title Mimeqor
yisrael.
This anthology contains about a thousand tales and fictional stories as well as
folktales, mostly from post-talmudic sources up until the period of Hasidism. In
arranging the texts, Berdyczewski ordered them according to the motifs of the
tales, as national, religious, folkloric, and so on, adhering as closely as possible to
their chronological order. In the main, though, he tried to retain their folkloric
character precisely because he saw the endeavor as an act of restoration. For this
reason, too, he chose to present different versions of the same story (including
rejected versions, such as those of the Samaritans, the Karaites, and so on), thereby
giving scope to a multiplicity of voices—a feature of the tradition that, in his view,
characterized Jewish culture throughout the generations.
The collection, assembly, and editing of the material, along with its division
into books, chapters, and sections, were all done according to criteria commonly
applied to the making of anthologies like those of folktales and to the preservation
of the vernacular character of the genre and its arrangement of material by subject
and content. At the same time, the historical-philosophical and typically Berdy-
czewskian toladatic approach to the material is also evident in the way the an-
thology adheres to the course of Jewish creativity and, as far as possible, organizes
its materials in keeping with it.
Berdyczewski was more than a compiler-editor. Even in Mimeqor yisrael, in
which he strove to keep its contents as faithful and exact a copy of the original as
possible, his interventions are felt by the reader. Precisely because he was both a
creative writer and a scholar, he was interested in presenting the legend or story
as an event, as an autonomous and authentic human spectacle, without tenden-
tious ideological meddling in its presentation. For this reason, he deleted the
didactic sermonizing frames that were attached to the texts in their homiletic
originals. The special value of the legend, Berdyczewski repeatedly stated, lay in
itself, not in its didactic purpose. The event of the legend preceded its purpose
and its moralizing function. The legend’s vision existed apart from the tendentious
interpretations piled onto it through the generations, and it withstood those inter-
pretations as well. Berdyczewski’s intention, as scholar and narrator, was to produce
a free encounter between the reader and the toladatic literature without an editor’s
intervention in the reader’s consciousness, and to allow the reader to construct
the “old yet new” connections according to his education and mental powers.
Dan Ben-Amos, who wrote a comprehensive introduction to the English edi-
tion of Mimeqor yisrael,21 similarly comments on the “light” involvement of the
anthology’s editor, with his interventions limited to alterations to the text of a word
or two, or sometimes more. But in his view, this does not diminish the importance
of Mimeqor yisrael as a monumental presentation of the evolution of popular
Jewish literature, and as a founding text for the scholarly study of the Jewish
folktale and of Jewish folklore—an abiding testimony to the art of storytelling
among Jews and to the literary achievement of Jewish storytellers through the ages.
The stories and legends from both earlier and later periods, the medieval ro-
mances, the historical chronicles, and tales of mystical kabbalistic experiences all
constitute a rich and colorful fabric that was in danger of perishing if not for the
fact that they were preserved, in their proper historical perspective, in Mimeqor
yisrael.
Even from this brief review of his various anthologies, a certain trajectory in
Berdyczewski’s work emerges. In his earlier works, he seems to have allowed him-
self greater freedom in rewriting his sources as he anthologized them. In his later
works, he more strictly maintained the original text, though often in multiple
versions. In either case, though, Berdyczewski rejected the common distinction
maintained by his contemporaries between the traditional literature, including
aggadah, and the new Hebrew writing. Early on, he published chapters of aggadah
from Meotsar haaggadah in periodicals such as Hatequfah—a publication that
aroused opposition precisely for this reason; in a letter to F. Lachover, the editor,
Abraham Joseph Steibel, the publisher of Hatequfah, confessed that while he per-
sonally enjoyed the aggadot, he felt that they did not belong in Hatequfah: “If we
wish young Hebrew readers to feel at ease in Hebrew literature, [the aggadot of
Berdyczewski] do not belong in Hatequfah in the stories section.”22 Berdyczewski
deliberately mingled literary and scholarly elements in his writing—ancient pas-
sages, modern fictions, and more scholarly commentaries, all for the purpose of
presenting a vision of the continuous creativity of the Jewish people.
The anthological genre, for Berdyczewski, was thus not a mere tool for col-
lecting or storing aggadot and other tales from the past but an independent literary
genre with its own literary and cultural value constructed by an editor who is both
a writer and a philosopher of history and who consciously reconstructs the mate-
rials of the past into a new composition. “The sources alone will not suffice without
a new light shining on them,” Berdyczewski wrote to Shemuel Abba Horodezki
in 1904. In another letter to Horodezki, dated November 20, 1907, Berdyczewski
formulated his credo as an anthologist with even greater clarity: “First we must
pave the way to organizing the parts and details of the talmudic literature. Then
we shall be able to inquire into the spirit. Again, we must do this not for them
but for ourselves; the work is first of all literary and toladati and not religious.”23
Berdyczewski’s radical understanding of the anthological genre can be detailed
in four areas relating to the genre:
1. Selection of material and organization: In collecting his sources, Ber-

dyczewski boldly included apocryphal and so-called heretical or sec-
tarian books (e.g., Samaritan and Karaite texts, as well as canonical
works). In present-day terms, one might say that Berdyczewski altered
toladatic discourse by expanding its range in the spirit of his main
idea, shinui arakhin (change of values), in which he sets out his vision
about “a new yet old” Jewish culture and Hebrew literature.
2. Fragments: Through the fragment, the anthology receives its unique
form, hence also its meaning. By presenting different versions of its
various traditions, each subject is “reproduced” with its own contra-
dictions and its full variety, a key factor for Berdyczewski.
3. Heterogeneity: All Berdyczewski’s anthologies represent the many pos-
sibilities of Jewish existence through different models developed down
the generations in the Jewish communities. The anthology structure
is re-created by the editor-anthologist, who has collected and arranged
the aggadot and tales from varied literary sources. The reorganization
of the aggadot and tales through the anthological form, which is a
process of conceptual and artistic transformation, makes the texts com-
municate across generations and encourages open dialogue among
them.
4. The power of ordering: Not content simply with preserving traditions
in multiple versions, Berdyczewski also organized the many fragments
into systems, arranging them according to thematic, poetic, or chron-
ological criteria. “Organization has many modes: we may use the
theme as a measure, or the chronology of the tales, or the poetic way
of writing; or we can use all of them, because the choice of one clear
and decisive mode is almost impossible” (Berdyczewski, 1914 [see n.
12], part 2, pp. xiv–xv).24 In the introductions to his various anthologies,
Berdyczewski admitted that sometimes the first principle took prece-
dence, at other times the second or the third. Analysis of the principles
of arrangement and organization can therefore help uncover the co-
herent and complete meaning of the anthology as an integral literary
structure.
Berdyczewski’s anthologies reveal signs of the cultural revolution that was

taking place across Hebrew literary culture during his time. His attitude toward
anthologizing both paralleled and differed significantly from that of his contem-
poraries H. N. Bialik and S. Y. Agnon. Bialik and Y. H. Rawnitzki’s Sefer
haaggadah (The Book of Aggadah), for example, claimed to present “essentially
a large and complete literary anthology, containing in correct order the best and
the choicest aggadot, all that is typical and characteristic of its important branches;
this is all that the compilers wished to show here,” its editors wrote modestly in
their introduction. Yet even though Bialik set great store upon the arrangement
of Sefer haaggadah, which he called “the essence of the work,” he seems to have
treated the enterprise mainly as a task, not as a creative act; only after completing
the work did he recognize its unique value. Agnon, on the other hand, was more
aware of the creative dimension of anthology making, but he and his followers
seemed to have considered it secondary to his work as a fictionalist and novelist;
thus, while Agnon published three anthologies (Yamim nora im [Days of Awe],
1938; Atem reitem [You Have Seen], 1959; Sifreihem shel tsadiqim [The Books of
the Righteous], 1961) and worked on several more, his engagement in anthology
making underwent many interruptions and periods of ambivalence.25
In contrast to Bialik and Agnon, Berdyczewski viewed the anthological genre
as a central creative medium, a primary source of Jewish creativity through the
ages—indeed, as the fundamental medium for understanding Jewish creativity in
the present time. So central was the anthological genre to Berdyczewski’s own
creativity that one might even argue that his anthological powers reached their
greatest height not in one of his anthologies proper but in his novel Miriam. Or,
to put this same claim in different terms: To understand this novel and its unusual
structure and meaning, it is necessary to appreciate Berdyczewski’s anthological
poetics.
The novel Miriam, which Berdyczewski considered to be his cultural-artistic
will, was completed in 1921, just two days before he died.26 Miriam, the protagonist,
represents the Jewish young generation in Eastern Europe at the end of the nine-
teenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Like most of her generation,
Miriam is in search of her identity, and at the same time she examines her relations
with society.
The influence of the anthology upon Miriam is most obviously evident in the
novel’s fragmentary structure, its structure in vignettes. From the time the novel
first appeared, this feature raised the eyebrows of Berdyczewski’s critics, many of
whom singled it out as proof of the failure of the book: “Berdyczewski wishes to
bestow a great novel upon us, but only a third of it written. The first part is a
piece of rare writing. The second is a kind of volume of gleanings. You do not
know the purpose of each chapter. The third part is both a continuation of the
story and another volume of gleanings,” wrote Yaakov Rabinovitz.27 Even Yaakov
Fichmann, the author of a riveting and enlightening introduction to Kol sipurei

berditshevski (The Complete Works of M. J. Berdyczewski), which included Mir-
iam, wrote that “at times [the novel] seems like a string of novellas, each of which
stands alone. . . . Only after some time does it become clear that [the novella] is
a link in the narrative chain.” Even so, Fichmann concluded that Miriam “is not
a structured work.”28
The view espoused by Rabinovitz, Fichmann, and others that Miriam was
only “a string of novellas”—in other words, a mere compilation or anthology—
was not completely unfounded. The novel’s structure is a singular mosaic of frag-
mentary events, deeds, myths, and tales. At a first reading, one is likely to feel that
it is nothing more than a medley of episodal stories. There is no clear way to join
the individual sections or to ascertain the overall meaning of the novel’s structure.
Berdyczewski was well aware of the compilatory nature of Miriam and of the
fact that this structure was alien to the normative models of the Hebrew (and
European) novel of his day. Indeed, within the book, Berdyczewski seemed to
allude to this difference by means of various “landmarks” strewn through the
book—including such paratactic statements as: “And here are two more tales”
(Miriam, part 2, p. 185), or “and I know something else that happened in those
days with another man” (ibid.)—linking statements whose only purpose was to
emphasize the fact that there was nothing more than an artificial link between
the story and what preceded it.
Further, in the course of each of the novel’s three parts, its author-narrator
explicitly commented upon the book’s unusual structure and its meaning:
Many years ago, I jotted down on a sheet of paper all the details of this affair,
which had within it the making of a novel complete in all its parts. I envisaged
everything, clearly observing the cycle of events and the interweaving of the in-
cidents. (part 1, p. 31)
Strange events and unprecedented happenings took place at this time, especially
among the Jews of Honyrad. I shall relate them one by one, even though they
are not relevant to my central story. (part 2, p. 180)
I am engaged in the birth pangs of creating a memorial for the people of my
generation, to give a pen-picture of life in the towns in which I was reared. . . .
My mind thronged with different faces and events. (part 3, p. 259)29
Miriam is indeed composed of hundreds of vignettes—“chambers and rooms,”

in the words of the author. An anthological assembling of numerous myths and
aggadot, the novel reflects two contrasting yet complementary tendencies, what
we might call, borrowing from Northrop Frye, the “episodic” and the “encyclo-
pedic.”30 Episodic literature is produced by the individual writer; it emphasizes
the separateness of his personality, his isolation. Encyclopedic literature, in con-
trast, presents its author as society’s spokesperson; it is a communal product, based
on the principle of the entire corpus. In Berdyczewski’s anthologies, the encyclo-
pedic tendency predominates. In Miriam, in contrast, the encyclopedic is coun-
terbalanced by the episodic. That is to say, by collecting and assembling its con-
stituent incidents, events, stories, and tales, the novel attempts the inward
“reproduction” of life from the perspective either of an individual (the narrator)
or of multiple individuals (the characters). The dozens of myths and stories con-
tained haphazardly in Miriam do not indicate a directionless writer who could not
help but overfill a limited canvas, but rather a consciously artistic effort motivated
by the writer’s intellectual drive to impose order on episodal chaos, to uncover
hidden processes beneath the chaotic surface, all with the purpose of constructing
a novel that would portray the life, customs, and beliefs of an entire community.
The episodal structure of Miriam reflects both elements or contrasting ten-
dencies as principles of life: the first militates toward isolation, the second toward
the integration of the individual in a larger whole. The two forces—of the one
and of the many—are in constant tension. The tendency toward isolation arises
from the individual’s wish to be true to himself, to control his fate. On the other
hand, the individual’s cultural background, his beliefs, and his habits can all be
traced back to the many. The individual cannot acquire self-knowledge without
recognizing the society from which he sprang and within which he lives. Even
when the individual seems to exist in isolation, he is still connected to the larger
community in some way. So, too, when a community appears to be wholly united
and consolidated into a single communal entity, one need only look closely at it
to find the odd, unassimilable, episodal narrative. This is true even in the case of
Berdyczewski’s anthologies, where the proper fundamental unit is neither an ep-
isode nor a chapter. Each story or text exists within its context. Every tale belongs
to a chapter, every chapter to a volume, and every volume to the central authority
responsible for the work’s overall meaning.
Within Miriam itself, the anthological dimension emerges in two realms, the
philosophical-historical and the poetic. In the first, the novel serves as a medium
for assembling multigenerational knowledge and traditional wisdom as preserved
in such ancient literary forms as myth, legends, tales, and proverbs. In the second,
the book’s poetic or narrative dimension, Berdyczewski was not content simply to
transmit information by imitating his sources; rather, he sought to reinscribe the
tales in a historical framework (namely, the modern period) and in a specific
literary genre (the novel). It is “old yet new.” At a time when the traditional
communal and religious frameworks were collapsing, Berdyczewski sought in his
anthologies to present a Jewish anthology as preserved in the aggadic literature
through the generations in its various forms. He thus offered the Jew a twofold
encounter with Jewish culture—as both an emotional and an ideological experi-
ence with its two distinct axes: knowledge and wisdom.
Researchers of Berdyczewski’s life have repeatedly tried to describe him by
attaching to him various labels—of a folklorist or of an editor or novelist, for
example. Although these labels are not in themselves incorrect, they cannot convey
the multiple intellectual and artistic roles that Berdyczewski filled—as a narrator
and storyteller, a literary critic and antiquarian, a theologian and a philosopher of
history—often simultaneously, and that contributed to the construction of the
anthological genre and to the anthological poetics in Miriam in particular. Traces
of the anthological genre are visible in all Berdyczewski’s literary work: in his
studies, essays, and stories.
Consequently, the path to “new yet old” Hebrew literature passes through the
anthologies. Indeed, as Berdyczewski increasingly found himself immersed in the
problematics of Jewish existence, so, too, did his work as an anthologist. In

the multiple versions and perspectives regularly preserved and recorded in his
anthologies, Berdyczewski revealed the creative forces that replenished the Jewish
people and community in its capacity to contend with and adapt the many changes
resulting from the change of regime, of place, and so on.
For Berdyczewski, in short, the making of anthologies was a philosophical-
historical and poetic activity, whose main goal was to do away with the artificial
borders separating the new Hebrew literature from its traditional sources, or even
classical anthologies from modernist novels. By placing anthologies of classical
aggadah within the new-yet-old Hebrew literature, Berdyczewski’s plan was to
broaden this literature and its horizons. The reservations of such writers as Brenner
and Yaakov Rabinovitz about Berdyczewski’s prolonged immersion in the study of
the past and in the preparation of anthologies—which, they argued, were mere
distractions and the waste of an important Hebrew writer’s time and energy—need
to be reappraised. Yet even more than serving the purpose of expanding Hebrew
literature and its scope, and even more than working to reconnect segments of
Hebrew literature that had been lost through the generations, the anthological
genre was for Berdyczewski perhaps the authentic modern Jewish literary form,
the literary genre most appropriate for capturing and communicating the nature
of modern Jewish existence.
Notes
Prooftexts 19 (1999):41–57. Reprinted by permission of The John Hopkins University Press.
I want to thank Prof. David Stern, who read this manuscript. His remarks and suggestions
were very helpful.
1. “History of the Ets Hfi ayyim Yeshiva,” Haasif 3 (1887):231–41.

2. M. J. Berdyczewski, Über den Zusammenhand zwischen Ethik und Aesthetik (diss.,
1896); intro. and Hebrew trans., Alexander Barzel (Tel Aviv, 1986).
3. About the term tolada in Berdyczewski, see Berdyczewski, “Al hatolada,” in Al em
haderekh (Warsaw, 1899), pp. 47–49. See also Z. Kagan, “The Toladatic Novel,” in M. J.
Berdyczewski, Miriam: Roman gamur [A completed novel] (Tel Aviv, 1997), pp. 25–31.
4. M. J. Berdyczewski archive (Ginzei mikha yosef), Holon, Israel. See Emmanuel Bin-
Gorion, Reshut Hayahfi id: The Life and Work of M. J. Berdyczewski in His Last Twenty Years
(Tel Aviv, 1980), pp. 201–5. See also Avner Holtzman, intro. to M. J. Berdyczewski, Mul
har hamoriyah [In front of Mount Moriah], (Tel Aviv, 1995).
5. Chroniq: Entries in M. J. Berdyczewski, Pirqei yoman [diary] January–November 1905
[Hebrew translation from the German by Yitshfi ak Kafkafi], Berdyczewski archive, file Vav
(Tel Aviv, 1995), pp. 27–89.
6. Ibid., p. 71.
7. Ibid., p. 72.
8. Ibid., pp. 85–86.
9. M. J. Bin-Gorion (Berdyczewski), H fi ayyei moshe [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1961).
10. Sinai ugrizim [Hebrew], ed. and pub. E. Bin-Gorion (Tel Aviv, 1962); 1st ed. in
German (Berlin, 1925–26).
11. H. N. Bialik, Letters (Tel Aviv, 1938–39), 1: 174–76.
12. M. J. Berdyczewski (Bin-Gorion), Meotsar haaggadah, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1914).
13. M. J. Berdyczewski, Tsefunot veaggadot [Hebrew], 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1924).
14. “It is he who made the earth by his power / who established [hekhin] the world
by his wisdom” (Jer. 10:12); “He established it [hekhinah] and searched it out” (Job 28:28).
15. The great importance Berdyczewski attributed to Tsefunot veaggadot is attested in
a letter to Brenner dated May 20, 1911: “This [work] is the greatest that I have written so
far, certainly in quantity, perhaps also in quality.” This statement also explains the fact that
it took the author two decades to prepare and write the book in its various editions. M. J.
Berdyczewski to Y. H fi . Brenner, Letters [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv).
16. Z. Kagan, “Divergent Tendencies and Their Molding in the Aggadah,” Scripta
Hieroselimitana 22 (1971):151–70.
17. See Emmanuel Bin-Gorion, Reshut Hayahfi id, pp. 77–81.
18. M. J. Berdyczewski (Bin-Gorion), Die Sagen der Juden, 5 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.,
1913–27).
19. Berdyczewski, Der Born Judas, 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1916–23).
20. Berdyczewski, Mimeqor yisrael [Hebrew](Tel Aviv, 1939).
21. Dan Ben-Amos also distinguishes between the objective writing of the author of
Mimeqor yisrael, who collected, edited, and published the aggadot, keeping exactly to the
writing and language in the sources, and his subjective writing in Tsefunot veaggadot, into
which the author poured his personality, his thoughts, and his feelings. See n. 10 here p. xx.
22. Cited from Steibel’s letters, in the archive of the Union of Hebrew Writers in
Israel. Publication is by kind permission of the archive management.
23. Shemuel Abba Horodezki, Zikhronot [Memoirs] (Tel Aviv, 1937), pp. 184, 189.
24. David Stern, in his introduction to the English edition of Sefer haaggadah (see
next note), relates to the connection of the editors with three basic obstacles they face: the
fragmentary nature of the material; its excessive heterogeneity; and the language, entire
points of which (including the Aramaic) are foreign to the modern reader. The criteria that
enabled them to overcome these difficulties are, according to Stern, selective choice: the
singling out of a certain version of the aggadah portions. To present the aggadah as classical
literature, the editors joined together aggadah fragments that seemed to them different parts
of a single literary creation, even if these fragments were taken from different sources and
different locations, such as the Babylonian Talmud or the Jerusalem Talmud (in his critical
essay Sefer haaggadah, 1913, Berdyczewski opposed the merger of aggadah fragments from
different sources into a single one).
25. On Bialik’s and Rawnitzki’s attitudes toward anthology making, see Haim Be’er,
Ahavatam gam sinatam [Their loves and their hates] (Tel Aviv, 1992), p. 207; and David
Stern’s introduction to the English translation of Sefer haaggadah (New York, 1996). On
Agnon’s anthologies, see Dan Laor, S. Y. Agnon: New Aspects (Jerusalem, 1995), pp. 125–53;
and on his attitude toward anthology making, cf. Dov Sadan’s letter (quoted in Haim Be’er,
“Hasafran hagadol shel hasivilizatsiah hayehudit” [The great librarian of the Jewish civili-
zation], Haarets, May 13, 1995); “I long to see Bluma and her world, and you give me a
collection, which even if it were perfection itself . . . would not compensate me for the loss
of time and mind to what is not your essence or your greatness”; and Agnon’s 1924 letter
to Zalman Schocken: “Indeed, this labor does remove me from my own world, and from
my own independent writing” (ibid., p. 209).
26. Miriam was published in six editions, five in Hebrew and one in English. Four
of them will be cited here. M. J. Berdyczewski (Bin-Gorion), Miriam: Roman mehfi ayyei
shtei ayarot [A novel about life in two townships], Hatequfah, vols. 10–12 (Warsaw, 1921);
Miriam, 3d ed. (Tel Aviv, 1971), intro. Dan Miron; Miriam, 5th ed. (Tel Aviv, 1983) (English
trans. A. S. Super, intro. Z. Kagan; Miriam, 6th ed. (Tel Aviv, 1997), intro. and annotated
Z. Kagan; see n. 3.
27. Y. Rabinovitz, “Miriam,” Hedim 1 (1922, no. 2):59.

28. Y. Fichmann, “Berdyczewski As Storyteller,” Kol sipurei berdyczewski (Tel Aviv,
1961), p. 27.
29. All quotations from Miriam are from the English ed.; see n. 26.
30. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 315–26.
12
mark w. kiel
Sefer Haaggadah
Creating a Classic Anthology
fi ayyim Nahfi man

ebrew literature has been waiting for such a book.”1 So H
“H Bialik proudly announced that his and Yehoshua Hana Rawnitzki’s Sefer
ha aggadah was soon to appear. His claim to have answered the call of history was
uncharacteristically immodest of him and, to be sure, he omitted his boast when,
in 1908, he reprinted the article in which it appeared as the introduction to their
classic anthology.
In any case, it was not entirely accurate either. It clearly was, as Bialik said,
“a great and plentiful literary anthology, which includes, in a suitable arrangement,
all the characteristics and types, of all the important branches of the aggadah.”2
But Hebrew literature had, in fact, long been afraid of such a book. Wissenschaft,
too, displayed a studious lack of interest in the subject as Bialik was now presenting
it. The need for such an anthology of aggadah had manifested itself slowly and
only recently. Once it appeared, however, Sefer haaggadah’s impact on Jewish
literary culture for nearly a century to follow was extraordinary by any measure.
As a result of Sefer haaggadah, similar works followed and academic interest in
the subject grew, as did the number of dissertations. It also became a phenomenal
best seller.3 It was the first and most successful effort to create a classic folk liter-
ature in Hebrew that could stand alongside the great European collections.4
It was not just the content of Sefer haaggadah that served a need and made
it great. Two years earlier, Bernhard Kuttner’s Jüdische Sagen und Legenden für
jung und alt: Gesammelt und wiedererzählt gave a positive romantic view of the
aggadah in German, but it was not as great, plentiful, or popular.5 Far beyond any
work of its kind, including Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews (which began to
appear in 1909), or any of Micha Joseph Berdyczewski’s collections (the first of
which appeared in 1913), Sefer haaggadah went through numerous editions in
Hebrew, and appeared in Yiddish, Russian, and German translations, “an inheri-
tance for all Jews everywhere.” Recently Schocken published a deluxe English
edition, and that has been followed by a CD-ROM version.6
Indeed, its success suggests that Bialik may have been right, after all. Whether
226
Sefer Haaggadah 227
it was because of his national or poetic genius, Bialik was among the few who
understood, as Berdyczewski said, that “for those of us who are concerned with
the aggadah itself, and not [just] its usefulness,” what had come before was not
enough to answer what was indeed, a long-denied and deep-seated need.7
Yet for all its success, Sefer haaggadah did not quite live up to its authors’,
particularly Bialik’s, grander national designs. What Bialik was after was nothing
less than an aggadic renaissance, a synthesis of literary theory and popular practice.
He wanted the aggadah to become a living folklore of the Jews, an ideal combi-
nation of academic and artistic self-consciousness, and a popular and unself-
conscious frame of reference that could give substance to the sense of being Jew-
ish.8 Bialik, in other words, wanted aggadah to be precisely what Jewish scholars
and writers had generally not wanted it to be—and feared its becoming.
An interest in the aggadah as folklore presupposed a receptive Jewish romanticism.

However, both intellectual trends in Jewish life that generated discussion of the
aggadah—Wissenschaft and Haskalah—were fundamentally at odds with some of
romanticism’s major trends. The Jewish enlightenment saw aggadah as a disrep-
utable and corrupt legacy of popular susceptibility to superstition. Until the rise
of Jewish nationalism, scholars had contented themselves with historical-
philological inquiry, while preachers and reformers as early as Hyman Hurwitz
(1826) had used aggadah publicly to advance a morally edifying view of Judaism
and the Rabbis.9 For Europeans, folklore was romanticism’s means of rescuing and
rehabilitating the legacy spurned by the Enlightenment. For Jews, however, even
where the impact of romanticism had begun to alter the negative image of agga-
dah, its transformation into a respectable literature hung precisely on the assump-
tion that aggadah was not folklore.
German Jewish scholarship elevated aggadah into an academic discipline that
almost resembled the efforts of German scholars to find in their legends, sagas,
and epics the living folk sources of their contemporary culture. By treating aggadah
as an antiquarian pursuit that was ultimately directed toward establishing the hu-
man ethical spirit of ancient or Rabbinic Judaism, Wissenschaft des Judenthums
carefully refrained from giving the aggadah the kind of contemporary political
significance that Germanistik, German scholarship, attributed to Sagenkunde.
Scholars such as Leopold Zunz, Nahman Krochmal, Shlomo Rapoport, and
Zacharias Frankel had alluded to the existence of an aggadic folklore surrepti-
tiously.10 It was a given of their enlightened faith, however, that they would not
use the terms “folklore” or Volkskunde because these connoted romantic ideas of
innate and unassimilable character. Acting in the service of Emancipation, what
Wissenschaft could do, at best, was defend the aggadah as finely crafted Gottes-
dienstlichen Vorträge, Rabbinic sermons.11 Cognizant of the prestige given to the
German sermon, and duly noting the halakhic limitations of the aggadah, they
respected the genre as a historically reliable tool for the moral development of the
Jews and promoted it as an integral part of Jewish literature.12
Although an anomaly in its time, Sipurei yeshurun, by the Maskilic Rabbi
Isaac Margolis, was a harbinger of change.13 Privately published in Berlin by the
author in 1877, it was, like Yavetz’s work later, a predecessor of the Sefer
haaggadah in several respects. Margolis retold aggadot drawn from the Babylonian
and Palestinian Talmuds, the midrash, the Yalqutim and the Zohar, in a variety
of clear and self-consciously biblical styles, depending on the nature of the topi-
cally arranged material. All the Aramaic passages were translated into Hebrew. On
the German title page, the work was subtitled Charakter Bilder und Sagen, but
the author did not describe the material as “folklore.” The aggadah was important
because it was the morally edifying literature of the Rabbis. Unlike the scholarly
intentions of some later research and compilations of aggadah, Margolis’s purpose
was explicitly didactic. He claimed to have written his stories specifically to fill
the void of a children’s literature in Hebrew, but Margolis also wanted to remove
the so-called reproach of the Talmud by exhibiting for public scrutiny the high
moral character of the Rabbis.
From here, it was a short step, in tune with the times, to regarding folklore
as the source of the sermon. It had to be preceded by a revolution in the way the
folk was perceived, that is, no longer as a repository of ignorance and superstition
but as a source of wisdom and authority.
With the publication of Isaac Hirsch Weiss’s Dor dor vedorshav (beginning
1871), a more positive view of the aggadah reached beyond Wissenschaft circles to
Maskilim and yeshiva bokhurs in Eastern Europe. Weiss, the “talmudic Darwin,”
had demonstrated in his person the compatibility of orthodoxy and historicism.14
He had written his magnum opus in Hebrew rather than German not only because
it suited the subject but because he wanted to reach an audience he admired as
a vital source of Torah.15
Concerned primarily with the evolution of Jewish law from its pre-Torah,
oral sources through the sixteenth century, Weiss also paid considerable attention
to aggadah and midrash. Aggadah was subordinate to halakhah, but its historic
role and abiding value were to amplify the meaning of the law as expounded by
the Rabbis in public sermons and in private lectures.16 Weiss did not look at the
interaction between the folk and Rabbinic culture and managed to avoid the
delicate question of a Jewish folklore.17 In the place where Weiss saw the source
of contemporary Torah life, however, a new cycle of discussion was spawned that
would look at the folk differently.
In a series of articles in Nahum Sokolow’s journal Haasif, Haim Oppenheim
distilled Weiss’s work and the work of the Wissenschaft school to produce an
erudite manifesto on the national significance of aggadah. He pleaded the case
for seeing aggadah as both a source of legal wisdom and the medium by which
the Rabbis shaped and preserved the character and faith of Judaism. Aggadah,
therefore, embodied the soul of Judaism and its people’s spirit. Like his predeces-
sors, however, Oppenheim continued to regard aggadot primarily as the literary
creation of the Rabbis, a historically layered and textured literature, not a folk
literature per se.
Ignoring Weiss’s suggestive thesis of the oral tradition’s antiquity predating the
written Torah, Oppenheim specifically dissociated aggadah from folklore by ar-
guing that, whereas the Sagenkunde of the nations was preliterate, aggadah came
into existence a thousand years after the Jews had their scripture. To the Jewish
devotees of Hellas, he said that although the ancient Greek philosophers anach-
Sefer Haaggadah 229
ronistically interpreted their morally inferior folk literature to reveal their own
values and wisdom, the Rabbis created aggadah to strengthen and popularize a
long-established way of life.18 National pride notwithstanding, Oppenheim was
unable to evoke the same sense of his texts’ contemporary relevance that German
scholarship gave to its Sagenkunde by linking it to Volkskunde.
It was the Maskil and editor of the defunct journal Hakarmel, Shmuel Yosef
Fuenn of Vilna, who crossed the threshold to romantic nationalism and articulated
the importance of the aggadah as a literature by the people and for the people.
His “Essay on the Aggadah” was a modest contribution, but its impact, as evident
in the works that followed, was considerable.
Fuenn first summarized the opinion of Wissenschaft scholars and summoned
the older authority of Azariah de Rossi, the Italian Renaissance scholar who first
suggested that the aggadot are best understood as the products of their time.19
Rossi was more concerned, however, with the need to read the aggadot critically
(in terms of the historical data they purported to reflect), rather than with the
usefulness of aggadic texts as primary documents of cultural history.20 For this
reason, Rossi was a hero to Wissenschaft scholars. Fuenn, on the other hand,
developed Rossi’s ideas along romantic lines, arguing that the aggadah, though
not always a reliable repository of historical truth, remained an unimpeachable
source of higher truth.
Citing Herder, Fuenn maintained that the aggadah was not properly under-
stood merely as a source or component of a sermon. He justified aggadah not in
terms of religious, ethical, or philosophical principles but rather in terms of current
literary and esthetic categories. As “legends” of the Jewish people, the aggadah
became a key to its collective consciousness, and a window into its soul.21
Zev Yavetz’s Ancient Fairy Tales (Sihot mini qedem) was everything Fuenn
could have asked for in a national writer.22 Appearing in 1887 as a subscription
premium for the Kneset yisrael yearbook, it presented twenty-one stories retold
from the aggadah à la Grimm, in modernized biblical Hebrew, and was an ex-
ample of the Hebrew renewal he advocated.
Yavetz resented Wissenschaft’s apologetic use of aggadah as proof to the out-
side world of the Jews’ humanity. He was proud to note that the stories reflected
the unique moral character of Rabbinic Judaism and were thus very unlike the
Grimm stories.23 But writing in Hebrew, he was certainly not concerned with
making a good impression on the gentiles.24 Like the Grimm brothers, Yavetz
intended his collection to instill national self-esteem.
Yavetz was indignant with Jews who lacked the pride Europeans had in their
folk traditions or the respect they had for their national mentors.25 Jewish Wissen-
schaft, Yavetz complained, remained the abode of antiquarians pursuing an irrel-
evant philology and writing in foreign languages.26
His tales were all set in Eretz Yisrael and bore all the familiar features of
modern fairy tales: the stock of heroes and villains, the sentiments of love and
longing, the aura of magic and myth, the eerie settings and bucolic landscapes,
and the ideals of innocence and integrity. Yavetz adapted the proven techniques
of the European genre, to promote interest in the aggadah among new and young
readers and Jewish readers of European folktales. He even adopted some of the
fashions’ excesses, boasting of Jewish peasants and deprecating the Jewish bour-
geoisie.27
Given his orthodoxy, Yavetz was remarkably rooted in a potentially pagan
romanticism. He was impressed with European scholarship that demonstrated the
benefit of folk studies in revealing the intuitive powers of native languages and
reviving the folk consciousness.28 The aggadah, Yavetz insisted, had to be revived,
just as the Nibelungenlied was in Germany. What made the aggadah particularly
suitable for its contemporary recasting was the fact, as he saw it, that the aggadah
rested on the foundations of those dimensions of awareness that were the distin-
guishing features of romantic poetry and could function as a Beer mayim hfi ayim,
a Jewish “well of living waters.”29
At the same time and without any apparent sense of contradiction, Yavetz
renounced outside influences on Jewish life as a threat to its eternal spirit, in the
fashionable terms of chauvinistic European romanticism. His romanticism was
both a strategy for national-religious awakening and an internalized esthetic for
the appreciation of Jewish tradition. His discussion of the rise of romanticism as
a reaction to the burdensome imposition of the classical heritage on the organic
folk cultures of Europe informed Maskilim that they, in fact, lagged behind the
nations that they were slavishly imitating.
The influential Warsaw critic David Frischmann hailed Yavetz’s slim volume
as a great national achievement. Here, he rejoiced, the reader can find a Jewish
version of “Snow White” and other wonderful stories that “we had heard a thou-
sand times.”30 In Yavetz’s Tales, Frischmann found “the dew of his youth” and the
answer to his question, “Who will educate the new generation that it might know
that it, too, had a childhood, that its people had a childhood?” Yavetz’s Tales,
Frischmann said, “will teach the coming generation after the death of our old
mothers, and they will plant in it the visions of their nation and of its fantasies,
and it will make Jews out of these lads.”31
Admirers of Yavetz believed that his Tales and similar works they now ex-
pected to follow would inspire a love of folk and religion for a generation that was
alienated from tradition, for children growing up without a strong sense of identity,
and for the Maskilim, whose rationalism had skewed their image of the aggadah.
Once again, the aggadah would serve its natural function as a consolation to the
people in time of crisis. If naive belief sustained aggadah in the past, this time it
would flourish through the creative imagination and a sense of art.
These expectations were all unduly optimistic. Yavetz and Frischmann, like
Fuenn and Sh. P. Rabinovitz, editor of the literary and scientific yearbook Kneset
yisrael, believed that the new generation, however lost, could still read Hebrew,
certainly Yavetz’s innovative and clear Hebrew (which appeared in a vocalized
text)—but that was wishful thinking.32
Rabinovitz paid Yavetz the highest compliment by comparing his work to that
of Zunz, who, a generation earlier, in Germany, had restored dignity to the legacy
of aggadah.33 Zunz, however, wrote in German. Considering furthermore that
there was, as yet, no secular or modern orthodox school system in place (the hfi eder
metuqan was still in its infancy), Rabinovitz’s recommendation that the Tales serve
as a model children’s textbook and resource for teachers was premature.34 The
Sefer Haaggadah 231
appreciative Hebrew audiences at the time were limited to the circles of romantic
Zionists, religious and secular. If the Tales addressed a new generation, it was the
one found in the yeshiva.
In Volozhin, Yavetz’s appeal came from his religious romanticism, his modern
Hebrew, and the mystique of his having settled in Palestine. The recognition of
the uncanny in romantic thought provided an opening for a religious Zionism
that viewed the return of the Jews to their homeland as a process linked to the
mystical destiny of Israel. The programmatic context in which Yavetz placed his
Tales also paved the way for a more thorough secularism.
Because folklore restored respectability to a segment of Jewish tradition that
had lost its authority for all but the most backward of traditional Jews, there seemed
little risk, at first, in supporting the folkways on secular grounds. But folklore did
not lead back to orthodoxy. Romantic interest in folklore was motivated by the
desire to recapture tradition as the substance of a new secular identity, with folklore
functioning as a surrogate for religion. Modern orthodox Jews may have continued
to delight in the works of Jewish folklore as much as anyone; on no grounds could
they tolerate secularism intruding into the heart of tradition as part of their ide-
ology.
In the romantic intentions of his iberdikhtung, his poetic revision, in the
programmatic translation of the Aramaic aggadot, as well as in the didactic vocal-
ization of the texts, Bialik discovered in Yavetz the model, if not inspiration, for
his Sefer haaggadah, although he never acknowledged it.35 Yavetz became asso-
ciated with a chauvinistic orthodoxy repugnant to Bialik and served as a warning
to him about the risks of withdrawing into national work.
Along with the inspiration of Yavetz, Bialik’s folkloristic work arose out of
developments in Hebrew literature and poetry, whose relationship to aggadah and
folklore grew more positive as the century drew to a close. Through the mid-
nineteenth century, Hebrew literature of the Haskalah parodied and derided folk
culture and the irrational excesses of the aggadah, along with the gullibility of
those who believed in them, particularly the Hasidim. Yet even the most extreme
opponents of folk culture showed an ambivalence toward their material in the
sheer delight they seemed to take in describing it, whether in Hebrew literature
or Yiddish.36
The inevitable impact on Yiddish and Hebrew literature of romanticism, and
specifically of symbolism and primitivism in Polish and Russian literature, resulted
in a reevaluation of demonology, legends, magic, and myth.37 In Hebrew through
Bialik (who was first exposed to these trends in S. Frug’s poetry), as was the case
in Yiddish through his mentor Peretz, aggadah became freely employed in the
most personal and subjective terms for their powerful psychological metaphors and
as symbols of the obscure line separating reality from fantasy.38
As a loyal disciple of Ahfi ad Haam, Bialik had suppressed these impulses for
years, although, as his noncanonical works show, they sometimes surfaced even
in Volozhin, at the very beginning of his career.39 In 1899, with the appearance
of the shadowy reflective poem “Razei laila,” Bialik finally came to terms with
these impulses and opened a path in Hebrew literature toward subjectivity and a
radical individualism he himself was reluctant to follow.40 Dan Miron has argued
that for Bialik, even the modern person unwilling to surrender his foothold in
reality could bridge this gap between mind and myth by means of the esthetic
appeal to the imagination.
Although in such magnificent poems as “Habrekha” (1904) and “Megilat
haesh” (1905) he moved in that direction, Bialik chose to harness that new con-
sciousness mainly in the service of the folk with a folksbukh.41 Bialik wanted a
work that would be known to all, young and old, just as until recently the entire
folk, so he believed, had been intimately familiar with hfi umash and Rashi.42
If to Bialik, hfi umash and Rashi were indeed together the common book of
devotion, why, then, did he not take it, rather than aggadah, as the focus of his
literary enterprise? Why, for that matter, did he turn away from what was for a
short while his most important project, the preparation of a modern textbook of
the Mishnah? Perhaps because neither project, as such, possessed romantic appeal
or was up to the task at hand. National revival required a way out of the bourgeois
compartmentalization of the spiritual and material, the private and public realms.
Legend, myth, and folklore, in the romantic vision, embraced all of life’s dimen-
sions just as they demanded an all-embracing acceptance, if they were to be ap-
preciated. Legend, myth, and folklore thus subsumed and legitimized the genres
of poetry, law, and Scripture. But they required, as Nietzsche pointed out, a certain
concession of the imagination in order to be acceptable to the rational person.43
From the beginning of his poetic career until 1901, Bialik had softened, dis-
guised, or eliminated altogether the contemporary folkloric-aggadic aspects of his
poems. He did this in deference to the H fi ovevei tsiyon, whose collective tastes were
presided over by Ahfi ad Haam. But when Saul Ginzburg and Pesahfi Marek’s col-
lection of Yiddish folksongs (1901) appeared, Bialik saw that not all of Jewish polite
society shared Ahfi ad Haam’s antipathy for folklore.
Shortly after Bialik founded the Moriah publishing house in Odessa in 1905 (to-
gether with Rawnitzki, Simha Ben Tsion, and Elhanan Leib Levinski), he began
planning a volume of aggadah for the growing modern Hebrew school system, the
hfi eder metuqan. Moriah, a telling name, saw its purpose as providing children with
secular textbook versions of classical Jewish literature.44
First, the editors thought of producing a work comparable to their already
popular biblical books.45 But conceptualizng a book of aggadah presented its own
peculiar problems. The literature of the aggadah was not the equivalent of a single
book but a sea of dispersed texts, from which a judicious selection would have to
be made in order to produce a true anthology. Otherwise, a single book of midrash
aggadah would have to be chosen. In that case, however, it would not be the
aggadic literature as a whole that would be represented, but only one specific text
in revised form. Such a single book was also more in keeping with the form of
their earlier projects, and far less complicated. Yet no single aggadic book, standing
alone, was the equivalent of a biblical book.
Plans were interrupted soon after they had begun when Bialik left for Warsaw
to become literary editor of Hashiloahfi . Having been dispatched by Ahfi ad Haam,
Bialik came armed to resist the Warsaw spirit that was dominated by the figure of
Peretz. But the Paris of the East, in which he found himself for a little over a year
Sefer Haaggadah 233
(December 1903–February 1905), cast its spell on him.46 Jewish Warsaw’s leading
literary antagonists, Peretz and Frischmann, had their differences over the purpose
of a Hebrew renaissance. Nevertheless, they shared a profound interest in reviving
“tales of old” as part of Jewish national life.47 Moreover, they helped convince
Bialik that aggadah was folklore and that folklore was central to modern national
culture.48 When Bialik returned to Odessa, the aggadah, which until then had not
been uppermost in his mind (at best, he saw it as a project that would take up a
small portion of his creative energies), became his all-consuming passion and his
major literary preoccupation.49
With Yavetz, Frischmann, Peretz, and Berdyczewski, Bialik came to share a
Nietzschean vision of aggadah as folklore and myth. Reinvigorated among the
people as a mass phenomenon, and on new secular grounds, myth could once
again give rise to a cohesive folk imagination.
Sefer haaggadah emerged, between 1908 and 1911, as a three-volume anthology of

edited and revised texts, with portions from the Aramaic translated uniformly into
modern Hebrew. The result was an unprecedented scholarly feat of haute vulgar-
ization.50
Bialik and Rawnitzki drew from a wide range of literary Rabbinic sources—
among them, the Mekhilta, Sifri, Sifra, the Yalqutim, and the Palestinian Talmud.
Most of the material was derived from the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), because it
was best known among the people and represented to Bialik the source of the most
authentic element of persistent folklore. Judiciously derived selections from widely
dispersed and inaccessible sources were pulled together and often quoted verbatim.
Bialik felt that the image of the slovenly Eastern European Jew had attached
itself to the aggadah and that, along with its inaccessibility, was to blame for the
widespread disinterest in the subject, if not downright contempt for it, by modern
Jews. “Contemporary man,” Bialik said, “needs order,” and it was the order of
Sefer haaggadah that he regarded as the work’s essential task. Through order,
Bialik wanted to render the aggadah whole—or, as he claimed to believe, restore
its original orderliness.51 Rather than editors, Bialik referred to himself and Raw-
nitzki as mesadrim (orderers).
The subjects were arranged chronologically and thematically. Beginning with
the third edition, they included philological glosses and vocalized texts in order
to foster correct pronunciation and proper understanding of the Hebrew.52 Bialik
called the reader’s attention to the essential interconnectedness of the material,
which was linked topically, logically, and causally in a narrative, from the Creation
through the period of the Second Commonwealth.53
To put the texts in order, Bialik first had to put them through considerable
revision on all levels. Each aggadah was itself a fragmentary piece of a larger epic
whose remaining shards lay strewn over a vast and inaccessible literature, alongside
relics of many other tales.54
Bialik claimed to have transcribed the texts faithfully from their diverse
sources, without adding to or subtracting from them or changing their basic style,
language, and substance.55 He also told artists and writers that they had more to
learn from the unretouched aggadah, in its pure folk form, than the aggadah could
ever benefit from what they had to offer.56 But Bialik also admitted to having made
all kinds of changes. Generally, however, he wanted to convince his audience that
such changes were no more than minor emendations that were necessary to reveal
the true character and esthetic quality of the story.
In fact, the changes Bialik made in the aggadic texts were considerable and
could certainly not escape the attention of his readers. The changes included:
eliminating aggadot of inferior quality; deleting the pervasive narrative digressions;
expurgating, in accordance with highbrow European tastes, some of the coarser
and unedifying elements of the stories; and making what he characterized as minor
linguistic changes.57 The aggadot that Bialik retained were chosen on the basis of
their artistic merit, for the quality of the idea embodied in the tales, and for their
popularity. Previous writers (Krochmal, for example) were not interested in the
popularity of the aggadah at all. On the contrary, its popularity or folkloric quality
often made it esthetically and intellectually suspect.58
The most important change Bialik made was one he vigorously defended until
his final days. Openly and uninhibitedly, he eliminated the original literary (hom-
iletical and exegetical) context in which the aggadot were used to illustrate, or
ultimately be justified by, a scriptural prooftext, or asmakhta. Unencumbered by
extraneous biblical quotations, the aggadah could free itself, Bialik believed, from
its narrow association with the beit hamidrash and could appeal to the new gen-
eration, which rejected religious authority.59 Presuming, uncritically, that an au-
dience was indicative of an alternative authority, Bialik presented the aggadah as
a secular genre that could assume its rightful place in world literature without
losing its national distinctiveness.60 Bialik fully recognized just how momentous a
step this was. For him, however, it was the crucial change that had to be made
in order “to rescue the aggadah” for the modern reader.61
To some extent, these changes were already present in the works of Margolis
and Yavetz. But their works were not nearly as extensive as Bialik’s, nor were their
aims the same. Certainly, Yavetz, whose hidden agenda was to lead modern Jews
toward an orthodox Zionism, would not have wanted to create a secular version
of the aggadah to take the place of the traditional texts.
Bialik later tried to bring some coherence to the field by insisting on its right
to be judged subjectively, on its own terms (which is to say, on Bialik’s terms).
But primarily he understood his mission to be the presentation of the human,
universal, ethical dimension of the aggadah, as a cohesive narrative composition,
however fragmentary it may have been in the original. Like the Sagenliteratur
(terminologically and conceptually the literal equivalent of aggadah), the Kinder
und Hausmärchen, and similar others, the folktales of the Jews were intended to
serve as the primary sources of a renewed folk inspiration rather than as the ex-
clusive subject of scholarly discourse. The editors’ description of their material as
aggadah, rather than the cognate Sagen, was itself a telling sign of their didactic
intent to restore the tradition to its native vocabulary.
For Bialik, the term “folklore” referred specifically to the material in his final
volume, which covered folk medicine, divinations, incantations, the “evil eye,”
folk sayings, and so on.62 These were the standard fare of documented Jewish
Sefer Haaggadah 235
folklore in Grunwald’s Mitteilungen, the Globus, the Urquell, and other contem-
porary folklore journals and magazines.63
At the same time, the editors of the Sefer haaggadah did not designate these
distinct folkloristic genres apart from the rest of the work. Bialik and Rawnitzki
clearly regarded all of the aggadah equally and indistinguishably qualified as the
“folk literature of the Jews” and the “permanent lodging of the soul and spirit of
the folk.”64
Bialik applied none of the folklorist’s rigor in identifying his material. His
understanding of Jewish folklore did not significantly evolve beyond whatever
vague notions he may have had of it when he wrote his first poems in Volozhin.
Moreover, Bialik had little patience for the scholarly trappings of the field; his
agenda was social, aimed at the creation of a national literature from which Jewish
folkloristics could achieve parity with that of other ethnic groups. From the very
beginning, folklore was, for Bialik, an essentially esthetic-literary category, a ro-
mantic intuition rather than a scholarly construct.65
Nor was Bialik at all interested in the actual folk origins of the Rabbinic,
midrashically transmitted aggadot. Although he later expressed some interest in
the Sitz im Leben of the midrashim, he never really developed more than a vague
concept of the aggadah as folklore.66 At the time, he basically conceived of the
aggadah as a collective body of folk literature.
Interestingly, Bialik later pointed to the Bible as exemplifying and justifying
his conception of the aggadah. He appealed to the Bible on secular grounds, as
historical precedent, as the voice of the people captured in literature, not as reli-
gious authority.67 First, the Bible was itself a collection of books and texts selected
and canonized by the Rabbis from a host of works. Even as a compendium of
diverse styles, it nonetheless achieved in its canonic unity a common style that is
readily identifiable as “biblical.” Second, precisely because the Bible was an edited
literary composition in its parts and as a whole, its genius was not lost on the
secular imagination. Finally, the Bible was a collective concept, which, in its
Rabbinic reinterpretation, permeated the folk life of the people.
The aggadah, Bialik would argue, had an existence apart from, and in some
measure equal to, the Bible. Turned into a book, it could acquire the same stature.
The esthetic presentation, or packaging, of the material would bring the material
to new, younger audiences. At the same time, it might convince a generation that
had rejected the irrationalism and chaos of aggadic texts that the aggadah was
worth serious reconsideration, though sincere appreciation, in the end, would re-
quire an act of will.68
To be sure, the aggadah, like the Bible, and all folk creations were initially
the work of individuals. Once they strove for expression, however, they entered
the folkloric process. No matter how original the work, it was mediated by the
richly figurative and allusive folk idiom.69
With this thought, Bialik left a door open to formalism. Through it, had
history taken a very different course, scholars might have advanced aggadic studies
along the lines of the formalist studies of the Bylini and other Russian folktales.
In that case, it might not have mattered that Bialik himself eschewed any scientific
pretensions. His works were, in the best romantic spirit, unabashedly subjective,
although, happily, his taste was nearly impeccable. For Bialik, the best of the
aggadot (and it was only those that he chose) were certainly not the artificial
products of the thirteen principles of rhetoric; true art was designed by intuition,
not by formula.70 Bialik later changed his position on the midrash, distinguishing
between the exegetically and homiletically derived aggadot and midrashim. Ag-
gadot were adaptive and dynamic, beginning with an idea and then searching for
a prooftext. The mediocre midrashim began, unimaginatively, with a verse and
forced out helpless illustrations.
The aggadah, however, was not just the preserve of the Rabbis, who them-
selves hailed from diverse elements of society, but also that of the lowly laborers,
the carpenters and shoemakers. As a folk literature, it enshrined the words, ex-
pressions, images, and ideas of the common man, whose name, like that of Daniel
the Tailor, it sometimes even remembered.71 Generally, however, its authors were
the collective, anonymous Baalei haaggadah, just as the period in which it was
created is known as the Tequfat haaggadah, concepts Bialik fully realized were
more “folkist or literary” than scientific.72 The aggadah, he pleaded, was the poetry
and belles-lettres of its time and had to be recognized as such.73
It is hardly conceivable that a pioneering work of such magnitude would
escape any criticism, deserved or otherwise. Yet that was the case—apart, that is,
from an occasional letter offering some minor correction of a text, or the com-
ments of Berdyczewski, a letter Ahfi ad Haam sent to Bialik and Rawnitzki, and the
private discussions Bialik had with Ben-Tsion Dinaburg (Dinur).74 Such was the
admiration for Bialik and for Sefer haaggadah that a body of criticism did not
appear until recently.75
When Sefer haaggadah first appeared, Berdyczewski, who was surely attuned
to all its problems, found nothing harsher to say than that while the work was
admittedly not “scientific,” Bialik should have included at least some historical
analysis of the aggadot. He was also puzzled by Bialik’s preference for Babylonian
sources over older sources.76
Ahfi ad Haam questioned the topical division of the texts: the position of some
of the texts under their particular rubrics, their editing, and the usefulness of the
volumes as a reference work. He also took issue with the translation into Hebrew
of popular Aramaisms and the insufficiency and sometimes inaccuracy of the phil-
ological commentary. Curiously, though Ahfi ad Haam was a notorious prude, he
wondered why Bialik left out some “adult material.” This was, of course, a very
sound folkloristic criticism, but here it was strictly a difference in taste.77 Ahfi ad
Haam liked Sefer haaggadah; he called it a “folk book, in the better sense of the
word,” by which he meant a book for the folk, not by the folk.78 He even suggested
that Bialik should have it translated into English.79
Only Dinaburg told Bialik, in so many words, that not all the material could
rightly be considered folklore and that there was a need to distinguish between
folk and literary sources, for a proper reconstruction of the ancient literature. For
the Zionist movement, this was especially important, Dinaburg said, to demon-
strate that there was a continuous tradition of Hebrew folklore that led from an-
tiquity into the Middle Ages. He assured Bialik that young people were interested
Sefer Haaggadah 237
in this material. In fact, Bialik was already aware of the young Jewish men and
women who attended Dinaburg’s lectures on the subject of labor and found his
use of sources from Sefer haaggadah fascinating.
Bialik respected Dinaburg’s talents as a scholar and valued his opinion. His
response, recorded by Dinaburg from memory, was typically ambiguous in some
respects, but uncharacteristically frank in others.80 Bialik repeatedly said that while
the aggadah was an entirely unique literature, not subject to scientific distinctions,
it had to be raised to the level of Greek drama, which transformed ancient folk
rituals and tales into art. No one, save scholars, Bialik told Dinaburg, would pre-
sume to improve on these classics by dissecting them in order to reconstruct their
original literary and folk contexts. The aggadah was not the work of artists; rather,
it represented the exegetical and homiletical parables of the Rabbis, transformed,
in content and form, into oral lore. This, he said, constituted its folklorization and
was the reason for the extant aggadic variants.
Bialik’s theory of variants was formulated impromptu, in response to the He-
brew critic Y. H. Taviov, an extreme opponent of Yiddish. To Bialik’s dismay,
Taviov had harshly dismissed the songs in the Ginsburg and Marek collection,
believing them to be recordings of defective texts rather than genuine folksongs.
Rejecting this, Bialik insisted that variants were the developmental signposts of
folklore, a process that was as true for the Yiddish folksongs as for the aggadah—
only more complicated and more culturally inclusive.81
Later critics took Bialik to task for all aspects of his work, from the omission
of proper citation of midrashic context for his extracts, to his book’s claim to self-
sufficiency. Though Bialik did not mean to eliminate interest in pursuing the
sources (certainly not on a scholarly level), scholars of the aggadah were bound
to reject his imposition of modern tastes on its distinctive style, even if his purpose
was to make the aggadah accessible to a popular audience.82 If, as Bialik argued,
the aggadah was to be understood on its own terms, it had to be appreciated
precisely in its own rhetorical framework. The critics also questioned—as had
Berdyczewski and Ahfi ad Haam—the faithfulness of his texts to the letter and spirit
of the sources. Far from synthesizing the aggadic fragments, Bialik was accused of
fragmenting them even further.83
Bialik was certainly aware of what Wissenschaft would have preferred to see
in a work of such scope.84 Given what Bialik claimed he hoped to do—restore
the fragments to their epic whole—the scholarly criticism regarding his selection
of variants was valid. Reconstruction of texts necessitated, in the first place, a
critical use of sources. However, it was not just that by disclaiming any scholarly
intentions, Bialik apologized in advance or hoped to forestall criticism, as E. E.
Urbach suggested. We may take Bialik at his word when he said that his intentions
were different from those of scholars; indeed, their aims were incompatible with
his.85 Berdyczewski, of course, was no less romantic than Bialik, and perhaps was
even more so. Berdyczewski, however, was a trained scholar, and he often required
a more precise methodology in order to demonstrate convincingly the existence
of subterranean traditions in Judaism. Bialik’s aims were more practical, program-
matic, and pedagogic than theoretical or scholarly, and they derived from his own
participation in the aggadic process, his actual work in shaping the aggadah.86
An important clue to Bialik’s literary imagination at work in the Sefer haaggadah

may be found among the familiar tales of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac (Gen.
22). One tale, on closer examination, stands out as strange and obscure.87 In this
version of God’s putting Abraham to the test, unlike all the others, it was Satan
who not merely attempted, but actually succeeded in foiling God’s plan. Satan
kept Abraham from going through with his tragic jest. Bialik wove separate mid-
rashic strands into a new whole that, as Joseph Heinemann discovered, did not
exist in the sources.88 Bialik made no secret of tying midrashic fragments together
into a larger epic that he imagined as their original form. It was quite another
matter, however, to fashion a narrative so brazenly antithetical to the spirit of the
sources. In Bialik’s Akedah, Satan saved Isaac and, in that moment, the Jewish
people.
When their destiny is left to God, the Jews must repeatedly suffer the shame
and humiliation of the Akedah throughout their history. The traditional Akedah,
which Bialik protests with his own version, is a metaphor for murder, both the
kind perpetrated against men, women, and children, as in the Kishinev pogrom
of 1903 (Bialik’s “City of Slaughter”), and the kind committed on a daily basis
against the spirit of young Jewish men who wasted away their lives in the yeshiva.89
Bialik held the Jews responsible for both—because they relied on God to
intervene for them when they were under the knife, as in Genesis, and because
they squandered their children’s youth by making them aspire to the image of the
matmid. In Bialik’s “ingenious mosaic,” as Heinemann called it, salvation comes
not from God, the Master of the Eternal World, but from Satan, master of this
world.90
Two years before the appearance of Sefer haaggadah, Bialik had upbraided
Berdyczewski for tampering with hallowed, ancient texts. In their fragmented state,
Bialik said, the aggadot were precious gems, consummate forms that were honed
to their bare essentials by generations of Jews telling and retelling them. Like the
Torah, the aggadah had to be left alone, “nothing added or subtracted.”91
But no sooner had Bialik embarked on his own epic quest for a Hebrew folk
literature—one he would have to rely on himself to create—than he, too, found
himself taking the time-honored literary prerogative of polishing folklore, whether
for his Hebrew folksongs, children’s songs, or aggadot.92
Bialik’s complaint that Berdyczewski should not have altered the aggadah, on
the grounds that such development of the sources was rightfully a process of time
and nature, not the art or artifice of individuals, was, in fact, disingenuous. What
really concerned him was that he thought Berdyczewski unsuited for the task. The
Jewish Nietzschean set out to liberate the repressed pagan traditions of the free
Jewish spirit, in an effort to redefine the canon of tradition. Bialik did not want
to give up the God in whom he had lost faith. He wanted to achieve for the classic
aggadic canon what Grimm and others had done for their classic tales: Bialik
wanted to “restore the crown to its former glory,” as he was fond of saying, by
giving the aggadah contemporary relevance and romantic appeal.
Of course, what was Bialik’s subversive version of the Akedah if not Berdy-
czewskian? The lines distinguishing the two writers should not be blurred: this
was not typical of Bialik’s style, but it does underscore the ambivalence that trailed
Sefer Haaggadah 239
and inhibited his work. Whereas Peretz freed himself of the religious tradition by
excising it from its ethical core, Bialik thought that by secularizing it, the religious
material could be salvaged. For Bialik, who lost his traditional faith, salvation lay
not in the present, as it did for Berdyczewski, with his Nietzschean affirmations,
but in the recalled and idealized vision of a clear commitment to tradition.93 Of
course, this was a hopeless vision of an undisturbed secular piety in which Bialik
did not himself believe, but for which he longed nonetheless. This is the due he
gave Satan, master of this world.
Bialik’s Akedah is fraught with the ambivalence of one who steps boldly, but
unsurely, from the cloister into the wilderness and, once out, looks back in long-
ing. Moriah had a host of meanings. It was a paradigm of martyrdom, the hekhal
hatorah, the Temple of Jerusalem in exile, and the altar on which the life of the
matmid was offered. In Bialik’s Akedah, Moriah was transformed into a frontier
outpost of secularism and the will to live. At the same time, it remained a powerful
symbol of rootedness and a competing memorial to what had been.94 From Moriah
came the people’s book, Sefer haaggadah.
Notes
1. “Lekinusa shel haaggadah haivrit,” Hashiloahfi 10 (1908):23, 24. See also B. Dina-
burg, “Tokhniyot shel bialik,” Kneset 9 (1945):13.
2. Hfi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik and Y. H fi . Rawnitzki, Sefer haaggadah, rev. ed. (Tel Aviv,
1930), 1:xi.
3. Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 14.
4. Ernst Simon, Chajim Nachman Bialik: Eine Einführung in sein Leben und sein
Werk (Berlin, 1935), pp. 98–99; Yehoshua Gutman, “Bialik baal haagadah,” Kneset 10
(1947):65.
5. Frankfurt am Main, 1906.
6. Hfi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik and Yehoshua H fi ana Rawnitzki, The Book of Legends: Sefer
haaggadah, Legends from the Talmud and Midrash, trans. William G. Braude (New York,
1992).
7. Kol kitvei berdyczewski (Tel Aviv, 1960), p. 249.
8. When exactly did Bialik make the explicit connection between aggadah and folk-
lore? The rubric Mishirei am first appeared in the 1908 edition of Bialik’s poems (F.
Lahfi over, Bialik: Hfi ayav vitsirotav [Tel Aviv, 1962], 3:620; herein, Lahfi over). Mi yodea ir
lishtina, his first “folk song,” appeared in 1901 (ibid., 1:347–48). By the time he came to
articulate his plan for Sefer haaggadah, he clearly regarded aggadah as the equivalent of
folklore. Of course, all Bialik’s poems bear the imprint of aggadah and represent his cultural
iberdikhtung of the past treasures of Jewish expression. See Mordecai Genn, “The Influence
of Rabbinic Literature on the Poetry of Hayyim Nahman Bialik” (Ph.D. dissertation, Bran-
deis University, 1978).
9. Hyman Hurwitz, Hebrew Tales: Selected and Translated from the Writings of the
Ancient Hebrew Sages (London, 1826), and its German version, Sagen der Ebräer: Aus den
alten ebräischen Weisen (Settingen, Hainsfurth, 1828).
10. On Frankel, see Ismar Schorsch, “Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of
Conservative Judaism,” Judaism 30 (1981):348–49. See also the nationalistic appreciation of
Frankel, by Shaul Pinhas Rabinovitz, R. zekharyah frankel: H fi ayav zemano, sefarav uveit
midrasho (Warsaw, 1898), pp. 59–70, 139–40.
11. Leopold Zunz, Die Gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden: Ein Beitrag zur Altertum-
skunde und biblischen Kritik, zur Literatur und Religionsgeschichte (Hildesheim, 1966),
pp. 62, 64–65, 98, 104–6, 126, 133, 136, 138–39, 147–48, 153, 163, 179, 324–25, 327, 335, 341,
375, 469. Rapoport began his lengthy discussion of the essentially literary-homiletical aspects
of the aggadah by identifying the material parenthetically, in German, as “Sagen, Erzäh-
lungen, Legenden, öffentliche Vorträge.” His work, however, only suggests a folkloristic
aspect of the aggadah (Salomo Jehuda L. Rapoport, Erekh Milin [Prague, 1852], 1:6–13). N.
Krochmal, Rapoport’s mentor, specifically rejected those elements of the aggadah that fall
under the category of folklore, as late, and vulgar accretions, to the edifying and noble work
of the Rabbis (Kitvei rabi nahfi man krokhmal, ed. Simon Rawidowicz, 2d ed. [London,
Waltham, 1961], pp. 251–66). See also Rawidowicz’s apt remarks, p. 145. Solomon Schechter
thought folklore was nonsense; see “Nachman Krochmal and the Perplexities of the Time,”
Studies in Judaism: A Selection (New York, 1974), p. 342.
12. See Alexander Altman, “Zur Frühgeschichte der jüdischen Predigt in Deutschland:
Leopold Zunz als Prediger,” Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute 6 (1961): 3–59; Alexander
Altman, ed., “The New Style of Preaching in Nineteenth-Century German Jewry,” in Stud-
ies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 65–117.
13. Isaac Margolis, Erzählungen Jeshurun’s: Charakter Bilder und Sagen (Berlin, 1877).
14. F. Lahfi over, Rishonim veahfi aronim (Tel Aviv, 1965), pp. 61–62; idem, Toledot ha-
sifrut haivrit (Tel Aviv, 1966), 3: pt. 1, 48–51; Nahum Sokolow, “Harav R.I.H. Weiss,
H.Y.V.,” Haasif 2 (1885):47–48.
15. J. Klausner, Yotsrim uvonim (Tel Aviv, 1925), 1:17, n. 1.
16. See Dor dor vedorshav (New York, Berlin, 1924), 1: chap. 22; 2: chap. 21, 3: chaps.
22–23, esp. pp. 252–53, 287, 294–95; see also Elazar Atlas’s contemporary review, “Even
bohen,” Haasif 1 (1884): pt. 2, 234.
17. Isaac Hirsch Weiss, “Haraayon haleumi beyisrael,” Haasif 6 (1893):95–101; En-
cyclopaedia Judaica, 16:413–14.
18. Haim Oppenheim, “Biqoret midrash aggadah,” Haasif 5, 2 (1889):1–22, and 6, 2
(1893):87–103. On Oppenheim, see the autobiographical notes in N. Sokolow, ed., Sefer
zikaron lesofrei yisrael hahfi ayim itanu kayom, (Warsaw, 1889), pp. 126–27, and Jewish En-
cyclopedia, 9:410.
19. On Rossi’s attitude to the aggadah in the context of his historiographical method,
see Salo Baron, History and Jewish Historians (Philadelphia, 1964), pp. 196–97, 225, 237,
435; cf. Yosef H fi ayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Historians (Seattle,
1982), pp. 71–73; 127, n. 40.
20. See Michael A. Meyer, Ideas of Jewish History (New York, 1974), pp. 120–21.
21. Shmuel Yosef Fuenn, “Maamar al haaggadah,” Haasif 1 (1884): 94–105.
22. Yavetz translated Sihfi ot as Märchen.
23. Yavetz, pp. 12, 17; Peretz, Ale verk (New York, 1947), 7:129.
24. Yavetz, pp. 11–12.
25. Yavetz, p. 12; cf. Zunz, “Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur,” Gesammelte Schrif-
ten (Berlin, 1875), pp. 23–24; Ismar Schorsch, “From Wolfenbüttel to Wissenschaft: The
Divergent Paths of Isaak Markus Jost and Leopold Zunz,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22
(1977):125. On Yavetz’s admiration of Zunz, as well as of Krochmal and Rapoport, see his
Sefer toledot yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1939), 14:18–22, 70.
26. Yavetz, p. 11.
27. Ibid., p. 12; idem, Toledot yisrael, 14:162; Lahfi over, Toledot, 3: pt. 1, 40–42.
28. Yavetz, pp. 3–7.
Sefer Haaggadah 241
29. Ibid., p. 8.
30. David Frischmann, Mivhfi ar ktavim (Tel Aviv, 1947), pp. 367, 369.
31. Ibid.
32. Shaul Stempfer, “Yediat qaro vekhatuv etsel yehudei mizrahfi eiropah batequfah
hahfi adashah: Heqsher, meqorot, vehaskalot,” in Tradition and Change in Modern Jewish
History: Essays Presented in Honor of Shmuel Ettinger (Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 459–83.
33. Preface to Sihfi ot mini qedem, p. x.
34. Ibid.
35. Bialik may also have been influenced by Yavetz’s Neginot mini qedem (Warsaw,
1892?), which retell some of the aggadot relating to the destruction of the Temples, as epic
poems, à la the ancient Greeks and Germans, but in the style and meter of ancient Hebrew
poetry. Some of these are reprinted in Rabi zev yavetz (Jerusalem, 1943), pp. 33–41; see also
A. Sh. Hershberg, “Letoledot yisrael ultoldot r. z. yavetz, z.l.” in Yavetz’s Toledot, 14:137–
38.
36. Dan Miron, “Folklore and Antifolklore in the Yiddish Fiction of the Haskalah,”
in Studies in Jewish Folklore, ed. Frank Talmage (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 219–49.
37. Czeslaw Milosz, The History of Polish Literature (New York, 1969), pp. 322–79;
James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New
York, 1970), pp. 474–518.
38. Dan Miron, Boah, lailah:Hasifrut haivrit bein higayon le i-giyon bamifne hameah
haesrim, iyunim bitsirot hfi . n. bialik ve-m. y. berditshevski (Tel Aviv, 1987), pp. 90–97, 157.
39. Moshe Ungerfeld, ed., Ktavim genuzim shel hfi ayim nahfi man bialik (Tel Aviv, 1970),
passim; Dan Miron, ed., Bialik: Shirim (Tel Aviv, 1983), pp. 94–193.
40. Miron, Boah, lailah, pp. 110–24.
41. Harold Fisch, “Bialik and the Greater Romantic Lyric: A Comparative Study,” in
Melanges Andre Neher, ed. E. Amalo Levy-Valensi et al. (Paris, 1975), pp. 227–36.
42. Lahfi over, 2:542; Iggerot hfi ayim nahfi man bialik, ed. F. Lahfi over (Tel Aviv, 1938), 1:
282–83. Sholom Aleichem’s semiliterate Tevye was a more realistic, although certainly a
peculiarly brilliant, image of how much hfi umash and Rashi the common man really knew.
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans.
Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), pp. 136–37.
44. Lahfi over, 1:520–29.
45. Tsvi Sharfshtein, Toledot hahfi inukh beyisrael bedorot haahfi aronim (New York,
1945), 1:363ff; Elias Schulman, A History of Jewish Education in the Soviet Union (New
York, 1971), p. 4; Iggerot bialik, 1:135, 140–42.
46. Y. H. Biletzki H fi . n. bialik veyiddish (Tel Aviv, 1970), pp. 24–29; Khone Shmeruk,
Peretses yiesh vizye: Interpretatsye fun y. l. peretses bay nakht oyfn altn mark, un kritishe
oysgabe fun der drame (New York, 1971), pp. 102–3, 114, 121, 124; Iggerot bialik, 1:264.
47. Lahfi over, 2:426–27; on Peretz and Frischmann’s stormy relationship, see Nakhman
Mayzl, Perets un zayn dor shrayber (New York, 1951), pp. 298–301.
48. Lahfi over 2:446–48. Idem, Toledot hasifrut haivrit hahfi adashah (Tel Aviv, 1966), 3:
pt. 1, 94; Menuhfi a Gilboa, Bein realizm leromantiqah: al darko shel david frishman (Tel
Aviv, 1975), pp. 119, 153.
49. See Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav (Tel Aviv, 1937), 2:128–30.
50. Book 1 of the first volume apeared in 1908, printed out of the elegant publishing
house of Joseph Fisher, in accordance with Bialik’s wishes that the appearance of Sefer
haaggadah be worthy of its subject. Originally, two volumes were planned. In all, three
volumes appeared, consisting of two books each. Both the second book of volume 1 (printed
by Moriah with imported type) and two books of volume 2 came out in 1909. The third
volume came out in Krakow in 1911. Bialik continued correcting and revising Sefer
haaggadah until just before his death in 1934. See Mordechai Ben Yehezkel, “Sefer Vayehi
hayom,” in Bialik: Yetsirot lesugeha bir i habiqoret, ed. Gershon Shaked (Jerusalem, 1974),
pp. 339–40; Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav 2:130–31.
51. Sefer haaggadah, 1:ix; Rawnitzki, among others, appreciated Bialik’s work for its
“architectural” order. “And Bialik’s luminous talent for spiritual architecture was revealed
in this vocation, too, in all its greatness. He was unequalled in organizing a broad and
complex program, or a great and beautifully ordered, spiritual tabernacle, with all its pas-
sageways, chambers, and inner chambers” (Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav, 2:132). The architectural
motif was frequently used by Bialik as well. Sefer haaggadah, 1:viii–x; see also D. Sadan,
Al sifruteinu (Jerusalem, 1951), p. 47.
52. Sefer haaggadah, 1:xiii; Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 16.
53. Sefer haaggadah, 1:xi.
54. See Berdyczewski’s generally laudatory review, “Divrei biqoret: sefer haaggadah,”
in Kol kitvei berditshevski pp. 249, 251.
55. Sefer haaggadah, 1:x; Rawnitzki, 2:130.
56. Sefer haaggadah, 1:x.
57. Ibid., 1:10–13.
58. See Rawidowicz’s introduction in Kitvei rabi nahfi man krokhmal, p. 143. Bialik de-
ferred to the authority of the sages for his esthetic distinction between “good and bad”
aggadot; see Devarim shebeal-pe (Tel Aviv, 1935), pp. 44, 71–72. Bialik’s prodigious memory,
at which Rawnitzki marveled, as well as his literary tastes, were also factors in determining
which texts would appear, and in what form. It is inconceivable that the editors could agree
on all the final material, but Rawnitzki confessed to disagreeing only sometimes with Bi-
alik’s interpretations of the aggadah. His admiration for Bialik overrode all differences be-
tween them, and the result, if we take Rawnitzki at his word, was equally satisfying for both
(Rawnitzki, 2:133). On Bialik’s criteria, see Devarim shebeal-pe, p. 62. On the Grimms’
revisions, see Maria Tartar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, 1987).
59. Bialik, Devarim shebeal-pe, pp. 62–63; idem, “Limud haaggadah beveit hasefer,”
Kneset 10 (1947):13; Yehoshua Gutman, “Bialik baal haaggadah,” Kneset 10 (1947):70–71;
Efraim E. Urbach, “Bialik veagadot hfi zl,” Molad 17 (1959):268; Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav, 2:
127.
60. Later, Bialik spoke of the aggadah acquiring a new kind of sanctity, “the sanctity
of national creativity,” and “a different kind of sanctity, a secular sanctity” (Devarim
shebealpe, p. 61; “Limud haaggadah,” pp. 13, 15). See also the critical remarks of this
method by Yosef Heinemann, “Al darko shel bialik baaggadah hatalmudit,” Molad 31
(1974), passim; A. A. Halevi, “Hakompozitsiya shel haaggada,” Kneset 10 (1947).
61. Bialik, “Limud haaggadah,” p. 13.
62. Sefer haaggadah, 1:xiii.
63. Ibid., p. xii.
64. This is also evident in the subtitle of the editors’ Yiddish translation of the Sefer
haaggadah, Di yidishe agodes: Folkstimlekehe ertseylungen; see also Bialik’s essay of 1913,
“Hasefer haivri,” in Kol kitvei bialik (Tel Aviv, 1962), p. 316; idem, “Limud haaggadah,”
p. 21, passim; Gutman, “Bialik,” p. 64; Sefer haaggadah, 1:9.
65. On Bialik’s ostensibly indifferent attitude to folklore as anything other than an
artistic source for his work, see Ben Yehezkel, “Sefer Vayehi,” p. 343.
66. Devarim shebeal-pe, p. 74.
67. Bialik, “Limud haaggadah,” pp. 13–14.
68. Nathan Rotenstreich, Tradition and Reality: The Impact of History on Modern
Jewish Thought (New York, 1972), pp. 98–99.
69. See Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 13; Lahfi over, 3:700. See Bialik’s “To the Aggada,”
Sefer Haaggadah 243
Selected Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik Translated from the Hebrew, trans. and ed. Israel
Efros (New York, 1938), pp. 19–20.
70. Devarim shebeal-pe, pp. 43, 61.
71. Vayiqra rabbah, p. 32.
72. “Lekinusa haaggadah,” pp. 23–24.
73. “Limud haaggadah,” p. 16.
74. On such a letter from the shtetl, see Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav, 2:132–33.
75. These include Gutman, Halevi, Heinemann, and Urbach. See also Shmuel
Verses, “Hasifrut haivrit beeinei bialik,” in his collection Biqoret habiqoret: haarakhot
vegilguleihen (Tel Aviv, 1982), p. 108; and on early Bialik criticism, “Shelavim rishonim
behfi eqer bialik: 1915–1948,” pp. 130–64.
76. Kol kitvei Berditshevski, p. 249.
77. Letter to Bialik and Rawnitzki (October 31, 1909), Iggerot ahfi ad haam (Jerusalem,
Berlin, 1924), 4:106–9.
78. Letter to Rawnitzki (February 27, 1910), ibid., p. 125.
79. Letter to Rawnitzki (September 23, 1910), ibid., p. 150.
80. Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” pp. 10–15.
81. Ibid. On Taviov, see Mendl Bobe, “Y. H. Taviov,” Heavar 16 (May 1969): 141–63.
82. Urbach, “Bialik,” p. 268.
83. Halevi, “Hakompositsiya,” p. 91.
84. Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 14.
85. Sefer haaggadah, 1:xi.
86. Urbach, “Bialik,” p. 268; Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 13.
87. Sefer haaggadah, 1:54. Bialik and Rawnitzki, The Book of Legends, p. 41.
88. Heinemann, “Al darko shel bialik,” pp. 89–91.
89. Selected Poems, pp. 114–28; Lahfi over, 2:424–39.
90. Heinemann, “Al darko shel bialik,” p. 90.
91. Iggerot bialik, 1:274, no. 21; Urbach, “Bialik,” p. 267; Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav, 2:130;
Heinemann, “Al darko shel bialik,” p. 90.
92. Ziva Shamir, Hatsirtsur meshorer hagalut: Lehfi eker hayesod haamami beshirat hfi .
n. bialik (Tel Aviv, 1986), pp. 18–21.
93. See Avraham Parnes’s “Hamatmid shel hfi . n. bialik, m. y. berditshevski lifnei shinuy
arakhin,” in his Mibein lemaarakhot (Tel Aviv, 1951), pp. 9–34.
94. On Moriah and its connection to Bialik’s Zionist longings, as midrashically sug-
gested in El hatsipor, which was written in Volozhin, see Lahfi over, 1:91, n. 20.
13
israel bartal
The Ingathering of
Traditions
Zionism’s Anthology Projects
Zionism and Culture

he intellectuals who enlisted in the Zionist movement’s Kulturkampf hoped
T to create a national culture for the Jewish society that was to grow on the soil
of Palestine. This culture, like other national cultures in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, was based on a tension-ridden conglomeration of elements of cul-
tural heritage from the period prior to the advent of modern nationalism, and
materials adopted from the European cultural repertoire, with Central and Eastern
Europe taking particularly central positions. One of the most important elements
in the creation of the new national culture was the reimaging of the past. The
Zionist movement’s past was designed out of materials taken from the traditional
cultural heritage; these, however, were rearranged in a manner that did not accord
with traditional Jewish society’s image of the past. Matters that had been central
to the traditional Jewish consciousness were moved to the margins, while others,
which had been minor and marginal, moved to center stage. Thus, thinkers and
writers within the Zionist movement focused on periods of national independence
such as the Hasmonean period and showed considerably less interest in periods
of cultural prosperity outside of Palestine. Past materials were given new meanings
and were transposed from their old religious context to social, economic, and
intellectual contexts determined by modern nationalism.
The new national culture was created in direct association with the Central
and Eastern European versions of romantic nationalism and was profoundly influ-
enced—in a manner that has yet to be fully studied—by Eastern European polit-
ical radicalism. The combination of nationalism and social radicalism left its mark
on the manner in which materials from the past were used. It created dialectical
thought patterns in which the desire for destruction and erasure coexisted with
the demand for continuity and rehabilitation. Out of this dialectical duality, a new
secular Jewish culture emerged and developed; it took root in the late nineteenth
century and developed later in Palestine, Israel, and communities throughout the
Diaspora.
244
The Ingathering of Traditions 245
How was this new national culture transmitted to its consumers in the growing
Jewish yishuv in Palestine? The new society, after all, was not supposed to continue
using Jewish text in the way they traditionally had, nor reading all the texts that
had been in use in traditional Jewish society. At the same time, there was a fear
of severing the relation to the old texts completely. It was hoped that the new
readers would read the traditional texts in a new way and find in them what their
ancestors had not found, thereby establishing a link between these texts and the
ideas of modern Europe. The Hebrew educational system that developed in Pal-
estine beginning in the late nineteenth century played a decisive role in this
matter, as did Hebrew journalism, in which members of the nascent national
intelligentsia actively took part. The written word—both the literary text and the
journalistic article—was seen as a major medium for the propagation of culture.
The Hebrew culture that emerged in Palestine consisted of many components
taken from Jewish tradition and channeled into a secular-nationalistic context.
From the Bible—serving now as a historical document—to the Holy Tongue that
shifted to a daily vernacular, much of the cultural upheaval in Palestine took place
in a written form. Within the realm of the written word, the present article will
address itself to one particular tool of cultural dissemination that was put to ex-
tensive use during the formative period of Hebrew culture of Palestine: the an-
thology. The Zionist anthologies, be they collections of poetry, historical docu-
ments, or journals of pilgrims, will be studied here as yet another cultural weapon
in the struggle for a new Palestine.
These anthologies were conceived of as bridges between the traditional text
and new texts. It was their task to fulfill the role played by the traditional text in
old reading habits, and to institute a new—and often directly opposed—manner
of reading within the continuum of generations of traditional Jewish texts. As a
selection of edited texts arranged according to particular organizational principles,
the anthology was a most fitting instrument for disseminating the values of the
new culture. By its very composition as a continuum of texts, the anthology could
express and indeed embody the historically continuous national existence to which
Zionism laid claim. The anthology had the capacity to extend lines of connections
backward and forward, drawing links among the interpretation of the past, political
action in the present, and national expectations for the future. By its nature, the
anthology authorized putting into practice in a small scale the selecting of mate-
rials from among the nearly infinite variety of traditional texts. Furthermore, a
textual continuity could be established between traditional texts from the past and
innovative texts of the modern era. Anthological editing also facilitated the order-
ing of the materials in a manner that seemed to fulfill the Zionist principles for
organization of the past: certain periods could be skipped over; periods distant
from each other in time could be brought close together; and new compounds
might be created according to a common denominator attributed to the various
elements by the anthology’s editor.
The anthology was not, of course, a Zionist innovation. Literary anthologies
had reflected literary tastes, political changes, and ideological trends in Europe
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collections of texts organized
according to topic, historical period, or geographic region had already served other
national movements prior to the rise of Jewish nationalism. Various nationalist

trends—not necessarily Zionist—published literary and historical anthologies that
were based on organizational principles different from those that characterized the
Zionist selections. For example, Yiddish literary collections began to appear in the
early twentieth century, which established a link between Yiddish creativity in
the late Middle Ages and the modern Yiddish literary revival. These anthologies
were created by editors associated with the Yiddishist camp, who saw the Yiddish
language and the culture associated with it as the backbone of Jewish nationalism.
Like the Zionist anthologies, these anthologies reflected a fusion of national ro-
manticism and social radicalism. They, too, were brimming with the dialectical
tension between the call for the destruction of the old world and the desire to
continue some of its characteristics.
The Project of Ingathering

The anthologies edited and published by editors associated with the Zionist move-
ment were inextricably linked to nationalist thought. This thought was expressed
in the structure of the anthologies, in the principles by which the sources were
selected and included in the various collections, and in the manner in which each
source was presented. Moreover, the very creation of the anthology was consciously
put forward as part of the project of national revival. The selection of the texts,
their translation into Hebrew (a dead language that had been resurrected), their
placement within the framework of the national narrative, and their reclamation
by the people renewing itself and by the land being rebuilt—all this served si-
multaneously as a means by which to achieve national goals and as an end in
itself. The anthological strategy was mounted as part of the project of “ingather-
ing,” or kinnus, which had been envisioned by Ahfi ad Haam and H fi ayyim Nahfi man
Bialik, the founders of cultural nationalism, and which was being realized in var-
ious quarters by Jewish intellectuals who devoted themselves to the preparation of
sections of this enormous cultural enterprise. The ingathering of elements of the
Jewish cultural heritage was to take place both in the realm of time—the materials
of all historical periods, beginning with the distant past and through the present,
would be linked together—and in the realm of space—cultural sources from all
parts of the Jewish Diaspora would be transferred to Palestine. The project of
kinnus was designed to preserve in the old-new homeland these national-cultural
values that appeared destined to be forgotten in the reality of the modern world.
The goal was to rehabilitate and reconstruct those elements of culture that had
been ostensibly lost yet implicitly preserved in Jewish creativity throughout the
generations. At the same time, the project assumed more interventionist preroga-
tives; it sought to reformulate what was deemed to be in need of improvement
and to adapt it to the new values of the national movement. Only with such active
gathering and reworking of the products of generations of Jewish cultural creativity
could one hope to transform materials scattered throughout time and space into
a Jewish national culture.1 As Bialik put it in a 1932 lecture to activists of the
Jewish Labor party of Palestine in the settlement of Nahalal:
So long as this material is not gathered, not utilized, not used to fortify the nation,
to preserve its unity, to increase its strength—it is not our cultural capital. Re-
couping the cultural capital—this is a matter for a great ingathering from the
most ancient times up until the most modern period, from all tongues, from all
generations; this is the matter of organizing this capital and reevaluating it with
a new approach, with the means and tools and new knowledge we have acquired
over time. All this material must once again be placed into a new crucible, in
order to be molded anew. This is something that must take place here in Pales-
tine.2
It is not an accident that these words were delivered before representatives of a

Zionist group that envisioned the creation of a new society and a new culture,
and in a place (Nahalal) that clearly represented the innovative nature of the
Zionist enterprise in Palestine: a workers’ moshav (cooperative settlement) in the
Jezreel Valley. Indeed, the anthologies edited in the spirit of the Zionist movement
were a link in the project of national cultural ingathering. The enterprise of kinnus
was aimed not only at preservation and restoration, but also, as was mentioned
previously, at discovery, disclosure, and reconstruction. This meant revealing the
meanings, concealed behind the visible, behind the plain sense of the text, bring-
ing forgotten or suppressed writings to consciousness, and exposing facts, events,
and deeds that the traditional Jewish reader had not known or had refused to
know. Since the modern nationalist movement sought to provide a new reading
of the past and reveal a different connection between people and land than had
been conceived of by traditional society, the editors of these anthologies also ad-
dressed themselves to the task of creating new texts out of the old ones. They
discovered subterranean streams that had been flowing in the dark throughout the
2,000 years of exile; they exposed vital manifestations of popular culture that had
been repressed by elites lacking in national consciousness; and they discovered
invisible threads connecting places and events in Eretz Yisrael in the past with
places and events in the Diaspora at different times and in different places.
Most of the Hebrew-language anthologies edited in the spirit of Zionist ide-
ology and published in Palestine and Israel appeared between the 1920s and the
1960s. A literary and scholarly establishment already existed in the twenties, and
it was a substantial factor in the cultural and political life of the new Jewish yishuv.
The inspiration for the publication of anthologies came from the circles of an
intellectual elite that identified explicitly with the Zionist worldview and took an
active part in the formulation of a Hebrew national culture. The collections’ ed-
itors included the most distinguished figures in the Zionist intelligentsia of the
time: writers such as Jacob Fichmann; political leaders such as Berl Katzenelson;
teachers and intellectuals who were to be among the first professors of the Hebrew
University, such as Ben-Zion Dinur (Dinaburg), Joseph Klausner, and Israel Heil-
prin. This distinguished group combined ideological fervor and political commit-
ment with an extremely broad education and intimate familiarity with traditional
Jewish texts. It included writers of history, editors of newspapers and journals,
excellent translators, and experienced bibliographers. In their work of gathering,
translating, editing, and interpreting, they were assisted by the experts and most
learned members of the small Jewish yishuv.3 The funding for the gathering of
the anthologies, some of which were quite large, was provided by Zionist institu-
tions such as the Jewish National Fund, the youth department of the Zionist
Organization, Sollel Boneh (the labor union’s construction company), the culture
department of the Kibbutz Hameuhfi ad (one of the kibbutz movements), and the
Jewish Labor Organization of Palestine.
Who were the intended readers of those volumes? According to the definition
provided by the poet Jacob Fichmann, such anthologies as Sefer haarets, which
he compiled, were edited in the manner of those folk collections of legends and
prayers that for many generations had expressed the powerful feelings of love and
longing for the Land of Israel. “It is not the nature of these books to provide a
systematic teaching. Their colorful material, gathered from all corners of literature
and poetry, is likely, more than any exhaustive scholarship, to awaken hearts and
to draw them to the Land of Israel.”4 The collections of new texts, moreover, were
intended for the entire Jewish population of the new yishuv, not for a small elite
of intellectuals. The historical-geographical-literary anthology was designed to take
the place of the kind of popular reading that had once been prevalent in many
sectors of traditional Jewish society. The popularization of the modern critical
scholarship was designed to take the place of midrash, legend, and liturgical poetry
or to present the old material in a new light, in such a manner that it would be
read by any and every Jew. In the following pages, I will survey some of the
principal Zionist anthologies that were edited according to themes central to Zi-
onist thinking. I will examine the relationship between ideology and knowledge
and between the message and the genre used for its transmission.
The Changing Map of Palestine

Sefer haarets—an anthology of writings about the land of Israel (1926), was ar-
ranged according to a geographic-historical principle. Its first section opens with
God’s promise of the land to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis and with the Tel
el-Amarna letters (the earliest extrabiblical mention of the Hebrews’ presence in
the land of Canaan) and ends with David Ben-Gurion’s recollections of his first
day in Palestine. It tells “the tale of the people exiled from its homeland.”5 The
exilic period includes sections on the remnants of the Jewish community in Pal-
estine in the Middle Ages, waves of immigration to Palestine, and various messi-
anic movements. The editor, poet Jacob Fichmann, speaks of exposing the sub-
terranean currents in which the connection between the people and its land found
expression. The prayers, the epistles sent by immigrants back to the lands of the
Diaspora, and the words of vision and prophecy spoken by messianic claimants
were like seeds blowing in the wind, which preserved the connection to the distant
land and eventually took root. “The love for the homeland never abandoned us.
It was that love that turned the wanderings of thousands of years into a temporary
sojourn, and the land that had been only told about into the one and only home-
land.”6 The longing for the land of the fathers is the theme that unites the mul-
titude of sources brought together by Fichmann and establishes historical conti-
nuity between kabbalists, Hasidim, Christian millenarians, and socialist atheists.
The second part of the book is organized geographically and includes historical
sources and literary and poetic depictions of settlements and locales in Palestine:
Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the Jezreel Valley, the Galilee, and Trans-Jordan.
In the same way in which the traditional texts in the first section are histori-
cized and linked to contemporary texts anchored in the immediate political mi-
lieu, so the holy geography of Palestine undergoes a radical transformation and
becomes concrete political geography, i.e., Zionist geography. This process also
involves the Judification of the map of Palestine and the obscuring of its Arab-
Muslim character. Rather than the existence of the Arab population in the land
being erased, their presence is felt more acutely in texts garnered from Arab ge-
ographic literature as well as from the many descriptions of twentieth-century
reality included in the collection. Nevertheless, this presence does not come to-
gether to form a complete geographical-historical picture in the same way that the
Jewish presence does. The Arab presence is most often related to the country’s
destruction and backward state.
One significant innovation is the change in the priority given to the different
geographic regions of the ancient homeland in accordance with what the Zionist
settlers had reconstructed during the decade preceding the book’s appearance. The
Jezreel Valley, an area of utterly marginal significance in traditional Jewish texts,
is given a particularly central position. In the anthology, it is this region, which
the new communal settlements had built up in the twenties, that becomes the
pinnacle of the Zionist enterprise and innovation. This is an innovation that is
related dialectically to the mystical element in the old texts. Take, for example,
the words of Eliezer Steinman, then a young and rebellious Hebrew writer and
later the editor of an anthology of Hasidic sources, upon visiting the new kibbutz
Beit Alfa in the valley: “Beit Alfa, which serves as the absorption ground for the
young and enthusiastic forces of Hashomer Hatsair during the Third Aliyah is,
because of its vibrant nature and the manner of its expression, the fruit of Hasidic
creation. . . . Do we not see here a continuous thread leading directly from the
students of [Rabbi Shimon] Bar Yohfi ai, who see the world in its entirety engulfed
in flames? Is this not a remnant of a burning ember from the periods of Hasidim
and Kabbalists?”7
The New Jew

In 1938, an anthology of the new prose of Palestine, accompanied by literary
appraisals, was published in Jerusalem.8 The introductory essay to this collection
was written by Joseph Klausner, professor of modern Hebrew literature at the
Hebrew University and one of the most prolific writers of the Zionist intellectual
elite. The anthology was designed, according to the introduction, “to provide the
reader with a picture of the revival of Eretz Yisrael reflected in the new Palestinian
literature. Although the roots of this new Hebrew literature are still embedded in
the exilic past, the Palestinian element in it is growing ever stronger and more
ubiquitous. All the customs of life that have been created by the nation now
reawakening in its homeland, from the days of the Bilu to the present, a period
of but fifty years, already found expression in the prose of Palestine. . . . The pur-
pose of this collection is to provide a survey, of these, and only of these, works.”9
Indeed, as the distance from the earliest days of Zionist settlement increased, so
the yishuv element in the anthologies grew increasingly dominant. The yishuv was
presented by the editors as an almost self-evident fulfillment of a vision to which
all the threads, currents, and historical contexts of pre-Zionist texts led. The an-
thology’s selections followed the transition from exilic mores to the new ways of
living in the Land. Moreover, the explanatory notes that accompanied the texts
clearly distinguished between works written by an author outside of Palestine and
those created by him once he arrived. This was held to be a crucial distinction,
because in Palestine the author absorbed into his being “the singularity, the
uniqueness of this little-big land.”10 It appears that the collection’s editors, fervent
Zionists who had recently emigrated to Palestine, were still filled with sincere awe
at the sight of the growing new society in the ancient-modern land, a society so
radically different from the one with which they had been familiar in Central and
Eastern Europe.
Most of the texts they chose to include in their Mivhfi ar hasippur haerets
yisraeli emphasize the sharp distinction between the new human product of the
national movement and the old-world Jew. In his story “Adam shalem” (A Com-
plete Person), for example, Shlomo Zemach describes the son of a rural Eastern
European ritual-slaughterer who goes out enthusiastically to the harvest because
“here [in Palestine] we are destined to become whole and healthy, here we are
unwittingly children of the field, whole in spirit, like a blade upon which one may
say a blessing.”11 An even more characteristic example is the visit paid by the
character of Menahem Mendl to a young kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley in which
his son and daughter-in-law are members. Menahem Mendl is Sholem Aleichem’s
familiar hero, the ultimate luftmentsh whose misadventures revolve around the
fluctuations of the stock market. He was brought back to life after Sholem Alei-
chem’s death in the Hebrew prose by his son-in-law, Dov Berkowitch. Unlike the
socioeconomic world to which Menahem Mendl is accustomed, the valley is new,
young, fresh, and in bloom; the kibbutz, unsurprisingly, is the antithesis of the
shtetls of Poland and Russia. “Here nothing is known of barter and trade, middle-
men and fraud, profit and price manipulation.”12 However, the young pioneers
are presented as successors to “our fathers and grandfathers, who had the strength
of lions, to arise with dawn to worship the creator.”13 In his introduction to the
anthology, Klausner defines the cultural rebirth embodied in the yishuv as a “re-
newal of what was superior in the old, and its connecting to what is good in the
new.”14 For him, the “old” was the distant past, the era of the ancient kings, the
prophets, and the Hasmoneans. This past served as the basis for the renewal ex-
pressed in the anthology’s literary selection, and not “the Middle Ages, a period
of darkness and distress that stretches from the destruction of the Second Temple
to the Enlightenment, with but a few intervals of light and rights.”15 Indeed, Klaus-
ner says, the new writers have returned to the landscape of ancient Palestine,
whose smells and views differ so much from those in the lands of exile. They
have, furthermore, returned to the flora and fauna of the land of their fathers,
associated with the glory of the distant past: “The anemones [kalaniyot], red like
large drops of congealed blood—the blood of the Maccabees, the Zealots, and
Bar Kochba’s soldiers, spilled in sanctification of His name and of freedom.”16 The
Palestinian man is also utterly different from the person he was in exile. Klausner
elaborates extensively on the change that has occurred in some of the stereotypical
traits of the Jew: “Before us is a new Jew, a man-Jew. The typical Jewish cowardice
has been terminated, the pallid color above the cheeks is gone, and the delicate
palms of the hands are no longer. Excessive spirituality has passed from the world
along with fear of dogs, of policemen, of the Gentile. The back has become
straight and the bent-over body has grown erect.”17 However, Klausner laments
that the old is hardly represented at all in the new Hebrew literature. In nearly
every story in the collection, he writes, “Judaism does not exist—either as a religion
or as a unique culture or as a national worldview. Aside from the land and the
language, there is nothing in here [eyn kan klum].”18
The first literary anthology of Palestinian prose, then, expresses the separation
from the past, a separation caused not by an abandonment of the old texts but
rather by a rereading of them in a new way. The connection with the distant past
is with a past invented by the new Hebrews and connected by them to the ge-
ography and natural landscape of Palestine. This is not a fictional past, but one
based upon a radical selection of particular portions of the old texts: courage,
physical prowess, political independence.
From Masada to the Haganah

Physical prowess and political independence were in the center of the Zionist
discourse, hence, the major place of the two concepts of shemirah (defense, or
guarding) and avodah (labor). Inherited, as is well known, by the modern Jewish
nationalist movement from the world of the Jewish enlightenment, these two terms
represented an array of demands for changes in traditional Jewish society. The use
of weapons and the study of warfare were seen as an uplifting of the Diaspora Jew.
Working the land and physical activity in general were seen as the cure for the
fatal disease suffered by the nonproductive Jew. This idealization of the active
heroic life played a decisive role in the new reading of traditional texts and in the
selection of modern texts attached to them in the Zionist anthology. Gevurah
(heroism) was the term used to describe Jewish physical courage, which had char-
acterized Jewish people in the distant past, when they had resided on their own
land, and which was lacking in them when they went into exile. The bravery of
the ancient Jewish warrior, whose last manifestations could be seen in Palestine
in the days of the rebellions against the Romans, was renewed in the image of the
Zionist settlers in the late nineteenth century. Judah Maccabee, Shimon Bar
Giora, and Shimon Bar Kochba were linked through secret subterranean currents
to the defenders of Petah Tikva and the fighters of the Haganah during the Arab
revolt of 1936–39. The conspicuous void between ancient and modern times was
filled in various ways. Berl Katzenelson, a leading politician and an influential
intellectual in the Zionist Labor movement, made this attempt in his introduction
to Sefer hagevurah:19
The giant figures of Rabbi Akiba and Bar Kochba . . . represent the two channels
of Jewish heroism after the destruction; the heroism of the sanctified spirit and
the heroism of the rejected arm [i.e., warfare]. At times the two channels flowed
together, and at times they flowed apart. . . . In essence, there is no difference
between the fate of the rebels in Galilee, the fate of the defenders of Tulchin
[the Cossack massacres in 1648], those who stood before Muhammad, those who
fortified themselves against the crusaders, and those who rebelled throughout the
Roman Empire, surrendering their lives for their faith.20
In the case of Jewish heroism, as we have seen elsewhere, the anthology was
designed to restore forgotten or repressed historical instances to the reviving na-
tional consciousness. The power of Jewish forgetfulness, Katzenelson opined, is
enormous: “A great deal of forgetfulness, to be sure, is caused by forceful conver-
sions, by burnings at the stake, by the fear of despots, and by the fate of the
vanquished. And what was able to survive the long arm of censorship from the
outside was lost because of internal censorship. Has a single line reached us from
the literature written by the Zealots [the Jewish extremists of the Second Temple
period]? Expressions of Jewish heroism that did not end in victory were sentenced
to erasure.”21 This, wrote Katzenelson, “is the fate of the vanquished!” And with
Zionist enthusiasm, Katzenelson adds that the modern movement of national lib-
eration has also liberated the imprisoned text and uncovered the truth behind the
words. With the appearance of Zionism, the narrative changed: the fighters of
Masada were liberated from Josephus’s Greek text and returned to the Hebrew
text read by young Jewish fighters, members of the Haganah; Rabbi Akiva and Bar
Kochba were liberated from the talmudic text and recognized anew as true rebels.
After the Jewish wars against Rome, the nature of Jewish bravery shifts; it became
the heroism of the defeated. With the return of the people of Israel to the land
of the forefathers, however, it was destined to become once again the heroism of
the triumphant.
The carefully selected texts of Sefer hagevurah emphasized the courage of the
Jews who had taken up arms to defend themselves in times of persecution and
war. This anthology had been conceived of as a counterweight to a group of
anthologies that had compiled descriptions of the murder of Jews from the early
Middle Ages through the pogroms in the Ukraine in the early twentieth century.
This was not to be a history of tears along the lines of Simon Bernfeld’s Sefer
hademaot, but rather a history of courage and defiance.22 This is an effort to expose
traits “that had never departed from Israel even in days of torture and debasement,
and to establish links connecting the defenders of Masada, who took their own
lives rather than tasting the taste of servitude, and those who, after 1,800 years,
have raised the flag of Jewish defense and have climbed once again to return to
her walls.”23 It is of great significance that among the selected texts, not a single
one deals with the courage of Jewish fighters who took part in other peoples’ wars
of national liberation, or who distinguished themselves as soldiers in the armies
of various European countries. Berek Joselewicz, the commander of a Jewish mil-
itary unit that was established during the Polish rebellion against the Russians in
1794, and who became a model for many Jews who wished to become integrated
into Polish society and culture, is entirely absent from the book. Such acts of
courage were considered deviations from the proper channel of Jewish bravery,
the sins of those who had yielded to the false allure of emancipation.24 The quan-
titative relationship between texts pertaining to Jewish courage in the Diaspora
and those dealing with the budding Jewish defense activity in Palestine in the late
nineteenth century is, not surprisingly, in favor of the Palestine-centered texts.
Altercations with Arab thieves in Jerusalem neighborhoods are mentioned exten-
sively, while the participation of hundreds of Jewish soldiers in the Prussian-French
war of 1870 is all but erased from historical memory.
The Praises of Labor

Like heroism and warfare, labor and creativity facilitated a complete revision of
the manner in which the old texts were read. Shirat heamal25 treats traditional
Jewish texts in a particularly radical manner. The volume begins with Genesis 1,
continues with the prophets, and ends with the poetry of Hebrew poets of the
1930s and 1940s. The editor of the collection, Pesahfi Ginzburg, a Labor-Zionist
intellectual, presents Zionist and socialist views in the spirit of his political affili-
ation and draws a connection between national redemption and the social re-
demption of the Jewish people. The single idea that runs through the over 300
pages of poetry in his collection is that the return from exile to the Jews’ historical
homeland reconnects the nation with the soil and returns the “song of labor” to
the Jews. This is the poetic expression of physical creativity that had been almost
entirely absent during the Jews’ long sojourn on foreign soil. In the words of Pesahfi
Ginzburg: “If there were no other proofs for the teachings of Zionism, this space
between the ancient poetry of the Land of Israel and the new poetry of the same
land would be enough to convert nonbelievers, and prove the land’s national
destiny.”26 Like the previous collections, this anthology incorporates the idea that
the texts hide a concealed stream connecting the days when Israel was a nation
of labor residing on its own land to the early days of modern agricultural settle-
ment, a stream that had not previously been exposed by Diaspora writers and poets.
Why, he reasoned, was almost nothing written on the laboring masses of Jews in
Babylon, North Africa, France, Germany, and Poland? The answer was that “the
labor a Jew invests in foreign soil cannot by definition take root and bear fruit.”27
The anthology’s editor, who selected many poems that were based on verses of
traditional Jewish prayer,28 was aware of the collection’s almost religious nature.
This was a religiosity that came to replace the old religious faith while using holy
language to describe a strictly secular experience. Moreover, Pesahfi Ginzburg iden-
tifies the labor poetry of the new socialist Zionism with the historicization of sacral
time (the hour of worship) and the holy place (the land of Israel). He chooses to
conclude his introduction to the anthology with a citation from Saul Tcherni-
chowsky’s poem “Qibbuts oleh al haqarqa” (A Kibbutz Is Established on the
Soil), in which history and sanctity are interchanged. History, that is, the Zionist
activity of settlement and construction, in effect takes the place of sanctity: “The
pulse of history is felt in our days: Holiness, holiness, and holiness! This is the act
of history [Kakh osim divrei hayamim].”29
Zionist Pilgrims
Traditional texts were not lacking in concrete and well-documented expressions
of the continuous affinity between the nation and the land during the long years
of exile. There were real and explicit expressions that did not need to be recon-
structed or teased out or otherwise liberated from hostile contexts. They needed
merely to be gathered and placed together into a single continuum. Among these
were texts written by Jews who either traveled to Palestine as visitors or journeyed
there to settle. All these texts were brought together by the bibliographer Abraham
Yaari in a trilogy of anthologies published in the 1940s.30 The connection between
the letters, memoirs, and travel stories was drawn in the Zionist spirit described
above. Similarly, the final links in Yaari’s chain are also modern texts related to
the new settlement enterprise in Palestine. Thus, out of the many travelogs written
in German by Jews traveling to Palestine, it was—not surprisingly—Herzl’s diary
of his voyage to Palestine in 1898 that was chosen to appear in the anthology. Like
those mentioned above, Yaari read the modern national reality into the past and
interpreted the old texts in a Zionist spirit.31
The Zionist Annual Cycle

This survey of the anthological activity of this time and place cannot come to a
conclusion without discussing the phenomenon’s most complex manifestation:
Sefer hamoadim (Book of Festivals) and other collections of texts designed to draw
a connection among the dimensions of historical time, geographic space, and the
annual cycle. These combinations of literary texts, historical documents, and schol-
arly research sought to play a role similar to that played by the traditional text in
traditional Jewish society: to connect it with the complex of regular rituals, and in
so doing to provide it with semireligious authority in terms of the reading and
performance of the text. On the whole, the nationalistic narrative replaced the
religious meaning of the old text—not only on the textual level, but on the con-
textual one as well. The traditional Jewish calendar, with its festivals and days of
commemoration, retained new secular meanings based on innovative interpreta-
tions of the text. Space (the land of Israel) and Time (Zionist version of Jewish
history) were connected to a revised yearly cycle, to form a quasi-religious unity
of both knowledge and experience. The editors of these compilations had in mind
the cyclic performance of religious rites and customs. Sefer hamoadim is an en-
terprise of enormous scale connecting these three axes in a clearly Zionist spirit.
The anthology includes writings from the holy Scriptures, halakhic literature, mid-
rash and kabbalah, historical sources, Jewish folklore materials, and modern lit-
erature and poetry. The project was inspired by poet H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik with
his Sefer hashabbat (Sabbath Book), which was published in Tel Aviv in the 1930s.
Sefer hashabbat was yet another product of the kinnus project, aiming this time
at collecting and preserving Jewish folklore, highly regarded as a true expression
of the nation’s spiritual values. It was then continued with many volumes devoted
to holidays, special dates, and memorial days, which appeared in the 1950s, after
the establishment of the State of Israel. Yom Tov Lewinsky, the anthology’s editor,
a fervent student of Jewish popular culture, consciously intended to combine kin-

nus (ingathering) with shihfi zur (reconstruction). He hoped to provide generations
of new readers in the Jewish community of Israel with a selection of sources from
the many lands and generations of traditional society. The intended readers, Is-
raelis who have long been cut off from the traditional contexts of the holiday
observance, would presumably continue what they found positive in the Jewish
heritage laid out before them. Even if they do not perform the strange and unfa-
miliar rituals, they will at least know about them. As with the other Zionist an-
thologies, however, rewriting played no less significant a role here than reconstruc-
tion. Certain holidays which had been marginal in premodern Jewish society were
moved to the center by virtue of the importance attributed to them by the Zionist
movement. Modern meanings utterly foreign to the traditional Jew were injected
into the old holidays. Hanukkah, for example, celebrated for centuries to com-
memorate the miraculous purification of the Temple in Jerusalem, emerged as a
secular festival of national liberation, military heroism, and statehood. Tu Bishvat,
traditionally the trees’ New Year, became a feast of the new Zionist settlers’ reunion
with the land, marking the victory of man over nature. The new Palestine forced
itself on the traditional text and made a variety of changes and renovations in it.
The case of the fifteenth of the month of Av, the day mentioned in the early
sources (Mishnah, Gemara, and midrash) as a day of dancing and celebration in
the vineyards, clearly demonstrates how Jewish holidays have been reshaped in
Sefer hamoadim. These are the words of the anthology’s author with regard to the
place of this holiday in the young State of Israel:
When we renewed our covenant with the soil of the homeland, we began to
return the celebration of dancing and the holiday of loving couples to the fifteenth
of Av. Workers’ settlements such as Genigar have recently begun to celebrate the
grape-harvest holiday on the fifteenth of Av. Admirable beginnings have been
made in Degania, Kiryat-Anavim, and the dance holidays of Dalia have been
crowned with great success. Writers and poets, especially from among labor cir-
cles, have created songs of harvesters and vineyard dances, and have indeed com-
posed heartwarming melodies for them. Indeed, happy days are gradually return-
ing to Israel.32
The traditional text was completely stripped away from its old religious context
and placed in a completely secular reality that was utterly different, but that
claimed to be a continuation of the ancient past. The conscious effort to create
signs of a national culture—agricultural holidays, farmers’ folk dances—is con-
ceived of as linked to the past and founded on its sources. But in reality, these
“signs” have little connection with that past.
A tendency latent in the earlier collections moves to the foreground in this
anthology: the attempt to replace the traditional book with an “alternative” book.
Here the anthology usurps the place of a variety of traditional collections of texts:
Sefer haminhagim (Book of Customs), the collections of legends and midrash, the
Passover Haggadah, and—if we are to go one step further—the siddur itself. It
draws from them, rearranges their various components, and grants to what it takes
from the old books new meanings unfamiliar to the traditional reader. It is in this
manner—whether in the realm of extended time, the annual cycle, or the di-
mension of space—that the anthology serves the project of rewriting the traditional
Jewish text. This was a project that stood at the center of the Zionist cultural
activity in its endeavor to re-create a nation, a land, and a calendar from the
materials of the past.
Notes
1. Some major products of the kinnus project in the first decades of the twentieth
century were Sefer haaggadah [Book of Legends], ed. H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik and Ye-
hoshua H fi ana Ravnitzky (first published in Odessa in 1908–11); Otsar hashirah vehapiyut
(Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry], Israel Davidson (New York, 1924); and the series
Antologya lemiktsoot hasifrut hayisraelit [Anthology of the Fields of Jewish Literature], ed.
Abraham Kahana (Sefer hahfi asidut and sifrut hahistorya hayisraelit, Warsaw, 1922–23). In
his introduction to the English version of Sefer haaggadah, David Stern points out the
“revisionist” nature of the editing process of aggadah, stemming from a decidedly romantic
idea: “Bialik did seem to believe that the fragments of aggadah in rabbinic literature pre-
served what had once been an epic literature of the Jewish people. Part of the purpose of
Sefer haaggadah was to recover that epic,” The Book of Legends, Sefer Ha-Aggadah, Legends
of the Talmud and Midrash, trans. William G. Braude (New York, 1992), p. xxi.
2. Hfi . N. Bialik, “On the Question of Hebrew Culture” [Hebrew], a lecture delivered
at a seminar of the Labor party of Palestine in Nahalal, summer 1932, in H fi . N. Bialik,
Devarim shebeal peh [Spoken Words] (Tel Aviv, 1935), p. 195.
3. The list of names I have found in the introductions to some of the anthologies
includes Ben-Zion Dinaburg (Dinur), Abraham Avrunin, Abraham Yaacov Brawer, Abra-
ham Kahana, Abraham Zifroni (Sefer haarets); Gedalia Alon, H fi ayim Wirszubski, Ludwig
A. Meir, Joshua Prawer, Abraham Shalit (Sefer hagevurah [Book of Valor]); Yitshfi ak Ben-
Zvi, Moshe David (Umberto) Kasuto, H fi ayim (Yefim) Schirmann (Masot erets yisrael);
Menahfi em Hartom (Artom), Yitshfi ak Baer, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Benjamin Klar, Getzel
Kressel (Iggerot erets yisrael).
4. J. Fichmann, ed., Sefer haarets [The Land of Israel Book] (Tel Aviv, 1926), p. 5.
5. Ibid., p. 7.
6. Ibid.
7. E. Steinman, “Beit Alfa,” in Sefer haarets, pp. 511–12. It is interesting to note that
in another Zionist anthology published the same year—but for the Orthodox Jewish com-
munities in Eastern Europe and the United States—the Jezreel Valley is also put in the
center. The texts used to depict the valley’s redemption by the Zionist pioneers, however,
were carefully chosen from Rabbis’ letters of support to the story of the first Hasidim set-
tlement in the region (Kfar Hasidim), Otsar haarets [The Treasure of the Land], ed. R.
Benjamin [Benjamin Redler-Feldman] (Jerusalem, 1926), pp. 86–89.
8. Refael Patai and Tsvi Samuel Wohlmuth, eds., Mivhfi ar hasippur haerets yisraeli
[A Selection of Stories from Palestine] (Jerusalem, 1938).
9. Ibid., p. 7.
10. J. Klausner, “Renewal of the Ancient Nation,” Patai and Wohlmuth, Mivhfi ar, p. 11.
11. Patai and Wohlmuth, Mivhfi ar, p. 166.
12. Ibid., p. 139.
13. Ibid., p. 143.

14. Ibid., p. 9.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 11.
17. Ibid., p. 14.
18. Ibid.
19. I. Heilprin, ed., Sefer hagevurah [Book of Valor], vol. 1: Defense and Martyrdom
from the Days of Masada to the Beginnings of Emancipation (Tel Aviv, 1941); vol. 2: De-
fense and Martyrdom from the Beginnings of Emancipation to the Early Days of Zionism
and Jewish Socialism (Tel Aviv, 1944). A second edition combining both parts was published
in 1950. A third edition, which included a third volume from the papers of Israel Heilprin,
appeared in 1977. David Roskies’s claim, in Against the Apocalypse, that the publisher’s
decision to publish a third edition was related to the period of despair that followed the
Yom Kippur War of 1973 is not accurate. The decision to issue a third edition stemmed
from the discovery of a manuscript of the third volume in Heilprin’s papers. It was reached
by a committee of historians who had set themselves the goal of publishing works of Heil-
prin that remained in manuscript or that were incomplete. This committee decided to
publish the three volumes of Sefer hagevurah approximately two years prior to the outbreak
of the Yom Kippur War, on October 6, 1973. On this committee, see: I. Bartal, “The
Records of the Council of Four Lands” [Hebrew], in Pinqas vaad arba aratsot, arranged
and annotated by Israel Heilprin, 2d and expanded ed. by Israel Bartal (Jerusalem, 1990),
p. 28. See David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern
Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 13.
20. B. Katzenelson, “With the Book” [Hebrew], in Sefer hagevurah, vol. 1, pp. 10–11.
21. Ibid., p. 9.
22. Simon Bernfeld, Sefer hademaot [Book of Tears], 3 vols. (Berlin, 1923–26); Jonas
Gurland, Leqorot hagezeirot al yisrael [To the History of Jewish Persecution], 7 vols. (1887–
92).
23. I. Heilprin, foreword to Sefer hagevurah, p. 16. On the evolution of the Masada
story as a major Israeli cultural and political symbol, see N. Ben-Yehuda, The Masada
Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison, 1996) and Y. Zerubavel,
Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago,
1995), pp. 60–76.
24. In an exchange of letters in the early 1940s between Berl Katzenelson and the
writer A. Kabak, the battles of Jews for the sake of the freedom of other nations (such as
the Poles) are presented as manifestations of Jewish energy being directed in various ways
until some energy reaches the proper channel: Zionism. On this, see M. Opalska and Israel
Bartal, Poles and Jews, a Failed Brotherhood (Hanover, 1992), pp. 118–19.
25. P. Ginzburg, Shirat heamal: Antologia [Song of Labor, an Anthology] (Tel Aviv,
1947).
26. Ibid., p. 7.
27. Ibid.
28. One of the most outstanding examples of radical-Zionist poetry alluding to the
Jewish prayer is “Amal” (Labor) by Abraham Shlonsky (Shirat heamal, pp. 233–36). In this
poem, the poet takes part in the creation of a new Hebrew city in Palestine, experiencing
in his work a “secularized” morning prayer (Shahfi arit). The text is loaded with allusions to
the traditional rite, while it is far away from any kind of observance or belief in God.
29. Ibid., p. 10. The poem itself appears on pp. 137–45 of the anthology.
30. A. Yaari, ed., Iggerot erets yisrael, shekatvu hayehudim hayoshvim baarets
laahfi eihem shebagola mimei galut bavel vead shivat tsiyon shebeyameinu [The Epistles of
the Land of Israel, Written by the Jews Residing in the Land to Their Brothers in the
Diaspora from the Days of the Babylonian Exile to the Return to Zion in Our Own Time]
(Tel Aviv, 1943); idem, Masot erets yisrael shel olim yehudiyim, mimei habeinayim vead
reshit yemei shivat tsiyon [Travels to Palestine by Jewish Immigrants from the Middle Ages
to the Beginnings of the Return to Zion] (Tel Aviv, 1946); idem, Zikhronot erets yisrael,
meah veesrim pirqei zikhronot mehfi ayei hayehudim baarets mehameah hasheva-esre vead
yameinu [Memoirs of the Land of Israel, 120 Chapters of Memoirs on Jewish Life in the
Land from the Seventeenth Century to the Present], 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1947).
31. See, e.g., the manner in which Yaari read the letters sent by the Jews of Jerusalem
and Safed to Sir Moses Montefiore during his voyage to Palestine in 1839. Yaari, the fervent
Zionist, viewed these letters as the earliest expression of Jewish aspiration for productive
labor and self-defense, all in the spirit of Labor Zionism. In fact, the letters discuss the
possibility of establishing farms in which Arab peasants will work under the supervision of
Jewish overseers. For extensive discussion of this episode, see I. Bartal, Galut baarets [Exile
in the Promised Land] (Jerusalem, 1994), pp. 100–160.
32. Y. T. Lewinsky, “Israel Had No Better Days in Ancient Times Than in the Month
of Av” [Hebrew], in Sefer hamoadim, vol. 6: Yemei moed vezikaron, purim, Lag baomer,
tu beav [The Holiday Book, vol. 6: The Holidays of Commemoration, Purim, Lag Baomer,
the Fifteenth of Av] (Tel Aviv, 1956), p. 500.
14
kathryn hellerstein
Gender and the

Anthological Tradition in
Modern Yiddish Poetry
n 1928 Ezra Korman (1888–1959), a teacher and literary critic living in Detroit,
Ipublished a volume of Yiddish poems by women, entitled Yidishe dikhterins:
antologye [Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology]. Clothbound, lavishly illustrated,
replete with introductions, notes, and bibliographies, this book collected poems
by seventy women who published between 1586 and 1927. The earliest figures
represented in Korman’s anthology wrote popular devotional poetry in Krakow and
Prague. The post-Haskalah poets in the late nineteenth century wrote on national
and social themes, using metaphorically the images and conventions of devotional
literature. The modern poets of 1910 to 1930 composed lyrics in America and in
the Soviet Union, under the influences of socialism and cosmopolitan modernism.
From the evidence of Korman’s collection, a reader might conclude that in 1928
women poets occupied an acknowledged and significant place in Yiddish literature
and that there existed unambiguously a tradition of women writing poems in
Yiddish. In fact, Korman’s anthology sets out to argue the case for such a tradition.
But he was shouting into the wind.
Just a decade earlier, Korman’s contemporaries—the Yiddish modernists in
the United States—had engaged in their own struggle to establish the very idea
of a tradition for Yiddish poetry. Anthologies of poetry were their tools. Among
these was a collection, Antologye: di yidishe dikhtung in amerike biz yor 1919 [An-
thology: Yiddish Poetry in America until 1919], edited by the Yunge poet Zishe
Landau (1889–1937) and published in New York in 1919, which asserted the criteria
for a consciously modern and esthetic Yiddish poetry in revolt against the didac-
ticism of national and social poetry.1 A year later, the newly self-proclaimed Intro-
pectivist poets Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971), A. Leyeles (1889–1966), and Na-
hum–Borekh Minkov (1893–1958) published In zikh: a zamlung introspektive lider
[In the Self: A Collection of Introspectivist Poems], an anthology advocating an
even more radical challenge to poetic use of language, form, and individual voice.2
In each of these works, the editors, according to their respective theories of mod-
ernism, selected poems to challenge the conventions holding that Yiddish poetry
259
must serve the collective good of the Jews. However, the anthology on which
Korman most closely modeled his Yidishe dikhterins was Moyshe Bassin’s (1889–
1963) historical anthology of 1917, the deluxe two-volume Antologye: finf hundert
yor yidishe poezye [Anthology: Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry], representing
poets in Yiddish from 1410 through 1910, in what Bassin claims is strict chrono-
logical order.3 In contrast to the modernist anthologizers’ argument for artistic
individuality, Bassin’s emphasizes the collective obligation of the Yiddish poet.
By comparing Bassin’s and Korman’s anthologies of Yiddish poetry, this essay
will argue that, while modern Yiddish poets compiled anthologies in order to
define competing literary traditions for a newly self-conscious Yiddish poetry, these
anthologies also defined what anthologies should be. An analysis of how Korman
modeled his anthology of women Yiddish poets on Bassin’s more general anthology
of Yiddish poetry will reveal the dynamics of the anthological tradition in modern
Yiddish poetry.
To set up the comparison, I will begin by describing Bassin’s two-volume an-
thology. The first volume consists of four parts and encompasses Yiddish poetry from
1410 through 1905, from the opening poem, “Shabes-lid” [Sabbath Song] by Reb Zel-
melin, who died around 1456, through the folklike poems of A. M. Sharkanski, who
immigrated to America in 1887. The second of the four parts contains folk songs,
which, as Bassin explained in his introduction, usually are considered to be “the old-
est form, the root of poetry” but which in Yiddish, the editor asserted, is predated by
fifteenth-century written verse—acrostics, devotionals, love poems. The third and
fourth parts contain poetry written between 1800 and 1885 and 1885 and 1905; re-
spectively. Along with these obscure printed texts, the popular folk songs, which Bas-
sin claimed to be sources for modern Yiddish poetry, and poetry of the nineteenth
and the first five years of the twentiety century, the first volume contains scholarly
apparatus—a glossary of archaic Yiddish words found in the poems and biblio-
graphic and linguistic notes to the poetry. The second volume presents the most up-
to-date poetry. It begins with the famous Labor poet Morris Rosenfeld and ends with
poems by Moyshe Bassin himself, who was twenty-eight years old in 1917. Both vol-
umes include biographical notes on individual poets, portraits of the poets by S. Za-
gat, and decorative illustrations by Y. Likhtenshteyn and Zuni Maud.
Bassin’s opening remarks to the first volume indicate that, in contrast to the
ideological selectivity of the Yunge and the In zikh anthologies, his edition in-
tended to be as inclusive and representative of all the kinds of Yiddish poetry as
possible, although he stopped short of including “every single person who has ever
jotted down a couple of verses.”4 Ber Borokhov (1881–1917) developed the anthol-
ogy’s thesis even more explicitly in his brief but scholarly introductory essay. There
he argued that Bassin’s anthology would ensure that the “Yiddish muse” would
not be left “orphaned” by and “vulnerable” to the works of “mere dilettantes,” for
it would present the “classical” tradition of Yiddish poetry. By stressing the idea
that each individual poet fit into the overall development of a collective Yiddish
tradition, Borokhov contradicted the Yunge ideal of individualism in the poetic
voice. In Borokhov’s view, a poet’s intent—however individualistic or even icon-
oclastic—was subsumed by the writer’s participation in promoting the overall
good. Borokhov reverted from the discriminating modernist ideas of a Yiddish
Gender and the Anthological Tradition in Yiddish Poetry 261
poetic tradition proposed by the Yunge and the Introspectivists and returned to
the authority of the collective. Such emphasis on the cultural collective corre-
sponds to the ideologies of socialism and Jewish nationalism that the modernist
poets had rejected. The idea of literary tradition that Borokhov stated and that
Bassin’s anthology embodied was a political and nationalistic statement about the
aims of Yiddish poetry. In this scheme, poetry serves the greater ends of people-
hood and national culture. This emphasis stood in opposition to the ideas of poetry
that were driving the avant garde poets of that moment.
These three anthologies—those edited by the Yunge poet Laudau, by the
Introspectivists Glatshteyn, Leyeles, and Minkov; and by the literary historian Bas-
sin—represented few women poets. Landau included two, Fradl Shtok and Celia
Dropkin. The 1920 Introspectivist anthology contained eight poets, all men,5 al-
though the first issue of the In zikh journal began with two poems by Celia Drop-
kin (1887–1956), the sole woman writer published there.6 From 500 years of Yiddish
writing, Bassin included a total of nine women poets: Gele (1702–?), Yehudis
(pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn) (1869–?), Roza Yakubovitsh (1889–1944), Zelda
Knizshnik (1869–?), Anna Rappaport (1870 or 1876–?), Paula R. (pseudnonym for
Pearl Prilutski) (1876–1941), Sara Reyzen (1885–?), Roza Goldshteyn (1870–?), and
Fradl Shtok (1890–ca. 1930). From this list, a reader might conclude that only one
woman wrote poetry before the late nineteenth century, and only eight others had
written poetry after that.
It was to address this misconception that Ezra Korman began work on his
anthology, Yidishe dikhterins, which assessed the actual contribution of women
poets in Yiddish. A contemporary of Landau, Glanz, and Bassin, all of whom had
come to the United States before 1910, Korman remained active in the literary
scene in Kiev, Warsaw, and Berlin until he immigrated to the United States in
1923.7 Korman himself was a teacher,8 a literary critic, a bibliographer, a translator,9
a poet,10 and the editor of two previous collections of Yiddish poetry of the Russian
Revolution in the Ukraine.11
In his first American anthological effort, though, Korman recast the political
agenda of poetry from the Russian Revolution to the sexual revolution. Was it
with irony or adulation that Korman modeled his anthology of women Yiddish
poets on Bassin’s anthology? While one might be tempted to view Korman’s col-
lection of women poets as a radical correction of Bassin’s male-dominated canon,
one might also see it as a tribute and enriching supplement to Bassin’s tradition
building. Although, in his introduction, Korman stated his intention to establish
the place of women poets in the tradition of Yiddish writing, he did not claim to
be original. In copious footnotes, Korman credited others whose recent works had
brought to light literate and literary women. Seeking to ground contemporary
Yiddish culture in a centuries-long history of Yiddish literature, these publications
included the first literary encyclopedia of Yiddish literature by Zalman Reyzen in
1914 Warsaw,12 scholarly essays such as Max Erik’s 1926 study of “Brantshpigl—di
entsiklopedye fun der yidisher froy in zibetstn yorhundert” [Brantshpigl—The En-
cyclopedia of the Jewish Woman in the Seventeenth Century]13 and Sh. Niger’s
1913 article on “Yidishe literatur un di lezerin” [Yiddish Literature and the Female
Reader], and Bassin’s 1917 historical anthology, Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye.
These works all shared the assumption that Yiddish writing of the early twentieth
century would gain status and legitimacy in the view of modern world literature
if it could prove its roots in a medieval past. Korman followed this model of
establishing authority. By discussing at length the textual and bibliographical var-
iants of the early poems that his anthology shared with Bassin’s, Korman acknowl-
edged his debt to his predecessor and set his collection into an anthological tra-
dition.14
Korman’s anthology resembles the Bassin anthology in its massiveness, its
chronological span, its format, and its apparatus, but Korman does Bassin one
better. Whereas the first edition of Bassin’s anthology was bound in boards im-
printed with a stunning four-color folklike graphic design by Y. Likhtenshteyn,
Korman’s anthology was clothbound in dark blue with gilded lettering and had a
blue dust jacket, matching the endpapers, imprinted with black graphics by Todres
Geler in the style of Russian Formalism. Korman also used higher quality materials
than Bassin, for the Bassin volumes are extremely fragile today while Korman’s
binding remains sturdy. Whereas the Bassin volumes featured S. Zagat’s sketched
portraits of each poet, Korman, utilizing the more expensive printing technology
of zincography, tipped in photographs of each modern poet as well as facsimile
reproductions of significant pages from some of the original books of poems, such
as the first and last pages of Toybe Pan’s seventeenth-century poem (a prayer for
God’s mercy in time of plague), a variant version of that poem, and a photo-
montage of the title pages of modern poetry books.15 Whereas Bassin’s anthology
had an alphabetical index of authors at the end of each volume, Korman’s opened
with an eleven-page table of contents at the beginning of the book and ended with
separate alphabetical indexes of the authors and the poems, as well as a list of
pseudonymns. Whereas Bassin’s “A Few Words” and Borokhov’s introductory essay
and concluding “Linguistic and Bibliographic Comments” on the poems for the
first volume comprised a total of seventeen pages and for the second volume were
one page, Korman’s introductory essay alone was thirty-eight pages long, including
footnotes. Fiinally, the section of “Biographies and Bibliography” at the end of
Korman’s volume was thirty-five pages long and included a 232-title bibliography.
Divided into two main sections, “Sources” and “Literature,” Korman’s bibliogra-
phy lists books of poems by individual authors, anthologies, handbooks, collections
and periodical publications, studies and literary histories, articles and reviews, a
bibliography of Old Yiddish literature, and translations of Yiddish poems by
women into Hebrew, English, and Polish. With this bibliography, Korman accom-
plished several tasks. First, by documenting the sources for all the authors included
in his anthology, Korman established his own credentials and the validity of his
research. Second, he showed how widely published were these poets in their con-
temporary culture. Third, he established the range of audience these women poets
had, for they appeared in anthologies, the specialized collections of literary move-
ments, political and literary journals, daily newspapers, and even in a short-lived
weekly journal for women, Froyen zshurnal—vokhenblat [Women’s Journal—
Weekly].16 These various works were published both in the centers of Yiddish
culture, such as New York, Montreal, Warsaw, Vilna, Moscow, Kiev, Lodz, and
in more remote places, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cape Town, South
Africa. Fourth, he provided an invaluable tool for future readers of Yiddish liter-
ature in an era long after most of the ephemeral publications, the newspapers and
journals, had been discarded, along with many of the Yiddish books themselves.
One can read the bibliography for a portrait of the time in which women
lagged behind men in the publication of books. For instance, Korman lists thirteen
books of poems by individual authors,17 and 126 entries under “Collections and
Periodical Publications.” These two lists show that, by 1928, women poets had
published a relatively small number of books, while they had contributed more
prolifically to periodicals.18 In contrast, during this same period, a much larger
number of poetry books had been published by men. While many of the younger
male modernists had published two or more books of their poems,19 their female
counterparts had published no books. Two of the women whose poems regularly
appeared in the American Yunge and Introspectivist journals—Celia Dropkin and
Anna Margolin—were to publish only a single volume of poetry during their
lifetimes. Other women, had brought out one book and were never to publish
another. Korman describes as completed but not yet in print second book man-
uscripts by two women poets in Poland—Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh.
These two volumes were never published.20
The “Introduction” set forth Korman’s ideological position. By presenting to-
gether with modern Yiddish poetry by women, or “the modern women-poetry”
(der moderner froyen-dikhtung), examples of the works of women writers (froyen-
farfasterins) who wrote in Old Yiddish (yidish-taytsh), Korman hoped to show the
connection between the beginnings of a new Jewish literature in the sixteenth
century, which marked the beginning of a new epoch of Jewish life, and the
current period, in which the buds of that early period had blossomed. He em-
phasized the creativity of women, old and new. Although Korman explicitly denied
a continuous poetic tradition between the women poets of the early and later
periods, he implied a line of influence. Old Yiddish poetry for and presumably by
women was “immeasurably huge and incomparable,” whereas modern poetry by
women was merely a “thin thread” continuing that heritage which still affects the
modern women poets. The Old Yiddish literature had an abiding influence over
the moderns, because, Korman argued, there had been no single great modern
voice to override it, restructuring the relationship of the new to the old. Signifi-
cantly, although Korman stated that the old literature of women in Yiddish out-
weighed the new, his selections in the anthology reversed this judgment: The sixty-
six modern poets contrast with the four examples of the premodern authors.
Korman considered the new women’s literature as a positive development for
the growth of Yiddish literature and culture in general: Un ver kon nevies zogn vos
unzer tsukinftike froyen-shafung trogt mit zikh un far der literatur? [“Who can
prophesy what our future female creativity bears within itself and for the litera-
ture?”]21 In this question, Korman attributed the unique creativity of women to
the processes of biological productivity. These processes are implied in the phras-
ing that suggests a connection between poetry and pregnancy. In the verb trogn
mit, “to carry, to bear” in a general sense and specifically in relation to child-
bearing, Korman drew an analogy between the making of poems and the making
of babies, both of which are froyen-shafung, “women’s creation.” Curiously, this

analogy at once attempted both to characterize women’s poetry as having a special
nature to distinguish it from poetry written by men, and to stereotype or limit it.
Feminist literary theorists of the later part of the twentieth century have dealt with
this analogy, but in 1928, when Korman’s volume represented the first compilation
of poetry by women as an entity unto itself, this analogy served as point of depar-
ture for a critic to classify poetry by women in either elevated or deflated terms.22
In the “Introduction,” Korman emphasized the typical characteristics of
women’s poetry in order to establish that a lineage existed. In the first part of his
“Introduction,” Korman discussed the literature af yidish-taytsh (in Judeo-
German), dating from Sefer mides (Morality Book, published in 1542) and the
Mayse bukh (Book of Tales, first published in Basel in 1602) through the eigh-
teenth century. Korman cited the translations and compendiums that enabled
women to study and pray, such as the Taytsh khumesh (the translation of the
Pentateuch into Yiddish, Prague, 1608), the Tsenerene (Yiddish translation and
elaboration on the Pentateuch, first known edition, Basel, 1622), and the tkhines
(the supplicatory prayers in Yiddish, some of which were composed by women for
the significant moments in the lives of women—for blessing Shabbes candles, for
childbirth, for recitation at the ritual bath and at the graves of family members—
from the sixteenth century onward).23 He dealt as well with other works created
by Jewish women themselves, such as musar-sforim (morality books), composed
and translated by women, tfiles and droshes (prayers and sermons), which, like
some of the tkhines, were composed in rhymed verse, and even lyrics and poems,
“which the pens of women possessed.”24 Within the context of this Yiddish de-
votional literature for women, Korman placed the four yidish-taytsh poets of his
anthology: Royzl Fishls, Toybe Pan, Gele, and Khana Ka″ts (Kohen-Tsadik). His
bibliographic information on and detailed discussions of these poems argue that
the publication of such Yiddish writings signaled the creativity of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Jewish women.25
In contrast to such expressiveness by Jewish women in Old Yiddish literature,
Korman explained, women were absent from Haskalah Yiddish literature because
the Enlightenment “brought with it only half a liberation” and “barely affected
the life of the Jewish woman, who remained but a mute witness.”26 Only with the
secularism of the 1890s did a new literature by women emerge, as women joined
the social and national political movements and acted in the newly established
Yiddish theater in Poland and Russia. Korman described the tension between the
modern and the traditional. Initially, he stated, Yiddish culture absorbed the voices
of the modern, nayveltike (new-worldly) women along with the traditional. Soon,
though, the modern voices dominated the traditional, causing both cultural pain
and joy, as Yiddish-speaking women cast off the tkhines’ old pieties:
Thanks to the girls, women, and mothers who were actresses and political activists,
the matriarchs dimmed and slipped into the shadows, leaving the modern Jewish
woman with sighs, tears, and a new kind of pleasure that had been, up to this
time, as foreign to her as the foreignness of idolatry.27
From such figurative language in the “Introduction,” it becomes apparent that

Korman’s anthology embraced the idea of a simultaneous movement toward and
away from women’s tradition. On the one hand, Korman’s phrasing suggests that
the entire body of modern poetry by women exists only because the familiar bib-
lical matriarchs of the tkhines and tsenerene withdrew into the shadows, as actresses
and activists took the spotlight and introduced Jewish women to the foreign pleas-
ures of secular “idolatry.” On the other hand, the very ability of these new women
to find their voices and even to conceive of writing in Yiddish depended upon
their knowledge of the obsolete devotional literature for women. The dependence
of the new, the secular, the revolutionary poets on the religious literature against
which they actively defined themselves is a paradox which extends both through-
out Korman’s historical introduction and within the language and structure of
many Yiddish poems by women. This paradox is another example of the way
modern Yiddish literature reappropriated the past, at once subverting it and re-
claiming it.28
Korman argued for the progress of Yiddish women’s poetry from 1899 to 1927
by placing individual women poets in the context of their contemporaries. He
discussed Roza Goldshteyn, whose first poem appeared in Yudishn folks-blatt in
1888, in terms of her contemporaries, the Labor Poets, David Edelstat, Morris
Vinshevski, Sh. Frug, and Morris Rosenfeld, to emphasize how her work was
typical of the times, in its nationalist and socialist themes: “The disappointing
belief in the earlier gods and the intellectuals’ turn to the Folk after assimilationist
ideology proved bankrupt—these are the themes and motifs of Yiddish poetry of
this period.”29 Such themes and motifs bolstered Korman’s sense that the history
of Yiddish literature was linear and “progressive.” Therefore Korman conde-
scended when he compared the Yiddish poetry of 1888 with the “improvements”
evident in 1927. For example, characterizing the male poet Sh. Frug as “a cantor
without a cantor’s desk,” Korman likened the sentimental Jewish nationalism of
Roza Goldshteyn’s poems to Frug’s. In one of Goldshteyn’s poems, “Di yidishe
muze” [The Yiddish Muse], he tells us, the muse, depicted as the embodiment
of the Jewish people in exile, provided the poet with a diasporic sorrow as inspi-
ration.30
Korman did acknowledge a margin of “improvement” in the poetry of the
1890s where he noted a change from the collective first person to “the personal
ikh” (I) of the poet. Anna Rappaport’s poems, written and published in America
from 1893 onward, reflected the conflict between the two possibilities of emigration
for the Jewish poet—either to the Golden Land of America or the Promised Land
of Eretz Yisrael. Korman called her “the modern Deborah, celebrating America
in song” and praised her poems for evoking the collective experience of immi-
grants with the immediacy of a personal “I.” By describing the individuality of this
1890s poet in terms of her service to the Jewish collectivity, Korman strengthened
his argument for the legitimate place that women writers occupy within Yiddish
literary tradition.
Korman developed this argument further by connecting modern Yiddish po-
etry with modern Hebrew poetry when he described the 1906–7 works by Paula
R. (pseudonym for Pearl Prilutski) and Yehudis (pseudonym for Rokhl Bern-
shteyn), who wrote after the failed 1905 revolution in Russia and the second wave
of pogroms. Their verse, like that of Goldshteyn and another poet, Zelda Knizsh-
nik, was characterized by “ideal language and colors” which expressed individual
moods and feelings in terms of the collective. Yehudis wrote “not about herself,
but in the language of the majority,” and her poems showed the influence of
Bialik’s famous 1904 Hebrew poem of the pogroms, “In the City of Slaughter.”
Despite this “language of the majority,” Korman said, Yehudis’s poems revealed a
greater sense of self than do those of her predecessors. He claimed that they
heralded a new age of deepened individualism, like that of their male contem-
poraries, Yehoash, Leissen, and Reyzen, whose poems developed “individual lyri-
cism and intellectual singularity beyond the tears of Morris Rosenfeld.” As an
example, Korman quoted lines from Yehudis’s poetry, which praised the new and
argued for discarding the old:
Enough! Don’t write old-fashioned poems,—
They are not yours . . .
They’ve had their day! They can’t revive.
Your poem now rings false.31
Despite his praise for this new poetic self, Korman argued that the individual
voice in modern poetry had a complicated relationship to the folk tradition. A
woman poet whose poetry alluded to or imitated conventions and tones of folk
poetry, he suggested, sought to hide her individuality behind the tsnies (“modesty”
or “virtue”) of Jewish peoplehood. As an example, Korman offered mixed praise
to the aforementioned Paula R. for the new tone she introduced to Yiddish poetry
through the folk motif:
In the disguise and modesty of folk-language, one can afford to speak to the world
about one’s own feelings and experiences and, with that popular virtue, cover
oneself as if with a veil.32
Although Korman depicted such modesty as a weakness in the poems of Paula R.,
this weakness promised strength, because, he asserted, the good poet would learn
to use the folk medium effectively. For Korman, then, the individual voice of the
modern woman poet was necessarily connected to the collective voice of the Jew-
ish people. The best poetry kept these two forces in balance.
Korman praised Roza Yakubovitsh, who began writing in Poland in 1910, for
her simultaneous respect for the “patriarchal” knowledge of Jewish suffering in the
Diaspora and for the revitalizing lessons of personal rebellion.33 He mentioned
Sara Reyzen, Yakubovitsh’s contemporary, whose later lyric poems show signs of
possessing “the personal I.” Yet Korman’s sense of the modern, which he valued
most, came clear when he discussed the originality with which the poetry of Fradl
Shtok unveiled “the personal ‘I’.” Shtok was a poet from Galicia, who began
writing in America with a sense of high culture in her literary form and content.
According to popular belief, Shtok introduced the sonnet and the sonnet cycle to
Yiddish poetry.34 Her diction and quality of imagination were innovative. The
Yunge’s concept of “reyner dikhtung” (pure poetry) as written by Mani Leyb, Zishe
Landau, Reuven Iceland, and Joseph Rolnik, influenced Shtok’s poetry. Korman
praised her poem, Baym yam [By the Sea] for its “individual poetic vision” and
the “personal ‘I,’ ” and he characterized her sonnet sequence as daringly erotic
and bitter. Although Korman mentioned that Shtok also published a novel and
short stories, he avoided discussing her sudden silence and subsequent breakdown,
which has been explained in part as a response to the reviews her short fiction
received in the Yiddish press, most notably from A. Glanz in Der tog in 1919 and
1920.35
In contrast to his views of the passive folk voice of Paula R., Roza Yakubovitsh’s
“gentle rebellion,” and Fradl Shtok’s modern sensibility and “personal ‘I,’ ” Kor-
man held up the poems of Miriam Ulinover as having achieved the ideal balance
between the traditional folk and the modern personal voices.36 Praising this Eu-
ropean poet for her innovative style and substance, he presented “her poems,
written in a folk-like, romantic tone, and wrapped in a thin veil of naive folk-
mysticism” as “approaching the classic.” These poems, from Der bobes oytser [My
Grandmother’s Treasure] (Warsaw, 1922), were “a monument to the Jewish woman
of the past . . . making luminous the customs and obsolete ways of Jewish life of
more than one hundred years ago.”37
When he emphasized the cultural distance that the Jews of 1928 had traveled
from the traditional Jewish ways of life, Korman found a safely modern perspective
as a critic from which to extoll the poems that Ulinover had based on the tales,
maxims, and utterances of an elter bobe fun iber hundert yor, a great-grandmother,
more than 100 years old, who was “the poetic inspiration [for the] first self-
possessed woman poet in the new Yiddish literature.”38 Only by declaring his own
firm modernity and faith in the progressiveness of progress (that recent poetry is
better than earlier poetry) could Korman express an appreciation for Ulinover’s
particularly female poetic achievement. Korman’s heavily qualified assessment
pointed to the central question of how poetry by women fit into the idea of a
Yiddish tradition. By attributing Ulinover’s achievement as the first “self-possessed”
woman poet in modern Yiddish to the “poetic inspiration” of the great-
grandmother, Korman acknowledged that the “muse” of Yiddish poetry was situ-
ated as much in the oral traditions of women’s lives and their lived customs as in
the modern world where individualistic notions of love and beauty vied with
socialist-nationalist ideologies. This sense that the religio-cultural tradition lived by
women in Yiddish was integral to modern Yiddish poetry distinguished Korman’s
idea of poetic tradition from the revisionist and implicitly male ideas of poetic
tradition expressed esthetically by Landau for the Yunge, formalistically by Glatsh-
teyn for the Introspectivists, and historically by Bassin and Borokhov. According
to Korman, even the most modern Yiddish poetry must acknowledge its origins in
the old-fashioned devotional literature for and by women.
In Korman’s dialectic between the collective and the individual, the tradi-
tional and the modern voices of a Yiddish poet that I have just delineated, we see
how Korman’s tenets as an anthologizer imitated those of Bassin. In the same way
that Borokhov’s introduction to Bassin’s anthology spelled out the idea of literary
tradition as one that places individual writers into a collective effort to serve the
Jewish nation and people, so Korman’s introduction valued the manifestations of
what is typical in the individual poets; however, Korman added to the national
and the folkloric qualities of these poets two other types of collectivity—the reli-
gious and the female. These particular qualities were especially sensitive points
for Korman’s contemporaries.
To be sure, interest in women was not altogether absent from the literary
scene. In the decade after 1910, a discussion arose about the role of women in
Yiddish literature, and Korman’s anthology represented a response to this discus-
sion as well as to Bassin’s anthology. This interest in women and culture first took
form in the projects of Yiddishists, linguists, folklorists, and ethnographers in Russia
and Poland. Expeditions by Noyekh Prilutski’s Warsaw group, the S. Ansky Vilna
Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, and the Ethnographic Commission of the
YIVO Institute in Vilna recorded folklore and gathered artifacts in order to preserve
the manifestations of a Yiddish culture vanishing with the changes brought by
modernity. In addition, scholars such as Max Weinreich, Max Erlich, and Bassin’s
introducer, Ber Borochov, were rediscovering Old Yiddish print literature.39 These
projects sparked some interest in women as readers and writers of devotional Yid-
dish texts.
For example, in 1913 Shmuel Niger (1883–1955) published a scholarly mono-
graph on Yiddish literature and the female reader in 1913, Di yidishe literatur un
di lezerin [Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader],40 which challenged the old
prejudice against Yiddish as a medium for learned and literary writing. Yet Niger
himself showed ambivalence about this gendered source for Yiddish writing. He
wondered: If “literature in Yiddish was in the beginning a literature only for
women and ignorant men,” then how could women and ignorant men be the
only sources for the profundity of Yiddish maxims and witticisms?41 Even worse,
Niger worried, modern, secular Yiddish literature might become suspect if it was,
in fact, rooted in those Yiddish devotions that had enabled women, ignorant of
the sacred tongue, to read Hebrew/Aramaic prayers and laws.42 Niger’s analysis
of the devotional literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century argued
that the female readership influenced the content and form of the Yiddish writings
in their “womanly matter,” their lack of analysis, law, and interpretation, the pre-
dominance of stories, legends, and morals, and a style that appealed to the female
readership.43 When Niger demonstrated how these “feminine” features of content
and form penetrated into the worldly, nonreligious “belletristic” Yiddish literature
of the sixteenth century,44 his ambivalence became downright contradictory: By
characterizing the stories of the aggadah tradition as “womanly” when adapted into
Yiddish, in contrast to the laws of halakhah, Niger feminized both the Rabbinic
tradition of Midrash and the early “belletristic” Yiddish writings. Niger claimed
these complex narrations for the source of modern Yiddish literature, yet he
spurned them for their association with women.
The second manifestation of this new interest in women took the form of a
popular concern with the growing number of women poets and writers who had
begun to submit work for publication; the increase in the number of aspiring
women writers led men to reexamine the role of women in modern Yiddish lit-
erature.45 This appreciation eventually culminated in Korman’s anthology, but
before that, on October 15, 1915, Arn Glanz (-Leyeles)—who, as A. Leyeles was to
become, with Glatshteyn and Minkov, one of the founders of Introspectivism—
wrote an article in the New York newspaper Di fraye arbeter shtime [The Free
Worker’s Voice], called “Kultur un di froy” [Culture and Woman].46 In it, Glanz
complained of the monotony and redundancy of recent poetry and philosophical
writings,47 which he blamed on the absence of “Woman” from the creative scene.
Transferring the terms of Marxist analysis from class to sex, Glanz blamed the lack
of male originality on modernism’s overemphasis upon the individual. The advent
of women poets would, he predicted, give male poets a context and a counterpart
to respond to and would help Man “find his real place, find himself.” Great poetry,
Glanz suggested, emerges not from the renegade, isolated individual, but from the
one who is conscious of the larger cultural tradition into which the individual’s
work fits and which it changes with its presence.
Yet in this call to power, Glanz set forth a paradox: on the one hand, he
called for women to find their own, original voices in poetry, and on the other
hand, he summoned this womanly originality and independence for the sake of
men: “Woman must be what she is! Then she will be able to be great, to create a
new world for us, and become a blessing for us men.”48
The trouble with Glanz’s theory of women’s creativity is that it was based only
on what he considered inherent sexual attributes—the concreteness of menstrua-
tion, childbirth, nursing, and motherhood—as a model for intuition and the gen-
erosity of creation. Glanz’s initial metaphor of poetic creativity as sexual repro-
duction, then, limited the possibilities for women’s creativity. His model provided
only the culture of sexuality, not any sort of temporal, literate culture, as a context
for the potential poetry by women. The men poets, Glanz intimated, had come
to a standstill, to what he called their “impotency,” over a period of time. To their
history, men needed to add the component of a new sexual context. But for the
women, Glanz provided no history, no past. Accordingly, without a conscious past,
lacking an awareness of tradition, the individual talent, or woman poet, would not
write good poetry.
Glanz held, then, that what Yiddish culture lacked in 1915 was the felt pres-
ence of cultural creativity by women. He argued that women’s writing would revive
the male-dominated, stagnated, overly rational Yiddish poetry of the day by adding
to the cultural mix the “intution” naturally inherent in all women. Yet his com-
plaint that women poets had not yet found their own artistic identities and modes
proved hypocritical: Glanz famously discouraged the original contributions of
women when he actually encountered them, as is suggested by his harsh review,
in Der tog, of Fradl Shtock’s 1919 volume of short stories. The review, it seems,
silenced her.49
The critical responses to Korman’s anthology revived the very ideas about
women writers against which Korman had reacted. The tone of Melekh Ravitsh’s
review in Literarishe bleter [Literary Pages] was mocking and suggestive. Published
in the leading Warsaw literary weekly on October 19, 1928, the review began, “My
dear, patient, infatuated, polygamist, Ezra Korman!”50 Discrediting Korman as an
editor by attributing to him personal, sexual motives in his literary judgment and
choices, Ravitsh also discredited the poets themselves. Perhaps his viciousness was
due to professional envy of Korman, for the poet Kadya Molodowsky, in her re-
sponse to an earlier review of women poets by Ravitsh, mentioned that Ravitsh
had stated in print his own intention to publish an anthology of Yiddish women
poets, “and with pictures!”51 Asserting that an editor’s ideal “principle is not to
want to be original, but to include a poet’s best-known poem, as long as it is also
his best” (emphasis added), Ravitsh argued for the conservative role of an anthol-
ogy, which should represent and perpetuate a canon established by popularity and
fame. Ravitsh designated the poet worth anthologizing with the masculine pron-
onun, zayn (his). “His” poems should already have achieved some fame, for they
are “well-known poems.” Accordingly, an unknown poet, who may well be a
woman poet, had no place in an anthology, and, conversely, there was no justi-
fication for an anthology of unknown poets. What Ravitsh most objected to in
Korman’s anthology, though, was the idea of a women’s tradition within Yiddish
poetry, for such a tradition would bring the devotional literature dangerously close
to the secular, politically correct Yiddish poetry that Ravitsh himself wrote.
Shmuel Niger’s review of November 1928 was somewhat more balanced in
tone, but still condescending. Published in the “Bikher velt” column of Literarishe
bleter, Niger’s review, “Froyen-lyrik” [Women-Lyric],52 differed from Ravitsh’s in
its acknowledgment of a tradition of “women’s poetry [which] now occupies an
acknowledged place in Yiddish poetry.” Yet despite this affirmation, Niger could
not resist the urge to belittle froyen-shafung, the creativity of women, commenting
that the forty-odd women in Korman’s anthology who began to publish poetry after
the First World War “might have been able to do more useful things.”53
Like Glanz in his 1915 article on women and culture, Niger attributed to the
female writer a sensibility distinct from that of the male writer. Claiming that the
new “women’s poetry” was “still too young” to be able to boast of great and ripe
talents, Niger nonetheless acknowledged the “gifted Yiddish women poets, [whose]
chief virtue is that they are women in their poetry.” Like Glanz, Niger argued that
the woman poet contributed a necessary femininity, a softness and gentleness to
counteract the harshness of the war years.
Yet Niger saw limitations in this benefit, for the poems by women connoted
a collective rather than strong individual voices. Like the Yunge and Introspec-
tivist critics, Niger attributed an advanced literary style to the degree to which
the individual voice could elevate itself above the collective. Consequently, he
judged that “women’s poetry” lacked the “artistic universalism, in which we
sense more the personality of the poet than the collective to which he belongs.”
“Sincere and straightforward,” this “group poetry, a type of folklore of the female
sex,” “conveys a sense of the feminine disposition.” By preserving “that element
of feeling, that intimate tone” which “has become such a rarity in male verses
since the war,” women poets could provide Yiddish culture with what contem-
porary men poets no longer possessed. In naming the role of women’s poetry as
subservient to men’s creative endeavors, Niger equated the “eternally-womanly”
with the “eternally-lyrical” and thereby circumscribed the definition of poetry by
women.
These condescending critical responses to Korman’s anthology in the most
prestigious literary paper, Literarishe bleter, published in Warsaw and Vilna, reveal
the inability of the evolving self-defined literary tradition of Yiddish poetry to ac-
cept the work of women. The inventors of this modern tradition resisted new
literary work by women, it seems, because they sensed a threat to the modernity
of their own achievements when Yiddish was associated with women. In the cul-
ture of religious Judaism that valued Hebrew and Aramaic as the sacred tongues
of Jewish law, prayer, and lore, languages available almost exclusively to men, the
Yiddish language was perceived as the medium for a literature written only for
“women and men who are like women in not having much knowledge.”54 Not
wanting to be like women, neither in ignorance nor in any other way—a fear
augmented by European anti-Semitism, which had conventionally cast Jewish men
in a feminized role55—the modern Yiddish critics diminished the works of their
female contemporaries.
Although Korman’s contemporary critics were unable to accept the implica-
tions that women held a legitimate place in Yiddish poetic tradition, readers today
can evaluate how Korman’s selections, in contrast to Bassin’s, changed the images
of some of the poets. Korman included more poets and more poems per poet, as
well as poems with religious content or context, unlike Bassin, who represented
modern women poets only with fashionable poems or with poems that fit the idea
of the feminine as spelled out by Niger and Glanz.
The second volume of Bassin’s anthology contains ninety-five poets, most of
whom were writing in the United States. Of these, eighty-seven are men and eight
are women. Of the men, thirty-two poets are represented by four or more poems,
and fifty-five are represented by three or fewer poems. Of the eight women poets
in Volume Two, only one, Fradl Shtok, is represented by more than three poems.
Two poets, Zelda Knizshnik and Yehudis, have three poems each; one, Sara Rey-
zen, has two; and four (that is, half of the women writers)—Roza Goldshteyn,
Anna Rappaport, Roza Yakubovitsh, and Paula R. (Pearl Prilutski)—are each rep-
resented by a single poem. While one must take into account that, as of 1917,
many books of poetry by women had not yet appeared and that other women poets
had not yet published anything,56 nonetheless, this list reveals how meagerly Bassin
represented women poets, in the number of both writers and works. That Bassin
limited the number of women poets and the kinds of poems to represent them
suggests this editor’s sense of the place of women poets and of the kind of poetry
he thought they could or should write. Bassin’s implied ideas about uniformly
“feminine” poems were spelled out by contemporary critics like A. Glanz, writing
in 1915 on women and culture, and Sh. Niger and Melekh Ravitsh, writing on
women’s poetry in 1927 and 1928, who characterized a poetic style endemic to
women as private, vague, conventional, intuitive, romantic, and appropriately emo-
tional.
When Korman, in contrast, represented the same eight poets chosen by Bassin
(along with fifty-eight other modern poets), he clearly attempted to give a more
varied and interesting view of these women’s works. In mere numbers, for example,
Korman represented Zelda Knizshnik with eleven poems, as opposed to Bassin’s
three; Yehudis with seven poems, to Bassin’s three; Roza Goldshteyn with five
poems (Bassin, one); Anna Rappaport with three (to Bassin’s one); Roza Yakubov-
itsh with ten poems (to Bassin’s one); Paula R. [Prilutski] with three (to Bassin’s
one); Sara Reyzen with fourteen poems (to Bassin’s two). The only poet repre-
sented comparably in both volumes was Fradl Shtok, with twelve poems in
Korman and eleven poems in Bassin.
While this contrast in quantity reveals the relative importance that Bassin and
Korman gave to women poets, a comparison of the types of poems each selected
will underline the difference in each editor’s ideas of what poetry by women was
and should be. It is instructive to contrast treatments by Bassin and by Korman of
two poets essentially unknown today, Zelda Knizshnik, born in 1869 in Vyazin,
Vilna Province, and Yehudis, the pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn, born in 1869
in Minsk. In the first case, although Bassin lamented that “Yiddish poetry possesses
very few women poets, and it is truly a shame that only a small part of Knizshnik’s
poems in Yiddish were published,”57 he chose only three lyrics by Knizshnik, all
of which depend upon rather conventional romantic tropes for sentiments of de-
sire, wanderlust, and passion.58 Korman’s selection of eleven of her poems, in-
cluding those in Bassin, presented a fuller sense of Knizshnik’s poetic range, her
more distinctive voice. The tropes in her poems play as often upon the imagery
of traditional religious life as upon romantic poetic conventions. Thus, in addition
to the sentimental Baym fenster [At the Window], Vinter [Winter], and Morgen
[Morning], which Bassin included, we find in Korman poems called Kapores
[Atonement], Un ven dayn neshome [And When Your Soul], O, heylike boyre [Oh,
Holy Creator]. In Mayn letste likht [My Last Candle], for example, Knizshik takes
on the dramatic persona of a male yeshiva student who is left in the dark by his
sputtering taper, for both his poverty and his loss of faith have kept him from
lighting another. Employing the familiar image of a candle, the poet puns ironi-
cally on the possibility of the student’s enlightenment. The device of the dramatic
persona and the densely Hebraic diction of this speaker, who edges ever nearer to
the door that will release him from the darkened house of study and prayer, give
the poem the edge of a wit more engaging than the vague wanderlust in Volkns.
Moreover, with the male persona and “masculine” Hebraic diction, the poem
disguises its female author. In Kapores, Knizshnik again shifts the perspective from
the personal by exhibiting an unexpected pity for the ritual object—chickens that
will be made into the symbolic scapegoat in the ceremony of atonement before
Yom Kippur. Knizshnik’s last poem in the Korman selection, Mayn man iz in
amerike [My Husband Is in America], presents another dramatic persona—a wife
and mother who has stayed at home, alone, as her entire family left der alter heym,
the Old Country. Again, Knizshnik plays upon this character’s predicament as the
ironic embodiment of the ultimate homelessness of a solitary woman, dependent
upon her relationship to the family to define her existence.
In the second case, Bassin included three of Yehudis’s poems, all of which
are spoken in a personal voice: In a vinkl fun mayn hartsn [In a Corner of My
Heart], Di nakht iz tif, di nakht iz shvarts [The Night is deep, the night is dark
. . . ], and Breyte himlen, erd a groyse [Ample Heavens, Earth Enormous].59 From
these three poems alone, one reads Yehudis as a poet essentially in the same vein
as Zelda Knizshnik—a poet relying upon the conventional tropes of the seasons
and the diurnal cycle to express romantic themes. Even in these poems, though,
Yehudis exhibits a more daring nonconformity, for her persona speaks of embrac-
ing her child in sleep, while tempted and then thrown into despair by the illicit
passion in a “youthful dream”60 of her lover. Her poem of romantic ennui, Breyte
himlen, erd a groyse, speaks first in a generalized voice of despair but breaks, mid-
stanza, into rebellious individuality. Even as Bassin allowed Yehudis’s bold voice
to be audible, his limited selection of poems emphasized a misleading similarity
between Yehudis and Knizshnik, as in the conventional figure of a locked door

that imprisons desire. Zelda Knizshik writes: “Under lock and key remains/ A
restrained desire.”61 Yehudis writes: “In a corner of my heart/ My youth is deeply
hidden: Locked away from the years/ With a rigid lock, an old one.”62 In Bassin,
then, these two poets sound very much alike.
In contrast, Korman, represented Yehudis with seven poems that show a far
greater range of imagery and voice. At the center of one such poem is a trope of
the womanly craft of weaving, suggesting an analogy between the making of a life
and the crafting of a poem.63 More important, Korman included Yehudis’s daring
attack on a kind of poetry she considered old-fashioned, an attack addressed to her
contemporaries, in Tsum dikhter [To the (male) Poet]. The collective voice in this
poem of artistic protest has the bravado of political poems of the revolution. Al-
though Yehudis cannot transcend the hackneyed forms of political poetry, her
poem reveals a public voice, distinguishable from the private voice of the “poetess”
and the “feminine lyric” that dominated Bassin’s selection. Korman’s presentation
of Yehudis worked against this stereotype. By contrasting the Bassin and Korman
selections of these two poets who are now obscure, we see how the choice of
poems can color the way a poet appears in an anthology.
Next, let us turn to the intriguing poet Roza Yakubovitsh. The ten poems
with which Korman represented her emphasized a strong personal voice speaking
from a religious context. Thus in Korman, Yakubovitsh stood out in sharp contrast
to such sometimes bombastic protest poems as those by Roza Goldshteyn and
Anna Rappaport, to whom Korman gave less emphasis.64 In Bassin, these three
poets appeared in equal measure, with one poem each, and Yakubovitsh was es-
sentially buried among them.65 Yakubovitsh’s single poem in Bassin, Tsu mayn
tatn [To My Father],66 while interesting in that the speaker sees God personified
in her father’s piety, does not convey the full range of this poet’s achievement.
Yakubovitsh’s work has a genuine originality and expressiveness that even Ye-
hudis’s spirited assertions lack. For example, she places the persona of one poem,
On a statsye [Without a Station], in the midst of a struggle between a young
woman’s desire and the morality imposed upon her by Jewish society. Yakubovitsh
presents this struggle through the extended metaphor of a railroad train—a symbol
of the modern world that recurs throughout Yiddish literature.67 Yakubovitsh dram-
atizes this conflict between what an individual woman wants and the religious or
social strictures that limit her in what she can achieve in the distinctive voices of
characters in the stock roles of traditional Jewish women, such as the kale (bride)
and the akore (barren woman). The best of her poems, from the series Biblishe
motivn [Biblical Motifs], speak in the voices of legendary biblical women, such as
Rachel, Hagar, Miriam, Esther, Shulamit. In these poems, Yakubovitsh offers an
interpretation of the traditional text while she fleshes out each ancient character
in modern terms, an approach that forshadowed the better-known poems by Itzik
Manger in the 1930s.68 Yakubovitsh’s poems, which Manger may have read, com-
bine knowledge of three powerful literary conventions—traditional Hebrew and
Yiddish biblical interpretation, the Western European love lyric, and the dramatic
monologue. Korman’s generous inclusion of poems by Yakubovitsh reveal her to
be a compelling, accomplished writer who developed beyond the earlier poets,
Knizshnik and Yehudis. Yakubovitsh’s treatment of religious themes distinguishes

her from the anti-religious, polemical strain in these and other earlier poets, as
well as from the estheticism and eroticism of her modernist contemporaries.
The one poet that both Bassin and Korman presented in full force was Fradl
Shtok, a modernist writing in New York; Bassin included eleven of her poems, as
many as the important male writers, and Korman included twelve, ranking her
with the now better-known poets Kadya Molodowsky, Anna Margolin, and Celia
Dropkin. In the context of both anthologies, Fradl Shtok stood out as an innovator
in verse forms, enriching the meters and stanzas of Yiddish poetry.69 The musicality
of her poems, almost impossible to convey in translation, is evident in the six-line
strophes of a love song, “Serenade.”70 Yet the euphony of the lyric contrasts with
the turn of her imagination, as eroticism takes on a threatening tone. In A vinter
ekho [A Winter Echo], the connotations of sweetness in the diminutive nouns
naming the lover give way to a metaphor likening marriage and burial.71 In another
poem, Farnakhtn [Dusks], Shtok transforms the quietude of dusk into a threat-
ening atmosphere and the singing nightingale of romantic poetry into a stinging
bee,72 thus subverting literary convention in the manner of a modernist. Shtok’s
sonnet cycle, which Malka Heifetz Tussman claimed was the first to be composed
in Yiddish,73 was an innovation both for Yiddish poetry and for the subgenre itself.
Shtok imports to Yiddish the formal as well as the thematic tradition of European
love poetry since Petrarch. At the same time, she distorts the very conventions of
that love poetry, for the female persona controverts courtly convention in sonnets
that most unconventionally declare love in the form of resentment and eros in the
form of rage.74
Both Bassin in 1917 and Korman in 1928 recognized Shtok as one of the
innovative modernist poets in America. Yet she appeared in Bassin as the only
substantial woman poet of the moment, whereas in Korman, Shtok stood as one
of a good number of strong, modern voices. Although Korman placed Shtok’s
poems chronologically, between the generous selection of Yakubovitsh and an
extremely small group of poems by Rivke Rozental, her poems resonate with those
of her American modernist contemporaries, Anna Margolin and Celia Dropkin.
Whereas in 1917 Bassin would not yet have been able to read and thus include
poems by Celia Dropkin in Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye, because that year she
had begun to write but not yet publish her poems in Yiddish, Zishe Landau’s
Antologye of 1919 included two of Dropkin’s new poems, Mayn vayse shney prin-
tsesin [My Snow-White Princess], dated 1917 in Dropkin’s 1935 book, and Kh’hob
zikh gezen in kholem [I Saw Myself in a Dream]. With these two poems—one a
spring poem, mourning the death of winter, and the other narrating a suicidal
dream—Landau placed this poet at the cutting edge of the new Yiddish poetry.
Dropkin’s poems join eroticism and morbidity, a combination that becomes her
trademark. Interestingly, these are also the qualities of the single poem by Fradl
Shtok, Du trogst dos harts [You Carry Your Heart], which Landau placed last in
his volume, allowing Shtok to have the final word on Yiddish poetry in 1919.
Whereas these three poems by women included in Landau’s anthology stand out
in his selection, replete with erotic innuendo in the themes of death, adultery,
and betrayal, their radical attitudes and shocking imagery are folded into the fabric
of Korman’s collection. In the context of Landau’s book, these selections suggested

that women poets wrote only about sex and death. Korman’s volume, however,
presented these subjects as only some of the many addressed in Yiddish poems by
women.
Bassin had expressed no explicit poetic ideology to explain the relationship of
the secular to the religious, nor of the place that women poets occupied in the
larger tradition of Yiddish poetry that his anthology sought to establish. Yet his
selection of poems by women implied a definition of “women’s poetry” as roman-
tic, private, domestic, and secular. In contrast, although Korman expressed a poetic
agenda in his introduction that favored the modern and the secular over the re-
ligious strain in Yiddish poetry, in fact the poems he included transcended these
limitations. Korman’s selection showed that modern women could write all kinds
of Yiddish poetry—the romantic, private, domestic, and secular poetry that their
contemporaries expected of them, but also modernist, public, political, erotic, and
religious poetry. Women could use forms and themes that violated the clichés
about women and the ideological boundaries of modernism. The quantity and the
range of poems that Korman selected by each poet presented a broad vision of
the types of poetry women could write in Yiddish. Moreover, while he argued
rather strenuously to deny any relationship between post-Enlightenment poetry by
women and Yiddish devotional poetry, his juxaposition of these two bodies of
material superseded his protestations of the distance between them. Whereas Bas-
sin’s anthology set out a historical survey of Yiddish poetry through five centuries,
in which poetry by women played a very small role and which relegated religious
poetry to the premodern past, Korman’s anthology, ostensibly modeled on Bassin’s,
argued in the end for a deep and important connection between the religious and
the modern in Yiddish poetry, put forth most centrally in writings by women of
his own day.
Literary anthologies of the 1910s and 1920s played an important role in the
way that modern Yiddish writers developed a sense of their literary tradition. In
the end, we see two kinds of anthologies. On the one hand are the modernist
efforts documenting the present moment and looking forward to the future, fore-
most among them the Yunge and Introspectivist anthologies. On the other hand
are the historical anthologies looking backward in order to figure out how the
literature could continue to move ahead, anthologies such as those of Bassin and
Korman. Even as Korman modeled his anthology on Bassin’s, however, he trans-
formed the project of constructing a tradition. Although the earlier anthology was
most innovative when it juxtaposed rediscovered Old Yiddish texts and newly ap-
preciated folklore with modern Yiddish belles lettres, it languished in conventional
notions of the roles women played as readers and as writers. Such unexamined
ideas about women as literary players reflected the activities women were thought
to perform in society. Literary critics, despite their intentions to stir up the status
quo, repeated these hackneyed terms of the domestic, the private, the emotional,
and the sexually procreative to describe and proscribe women’s writing. In his
decision to compile an anthology solely of women poets, Korman began to ques-
tion the unstated assumptions about gender in Bassin’s anthology and beyond it.
The poets and the poems Korman chose to include in this anthology expanded
and complicated the image of what kinds of women could write poetry and what
kinds of poetry they could write.
Korman’s anthology did not make a large impact when it was published.
Rather, in the cultural climate of its day, this serious compilation of works by
women inspired more scorn than praise and failed in its effort to demand that the
tradition of Yiddish poetry include women. Had Bassin learned from Korman, his
1940 anthology of Amerikaner yidishe poezye [American Yiddish Poetry] would have
held more than one woman poet, among thirty-one.75 Korman’s was a work before
its time. Regarded in the kinder light of a more open cultural milieu some seventy-
five years later, though, perhaps Korman’s anthology can finally find a place of its
own.
Notes
All translations are by the author, unless otherwise indicated.
Some of this material was previously published in different forms in “A Question of
Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish,” in Handbook of American-Jewish Literature: An An-
alytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources, ed. Lewis Fried (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1988), and in “Canon and Gender: Women Poets in Two Modern Yiddish Anthol-
ogies,” first published in Shofar 9.4 (Summer 1991), which was abridged in Women of the
Word; Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State Uni-
versity Press, 1994). I am grateful for a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania, during Spring 2003, where I worked on a book in which
this article is a part.
1. Zishe Laundau, Antologye: di yidishe dikhtung in amerike biz yor 1919. Illustrations
Z. Maud (New York: Farlag Yidish, 1919).
2. Introspektive lider (New York: Farlag M. N. Mayzel, 1920).
3. Moyshe Bassin, ed., Antologye: finf hundert yor yidishe poezye, Vol. 1. (New York:
Farlag dos yidishe bukh, 1917), pp. i–ii. Despite Bassin’s insistence that the anthology in-
clude no poems published after 1910, a number of selections actually appeared after that
date, such as poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, H. Leyvik, and Mani Leyb.
4. Bassin, Antologye, Vol. 1, p. i.
5. In zikh: a zamlung introspektive lider 1920 (New York: M. N. Mayzel Farlag, 1920).
The poets are M. Apranel, A. Gurieh, Yankev Glatshteyn, Bernard Lewis, Reuven Ludvig,
A. Leyles, N. Minkov, Yankev Stodolski.
6. Celia Dropkin, “Du erniderigst mikh haynt” [Today You Humble Me] and “Mayne
hent”[My Hands], p. 11.
7. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture,
1981), vol. 8, pp. 137–38.
8. According to Malka Heifetz Tussman, Berkeley, California, telephone interview,
December 1985.
9. Korman’s reviews are “Vegn miriam ulinovers Der bobes oytser” (Bikher velt, no. 1,
Warsaw, 1922) and “Vegn glazer-andrus, In halb shotn, celia dropkins un rashel veprinskis
lider” (Bikher velt, no. 6, Warsaw, 1922). Cited in Ezra Korman, ed., Yidishe dikhterins:
antologye (Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1928), p. 373, n. 215.
10. Korman’s original poetry appeared as Shkye: lider [Sunset: Poems], 1932. Poems
also appeared in Mattes Deutch, ed., Antologye: mitvest-mayrev [Anthology: Midwest-West]
(Chicago: Farlag Tseshinski, 1933), pp. 152–55, 197. The biography on p. 197 states that
Korman, born in 1888 in Kiev, began to write in 1910 for Sh. Godelik’s Almanakh. He was
a journalist for various European and American newspapers and published poems in the
journals Milgroym [Pomegranate], Kultur [Culture), and Yidish [Yiddish]. He also compiled
bibliographies of Sh. Niger and A. Tseytlin, in Zalman Reyzen’s. Leksikon fun der yidisher
literatur un prese [Lusican of Yiddish Literature and Press] (Warsaw: Farlag Tsentral,
1914).
11. Ezra Korman, ed., In fayerdikn doyer—zamlung fun revolutsionerer lyrik in der nayer
yidisher dikhtung (In Fiery Duration—Collection of Revolutionary Lyric in New Yiddish
Poetry, (Kiev, 1921), and ed. and intro., Brenendike brikn—antologye fun revolutsionerer lyrik
in der nayer yidisher dikhtung fun ukraine (Burning Bridges—Anthology of Revolutionary
Lyric in the New Yiddish Poetry of Ukraine (Berlin, 1923) (second edition of In fayerdikn
doyr). Cited in Ezra Korman, “Kvaln un literatur,” (Sources and Literature), Yidishe dikht-
erins: antologye, p. 360, nos. 16, 17.
12. Zalman Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur un prese [Lexicon of Yiddish
Literature and Press] (Warsaw: Farlag Tsentral, 1914).
13. Max Erik, “Brantshpigl—di entsiklopedye fun der yidisher froy in 17tn yorhundert”
and “Bleter tsu der geshikhte fun der elterer yidisher literatur un kultur” [Pages toward the
History of Old Yiddish Literature and Culture] Tsaytshrift [Periodical], Book I (Minsk,
1926). Cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. xxx, n. 3.
14. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. xxvii, xxxi–xxxii, xxxiii–xxxv.
15. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. lxvii–lxxxiii, 357.
16. Froyen zshurnal-vokhenblat (New York, 1922). Cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins,
p. 364, n. 73.
17. Miriam Ulinover, Der bobes oytser [My Grandmother’s Treasure] (Warsaw, 1922);
Anna Blokh, Poezye fun a litvishe(r) meydel in afrike [Poetry by a Lithuanian Girl in Africa]
(South Africa, 1921); Roza Gutman, Far gor dem noen(t)stn: lider. [For the Nearest and
Dearest] (Berlin, 1925); Ida Glazer-Andrus, In halb-shotn [In Half-Shadow] (New York,
1922); Leah K. Hofman, In kinderland [In the Land of Children], 2d ed. (New York, 1921);
Pesi Hershfeld, Kareln [Carols] (Chicago, 1926); Khana Vurtsel, Hundert lider [A Hundred
Poems] (New York, 1927); Rashel Veprinksi, Ruf fun fligl [Call of Wings] (New York, 1926);
Khana-Loye Khaveydanski, Gedikhte un aforizmen [Poetry and Aphorisms] (Ponevezsh,
1922); Roza Yakubovitsh, Mayne gezangen [My Songs] (Warsaw, 1924); Yudika, Naye Yugent
[New Youth] (Kovne, 1923); Kadya Molodowsky, Kheshvendike nekht. lider [Nights of Hesh-
van. Poems] (Vilna-Warsaw, 1927); Sara Reyzen, Lider [Poems] (Vilna, 1924).
18. This bibliography, though, is not complete, for among the biographies, Korman
mentions at least one book, Paula R.’s Der malakh un der sotn: poeme [The Angel and the
Devil: Long Poem], (Warsaw, 1908), which does not appear in the bibliography. Korman,
Yidishe dikhterins, p. 350.
19. Among the earlier generation of Labor Poets, editions of the collected works of
Morris Rosenfeld and David Edelstat had appeared in 1908 and 1909, signaling a self-
conscious making of a canon. Of the Yunge, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern had published his two
collections of poems; Mani Leyb had published at least twelve books of poems, children’s
poems, and other writings; Reuven Ayzland had published one volume of poems and several
of translations; Zishe Landau had published a play, the anthology of 1919, and translations.
Of the Introspectivists, Yankev Glatshteyn had published three books, and A. Glanz-Leyeles
had published at least six volumes, including poems, plays, and scholarship.
20. See Dov Sadan, “Guardian of the Treasure: On Miriam Ulinover” [Hebrew], In
Der bobes oytser by Miriam Ulinover (Jerusalem Mosad Harav Kook, 1975), pp. 1–8.
21. Korman, Yidishe dikherins, p. xxix.
22. See Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity in the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender
Difference in Literary Discourse.” Feminist Studies 13 (Spring 1987), pp. 49–82. Also see
Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). pp. 13–17, 131–223. Julia Kristeva, “Semiotics
of Biblical Abomination,” in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Rou-
diez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). pp. 90–112.
23. See Chava Weissler, “The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women” and Voices of
the Matriarchs. Also Israel Zinberg, “Historical and Travel Literature: Memoirs and Tehin-
not” and “Popular Literature. Tze’ena U‘re‘enah,” pp. 119–39, 229–59, in A History of Jewish
Literature: Old Yiddish Literature from its Origins to the Haskalah Period (Cincinnati: He-
brew Union College Press; New York: KTAV, 1975), vol. 7. Also Solomon B. Freehof.
Devotional Literature in the Vernacular,” Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1923, repr.
from Yearbook, vol.33, pp. 1–43.
24. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. xxx.
25. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. lxiv–lxv.
26. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. xlvii.
27. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. xlviii–xlix.
28. David G. Roskies has pointed this out in reference to Jewish literature responding
to catastrophe. See David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Jewish Cultural Responses to
Catastrophe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 17, 77–108, 225–57, 283, 289.
29. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. l.
30. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. li.
31. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. liv–lvi.
32. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. lvi.
33. Roza Yakubovitsh, Mayne gezangen [My Songs], (Warsaw, 1924). Lider tsu got
[Poems to God] not published as of 1928.
34. Conversation with Malka Heifetz Tussman, Berkeley, Cal., September 1978. Fradl
Shtok published her sonnets in groups, for example, the eight sonnets in the anthology Di
naye heym (New York, 1914). However, A. Tabatshnik argues that this is a popular miscon-
ception that originated with Bassin’s Antologye: 500 yor yidishe poezye; rather, Morris Vintsh-
evski was the true innovator, writing sonnets between 1892 and 1908. A. Tabatshnik, “Fradl
Shtok un der Sonet” [Fradl Shtok and the Sonnet], Dikhter un dikhtung [Poets and Poetry]
(New York: Published by author, 1965), pp. 505–8.
35. Norma Fain Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers, 1890–
1940,” 70.1 (September 1980), pp. 78–79.
36. See also Ezra Korman, “Vegn miriam ulinover’s Der bobes oytser,” cited in Kor-
man, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 373, n. 215.
37. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. lxiii–lxiv.
38. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. lxiv.
39. For a study of the Warsaw group, led by Noyekh Prilutski, the S. Ansky Vilna
Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, and the Ethnographic Commission of the YIVO
Institute in Vilna, see Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish
Folklorists of Poland. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). On the efforts of S.
Ansky (Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport) to collect folk literature and folk art before and during
the first World War, see also Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, pp. 133–62.
40. Sh. Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” Der pinkes (Vilna, 1913; reissued,
Vilna, 1919). In Geklibene verk fun sh. niger, volume 2: bleter geshikhte fun der yidisher
literature (New York: Sh. Niger Book Committee of the World-wide Jewish Culture Con-
gress, 1959), pp. 35–107. See also Freehof, “Devotional Literature in the Vernacular,” pp. 1–
43; Israel Zinberg, “Popular Literature; Tze’enah U-re’enah” and “Historical and Travel
Literature; Memoirs and Tehinnot,” pp. 119–39, 241–59.
41. Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,”p. 37.
42. Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” pp. 52–53.
45. Fifty women Yiddish writers first surveyed from a cultural historical perspective by
Norma Fain Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers 1890–1940, Amer-
ican Jewish History 70 (September 1988),” pp. 68–90.
46. A. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” Di fraye arbeter shtime, October 30, 1915, pp. 4–5.
Brought to my attention by Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” p. 77, n. 18.
47. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” p. 4.
48. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” p. 5.
49. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” p. 79.
50. Melekh Ravitsh, “ ‘Den mir hobn zunshtn keyn andri (mekhaye) in der velt’: E.
Korman—Yidishe dikhterins: antologye” [Then We Have Hardly Any Other Pleasure in the
World: E. Korman—Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology], Literarishe bleter 5, 42, (October
19, 1928):830–31.
51. Kadya Molodowsky, “Meydlekh, Froyen, Vayber . . . un Nevue,” Literarishe Bleter
4, 22 (June 3, 1927):416.
52. Sh. Niger, “Froyen Lyrik,” Literarishe bleter 5, 46 (November 16, 1928):909–10.
53. Niger, “Froyen lyrik,” p. 909.
54. Chava Weissler translates this conventional Yiddish and Hebrew phrase, which
often appeared at the beginning of religious Yiddish books from the seventeenth century
on, such as Brantshpigl: “This book was written in Yiddish for women and for men who
are like women in not having much knowledge.” Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Lis-
tening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), pp. 38–
44. See also Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: Sexual Politics of Hebrew and
Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
55. For a study of the feminization of Jewish men by European anti-Semitism, see
Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Represen-
tations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington, 1995).
56. Such as Kadya Molodowsky, whose first poem appeared in 1921, or Malka Heifetz
Tussman, whose first poem appeared in 1919.
57. Bassin, Antologye, p. 47.
58. Zelda Knizshnik, Unter shlos [Under Lock and Key], Volkns [Clouds], and A
shpetige royz [A Late-Blooming Rose], Bassin, Antologye, 2:47.
59. Yehudis, In a vinkl fun mayn hartsn [In a Corner of My Heart], Di nakht iz tif,
di nakht iz shvarts [The Night Is Deep, the Night Is Dark . . . ), and Breyte himlen, erd a
groyse [Ample Heavens, Earth Enormous), Bassin, Antologye, 2:49–50.
60. Yehudis, Di nakht iz tif, di nakht iz shvarts, in Bassin, Antologye, 2:49–50; Korman,
Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 64–65.
61. Knizshnik, Unter shlos, Bassin, Antologye, 2:47; Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 55.
62. Yehudis, In a vinkl fun mayn hartsn, Bassin, Antologye, 2:49; Korman, Yidishe
dikhterins, p. 62.
63. Yehudis, Ikh endik mayn veben [I Finish my Weaving], Korman, Yidishe dikhterins,
p. 65.
64. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 84–92, 344. Roza Yakubovitsh remained within a
traditional Jewish context, having been raised in a rabbinical household in the Polish prov-
ince of Plotsker; she was educated in Russian and then Polish Jewish government schools,
as well as by her father, a rabbi. She published in Peretz’s collection Yudish (Warsaw, 1910),
and in her own volume, Mayne Gezangen [My Songs] (Warsaw, 1924). Her second book,
Lider tsu Got [Poems to God] was destroyed in World War II.
65. Of course we have to take into account the fact that Yakubovitsh’s book, Mayne
gezangen, was not published until 1924, and thus Korman had more to choose from.
66. Roza Yakubovitsh, Tsu mayn tatn, Bassin, Antologye, 2:125–26; Korman, Yidishe
dikhterins, pp. 88–89.
67. Roza Yakubovitsh, On a statsye, Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 86.
68. Roza Yakubovitsh, “Rokhl” and “Hagar,” (from Biblishe motivn), Korman, Yidishe
dikhterins, pp. 89–91.
69. Melekh Ravitsh referred regretfully to the sudden silence of Fradl Shtok, the po-
etess from Galicia, whom he accused of being more woman than poet in his review of the
anonymous women poets in 1927. In the biographical notes, Korman simply reports that
she was born in 1890 in Skala, Galicia, came to America in 1907, had a literary debut in
1910, and published a collection of short stories, Gezamelte Dertseylungen, in New York in
1919. On her subsequent life, see Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics.”
70. Fradl Shtok, “Serenade,” Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 93–95.
71. Fradl Shtok, A vinter ekho, Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 94–95.
72. Fradl Shtok, Farnakhtn, Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 96–97.
73. Conversation with Malka Heifetz Tussman, Berkeley, Cal., September 1978. Fradl
Shtok published her sonnets in groups, for example, the eight sonnets in the anthology Di
Naye Heym, (New York, 1914). Zishe Landau’s Antologye of the Yunge poets (New York,
1919) presents only one Shtok sonnet. A decade later, Itsik Manger included a series of his
sonnets on biblical themes in his first book, Shtern Afn Dakh (Bucharest, 1929), pp. 62–67.
74. Fradl Shtok, “Sonnet,” in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 98.
75. Moyshe Bassin, ed., Amerikaner yidishe poezye: antologye [American Yiddish Po-
etry: Anthology] (New York: A komitet, 1940). Of the thirty-one poets, Bassin includes one
woman, Anna Margolin.
15
hannan hever
“Our Poetry Is Like an

Orange Grove”
Anthologies of Hebrew Poetry in
Eretz Yisrael
And it is indeed possible to view [this] book as the orange grove of our
poetry, with its great and little trees, a grove whose earth is also covered
with shrubs, flowers, and weeds. A spirit of sadness stalks the garden,
and the gay sound of birdsong is heard there only seldom. But many
are the paths of the orange grove, royal roads and side paths, mountain
ranges and valleys, and it is full of breezes and pleasant odors, sights,
and colors that take the breath away and that expand the mind.1
ince the earliest days of the Jewish settlement (yishuv) in pre-State Israel, the
S literary form of the anthology has served as an instrument for creating as well
as documenting Hebrew cultural discourse. Once it was included within an an-
thology and thereby transmitted to the community of writers and readers, even an
individual poem or story played a role in the construction of what Benedict An-
derson has called the “imagined national community.”2 Yet in contrast to Ander-
son’s description of the formation of such a national community—as a linear,
homogeneous process—the case of anthology shows that this process is profoundly
hybrid, simultaneously encoded as natural and yet always bound up with the op-
eration of mechanisms of production and distribution.3
This duality or oscillation between the natural and the artificial may already
be observed in the first anthology of Western culture known to us: Stephanos
(literally, a “garland”), a collection of minor poetic works, mainly epigrams, edited
by Meleager, a first-century a.d. inhabitant of Gadara. Etymologically, “anthology”
in ancient Greek means “bouquet.” Anthos is a flower, and legein denotes the
action of gathering or picking up. The metaphorical use of “bouquet” presents
the anthology as belonging to the plant realm and therefore as coming into being
naturally or organically. Like the bouquet of flowers, however, the anthology is
structured through the artificial arrangement of the bouquet’s natural constituents.
The esthetic effect of the anthology is, therefore, one of heterogeneous beauty
founded on two constituents: the organic and the artificial. The first points to an
281
immediate link, the natural sign of a certain cultural/textual reality whose full,
appropriate, and authentic reflection the anthology constitutes, thus lending the
individual text appearing in its pages an exemplary or illustrative status. By contrast,
the second constituent points to an artificial act, a reflection that has been con-
structed, which is the product of human intervention, and which mediates be-
tween a cultural/textual reality and its representation in the anthology.
The duality between the natural and the artificial is basic to the enterprise of
the anthology. This duality is responsible for the hybridity of the anthology as a
cultural signifier: an anthology simultaneously generates a natural effect and dis-
plays its unnatural making. In the one case, the anthology appropriates represen-
tations of cultural texts and confers upon them an illustrative status. In the other,
the anthology never conceals its constructed nature as a product of human inter-
vention. The anthology can thus never wholly erase the signs of human agency
or of the hand that has compiled it. Forewords to anthologies and their compo-
sitional scaffolding (chapters or subdivisions, footnotes, editors’ comments, and the
like) play a central role here.
This hybridity and commingling of the organic with the artificial allow the
anthology to function in two ways. While claiming merely to collect representative
texts that mirror what is already there, the anthology is itself at work producing
such new entities as “modern poetry,” “Hebrew love poetry,” or “workers’ poetry,”
and so on. All these are joined with the material presence of the anthology in the
distribution and preservation of texts in culture. But these acts of publication and
distribution already imply an announcement, the naming of a privileged closure
within the field of culture. When an anthology arrives on the scene, it therefore
already bears the status of a representative gathering of representative texts, each
of which is itself a representation. By collecting, concentrating, and distributing
these texts as a group, the anthology constructs its authority. But at the moment
of its crystalized appearance in the general literary discourse, the anthology is a
“representative representation.”
The “Comprehensive” Anthology and Universal Nationalism

Schocken’s 1938 volume Mivhfi ar hashirah haivrit hahfi adashah: Antologya hame-
khila et mivhfi ar hashirah halirit haivrit bemeshekh matayim shanah, merabbi moshe
hfi ayyim lutsato ad hayom [A Selection of the New Hebrew Poetry: An Anthology
Containing Two Hundred Years of Select Hebrew Lyric Poetry, from Rabbi Moses
Hfi aim Luzzatto until the Present], the work of the writer and editor Asher Barash,
would become a far more central text than any other yishuv anthology. Barash’s
volume achieved a more widely representative and popular status than any of its
counterparts and continued to be seen as the authoritative embodiment of the
history of the new Hebrew poetry for generations, long after the period of the
yishuv. This anthology did not appear under the aegis of any one literary camp or
political orientation but represented itself as a compendium of Hebrew poetry at
large. At a time—the late 1930s—when the modernism and avant-gardism of Eretz
Yisraeli poetry had long been institutionalized, Barash’s perspective was deliber-
“Our Poetry Is Like an Orange Grove” 283
ately general and sought to allow each of the various schools and streams within
Hebrew poetry to coexist in harmony.
It is worth noting that the general rubric had long been a feature of the
Hebrew poetry anthologies of the yishuv (select examples of its use would include
“Love Poetry,” found in H fi aim Toren’s anthology Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei
qedem ad yameinu [Love Poems in Israel: From Ancient Times to the Present];4
“Poetry of the 1936 Riots” in Shirat hadamim: Kovets shirim mitovei meshorereinu
al meoraot tartsav;5 and “Generations of Jewish Heroism,” in an anthology edited
by Zerubavel Gilad in 1944 containing poems of past glory as a species of heroic
testament).6
But the diverse titles and organizational rubrics of these anthologies notwith-
standing, the “comprehensive anthology” emerges as worthy of special scrutiny:
the field it represents expands to include “the totality of poetry,” where this “to-
tality” pointedly refers to the national whole. This national norm of anthological
representation became a fundamental principle of modern Hebrew criticism. Dov
Sadan, one of the most important critics of modern Hebrew literature, speaking
from the Zionist perspective at the end of the fifties, and paraphrasing Bereshit
Rabbah (3, 7), states emphatically that the anthologist who “labors over the entire
field of poetry and poets” cannot act on the basis of mere caprice alone.7
The particular poetic text that is included in the “comprehensive anthology”
appears to have a general status whereby it exemplifies a collective whole and
assumes a certain authority and privilege as this type of representation. Barash,
who stands at one generational remove from H. N. Bialik, edited anthologies of
Hebrew poetry from a Zionist national perspective. To this end, he constructed
the anthology as a conservative site that reduplicates the norms of the hegemonic
common denominator through positing a supposedly harmonious and shared sys-
tem of high national culture, one that negates or ingests political, generic, reli-
gious, class, ethnic, or racial differences and conflicts, instituting in their place a
shared representation aspiring to a general or universal status. In Barash’s A Selec-
tion of the New Hebrew Poetry, as well as in other anthologies, the organizing
agency is noteworthy precisely because it produces its overall representation
through the postponement of conflicts and the exclusion of anyone deemed likely
to generate conflict or to harm the yishuv’s view of itself in terms of the shared
national image it had constructed. Thus, for example, in Barash’s volume, a rev-
olutionary political poet like Alexander Penn is represented by means of a lyric
poem, “Bli daat lamah” [Without Knowing Why], rather than by means of any
of his political poems (p. 484).
The comprehensive Hebrew anthology seemingly uses the criterion of writing
in the Hebrew language as the disguise for a series of constraints on the type of
material it might contain. Anterior to the norm of texts written in Hebrew, there
exist criteria concerning ethnic origin, class, and religious or gender identity,
which grant legitimization to the texts eventually included in the Hebrew anthol-
ogy. The appearance of national-universalism that Barash’s anthology generates
under the cover of its status as an anthology of Hebrew poetry is actually the
product of particular representations that do not violate the constraints of the
national image. This image is admittedly produced in poems written in the He-
brew language, but its authors are of exclusively Jewish origin, are mainly male
(Leah Goldberg, who had already published her Tabaot ashan [Rings of Smoke],
does not appear), are identified as secular writers (although a minority are reli-
gious), and are all (with one exception: Yosef Halevi, born in Adrianople, Turkey)
ethnically Europeans, in total disregard for contemporary Hebrew poetry then
being produced by poets of Eastern descent, such as Yemenites8 or North Africans.9
In order to institute its universal authority, the comprehensive anthology does
not render the individual poem central, nor does it grant prominence to a specific
political or historical event. In their stead, we find the individualistic figure of a
poet with a personal biography, someone who is represented to the readership as
having created poems whose worth must be measured against the universalist stan-
dards pertaining to the esthetic products of creative genius. It is thus only to be
expected that the most crucial cultural category employed in the development of
the inclusive hegemonic representation in the field of poetry will be the lyric. In
terms of this category, to conform to the lyric mode is to obey criteria of beauty,
esthetics, naturalness, and authentic immediate personal expression, all of which
erase the oppositions, conflicts, and incoherencies of the cultural community.
Indeed, paralleling the increasing crystalization of the Hebrew Eretz Yisraeli cul-
tural community as a national one, we see a corresponding expansion of the power
of the category of the “lyric,” which becomes a kind of umbrella concept bridging
gaps, resolving conflicts, and bringing into being an imagined community pos-
sessing a uniform narrative of linear progress that spans the present to take in a
shared future. Barash explicitly formulates these considerations in the foreword to
his anthology:
I have restricted my focus to the lyric alone, because this is the most prolific and
most developed form of poetry in Israel throughout the generations, from the holy
texts and the poetry of medieval Spain to the present day. Well into this gener-
ation, the lyric poets have been the crowning glory of our poetic literature. The
Book of Psalms, and the Book of Lamentations, and a portion of the Song of
Songs are the foundations supporting the edifice of Hebrew poetry as a whole.
Here is the soul of the Hebrew nation and of the Israeli man revealed in its
exultation and its pain, in all of its agitation and fine nuances of feeling. Through-
out all the sacred and the secular did the Israeli soul find in the lyric its zenith,
and through it does the Hebrew language achieve heights of choice beauty and
pleasantness. (p. 1)
The proliferation of poems whose theme concerns the writing of poetry as a
universal artistic act—and thus one that is destined to serve the needs of the people
as a whole—also contributes to the crystalization of images such as these in the
anthology. One case in point is the first stanza of Hameshorer livnei ever [The
Poet Addresses the Sons of the Hebrews] by Issakhar Ber Horwitz, whose inclusion
in Barash’s anthology (p. 95) nevertheless fails to rescue him from oblivion. Par-
adoxically, Horwitz’s subsequent disappearance from the eyes of posterity merely
confirms the power of the anthology, which exploits the lyric as the common
denominator of the national poem, using this overall organizing principle to confer
a certain status on the little-known text. Like Y. L. Gordon’s famous poem Lemi
ani amel? (For Whom do I Labor?), also included in the anthology (p. 80), the
basic thematic principle of this national lyric is that the poet’s contribution to his
people is founded on that people’s lack of recognition for his contribution. The
substance and forms of the national poem are predetermined to be unacceptable
to the public at large, for whom they are nevertheless written. The tradition of the
biblical prophet serves here to create a modern national consciousness, in terms
of which the national poet is the guide whose instruction will always be refused
as a foregone conclusion by the people. But through this paradoxical existence,
the poet (whose labors are always in vain) isolates and institutes his independent
authority as a universal artist, whose chief vehicle of expression is the lyric:
,rb,[e ynEb.li rrEAvm.h; lAm[]y: aw>v' $yae
>
!H: Gon>li rAa fArp.yI qyrIl' wyr"yvib.W
rb,q, d[; !j,B,mi Arz>nI Hy"-tT;m;
,H: lo a/
tArc.x; ~h; ,ryVih; tArc.x;b.W
—bv,q' br: wyr 'yvil.W wyg 'h]Ko varo aWh ~v'
(95) .bv,x'yE a lo AKr>[, ,lq;yE AM[;b.W
[How the poet labors in vain for the children of Israel. / How he seeks in vain to
spread a blazing light! / God’s gift to him is the laurel, which he bestows from
the womb to the grave; / The courtyards of his poems are the courtyards of God,
/ Where he is the high priest and his poems are heard with rapt attention— /
Though the people underestimate him and pay him little heed.]
Anthology as a Narrative of Literary History

Upon the appearance of Barash’s anthology, Yaakov Fichman wrote of it as a
unique event, the first of its kind. “More than in any scholarship or explanatory
tract,” he states, “do we find in this book the means to educate [the public] toward
the reception of the lyric, thus enabling the reader to appreciate this highly varied
poetic form.”10 In response to the question of why similar works had not appeared
earlier in the annals of Hebrew literature, Fichman argued that this was due to
the fact that “Hebrew readers in general have only a blurred conception of the
essence of lyric poetry, and it is to be feared that precisely the most excellent
examples [of the genre] in this book are those that will create astonishment in the
minds of many: For what reason were these [particular poems] chosen as master-
pieces?” Fichman ultimately praises Barash’s courage in devoting his book
to virtually pure lyric poetry alone, without shying away from our readers’ lack of
training in this field. For this reason, the book has certainly been reductive in
one obvious respect—some of the most important poets and personalities of the
Haskalah [Enlightenment] period have been underrepresented. . . . Final judg-
ment [of the anthology] demands the expansion of the notion of the lyric with
respect to some poets, since the lyric is sometimes found to be extremely robust
in philosophical poetry. Ultimately, it is necessary to present each poet first and
foremost in the properties in which he has been blessed.
The lyric, it would appear, is interpreted as a focus of affiliation and coop-
eration that eliminates every potential challenge to its functioning. The pure image
of the lyric lends a degree of continuity to the historical development of Hebrew

poetry, whose lyrical homogeneity continues to serve as a cultural site transcending
all division and conflict.
Fichman’s comments concerning the Hebrew reader’s lack of competence in
the reception of the lyric provides indirect testimony to the simultaneity of Barash’s
anthologizing work and the internal split that divided the Hebrew cultural and
poetic field. Precisely at the time of its publication—during the height of the great
debate over the Partition plan, and the heated confrontations between the Labor
movement and the Revisionists, that is to say, a time when the very existence of
a common notion of nationalism and national culture in Eretz Yisrael was in
jeopardy—the massive efforts of Eretz Yisraeli culture to generate a supposedly
apolitical enclave emerge most clearly into vision. It should be remembered that
the Symbolist school, led by Avraham Shlonsky, had attained literary hegemony
over the Hebrew poetry of this era, largely through the neutralization of poetic
political utterances.11 But in opposition to the universalist symbolism of Shlonsky
and his coterie, we find the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg (in the wake of the
publication of his work Sefer haqitrug vehaemunah [The Book of Admonishing
and Faith])12 enunciating new heights of nationalist sentiment in all its political
radicalism. As radically nationalist, Greenberg’s poetry indicated through its very
presence a challenge to the collective place it could not occupy. Greenberg’s status
as the “absent presence” of the Hebrew anthology has various manifestations. Ba-
rash anthologized various “lyric” poems by Greenberg, appending at the end of
the volume, apparently by prior agreement, a note stating that these poems were
included against Greenberg’s will because “I [Barash] did not intend these poems
to convey the essence of Uri Zvi Greenberg’s [vision of the] national destiny in
Hebrew poetry” (p. 503). A similar note concerning a “famous [poet] of our gen-
eration, who opposes in principle being included in ‘compendiums’ ” appeared
some years later in Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad yameinu, edited by
Hfi aim Toren. An even clearer enunciation of Uri Zvi Greenberg’s position, out-
lining the type of collaborative effort in which he himself refused to participate,
appeared in yet another anthology, published in 1938, Shirateinu hahfi adashah:
Liqutim lemiqra uldiqlum, edited by Eliyahu Meytus. In his foreword, Meytus
remarks that “a certain poet has not been included here, because of his opposition
in principle to the compilation of a collection representing [our] poets as a
whole.”13 Thus does Meytus lay bare the problematics inherent in the very act of
collecting and instituting this very “totality” of poets as a uniform, common field.
Meytus’s anthology is different from Barash’s anthology, which presents the lyric
as an obligatory ideal. In his foreword, Meytus emphasizes that it is
a compendium of poems, from among our poets’ best work, which will serve to
amuse the lovers of poetry, will assist the performer in search of pieces for public
recital, and might also simultaneously serve as a textbook of the development of
Hebrew poetry. . . . This book includes poems that are appropriate for recital, both
those that show dramatic content and those that are purely lyrical, where a tal-
ented performer having the proper good taste might show off his talents, because
a good lyric poem, in my opinion, is a poem that may pleasantly be recited. . . .
As to those poets who are already publicly accepted, I included such poems as
are already established in the repertoire of recital, relinquishing my own taste in
the process, even if the particular poems in question are not exactly characteristic
of a given poet and even if they are not among the best of his poems considered
from an artistic point of view. (pp. 1–2)
Since public recital is the dominant function of this collection, poems that
show no “recital interest, even if they are good from a poetic point of view” may
be excluded. But despite the more limited aims of his collection compared with
those of Asher Barash, Meytus continues to obey the rules in terms of which a
tradition is fabricated over the course of a shared national historical progression.
This is reflected in the chronological ordering of the poems: the anthology con-
tains 200 years of poetry, says Meytus, “with all its progressive periods, stylistic
changes, and formal alterations. This date order is doubly beneficial for the reader,
whose sequential reading will enable him to judge the diversity and wealth of the
poetic repertoire our literature contains, and to learn to recognize its different
metamorphoses.”
What emerges clearly from this citation is that Meytus, despite having defined
his anthology as seeking to fulfill the specific public function of recital (a function
that deviates from the lyric ideal, which is apparently based on anti-functionalist
and universalist criteria of poetic quality), nevertheless confirms the status of the
comprehensive anthology as the tool of inclusive national representation, since it
becomes the normative model that Meytus himself employs in editing his own
recital-oriented anthology.
Both Meytus’s anthology and that of Barash reiterate the accepted view of the
development of the new Hebrew poetry, which H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik had al-
ready enshrined. Given his desire to institute a common and continuous national
history of poetry from the perspective of the “National Revival,” Bialik points to
Rabbi Moshe Haim Luzzatto as the pioneer who made the beginnings of Haskalah
literature accord with the coming into being of a new national literature. In his
mystical and romantic reading of Luzzatto, which was to be highly influential for
Hebrew literary historiography, especially in Fishel Lahfi over’s writings, Bialik pro-
poses Luzzatto as the father of the new national Hebrew literature primarily by
virtue of his fusion of old and new, Jewish and foreign European. After 400 years
of secret existence in the world of the kabbalah, Hebrew poetry emerged, says
Bialik, at the time of Shabbetai Zevi during the seventeenth century, through
Luzzatto’s “volcanic eruption” that restored it to the light of day. “Luzzatto,” writes
Bialik, “was also the first European in Hebrew poetry.” It was through
his poetic spirit’s harmonious coupling of the might of the Bible and the pleas-
antness of the German language, that he delivered unto us a fine and pleasant
fusion. He used a meter poised between ancient and European ones and found
once again the route to the revival of our poetry, and it is for this reason I see
Rabbi Moshe H fi aim Luzzatto as the father of the new Hebrew poetry whose
existence continues into the present.14
Elsewhere, Bialik emphasizes Luzzatto’s internal contradictions as the source

of inner wealth. Reliance on this inner wealth lends his character universal power,
which enables Bialik to present Luzzatto as a messianic-national poet. It is through
coupling Luzzatto’s ideological commitments to the form of the lyric that Bialik
is able to present him as the forerunner of the new national culture. Through
attributing to Luzzatto’s poetry inherent power stemming from the inner depths
of his soul rather than being imposed on him from some external source, Bialik
is able to invest Luzzatto with a type of national Zionist authority capable of serving
as a model for the fashioning of the new Jew who derives his strength and life’s
meaning from universally accepted values of inspiration and spiritual power. For
“all of these contraries were united in the heart of the ‘young of Padua,’ the man
whose destiny it would be to bring the literature of Israel from the lowest point of
its degradation—to extract from within the very depths of [this literature’s] being—
the great message of awakening and renewal, the message of the Revival.”15
These historiographic assumptions achieved wide currency in Hebrew litera-
ture between the two world wars. Taviov’s anthology16 —encompassing texts from
the time of Menakhem ben Sarug’s early contributions to medieval Spanish poetry
up to the work of Immanuel Francish in Italy—represents yet another prime ex-
ample of the sheer ease with which they were naturalized. Taviov’s introduction
sketches the development of Hebrew poetry, positing Luzzatto as the chief initiator
of the national turn in the history of Hebrew poetry.
fi alutz Anthology
Nationalism and the H
The need to construct national historical continuity in the Hebrew poetry an-
thologies of the twenties and thirties is not uniformly central. Earlier stages of the
development of the poetry anthology in Eretz Yisrael show no such pretensions to
the authoritative historical narrative of the national development of the new He-
brew poetry. In 1904, at the tail end of the First Aliyah and in the early days of
the Second Aliyah, a small volume of poetry entitled Kinor tsiyon [Harp of Zion]
appeared. Its 1914 edition contained “fifty national and folk songs currently sung
in the cities and settlements of the Holy Land,” and its editor was Abraham Moses
Luntz, a researcher of the land of Israel and a publisher.17 The territory to which
Luntz’s work lays claim was defined by him in quintessentially national terms.
The collection was “one of the basic and most important devices in the cultural
inventory of the elders of the Yishuv, and it accompanied them to every public
forum.”18 The title of the collection, which was reprinted in seven editions, was
drawn from the Zionist songbook Kinor tsiyon, which the Tushiya publishing
house published in Warsaw in 1900, just before the Fourth World Zionist Congress
in London.19
In contrast to the universal facade of the lyric in Barash’s anthology, Luntz’s
work uses more disparate elements, which will ultimately create a very different
collective image from the national-universalist one fostered toward the late thirties.
Luntz’s anthology had an explicit function: it was a songbook of national poems.
Its authority derived from its use as a collection of songs “currently sung in the
cities and settlements of the Holy Land.” But instead of a general national au-
thority presaged on a historical narrative—an authority that makes claims for the
continuity and homogeneity of the national narrative whose individual poems are
welded together to tell of the development of a national poetry having a fixed
national and historical common denominator—Luntz’s anthology displays a rather

more modest collective image, whose transient authority is born of actual circum-
stance. Luntz himself emphasizes this facet of his collection through entitling his
introduction Zemanim ahfi erim: Shirim ahfi erim (Other Times: Other Songs):20
If you want to know the status of a given nation, its programs and goals at a given
period, pay attention to the songs of that generation, for every generation has its
own songs. And the visions of the long life of our nation can be viewed as if in
a polished mirror in its poetry from “Then sang Moses and the Children of Israel”
to the songs of our contemporary songwriters. Our generation is the generation
of revival. Our people has arisen from its long dreams and slumber: seeing that
time has misinterpreted them, it has begun to strive with all its might for a new
life. New poets have arisen to pluck the strings of their harps, and new songs have
been aired, songs of awakening. Many are these songs at present that would imbue
our people with energetic desire and fierce enthusiasm, and it is common now-
adays for those present at social gatherings to request, “Sing us one of the songs
of Zion.” But not everyone knows these songs by heart; thus, we have attempted
to gather the best and most appreciated of these songs into a single collection
printed on good-quality paper, in the hope that the honorable public will be well
disposed to this collection, which will be our reward.21
The fact that the organizing principle behind Kinor tsiyon is not historical but
is rooted in actual circumstances of performance in a given place and time by
given participants is reflected in the heterogeneity of this anthology, which does
not require any uniformity from its constituents. Unlike other songbooks, which
gradually became a “natural” component of popular Hebrew culture in Eretz
Yisrael (and which fall beyond the scope of this discussion), Luntz’s anthology still
makes no clear distinction between the songbook per se and the poetry anthology.
So folk songs that exist only in oral performance, like Hfi ushu ahfi im hfi ushu [Hasten
Brothers, Hasten] by N. Pines are found side by side with poems like Masat nafshi
[My Soul’s Desire] by M. Z. Mane, or Hatikvah (The Hope) by N. H. Imber,
which—in addition to being sung—are assured of a place in the canon of high
Hebrew lyric poetry. But this dependence on actual conditions also deprives
Luntz’s anthology of its authority as a persistent and stable national representation
with long-term validity extending from the present into the future. The national
image created by Luntz’s anthology is a particularistic one of a community or
grouping whose claims and expectations are far more circumscribed than those
that characterize the modernist national consciousness.
This type of modest national orientation persisted into later years. The hall-
mark of this nonuniversalist and limited national self-representation lies in its re-
gionalism, its rootedness in the locale of Eretz Yisrael. The national territory was
still not perceived in abstract terms as possessing universal meaning for the nation
as a whole—in accordance with the universal norm of freedom, and rootedness
in the nation’s own land. Rather, the space of Eretz Yisrael was seen in terms of
belonging concretely to concrete locations: a belonging brought about through
the pioneer’s, or hfi aluts’s, manual labor. Thus, for example, the pioneers’ poetry
from the time of the Third Aliyah onward is seen as the local expression of native
inhabitants anchored in their soil and their land. Such poems appeared in the
anthology Hahfi alutsim, which M. Narkis edited in 1925 and which was illustrated
by the artist Meir Gur-Aryeh, an associate of the Bezalel Art Academy. The an-
thology’s chief goal is evident in its albumlike coupling of the poetic texts with
Gur-Aryeh’s silhouettes so as to construct this cultural product as a popular na-
tional one, depicting the poetry of the hfi alutsim as representative of a popular
stratum of the people. With the exception of three texts, all the poems (which
include musical notes) are anonymous. The cutout silhouette illustrations, says
Narkis in his preface, are also intended as a link in the long chain of popular
Jewish art. The poems were selected not on the basis of their universal esthetic
worth, or for their individual folk characteristics, but according to the criterion of
their appropriateness in terms of the popular whole that the anthology sought to
create. “I am aware of the difficulty of collecting these poems,” writes Narkis,
“especially when their poetic worth is so limited and even when their popular
status is in doubt.”22
While emphasizing the populist goal of the anthology, its editor nevertheless
does not downplay the artificiality inherent in creating this effect. For this reason,
he juxtaposes both the popular and the ethnographic principles, and even fashions
a historiographic hypothesis regarding Hebrew poetry’s neglect of the topic of the
hfi aluts:
As we have noted, this movement [of the hfi alutsim] is held not to have
influenced Hebrew poetry at all (except for a few individual and isolated cases:
in poems and idylls). But if we are honest with ourselves, we will not reject the
matter out of hand. We are dealing with the question of an elemental force, and
only by virtue of the confusion of our tongues [Yiddish and Hebrew] have we
lost hfi aluts poetry.
This poetry has, however, a popular and ethnographic basis, and anyone
tracing the development of these poems will sooner or later witness and discover
gradual refinement.23
Populist characteristics are identified here with Yiddish, whose decline in

prestige vis-à-vis Hebrew is held to have had an adverse effect on popular texts,
whether those written by the hfi alutsim or those that they sang: texts valued more
for their tunes than for their verbal patterning. The latter poems, writes Narkis,
were included “only in a small number of cases, where they displayed the special
originality of life on the roads.”24
Canonical hfi aluts “Labor poetry” (presumably that of Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avra-
ham Shlonsky, Yitshfi ak Lamdan, and others) is presented as “really” bearing little
connection with the popular hfi alutsic tradition. The valorization of the local, and
the specific group expression of the hfi aluts as a national archetype, found their
expression in the creation of a poetry anthology that fashioned a nonuniversal
national image, in opposition to the canonical stance of Hebrew poetry in Eretz
Yisrael of the period. Unlike one of the founding assumptions of the canon, which
saw in the pioneer (someone in advance of the camp) the incisive embodiment
of national universal values, Narkis’s anthology (which included texts of recognized
poets alongside anonymous folk- or “road-paving” work songs) promulgates the
alternative image of a local collective—an image sharply at odds with the tradition
of modern national Hebrew poetry.
Politics and Anthological Warfare

There would be no successors to this type of specific anthology, whose represen-
tativeness does not obey the demands of universal or pan-national representation.
The highly crystalized nature of the field of Hebrew culture in Eretz Yisrael in
effect invested the anthological act with considerable power: the very act of col-
lating poems into a single volume itself became the immediate symbol of a general
national representation. Such a stance was still problematic, however, during the
1920s. The second half of the decade would witness the politicization of Hebrew
poetry in Eretz Yisrael. The basic principles of an all-embracing nationalism (in
terms of which the shared image of the hfi aluts as depicted in Shirat haavodah
[Labor Poetry] had been central) began to be criticized. The poetry of the extreme
leftist Lyova Almi, and later, even more powerfully, that of Uri Zvi Greenberg,
rewrote the central representations of Eretz Yisraeli poetry, and the hfi aluts began
to be perceived as the site of contest rather than consensus. In a series of poetic
interventions, these avant garde poets attacked the foundations of Shirat haavodah,
its agricultural metaphors, its compositions—which were well on the way to be-
coming a national teleology—and especially, the taken-for-granted continuity that
Shirat haavodah constructed between the individual hfi aluts, whose body bears the
suffering of the Zionist revolution in Eretz Yisrael, and the political leaders of this
revolution—leaders that the avant garde sees as having abandoned or cynically
exploited this suffering to their own political ends.25
One direct result of such exacerbated politicization was the conflict between
the two rival factions of Eretz Yisraeli poetry, which reached its peak in the mid-
thirties. One camp centered on the dominant presence of Uri Zvi Greenberg,
turned to the Expressionist poetry of national messianic aspirations. It generated a
blunt form of poetic discourse that stood in almost total opposition to any of the
forms of Eretz Yisraeli Hebrew culture. The second camp, led by Avraham Shlon-
sky, had begun from the early thirties to crystalize around an abstract symbolism,
having universal-existential claims that reached their epitome in Shlonsky’s Avnei
bohu (Stones of Chaos), published in 1934.26
When, in 1932, Avraham Shlonsky published Lo tirtsahfi : Yalqut qatan shel
shirim neged hamilhfi amah on the eighteenth anniversary of World War I, all its
texts—with the exception of those by Avigdor Hameiri, who was prominently
identified with anti-war literature—were translations of European poetry. The po-
ems of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ernst Toller, Noel Martine, Karl Otto, and others
are collected here in an act that displaces the discussion from the polarized field
of Zionist national culture in Eretz Yisrael to the world of Europe. It is only in
his introduction to the anthology that Shlonsky refers to the political situation of
Eretz Yisrael. He links the pacifist spirit of the anthology to Eretz Yisraeli politics
and compares the rift dividing the Zionist right and left to the political polarization
of Europe in the wake of World War I. The European right and its Eretz Yisraeli
counterpart, claims Shlonsky, share an admiration for political messianism, while

both support Fascist-style militarism and violence:
For even in our circles, even before we have achieved sovereignty or its symbols,
the “lead soldiers” of extreme nationalism have been clamoring continuously for
years. We have youth, leaders, and a party in our midst, who have made brute
force into the symbol of revival, who sanctify the symbols of bravery and extol
the outer trappings of hollow militarism.27
Here, Shlonsky takes aim at all those who “have taken upon themselves to set
this mental intoxication to poetry in the best rhythms and rhymes, and to infiltrate
the Israeli poetic brew with such notions as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘vision’ ” (p. 31). But
there can be no doubt that his main target is Uri Zvi Greenberg, whom he openly
attacked for his political and literary views, singling him out as someone who had
wrought militaristic changes in the hfi alutsic ethos, during the course of which:
“ ‘barracks’ terminology has been infused into the poetry of the Messiah and the
Kingdom of the House of David” (p. 31).
Shlonsky chose to stage his opposition to Uri Zvi Greenberg and to the acute
political polarization characteristic of the Eretz Yisraeli Hebrew culture of the time
through the medium of his essays rather than in poetry. Shlonsky left poetry out-
side the theater of direct conflict, thus enacting—and testifying to—the distance
his school sought to establish between poetry, on the one hand, and overt public
or political engagement, on the other. While war and military conflict could le-
gitimately serve as the subject of an anthology of poetry, for Shlonsky and his
increasingly powerful school, such issues could be addressed only through the
indirect channels of universalist pacifism, which distances its testimony from the
military dimensions of the local arena, through the inclusion of translated poetry
rather than Hebrew poetry, which is represented discursively only in an analytical
manner and only in his opening essay.
The Consummation of the Nationalist Anthology

In 1936, at the start of the great Arab rebellion known to the yishuv as the “1936
riots,” another anthology appeared, Shirat hadamim: Qovets shirim mitovei me-
shorereinu al meoraot tartsav. The members of Shlonsky’s school were not rep-
resented here (with the exception of the marginally affiliated Yaakov Orland).
Instead, one finds the marked presence of people like Saul Tchernichowsky, David
Shimonowitz, and Yehudah Karni, who belonged to previous generations of He-
brew poets; some of Shlonsky’s contemporaries, like S. Shalom and Avraham Broy-
des; and even younger poets, like Moshe [Tabenkin], who were unaffiliated with
Shlonsky’s school or coterie.
In the introduction, entitled Bli hfi aruzim [Without Rhymes], Avigdor Hameiri
(who was associated with right-wing factions of Eretz Yisraeli politics) formulated
a national apologetics for the involvement of poetry in current affairs. His starting
point was the moral or universalistic inquiry whether the Zionist refusal to rec-
ognize the Arab rebellion as a national one stemmed merely from the particularism
of the Zionist perspective. Hameiri’s emphatic answer was that the contrary, in
fact, held, and that “we are faced with the loathsome nature of the rebellions: the
overlords of property and pleasures are employing the miserable oppressed stratum
to increase its own oppression, and to eliminate both soap and the candle from
the dark and musty tent of the Bedouin or fellahfi [peasant].”28 Only after this
categorical refusal and after reiterating the morality of the Jewish position in the
Jewish conflict with the Arabs does Hameiri discuss war poetry, justifying it as a
form of national expression that gives primacy to universal or moral issues that
stand beyond all esthetic considerations. The fact that “included in this collection
you will find poems whose artistic value does not enhance it” testifies to an alter-
native viewpoint. It reflects the opinion of those who hold that “I am forbidden
to keep silent on this good occasion. That is to say, let me join the chorus, let me
raise my voice in the national performance [literally, hfi azzanut, or ceremonial
chanting] that is eagerly attended by many ears. Such individuals also find their
place here. And they are also worthy of it. If not their artistic worth, surely their
moral worth justifies their being and their inclusion” (pp. 4–5).
The dominant strategy in Shirat hadamim represents the national position as
a universalist and a moral one. This strategy eventually culminates in the fusion
of nationalist morality with the national needs of the local Eretz Yisraeli collective.
It is only after he has established the larger nationalism that Hameiri, in the
conclusion to his introduction, reveals its local or Eretz Yisraeli functionality: “As
for the Israeli moral or human function of these poems: more than a generations-
old lament, they unite into a rousing victory chorus. This is not the Book of
Lamentations . . . not the complaint of death but a ground plan for the eternity of
Israel” (p. 6).
But what, in 1936, is for Hameiri still the subject of polemical contest and
proof appears slightly later as the self-evident subject of consensus. Asher Barash’s
anthology, published only two years later, already assumes the Eretz Yisraeli na-
tionalist ideology to be self-evident. Here, the Eretz Yisraeli national center is held
to be of primary importance. The entire development of Hebrew poetry over the
preceding 200 years is represented as progressing toward its Zionist fulfillment in
Eretz Yisrael. Further proof of this is found in the year of publication of Barash’s
anthology when the Antologya shel shirah ivrit baameriqa [Anthology of Hebrew
Poetry in America] appears under Menahfi em Ribolov’s editorship. In order to de-
cide whether to include a given poet in the anthology, the editor found it sufficient
for America to have served as a stage in his development (in a trajectory that often
leads to Eretz Yisrael), thus reaffirming the peripheral nature of the Hebrew center
in the United States vis-à-vis its Eretz Yisraeli counterpart.29
Nationalist Anthologies and Universal History

Immediately hereafter, during the Second World War and later, during the strug-
gle for independence and the 1948 war, the anthology of Hebrew poetry became
established as a quintessentially Eretz Yisrael institution. The pan-national and
regionalist representations fuse so that the moral-universalistic stance and the lo-
calist one unite into a single central nationalist affirmation. Thus, even though
anthologies dealing with the war and the military struggle against the Arab nations
do appear at this time, the national framework goes unchallenged, and the Eretz
Yisraeli arena becomes the most natural stage for the national representation of
Hebrew poetry. The substitution of more specific anthologies for the comprehen-
sive and lyric-oriented one augments—rather than diminishes—the anthology’s
universalist dimensions: the shift rendered the elevated and harmonious represen-
tation supposedly inhering in the lyric an overt source of collective resources and
a tool of the struggle.
Shlonsky’s poetic school, which valorized this universalist conception of the
lyric, was then at the height of its powers. In 1941, Shlonsky edited a representative
collection of the school’s contribution, entitled Shishah pirqei shirah [Six Chapters
of Poetry],30 which included the work of Refael Eliaz, Natan Alterman, Yocheved
Bat-Miriam, Leah Goldberg, Alexander Penn, and Shlonsky himself. But the
school’s most dominant imprint lay in the translations contained in one of the
best-known anthologies of the period, Shirat rusyah [Russian Poetry], which ap-
peared in 1942, at the height of the war years, and which was jointly edited by
Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg. Published by Haqibbuts Haartsi Hashomer Hatsair,
this anthology expressed a universal humanism, in the light of the editors’ and
publishers’ identification with the Soviet Union’s struggle against Nazism. As was
the case with the esthetic and ideological assumptions of Barash’s anthology, here
too a refined universalism (in whose name the anthology claims to speak) serves
to ground all historical occurrences. The events of the day and its political trends
did not move Shlonsky from his commitment to a position that derived its hege-
monic authority from the universal. Whereas in Barash’s anthology, esthetic ideals
fostered the Zionist spirit of the nation, Shirat rusyah renders central the lyric as
the source of those moral qualities that unite all humanity—including the Jewish
people—in its struggle against the common enemy during this dark historical
hour:
Yalqut shirat haamim [Compendium of Poetry of the Peoples]—this is an inclu-
sive name for six poetic sequences conceived as one unit of the new world poetry
across its various nations and tongues—especially in lyric form—texts that begin
with Russia, not necessarily for formal reasons. The intention is not to such-and-
such selected poetry or to so-and-so unique poets of genius. The intention is to
sketch the portrait of a generation, [to write] its moral biography, which achieves
its highest expression in each language and each nation through the medium of
poetry. Poetry—which is apparently the expression of a particular period—speaks
to all periods precisely by virtue of this fact. [Poetry is] apparently the introspective
dialogue of a generation addressing its own heart, and of each individual nation
addressing its own soul. But ultimately, [it is] a single chorus of the nations of
the world. For each and every generation fashions through its poetry (in its general
ensemble rather than through the individual play of poets of genius) its own
character; and in the essence of its being, all true poetry is rooted in the here
and now: springs from its own place, suckles [the milk] of its own times. Because
it aims to express the essence of what is human, the boundaries of time and place
are necessarily violated and poetry ascends the intergenerational and international
bridge of the human spirit. And it is appropriate for the poetry collected here to
open this series of collective confessions—regarding the emotions of a generation,
its high and low tides, its hates and loves. It will certainly be said in the annals
of this generation: this was a hard-hearted generation of sinners that nevertheless
sought redemption and atonement.31
In 1943, when the Holocaust was at its peak, a literary critic identified with
Hashomer Hatsair and the left, Azriel Schwartz (who later called himself Uch-
mani), edited a small anthology called Alei teref: Mishirei haamim bamilhfi amah.
Its poems, which had appeared in contemporary periodicals, were to be judged
“not according to the merit of each poem, but in its ability to join the poetic
chronicle of our times, a tragic chronicle whose beginnings lie twenty-nine years
ago, in that fateful junction between two ‘histories’—that of ‘blood and selfishness’
and that which ‘creates the lives and souls of nations.’ Today it lies in the scaffold
of public execution and horror, in heroism and the sanctification of the name of
humankind, and its end lies in that distant day, whose warm breath is only appre-
hended from time to time by a heart’s guessing.”32
Hebrew poetry is the last of the sections of this book, which contains mostly
representative translations of poetry from Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, Po-
land, England, Greece, Serbia, the U.S.S.R., as well as Yiddish poetry. But the
universal gaze is soon revealed to have a specific political commitment that sees
the U.S.S.R.’s war against Nazi Germany as part of the large struggle of the socialist
camp. The universalist humanism that it sees in the poetry of the Jewish Holocaust
is given a strictly political reading:
It is no coincidence that it is the Jewish poet who is currently voicing the plea
“from the vanities of the monster’s mouth, we beseech, protect the tribe.” [It is
no coincidence] that it is he who waits so eagerly for a day when “all our words
will be told to return from the den of distortion and the grinding of teeth.”
Destiny? Surely. Tragic destiny, but splendor inhabits its margins. In our day, this
bears no name other than socialism. (p. 6)
Accordingly, the historical narrative in whose framework the poems are ordered
presents the socialist interpretation of the Second World War. It is held to derive
from the events of the First World War, which the socialists saw as a conflict
between nationalism/capitalism versus humanism/socialism.
In the anthology that Shlonsky edited two years later, Shirei hayamim: Yalqut
mishirat haolam al milhfi emet haolam, the universalist stance is even more blatant.
Here, the editor in fact declares his intention to use the poems he has anthologized
in order to write a universal history:
Songs of the Days: modeled on the Book of Chronicles. A kind of autobiography
of a generation, written collectively in rhyme. Poetic testimony on the forecasts
and events that opened World War II, on that which preceded it, on the war, the
war itself when it reached fruition, ripe in its sins and its retributions. . . . And
thus, from people to people, from matter to matter. A kind of montage of poems,
which aim to give expression to the major and minor dates of the period. If not
to all of them, at least to most, insofar as they fuse into a general picture, a fabula
of the time, insofar as they are to be read in a manner that differs from the way
anthologies are usually read. That is to say, [they are not to be read] randomly,
but in sequence, one after another, the way one reads a book whose plot unifies
it. . . . The main aim of the book: to focus mental identification on the rage of
men and nations, the lamentations of cities and countries, all plunged alike into
the abyss of blood—and not taken by surprise or overcome by the way of the
world, but intentionally destined to it, for the sins they committed, everyone,
everyone, down to the very last individual.33
The conflict between commitment to hegemonic universalism, on the one
hand, versus the horror of the actual forces ranged against the Jewish people, on
the other, brought Shlonsky, ever loyal to his universalist conceptions, to portray
the Jewish national Holocaust as part—admittedly, the most appalling part—
of the larger world tragedy. “Min hatevahfi ” [From the slaughter], he would write,
is “the name of the Israeli section of this inclusive book. . . . For despite the
uniqueness of our destruction, which is a result of our actual/historical singular
destiny, is it not also ‘inverted,’ the result of the general destiny of the world?
These chronicles prove this in cutting (in both senses of the word!) terms” (p. 6).
Shlonsky fused national and universal destiny through combining his own
poetry with translated poems, as well as by means of a key poem entitled Otot
(Signs), which he wrote specially for the collection. Each of its stanzas serves to
introduce the different sections of the anthology; thus, for example, the section
“Otot,” which deals with the historical buildup to the war in Europe, including
the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi rise to power in Germany and which contains
poems by H. Leyvik, Fritz Brigel, Pablo Neruda, and others, as well as poems by
Shlonsky himself.
Taken as a whole, the poem’s symbolist framework and its plot of lights cul-
minate in the optimistic gesture of “You, and You again, command there will be
light” (p. 6), which interprets actual events in a lyric and universalist fashion. But
in the note concerning the rights of public reading of the collected poems, which
Shlonsky appends in the margins of the anthology—a note that is indicative of
the direct enlistment of the anthology in the national cause—we might discern a
certain confusion of the traditional generic boundaries between written lyric poetry
and poetry for recital. The implicit recommendation that the poems be recited in
public may be linked to the fact that the anthology has as its object indisputably
collective themes—“war,” “bravery,” “illegal immigration to Palestine,” “settle-
ment”—each entailing previously institutionalized and fixed public meanings out-
side of the orbit of poetry. Unlike the collective anthology, which produces and
represents the imagined national community only indirectly in a lyric transcen-
dence of oppositions, now, at the height of the struggle for Independence, we find
the anthology being used more and more frequently as a direct tool of propaganda
bearing instructions to its readers on its public use.
Mapilim: Miqraah lanoar velaam, a work edited by Zvi Zohar and published
in 1940, is a characteristic example of the anthology that engages in specific and
immediate issues in public life. Berl Katzenelson’s address to the Twenty-First
World Zionist Congress opens the volume: an address that links the contemporary
illegal immigration to the ongoing sequence of Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael
as clear expression of “the common Jewish destiny.”34 The anthology contains a
diversity of texts—articles, stories, prose essays, and extracts from plays and po-
etry—which are ordered chronologically to reflect the history of immigration to
Israel from Yehudah Halevi to the refugees fleeing Nazism who had begun to
make their way to Israel from Europe. In the preface to a similar anthology, Pirqei
gevurah, the editor Zerubavel (Glas, and later, Gilad) writes:
This collection is the product of the needs of the hour: tens of thousands of our
friends have joined their units, and are serving in the distant corners of the
world—they require this anthology to assist them on festivals and other occasions
suitable for public reading that are integrated in our lives. [It is also needed] for
reading around the campfire, when out camping, or when marching on the
road.35
One consequence of the dominance of the propaganda function lies in the

blurring of the genres of texts selected now for their direct and overt contribution
to the propaganda effort. In Pirqei gevurah, as well as in its second edition, which
bore the title Moreshet gevurah: Peraqim misifrut yisrael, popular songs stand
alongside canonic poetry, stories, articles, and memoirs. But all are arranged ac-
cording to the chronology of the Jewish national struggle from biblical times
through the period of the Holocaust to the struggle against the British Mandate.
The stated intention is to construct a continuous saga of Jewish heroism, which
unites the Diaspora tradition of martyrdom, or Qiddush Hashem, with the need
for self-defense in such a way that “Jewish self-defense will resound through the
generations as the vision of the heroism of the few who opposed the tsars; those
who extended their necks in powerful exultation of the martyrs and as the mighty
and passionate defenders bearing arms—a source of pride and a fortified wall
against the evildoers. Until this very day.”36
The anthology Lamagen: Pirqei shirah [To the Defender: Selected Poetry],
edited by Yehudit Hendel and published in 1948 by the Information [Hasbarah]
Department of the Executive Committee [Havaad hapoel] of the General Labor
Union [Histadrut haklalit shel haovdim], is devoted entirely to poetry, but its
didactic intent is underscored by its glossaries as well as by its blurring of the
boundaries between “high” and “low” texts; between translated and original texts;
and between the lyric and poetic prose. It includes biblical extracts, Yiddish poems,
popular songs (Natan Alterman’s Zemer haplugot [Song of the Brigades], for in-
stance), and canonic poetry by Alterman, Saul Tchernichowsky, and others.
A similar heterogeneity marks other literary and documentary works published
during the war, collections devoted to contemporary literary products that sought
transparently to reflect the events of the time. Thus, for example, we have Beiqvot
lohfi amim: Mivhfi ar reportaz'im meet tseva haganah urshimot midivrei yishuvim
bamaarakhah [In the Footsteps of Soldiers: Selected Reports from Defense-Force
Writers and Notes from Front-Line Settlements], which appeared in 1949, or the
collection Qeshet sofrim: Yalqut ledivrei sifrut shel sofrim hfi ayalim [The Writer’s
Bow: A Collection of the Literary Output of Soldier Writers], published under
Moshe Shamir’s editorial direction in 1949 by the cultural wing of the IDF press
(Hotzaat Sherut Hatarbut Shel Tseva Haganah Leyisrael). The latter anthology
contained poetry, stories, and articles. Despite the fact that it is supposedly a col-
lection produced by “soldier writers,” the presence of writers of the generation of
the Palmahfi and of Shlonsky’s successors among the poets of the forties—Ayin
Hillel, Binyamin Galay, and H fi aim Guri—is marked.
The Boundaries of an Anthology

For the anthologies of war literature published during the war, national engage-
ment seemed to be a dictate of reality. But in 1948, when H fi aim Toren published
his Shirei ahavah beyisrael, we find the same overt nationalist criteria still in force.
The guiding principle is encoded in the full title of the work: Shirei ahavah
beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad yameinu. The editor took pains to imbue the anthology
with the appearance of continuity through the inclusion of biblical texts (from
Genesis, the Song of Songs, and Proverbs), the literature of the aggadah, medieval
Spanish poetry, Hebrew poetry composed in Italy, Haskalah poetry, H fi ibbat Tsiyon
poetry, revival poetry, all alongside the early modernists, as well as the modernists
of the thirties and forties. These texts are included in the anthology under the
rubric of common national sources. The chronological organization of the work
is constantly interrupted through deviations, such as the placing of extracts from
the Song of Songs at the end of the sequence, thus ensuring a cyclicity that unifies
the sequence into a kind of synchronous existence through returning to the bib-
lical period with which it begins.
The editor chose to open the anthology with Yaakov Fichman’s preface, Al
shirat haahavah besifrut yisrael, where he narrates the history of Hebrew love
poetry as a form of national teleology. In the same way that morality provided the
universalist underpinnings for the representation of national culture in the an-
thologies of war poetry, so do Eros and love perform a similar function here:
Love, which is the yeast of experience, is also the yeast of poetry. From time
immemorial, poetry has seen love as the root of all growth, of every great awak-
ening in the human heart or in nature. All folk poetry begins with it, blossoms
with it. . . . Love poetry teaches one of the uniqueness of the individual soul, and
of the nation as a whole. Just as each individual loves differently, so each nation
loves differently.37
Fichman proceeds to recount the development of Hebrew love poetry as a national

saga, where, for example:
The Song of Songs is the most complete and full expression of Israel’s affinity for
love and nature, which fuse together in all true lyric poetry. . . . But the erotic
song, which flows forth from the heart of the shepherd in the Song of Songs
under a burning sun, is completely cut off. There is not a single love poem in
Hebrew literature until the Spanish period. This was one of the most harsh signs
of Diaspora. It reveals a kind of fear of life and love of life. The national genius
was forced into a dim corner: the light of religion and the Torah absorbed all
other sources of light. And while there can be no doubt that the masses of the
people expressed the delight of their spring in oral poetry, no written traces have
survived. (pp. 5–6)
The metaphor of poetry as life and vice versa becomes the central figure for
the fusion of the metamorphoses of poetry and the metamorphoses of the nation
into one homogeneous tale. Thus, the story reaches its climax with the poetry of
Bialik and his generation in the Zionist narrative in Eretz Yisrael:
Particular mention must be made of the young Hebrew poetry that Erets Israel
has generated—this cult of dawn that has derived sustenance from our new life.
This is a special case—the first pages of a new story in poetry as well as in life.
It has one color, one rhythm. Certainly, all great love is blessed with joy and with
pain—this has its character since the Song of Songs until the present: anxiety
and security are always bound up in it together. Nevertheless, the love poetry that
accompanies the new flowering is more the poetry of day, of the sun-filled with
the light of renewed experience. (p. 19)
The editor, Toren, in his afterword, similarly reiterates the storytelling mold
that identifies love poetry with Jewish existence in its homeland, and the absence
of love poetry with the experience of the Diaspora. The exception that proves the
rule is Hebrew poetry in Spain and Italy. Like Fichman, Toren progresses inex-
orably to Eretz Yisrael, where, in the boundaries of the motherland, hammer meets
anvil—and the ears are open and ready to absorb the abundance of sounds and
voices. Here, nature and love poetry are heard in their full power and momentum,
as is appropriate to a people undergoing an awakening of body and soul.38
But the process of fashioning a national image by means of love poetry also
involves confronting questions of gender identity in the individual/national love
story. When the editor comments on the inclusion of women poets in the an-
thology, his intervention comes to be a complex form of exclusion. To justify their
inclusion, he relies on the notion of national fulfillment in Eretz Yisrael: “The
very appearance of a group39 of Hebrew women poets is a great innovation (Eli-
sheva, Rahfi el, Y. Bat-Miriam, Anda Pinkerfeld, Leah Goldberg, and others). Their
coming reveals to us the inner world of the woman, and elucidates something of
the secret of her being, in all its delicate and complex experiences” (p. 342).
When the discussion turns to the inclusion of women, the norm of the in-
dividual lyric is suspended. Instead, Toren uses the metaphor lahakat meshorerot
(“flock of women poets”), translating the traditional metaphor of the lyric as a
form of birdsong (Goethe) into the collective formulation of a flock of birds.
Women writers’ contribution to the institution of imagined nationalism is made
possible here through their enclosure within a stereotype, whereby they are the
collective representatives of the female in national culture and are supposed to
embody this femininity through such “female” qualities as gentleness, irrational-
ism, and secret mystery. Since they fulfill the legitimate norms of nationalism, the
national hegemony grants them a space of inclusion, but it does so within rigidly
defined and circumscribed limits.
The contemporary equivalent to Toren’s Shirei ahavah beyisrael is the an-
thology Shirat haamal, edited by Pesahfi Ginzburg. Ginzburg chose a topic like
Labor, whose national implications are unmatched. “Labor poetry” reached its
zenith in the days of the Third and Fourth Aliyah. The historical specificity of
the phenomenon is made by the anthology into a pan-national one, which is
invested with a continuity stretching from the days of the Bible until present times.
The continuity of Jewish culture is absorbed into the continuity of the Zionist
culture of the day. This inclusive representation also assumes Eretz Yisrael affili-
ation to be the turning point in the development of the poetic corpus. As we have
already noted regarding Toren, here, too, there is total overlap between the de-
velopment of the poetry and the Zionist teleology:
The song of the land—how fundamentally it differs from Hebrew poetry in the
Diaspora. Diaspora poetry is no more, and while most of the Diaspora poets have
settled in Israel, their immigration has produced a new melody in their poetry.
This is the melody of a special type of rejoicing, the rejoicing of workers, the
reward of productive labor, which was almost unmentioned in Hebrew Diaspora
poetry despite the fact that it treated other human issues. And wonder of wonders:
this “new” song contains the echoes of a very ancient one indeed: the song of
“they that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” This melody, thousands of years old,
was preserved for a wandering people in the sacred parchments and whispered
prayers, where the people throughout its wandering sought union with its God
and with its devastated, far-off land. It seems that these echoes grew more and
more faint until the people returned to beautify the dust of its land.40
In Shirat haamal, however, as in the other anthologies, the organizing agency
may be seen to produce the inclusive and seemingly natural representation
through the deferral of conflicts and the exclusion of dissident elements for the
construction of the shared imagined nationality. Once again, the anthology seeks
out the alibi of “writing in Hebrew” in order to disguise a much larger system of
constraints affecting participation in a representative anthology of Hebrew poetry.
It is not the criterion of the Hebrew language, but norms concerning ethnicity,
class perspectives, religious and gender identity that establish which texts may
legitimately be included in the pages of the anthology. Thus, despite his stated
commitment to the tradition of the theme of work in Hebrew poetry, Ginzburg
consistently refuses to include in his anthology all political or class-bound repre-
sentations of work produced in Eretz Yisrael, such as the proletarian poetry of
Lyova Almi or Alexander Penn. Instead, his evidence is distanced in both time
and space to alight on the work of the Hebrew socialists Morris Winchevsky (Ben-
Netz) and Yitshfi ak Kaminer, written in the Diaspora in the period of H fi ibbat Tsi-
yon. The exclusion of unworthy candidates is, once again, the gesture that fixes
the legitimate boundaries of the national anthology, rather than the use of Hebrew
in and of itself.
Lyric and the Universal Nationalist Experience

In the afterword to Shirei ahavah beyisrael, Hfi aim Toren testifies to having spent
about four years editing the volume—that is to say, from the period of the world
war and the Holocaust to the appearance of the book in 1948. But alongside this
admission, Toren stresses his didactic motives (p. 342). In this sense, his antholo-
gizing gesture serves to transplant the literary act far from the arena of suffering
and death, which was so directly and strongly felt at the time. So once again,
under the guise of its universalism, nationalist discourse evades direct confronta-
tion with the events and polarizations of its period, just as the anthology once
again achieves its status as representation through the displacement of deferral of
oppositions and incommensurate fragments.
In this sense, even the historically comprehensive anthology such as Shirah

ivrit: Antologyah shel hashirah haivrit hahfi adashah meramhfi al vead yameinu,
which Yitshfi ak Ogen edited, still constitutes a form of displacement. Retrospec-
tively, viewed in the wake of the Holocaust, it seems to attempt a nostalgic pres-
ervation of the world of Jewish culture that had been destroyed. And it is not alone
in this respect. H. B. Ayalon-Bernik’s 1946 anthology Hayo haya maaseh: Folqlor
shel yehudei mizrahfi europah [Once upon a Time: Folklore of the Jews of Eastern
Europe] explicitly inscribes itself as seeking to save the spiritual possession of Eu-
ropean Jewry. Ogen, one of the central authors in the group affiliated with the
periodical Gilyonot, edited by Yitshfi ak Lamdan, seems to have sought to use his
anthology to invest the poetic voice with public and national authority and legit-
imacy—a poetic voice, however, which spoke in accordance with a Bialikan po-
etics that was already beginning to be seen as outmoded during the early forties.
Although intended as part of a series stretching into the present, the anthology
had no successor—and it ended, in fact, with the poetry of the H fi ibbat Tsiyon
movement. But the presence of Bialik and his generation is inescapable, especially
in Ogen’s treatment of Luzzatto as someone who sought “to redeem the people
so that its redemption is a redemption of experience itself in the mystical appre-
hension of the Hebrews. [Luzzatto] opened new horizons for Hebrew poetry, using
it in the quest for the people’s redemption.”41 Similarly, Ogen proposes a nostalgic
and anachronistic reading of Haskalah and H fi ibbat Tsiyon poetry in the shadow
of the Holocaust:
While its primary orientation concerns social questions, throughout its course it
shows a strong and emphatic individualistic principle. . . . Poetry deals with the
public and its needs, serving as a mouthpiece for its preoccupations, but it nev-
ertheless does not neglect the general human problems of the individual, or
purely artistic problems. These are refined, exposed, and commemorated in ex-
pression, in imagery, in vision and character. (p. 2)
Unlike the almost compulsory attitude of disparagement toward the poetry of

the Haskalah, brought about largely because of the interventions of Shlonsky and
his associates42 in the wake of the devastation of the European Diaspora, the em-
phasis shifts to a late rehabilitation of the poetry of the Haskalah. The overall
organizing principle of the anthology still manifests the same fixed tension between
the romantic nationalist stance and the recognition of the rationalism and rhetoric
of Haskalah poetry. But Ogen seeks to overcome this tension, to espouse two
incommensurate positions simultaneously in the cause of the construction of a
consensual, continuous framework for the national literature. Thus, on the one
hand, he states his editorial policy to have privileged “the individual lyric principle
in the work of each poet,” over “the social publicist” elements, which are in turn
privileged over “epic principles” (p. 4). But on the other hand, he declares his
intention to familiarize the reader and the student with the poetry of Haskalah
and H fi ibbat Tsiyon (p. 2).
In the wake of the Holocaust, the fixed model of the universalist representation
of the national experience through the individualist lyric emerges as the most
effective and most widespread means of instituting a shared national image by

means of the Hebrew anthology.
Notes
1. Asher Barash, foreword to A Selection of the New Hebrew Poetry [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv,
1938).
2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1991).
3. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 157–60.
4. Jerusalem, 1948.
5. Tel Aviv, 1936.
6. Moreshet gevurah: Peraqim misifrut yisrael [The Legacy of Heroism: Chapters from
the Literature of Israel] (Jerusalem, 1948).
7. yli—!y"nh. " —al" —!Wht.y ;w . yli—!y"n>h"—!yDE. Dov Sadan, “Poetry and Its Selection,” in Avnei
bedeq: Al sifruteinu, masdah vaanafeha [Stones of Repair: About our Literature, Its Foun-
dations and Its Branches] (Tel Aviv, 1962), p. 69.
8. Yehuda Ratsabi, ed., Shirat teiman haivrit (leqet nivhfi ar) [Yemenite Hebrew Poetry
(Selections)] (Tel Aviv, 1989).
9. Hazan Efraim, ed., Hashirah haivrit bitsfon afriqa [Hebrew Poetry in North Africa]
(Jerusalem, 1995).
10. Y[aakov] F[ichman], “The Selection of New Hebrew Poetry” [Hebrew], Moznayim
6 (1937–38):399.
11. Hannan Hever, Bishvi hautupia [Captives of Utopia] (Kiryat Sde Boker, 1995),
pp. 95–177.
12. Tel Aviv, 1937.
13. Foreword to Shirateinu hahfi adashah: Liqutim lemiqra uldiqlum [Our New Poetry:
Compilations for Reading and Recital] (Tel Aviv, 1938).
14. Hfi . N. Bialik, Devarim shebeal-pe [Oral Presentations], 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1935), 2:
17–18.
15. Hfi . N. Bialik, “ ‘The Young of Padua,’ with the Publication of The Book of Plays
by Ramhfi al” [Hebrew], in Divrei sifrut [On Literature] (Tel Aviv, 1974), p. 137.
16. Y. H. Taviov, Otsar hashirah vehamelitsah [Treasury of Poetry] (Tel Aviv, 1922,
1929).
17. Kinor tsiyon [Harp of Zion] (Jerusalem, 1993 [1914]).
18. “Other Times: Other Songs,” Kinor tsiyon.
19. Eliahu Hakoen, “Introduction to the Facsimile Edition,” Kinor tsion.
20. Shir, the Hebrew term that was used in the original text, covers meanings of both
a poem and a song.
21. “Other Times: Other Songs,” Kinor tsiyon.
22. M. Narkis, preface, Hahfi alutsim [The Pioneers] (Jerusalem, 1925).
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Hannan Hever, Paytanim uviryonim: Tsmihfi at hashir hapoliti bashirah haivrit
beerets yisrael [Poets and Zealots: The Rise of Political Poetry in the Hebrew Poetry in
Eretz Yisrael] (Jerusalem, 1994).
26. Hannan Hever, Bishvi hautopia: Masa al meshihfi iyut ufolitiqah bashirah haivrit
bein shtey milhfi amot haolam [Captive of Utopia: An Essay on Messianism and Politics in
Hebrew Poetry on Eretz Yisrael between the two world wars] (Kiryat Sde Boker, 1996).
27. Avraham Shlonsky, introduction to Lo tirtsahfi : Yalqut qatan shel shirim neged ha-
milhfi amah [Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Small Compilation of Anti-war Poems] (Tel Aviv, 1932),
p. 27.
28. Avigdor Hameiri, “Without Rhymes” [Hebrew], introduction to Shirat hadamim:
Qovets shirim mitovei meshorereinu al meoraot tartsav [The Poetry of Blood: An Anthology
of the Best of Our Poets Concerning the 1936 Riots] (Tel Aviv 1936), p. 4.
29. Menahfi em Ribolov, “Lasefer” [For the Book], Antologyah shel shirah ivrit
baameriqah [Anthology of Hebrew Poetry in America] (New York, 1938), p. 2.
30. Avraham Shlonsky, Shishah pirqei shirah [Six Chapters of Poetry] (Tel Aviv, 1941).
31. Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg, preface to Shirat rusyah [Russian Poetry]
(Tel Aviv, 1942), p. 7.
32. A[zriel] S[chwartz], preface, Alei teref: Mishirei haamim bamilhfi amah [Fallen
Leaves: From the Poems of Peoples at War] (Tel Aviv, 1943), p. 5.
33. Avraham Shlonsky, preface, Shirei hayamim: Yalqut mishirat haolam al milhfi emet
haolam [Poems of the Days: A Collection of World Poetry on the World War] (Tel Aviv,
1945), p. 5.
34. Berl Katzenelson, “Instead of a Preface,” in Zvi Zohar, ed., Mapilim: Miqraah
lanoar velaam [Illegal Immigrants: A Reader for Youth and for the People] (Jerusalem,
1940), p. 8.
35. Zerubavel [Glas], preface, Pirqei gevurah [Chapters of Heroism], 1944.
36. Zerubavel [Glas], preface, Moreshet gevurah: Peraqim misifrut yisrael, p. 3.
37. Yaakov Fichman, “Al shirat haahavah besifrut yisrael” [On the Love Poetry in
the Literature of Israel], in Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad yameinu [Love Poetry
in Israel from Ancient Times to the Present] (Jerusalem, 1948), pp. 1–2.
38. Hfi aim Toren, “With the Book,” in Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad ya-
meinu, pp. 341–42.
39. The Hebrew word is the feminine lahaqah, literally, “flock.”
40. Pesahfi Ginzburg, introduction, Shirat haamal [Work Poetry] (Tel Aviv, 1947), p. 5.
41. Yitshfi ak Ogen, preface, Shirah ivrit: Antologyah shel hashirah haivrit hahfi adashah
meramhfi al vead yameinu [Hebrew Poetry: An Anthology of the New Hebrew Poetry from
Rabbi Moses H fi aim Luzzatto until the Present Day] (Tel Aviv, 1948), p. 6.
42. See esp. Eliezer Steinman’s comments in his Bemizreh hazman [In the Winnow-
ing Shovel of Time] (Tel Aviv, 1931).
16
jeffrey shandler
Anthologizing the
Vernacular
Collections of Yiddish Literature in
English Translation
he cultural value that Jews have long invested in translation and their attraction
T 1
to what David Stern terms the “anthological habit” converge in anthologies
of Yiddish literature in translation. While these collections bear traits in common
with other anthologies in the Jewish library, they are distinguished by the associ-
ation of Yiddish with vernacularity, especially with the particulars of Ashkenazic
vernacular speech and culture as they took shape within a variety of multilingual
Diaspora milieus. Anthologies of modern Yiddish literature translated into English
(the largest corpus of Yiddish belles lettres rendered in a non-Jewish language)
seek to present the unique achievement of this modern secular literature to new
audiences—not only to non-Jews and non-Ashkenazim, but to the growing number
of descendants of Yiddish speakers who no longer speak or read Yiddish and who
have a very different sense of Jewish linguistic and cultural vernacularity than did
their recent forebears. For this reason, these collections are of interest not only as
literary works of translation and canonization, but also as agents of cultural trans-
mission.
My examination of selected anthologies of Yiddish literature in English trans-
lation does not center on issues of literary connoisseurship involved in selecting
and translating works, which have been ably addressed by others.2 Rather, my focus
is on how issues of canon, format, taxonomy, and framing in these volumes relate
to the anthologists’ conceptualization of their respective readers and of the readers’
mission. In each example examined here the mission is, ultimately, extraliterary,
imposing both on the works themselves and on their readers an onus of cultural,
even communal, survival. The volumes I’ve chosen for discussion are therefore
not necessarily those of the highest artistic merit; rather, they articulate the dy-
namic relationship of English-speaking Jews with Yiddish literature and culture at
strategic moments over the course of the twentieth century.3
At the turn of this century, Yiddish language and literature were poised on a
cultural threshold, as notions of Jewish vernacularity were in the throes of a signal
change. In what Benjamin Harshav has termed the “modern Jewish revolution,”
304
Anthologizing the Vernacular 305
the semiotics of traditional Ashkenazic multilingualism experienced abrupt, radical

reconfigurations on an unprecedented mass scale.4 Many European Jews were
embracing local non-Jewish languages as their vernacular in the spirit of integra-
tion, and growing numbers championed the revival of Hebrew as a language of
daily life. At the same time, the status of Yiddish—the mother tongue of the
majority of world Jewry and almost universally spoken by the several million Jews
living in Eastern Europe—was transformed, by both its detractors and its cham-
pions. The remarkable achievements of modern Yiddish literature and culture
were wrought in this linguistically volatile situation; some of the staunchest cham-
pions of Yiddish were learning the language as something other than their mother
tongue (e.g., the great linguist Max Weinreich, whose first language was German),
while others were abandoning it as their vernacular (the children of the three
klasiker—Sholem Jacob Abramovitsch, Sholem Aleichem, and Isaac Leib Peretz—
were raised speaking Russian or Polish, not Yiddish).
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that one of the first major studies of modern
Yiddish literature was written not in Yiddish by a native speaker, but in English
by a man whose first language was neither Yiddish not English. Leo Wiener’s The
History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1899) is of interest here
in that it also contains the first significant collection of Yiddish belles lettres pub-
lished in English translation. Yiddish may not have been spoken in the Wieners’
home, suggests Elias Schulman, in his introduction to the 1972 reissue of Wiener’s
study. Instead, Wiener may have acquired his knowledge of it (as Weinreich did)
from “playmates and friends.”5 A native of Bialystok, Wiener was the son of a
Maskil who educated the author in Russian, Polish, and German before his im-
migration to the United States in 1882 at the age of twenty. There Wiener even-
tually pursued a career as a professor of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic lan-
guages, ultimately at Harvard University, where he taught Slavic languages from
1896 to 1930. As an adult, Wiener was a progressivist and assimilationist in his
personal convictions; he belonged briefly to a Fourier colony in Missouri and later
sent his son to a Unitarian Sunday school.
Wiener’s intellectual and ideological background is reflected in his approach
to the study of Yiddish. While bemoaning the lack of scholarly attention and low
regard generally paid to Yiddish letters, Wiener was not, Schulman notes, an ad-
vocate of Yiddishism. Rather, Wiener viewed the language within a larger evolu-
tionary perspective on Jewish culture, in which he saw the emergence of Yiddish
as a kind of happy accident of late medieval Jewish life: “Had there been no
disturbing element introduced in the national life of the German Jews [during
the sixteenth century], there would not have developed within them a specifically
Judeo-German literature.” While characterizing Yiddish as “not an anomaly, but
a natural development,” Wiener also saw its imminent passing as inevitable: “It is
hard to foretell the future of Judeo-German. In America it is certainly doomed to
extinction. Its lease of life is commensurate with the last large immigration to the
new world. In the countries of Europe it will last as long as there are any disabilities
for the Jews, as long as they are secluded in Ghettos and driven into Pales.”6
Wiener thus positions his study of Yiddish literature near its inevitable denoue-
ment.
Wiener’s approach to this subject involved intensive research of a phenome-

non that was, in his view, as active as it was evanescent, as fervid as it was obscure.
(“The purpose of this work will be attained,” he writes, “if it throws some light on
the mental attitude of a people whose literature is less known to the world than
that of the Gypsy, the Malay, or the North American Indian.”7) In his introduction,
he describes the challenges of collecting works of Yiddish literature that had been
published over the course of the nineteenth century, and he lists an impressive
roster of authors whom he was able to interview for his study during visits to
Eastern Europe, including Peretz, Jacob Dineson, Mordecai Spector, Sholem Alei-
chem, Abramovitsch, and Isaac Joel Linetzky, among others.
The final hundred pages of Wiener’s book consists of a chrestomathy (i.e., an
anthology of literary excerpts) of Yiddish literature spanning the nineteenth cen-
tury. Fifteen writers are represented in eighteen samples: eleven poems (ranging
in length from a few lines to several pages), five short excerpts from longer prose
works (up to five pages in length each), one brief excerpt from a drama, and one
complete short story. Arranged in chronological order of their composition, they
chart the development of Yiddish literature from the Haskalah to the (then) pres-
ent. This is exemplified by the first and last works in the chrestomathy: the former,
an excerpt from Mendel Lefin’s Yiddish translation of Ecclesiastes, written by 1788;8
the latter, Peretz’s short story Bontshe shvayg, which had first been published only
five years before Wiener’s study appeared. These two works bracket the develop-
ment of modern Yiddish literature, starting with a work tied to Jewish religiosity
and traditional Ashkenazic internal bilingualism (albeit striving to transform them),
and ending with an avowedly modernist, linguistically independent literary work
that offers a sharp critique of traditional pietism.
In between are texts that demonstrate the emergence of Yiddish belles lettres
from its folkloric origins—for example, a poem by Eliezer Zweifel and an excerpt
from an Abraham Goldfaden play. Other works, such as the fiction of Abramov-
itsch and Sholem Aleichem, and the poetry of Shimon Frug and Morris Rosenfeld,
demonstrate Wiener’s connoisseurship (no doubt influenced, at least in part, by
some of his author informants) of quality works of Yiddish literature, distinguished
from the efforts of such “scribblers” as Shomer and M. Seiffert, who have “not
only corrupted the literature but also the language of the Jews.”9 As Wiener ex-
plains in a brief preface to the chrestomathy, the selected works serve as illustra-
tions of literary arguments made in the body of the anthology:
The main intention . . . is to give a conception of the literary value of Judeo-

German literature. . . . The translations make no pretence to literary form: they
are as literal as is consistent with the spirit of the English language. . . . The choice
of the extracts has been such as to illustrate the various styles, and only inciden-
tally to reproduce the story; hence their fragmentariness.10
Indeed, some of the excerpts, especially from longer prose narratives, are so frag-
mentary as to be of limited value as works to be read on their own.
The format of Wiener’s presentation of the translations further demonstrates
how different his interest in Yiddish literature was from that of its contemporary
native audience. Translations with, as he states, “no pretence to literary form” are
printed opposite romanizations of the Yiddish originals, which use a transcription

system modeled on German orthography.11 Works of Yiddish literature are offered
as linguistic specimens and as artifacts, fragmentary by their very nature, of a
passing cultural phenomenon of interest to scholars at an intellectual as well as
geographical remove. Rather than stand on their own, these excerpts serve to
illustrate a much more ample history of their existence, which Wiener envisions
as the primary mode of encounter for his readers. Nevertheless, Wiener was aware
of the appeal of this literature beyond the Yiddish-speaking world and promised
that, “should the present work rouse any interest in the humble literature of the
Russian Jews, the author will undertake a more complete Chrestomathy”—a prom-
ise he never realized.12
Helena Frank’s Yiddish Tales, first published by the Jewish Publication Society in
1912, is, in a sense, a fulfillment of Wiener’s proposed collection, offering English
translations of forty-eight short stories by twenty authors.13 Addressed to a popular
rather than scholarly readership, Frank’s collection foregrounds the stories them-
selves, though, like Wiener’s collection, Yiddish Tales also calls attention to Yiddish
writers and their cultural milieu. Moreover, Frank and Wiener are similarly con-
cerned about enlightening an audience ignorant of the treasures of this undeserv-
edly esoteric literature, which serves as a point of entry into “that strangely fasci-
nating world so often quoted, so little understood (we say it against ourselves), the
Russian Ghetto—a world in the passing.”14
The volume’s organization is also chronological, according to the birth dates
of its authors, who were between twenty-seven and sixty-one years old at the time
Yiddish Tales was first published. These dates and other information about the
writers are given in brief introductions throughout the volume, providing readers
with an opportunity to observe the dynamics of modern Yiddish literature over a
generation, from Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and their contemporaries to Sholem
Asch, Lamed Shapiro, and others whose careers were just beginning.
Thus, Yiddish Tales can be read both as a literary ethnology of Old World
and immigrant Yiddish-speaking Jews and as a capsule history of the development
of Yiddish literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
former, dominant agenda offers a retrospective and often plangent view of an
endearing, yet beleaguered, folk community in decline. The latter agenda, though
secondary, portrays an active, diverse community of writers—and, implicitly, of
readers—intensely engaged in literary responses to the challenges that modernity
posed to Yiddish-speaking Jews.
The first major collection of Yiddish literature in English translation published

after World War I, Samuel J. Imber’s 1927 anthology Modern Yiddish Poetry, offers
a radically different image of Yiddish belles lettres. Unlike Frank or Wiener, Imber
was himself a Yiddish writer (five of his own poems appear in this collection), and
the primary mission of Modern Yiddish Poetry seems to be an extension of his
personal interest and involvement in the development of modernist literary es-
thetics in Yiddish. (However, he too sees his anthology as being, in part, a correc-
tive to those who “regard that Cinderella among languages with indifference, if
not contempt.”) In his preface Imber celebrates the swift, diverse efflorescence of
modern Yiddish poetry as well as its rapid rise in sophistication: “The artistically
worthwhile Yiddish writing, dating back not over half a century, is already reaching
the level attained by the other literatures of the modern world.” Significantly, he
situates Peretz—who less than thirty years earlier figured as the culmination of
Yiddish literature in Wiener’s collection—as the “father” of Yiddish literary mod-
ernism, “the saviour of the Yiddish Muse.”15 Indeed, whereas Wiener and Frank
portray Yiddish literature and its culture in decline, Imber’s vision is uncompro-
misingly ascendant and forward-looking.
Imber’s selections—166 poems by 53 poets—foreground the modernist aspi-
rations of Yiddish writers, especially evident in their range of subject matter.
Whereas most of the tales in Frank’s collection portray Jewish life in the Old
World, the New World—and “the new”—dominates in Modern Yiddish Poetry.
Most of the poets represented by four or more poems had careers that were entirely
or prominently set in America: Jacob Glatstein, Moshe-Leib Halpern, Reuben
Iceland, Zishe Landau, Mani-Leib, Anna Margolin, Abraham Reisen, Joseph Rol-
nick, Yehoash. Prominent among the anthology’s contents are poems about Amer-
ican life, especially in New York (including poems titled “New York” by A. L.
Feinberg, Y. Kissin, Aaron Nissenson, and Joel Slonim), as well as works that
demonstrate the wide-ranging cosmopolitan spirit of Yiddish poets’ interests (e.g.,
Leon M. Herbert’s A melodye fun Shubert, Michael Licht’s Mishel Fokin, Ye-
hoash’s Yang-se-fu).
Imber states that his goal is to offer an alternative to the sort of Yiddish lit-
erature hitherto favored by anthologists, which he characterizes as either “the
typical nationalistic pseudo-art of our earlier authors” or “the typical folkloristic
genre-art.” Rather, his collection strives to present the Yiddish poet “not as solitary
traveler, but as good comrade in the universal march of the world’s art. . . . Art is
the guiding principle in this book and the Yiddish poet as part and parcel of the
modern artistic family is its main object.”16
The selection, organization, and presentation of the contents of Imber’s an-
thology stress the anthologist’s valuation of Yiddish poems, true to the modernist
spirit, as absolute works of art in and of themselves. The poems in Modern Yiddish
Poetry are not organized by any taxonomic or narrative system. Rather, they are
printed in alphabetical order of the poets’ last names—in effect, a random ordering
with regard to form, content, chronology, generation, poetic school, nationality,
gender, or other substantive category. No biographical information or dates of
composition accompany the poems; historical or culturally specific references in
the verses go unexplained (e.g., the identity of the protagonist of Zishe Landau’s
Iz der heyliker Balshemtov . . . ).
At the same time, Imber’s presentation of the texts themselves refracts their
poetics, separating form from content. Like Wiener’s collection, Modern Yiddish
Poetry employs a modified bilingual format: The Yiddish originals, in a hybridized
Germanic romanization, are printed on the verso, facing prose translations in
English. This presentation gives readers who know no Yiddish access to the sound
play in the original, but the language becomes, in effect, a musical presence,
divorced from its semantic value. For their part, the utilitarian English translations
that Imber offers make no effort to convey a sense of the interaction among im-
agery, poetic forms, and the Yiddish language.
The overall impact of Imber’s anthology is of a literature that has been at-
omized: individual poems are given a bisected presentation, and the corpus is
presented apart from any chronological, geographical, or esthetic orientation.
While this strategy is intended to allow readers to savor poems as examples of
modernist art, it does so at the expense of the cultural and social—not to mention
esthetic—context that enriches their artistic achievement. Such an approach to
Yiddish poetry was, perhaps, only possible in the 1920s, which witnessed the peak
of Yiddish poets’ pursuit of avant-garde estheticism. In the decade following, the
work of Yiddish poets was increasingly attuned to onerous social, economic, and
political realities, as was the next major anthology of Yiddish poetry in English
translation.
Indeed, Joseph Leftwich’s The Golden Peacock (hereafter, Peacock) provides a sin-
gular opportunity to consider the impact of the events that culminated in the
Holocaust on a Yiddish literary anthologist’s sense of mission. Leftwich’s anthology
was first published in 1939; a revised version appeared in 1961.17 Changes in the
contents, the organization of the translations and their contextualization, as well
as elements that remain unchanged from the prewar to the postwar versions in-
dicate how some Yiddish literati during the middle years of the twentieth century
negotiated the terrible breach in Yiddish culture wrought by the Holocaust.
Unlike Imber’s anthology, Leftwich’s collection offers translations only, and
these poems are, as the title page of the 1939 edition proclaims, “translated into
English verse.” In the volume’s preface Leftwich rejects Imber’s argument that
endeavoring “to preserve the full meaning of the original text . . . is hardly possible
in versified translations.” Leftwich, also a Yiddish poet, counters that “all that is
necessary in translating poetry is to have a poet translate it.” Most of the translations
in Peacock are, in fact, his own work; other translators include Isadore Goldstick,
Abraham M. Klein, and the collaborative efforts of Rose Pastor Stokes and Helena
Frank. Far from apologizing for the limitations of literary translation, Leftwich
touts its virtues, citing no less a figure than Goethe (who, on hearing a translation
of one of his own poems, is said to have likened the experience to a “light [falling]
through a stained-glass window”). Moreover, Leftwich argues that “the translator,
by making accessible the work of other people and ages, by diffusing thought and
suggesting new ways of thinking, influences the whole course of civilisation.”
Translation is also, he posits, a distinctive virtue of Jews as cultural middlemen,
who served, for example, as “the chief interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian
learning.”18
The Jewish contribution to Western civilization doubtless took on special ur-
gency for Leftwich in the late 1930s (he was then living in England), as animosity
toward Jews and their culture grew with unprecedented malevolence in Europe.
Indeed, whereas America is foregrounded in Imber’s anthology, epitomizing the
frontier of Yiddish modernism, Europe is at the symbolic center of Peacock. In
his preface Leftwich positions the Old World as the fountainhead of Yiddish cul-
tural creativity, citing Israel Zangwill: “The question is sometimes raised . . .
whether Jews are Europeans. They are more, for they have helped to make Eu-
rope.”19
In his prefatory overview of the history of Yiddish literature, Leftwich char-
acterizes it as indigenous and continuous; at the same time, he limns its diversity,
articulating “the pious note” that runs through much of Yiddish poetry as well as
its cosmopolitanism: “Yiddish poets think of the world as a whole and of the future
of all mankind, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.20 By the anthologist’s own admission,
such assertions make the task of selecting and organizing the corpus of material
in the anthology especially challenging: “My method of arranging the anthology
. . . is neither alphabetical nor chronological, nor even strictly regional . . . , and I
expect there will consequently be some disagreement with my . . . classification.”
Leftwich groups the extensive number of poems in the collection (the work of 239
authors, plus forty folk songs, in the 1939 edition) according to multiple criteria,
including connoisseurship (“Great Figures”), chronology (“Older Poets”), gender
(“Women Poets”), and geography (Soviet Poets, Galicia, America, South America,
Poland, Roumania, Palestine, France, England).
This last criterion embraces the majority of works, yet, as Leftwich notes, it
entails problems of its own, especially given the large number of immigrant poets.
The emphasis on national or regional groupings may have been intended to call
attention to the Jewish people’s geographic presence at a time when their rights
as citizens were increasingly endangered. Like the title image of the golden pea-
cock, which traditionally invokes the splendor of Jewish life in the Diaspora, Left-
wich’s taxonomy, for all its awkwardness, characterizes Yiddish literature as having
extensive historical length, geographic breadth, and cultural depth.
Particularly interesting in light of this characterization is Leftwich’s sizable
selection of premodern works, especially their position in the volume. While Pea-
cock opens with ample selections from the nine “Great Figures” (Reisen, Hayyim
Nahman Bialik, Peretz, Zalman Schneour, Yehoash, Rosenfeld, Halpern, H. Lei-
vik, Mani-Leib), it concludes with works by “Older Poets” (thirty-six authors, from
Elijah Levitah to Frug), followed by an ample selection of “Folk Songs.”21 This
arrangement offers an implicit narrative frame for Yiddish poetics that moves back-
ward in time, from the first half of the twentieth century to the late Middle Ages
(the poems in the “Older Poets” section are themselves arranged in reverse chron-
ological order) and that retreats from its contemporary literary acme to anonymous,
undated works that originate with “the folk.”22 Leftwich’s choice to conclude Pea-
cock in this manner further reflects his focus on the “European-ness” of Yiddish
culture and may have also been responsive to contemporary concerns for the
legitimacy of European Jewry. Thus he cites folklorist Joseph Jacobs’s assertion:
“That Jews by their diffusion of folk-tales have furnished so large an amount of
material to the childish imagination of the civilised world is to my mind no slight
thing for Jews to be proud of.”23
The revised version of Peacock appeared twenty-two years after the first edition,
sixteen years after the end of World War II. Leftwich’s foreword (dated 1959) begins
by considering what has transpired since the 1939 edition, but surprisingly—at
least by current expectations—the Holocaust is not foremost in his discussion.
Rather, he begins by considering then recent positive cultural developments, call-
ing readers’ attention to the fact that “a great deal has been published in the past
twenty years about Yiddish literature, and several adequate translations have dem-
onstrated its value.” These two decades have also “seen a great advance in Yiddish
poetry,” including the maturation of such poets as Abraham Sutzkever, Chaim
Grade, Bunem Heller, and Israel Emiot. Leftwich offers the existence of these
and even younger poets, such as Jeremiah Hescheles, as evidence that “in spite of
the Hitlerist extermination of the Jews of Europe”—the anthologist’s first reference
to the Holocaust—“Yiddish still lives.”24 Indeed, Leftwich’s affirmation of the vi-
tality and viability of Yiddish literature begins with his dedication of the revised
anthology: “To the Yiddish poets who will be writing Yiddish poetry fifty years
hence.” (The 1939 edition was dedicated to Leftwich’s daughter, Joan.)25
Although Leftwich makes no organizational innovations in the postwar edition
of Peacock, he does discuss and present examples of what had emerged as the
dominant new genre of Yiddish belles lettres: “Churban literature.” He character-
izes writing on what was, at the time, just coming to be known in America as the
Holocaust as giving Yiddish literary activity a new agenda, even a renewed sense
of purpose, and as transforming the valuation of the language itself. Thus, he cites
an unnamed survivor of Nazi persecution: “Yiddish, which I hardly knew before,
the language of my parents and grandparents, has become my most sacred credo,
. . . and I swear that if there is anything I can write out of my experiences, it will
be written in Yiddish, the language hallowed by our millions of martyrs.”26 Left-
wich also offers the examples of Itzhak Katzenelson and Uri Zevi Greenberg, who
turned from Hebrew to Yiddish in order to address the Holocaust in their poetry.
Like more recent scholars of the subject,27 Leftwich situates Churban litera-
ture in a longer history of Jewish literary responses to persecution, including Jer-
emiah’s Lamentations, medieval responses to anti-Jewish attacks, and the more
recent “pogrom literature” of the late nineteenth century. (He also links the trag-
edy of the Holocaust to the Soviet persecution of Yiddish culture in the early post-
World War II years.) Perhaps with this sense of precedent in mind, Leftwich chose
not to present Churban literature as a separate category in the revised edition but
to integrate it into the volume’s existing schema.
Leftwich may have also been concerned about distinguishing Holocaust po-
etry as the culmination of Yiddish literary activity. Mindful, perhaps, of the prob-
lematic consequences of characterizing the most recent developments in Yiddish
literature as being centered around loss, Leftwich concludes his introduction with
a discussion of “Jewish survival” that serves to validate both the endurance of
Yiddish literature and its translation. Citing Aaron Zeitlin, he makes the case for
Yiddish as part of Jewish cultural literacy, which is key to Jewish continuity:
We are not addicted to the nonsense of the mysticisms of race, blood, and phil-
ogenic legacies. To be a Jew is simply the accident of being born to parents who
are Jews. It is only when this accident of birth is accepted as destiny-and-
commitment that the accidental Jew becomes a purposive Jew. There is therefore
a Jewish mode of lyrical expression which is not inherited but acquired by the
acceptance of the Jewish destiny and the commitment of its obligations.28
Key to maintaining Jewish cultural literacy and continuity, Leftwich argues, is

Jewish bilingualism, epitomized by the translations in his volume—indeed, by the
act of translation itself, which he champions as a bridge, rather than a border,

between past and present.
In the preface to the 1961 edition of Peacock, Leftwich mentions the publication
of Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s 1954 A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (here-
after, Stories) as exemplary of positive developments in Yiddish literature’s stature
during the early postwar years.29 Howe and Greenberg’s collection is, indeed, a
landmark work, being the first major new anthology of Yiddish literature in English
translation to appear after the Holocaust. Still in print at the turn of the millen-
nium, the volume has had an extensive impact on the reputation of Yiddish lit-
erature in the English-speaking world. As David Roskies has observed, “the mea-
sure of [the anthologists’] success . . . is the large number of students of Jewish
literature whose familiarity with Yiddish rests solely on the introduction to A Trea-
sury of Yiddish Stories . . . and the subsequent anthologies that drew their Yiddish
materials exclusively from that collection.”30
Unlike the previous efforts already discussed, the creation of this anthology
does not rely on the vision of a single scholar or belletrist but results from a joint
effort between these two perspectives. This collaboration bridges a generational
gap defined not only by age, but also by country of origin, native language, and
notions of cultural literacy: Greenberg, an established Yiddish poet (he was about
fifty-eight years old when Stories appeared in print), was a native of Bessarabia and
had emigrated to the United States in 1913. In the early 1950s he was a leading
figure in the Yiddish PEN Club and in 1953 received a prize from the National
Jewish Book Council for Baynakhtike dialog, a volume of poems. Howe, the New
York-born son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, was in his early thirties and at the
start of his career as a literary scholar and social critic. He had just begun teaching
at Brandeis University and was about to begin his long association with the new
socialist journal Dissent.31 The two men’s relationship as anthologists would con-
tinue until Greenberg’s death in 1977. During this time they produced four more
collections of Yiddish writing in English translation.32 Theirs was a strategic joining
of distinct, complementary talents, as Howe later described:
What we established . . . was a cultural chain. First, from [the] translators to my-
self, who am an amateur in this field, and whose knowledge of Jewish tradition
is severely limited and whose knowledge of Yiddish is fairly limited. Then, from
myself to Greenberg, a veteran Yiddish poet, and then of course from Greenberg
to the whole Yiddish tradition itself. This chain is terribly precarious. It can be
snapped at any number of points.33
Just as Howe characterizes his collaboration with Greenberg as a test of (and

testament to) the highly contingent persistence of Yiddish cultural continuity, so
too is Stories a work of homage to the distinctive, tenacious phenomenon of mod-
ern Yiddish prose. In this sense, Stories has a different agenda from Wiener’s and
Frank’s collections or from such English-language anthologies as Leo Schwarz’s
The Jewish Caravan (1935) and A Golden Treasury of Jewish Literature (1937). The
latter two are compendia of far greater scope (Schwarz’s vaunts “Great Stories of
Twenty-Five Centuries”), in which Yiddish works are integrated into a literary
canon that strives to offer “a collective portrait of the Jewish people,” celebrating
their longevity and geographic dispersion through works originally written in al-
most a dozen languages.34 Howe and Greenberg’s anthology focuses specifically
on Yiddish prose and, moreover, on the particular history and character of the
cultural moment that created this body of work and which it, in turn, is seen as
embodying.
Like previous English-language anthologists of Yiddish literature, Howe and
Greenberg describe their task as one of shedding light on a phenomenon “virtually
unknown to Americans.” At the same time, they conceptualize Yiddish literature
differently than do their predecessors, first by treating it as a phenomenon that has
all but run its course. A half century earlier, Wiener had also expressed doubts
about future Yiddish literary activity, though he attributed its expected imminent
demise to Jewish culture’s own evolution. By contrast, Howe and Greenberg’s view
of Yiddish literature as an all-but-closed canon was defined by the abrupt and cruel
annihilation of its base culture: “The world of the East European Jews showed
severe signs of internal stagnation, but its recent destruction came not from within
but from without.” Thus, in contrast to Leftwich’s sentiments in the revised edition
of Peacock several years after Stories appeared, Howe and Greenberg did not look
for forward movement in Yiddish literature; their gaze is directed exclusively to-
ward the past. Their anthology offers its selections and commentary as a “brief
and tragic history.”35
Stories presents the act of retrospection that Yiddish literature facilitates as an
entry into a singular artistic and cultural accomplishment, whose discovery is as
rewarding as it is challenging. At the same time that the editors remind readers
of the daunting historical barriers that stand between them and the original milieu
of Yiddish literature—their volume is dedicated “to the Six Million”—they offer
words of encouragement; the epigraph to their introduction is Kafka’s famous
assertion that “you understand Yiddish better than you suppose.”
Just as the distinctiveness and the remoteness of Yiddish culture are funda-
mental to the editors’ presentation of Stories, so is a humanistic valuation of West-
ern literature assumed to be the readers’ point of entry. Howe and Greenberg
expect their readers to be familiar with English literary history and with that of
other European (especially French and Russian) literatures as well. Throughout
their introduction, the editors compare works, writers, schools, and themes of Yid-
dish and other literatures (e.g., in introducing the Ba’al Shem Tov: “had he lived
a century later in New England, he would have called himself a Transcenden-
talist”). At the same time, they assert that “the cultural distance between East
European Jewry and Western society is much larger than the distance, say, be-
tween American and French culture.” The reader of the anthology must therefore
“be willing to enter an unfamiliar world and to adjust himself to literary modes
and expectations that differ from those of his own culture.”36
The editors thus felt that their readers required “a minimum of special infor-
mation,” and to this end they drafted an extensive introduction (seventy-one pages
long) and capsule biographies of the authors whose works are included in Stories
(another twenty pages)—prefatory materials that constitute a full seventh of the
volume.37 Like previous anthologists, Howe and Greenberg offer an overview (al-
beit with greater detail and drawing on more advanced scholarship) of the history
of Yiddish language and letters from its medieval origins to the present. But they
preface this with a discussion of the “World of the East European Jews,” thereby
situating the ensuing chronicle within a conceptualization of the Yiddish-speaking
world as a cohesive, self-contained social entity—“a kind of nation, yet without
nationhood”—whose cultural patterns are “probably without parallel in Western
history.”38
The editors’ characterization of this world cites Abraham Joshua Heschel’s
The Earth Is the Lord’s39 and invokes another “American-Jewish classic of the
1950s,”40 Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog’s Life Is with People, which had
appeared in 1952.41 Indeed, Stories itself can be viewed as another example of what
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has termed “the popular arts of American Jewish
ethnography,” which provided the American public, Jews as well as non-Jews, in
the post-World War II era with portraits of prewar East European Jewish culture
as “a total world.” Though destroyed during the Holocaust, this “world” can be
virtually reanimated, these works promise, through anthropology, personal mem-
oir, biography, performance, or belles lettres. Moreover, all these works were
widely perceived by audiences not merely as popular art but as authoritative ex-
amples of “autoethnography.” In this respect, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues, these
works attain a power to enable audiences to imagine a way of life remote in time,
place, and culture by situating their subject within what Raymond Williams terms
a “structure of feeling.” Howe and Greenberg’s anthology exemplifies the value of
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s attention to matters of “affective elements of conscious-
ness” and how they relate to the form and content of such works.42
That Stories is a work of popular ethnography is perhaps best demonstrated
by the organization of the texts included in it: fifty-two short stories or excerpts
from longer prose works by twenty-three authors, as well as a brief sampling of
folktales and proverbs. Unlike works in previous anthologies, these selections do
not appear in chronological order according to their date of authorship or their
authors’ lives, nor are they grouped thematically or regionally. Instead, Howe and
Greenberg organize them according to an innovative scheme: Prose works from
Abramovitsch through Grade are fashioned into a hypertext that narrates the emer-
gence, efflorescence, and destruction of Yiddish modernity. Part One, labeled
“The Fathers,” presents one selection from each of the three klasiker; Part Two,
“Portrait of a World,” the largest section by far, offers thirty-five selections, includ-
ing five more stories by Sholem Aleichem, eight more by Peretz, plus works by
twelve other authors. Part Three, “Jewish Children,” both marks generational con-
tinuity from “the fathers” and constitutes something of an idyllic interlude in the
anthologists’ master narrative, with texts by Moshe Nadir and Itzik Manger and
yet another selection from Sholem Aleichem. This is followed by Parts Four,
“Breakup” (three stories) and Five, “New Worlds” (eight stories). (Part Six, “Folk
Tales”—which functions, much like the selection of folk poetry that concludes
The Golden Peacock, as a kind of coda—is offered as a demonstration of “how
intimate is the relationship between the culture of the East European Jews and
the formal Yiddish literature that arose during the nineteenth century.”43)
The distribution of stories within these sections is decidedly subjective, giving
primacy to the compilers’ own general sensibilities and readings of particular texts
than did the Yiddish anthologists discussed earlier, who strove to use more sub-
stantive taxonomic criteria. Howe and Greenberg link works in an intertextuality
of their own making, crossing generational, geographic, and stylistic boundaries as
they fashion discrete works into chapters of a master narrative that, like their in-
troduction, traces pathways that lead to, and then away from, “Maidanek and
Auschwitz.” (The sense that all these discrete prose works are part of one larger
master narrative is subtly underscored by their punctuating the volume with graph-
ics by Ben Shahn—spare line drawings of shtetl “types.”44) Indeed, in their pref-
atory writing Howe and Greenberg sometimes situate individual texts within their
master narrative in ways that would be inconceivable in their original presenta-
tions. For example, of “The Return,” a selection from Glatstein’s 1940 novel Ven
Yash iz gekumen, they write:
Through the frail figure of the precocious Hasidic student the story suggests that
even before Hitler invaded Poland the Jewish community was beset by the same
crises of belief that have troubled the Western world. The young Hasid thinks he
has found the way to the Jewish masses, but it is only a hallucination; over his
brilliance hangs the threat of tomorrow’s concentration camp.45
The epicenter of Howe and Greenberg’s master narrative is, as Roskies has
observed, the shtetl—reflecting both the predilections of a preponderance of Yid-
dish prose writers and the anthologists’ preference “for literature as a critique of
observable reality” over “the fantasy school in Yiddish fiction.”46 Moreover, Howe
and Greenberg identify the shtetl as the crucible of Yiddish modernism: “Modern
Yiddish literature focuses upon the shtetl during its last tremor of self-awareness,
the historical moment when it is still coherent and self-contained but already
under fierce assault from the outer world. . . . Yiddish reaches its climax of ex-
pressive power as the world it portrays begins to come apart.”47 Situated at a his-
torical and cultural crossroads, the shtetl also becomes the strategic locus for look-
ing back at the “World of the East European Jews.”
Key to facilitating Howe and Greenberg’s cultural retrospection is the prom-
inent place they accord Yiddish and the values they attribute to the language. In
celebrating its orality (“Yiddish culture was oriented toward speech: its God was a
God who spoke”) and its tenacity (“it was extraordinarily virile and stubborn, and
its survival over the centuries reflects the miracle of Jewish survival itself”) they
link Yiddish to the Jews’ covenantal relationship with God. At the same time, the
introduction celebrates Yiddish as the embodiment of a vital and mutable subver-
siveness:
Yiddish itself was a language of great plasticity, neither set nor formalized, always
in rapid process of growth and dissolution; it was a language intimately drenched
with idiom, and thereby a resourceful term in a dialectic of tension of which the
thesis was Hebrew and the synthesis a blend of speech so persistently complex
and ironic—really a kind of “underground” speech—as to qualify severely the
very values it was dedicated to defend.48
Howe and Greenberg’s Stories strives not only to reanimate the lost “world”
of East European Jews, but also to reconfigure an audience for Yiddish literature
in light of the relationship that it had, at its acme, with a reading public that was
understood as “the folk.” The challenge for the anthologists—and for their read-
ers—is nothing less than forging a new conceptualization of Yiddish vernacularity
in the American post-Holocaust milieu, in which fluency in Yiddish language and
the cultural literacy of prewar Yiddish-speaking Jews are no longer central. The
works in the volume cannot, therefore, “stand on their own,” as they are under-
stood to have done previously; readers now require supporting material (introduc-
tions, glossaries, annotations) as well as an overarching metanarrative to contex-
tualize individual works. Significantly, the anthology situates them not so much
in some kind of experiential context as in a historical and cultural intertextuality
with each other.
Indeed, the only affective relationship that Howe saw postwar American read-
ers already had for Yiddish culture “takes the form of sentimental nostalgia,” which
he repudiated: “What they want is to remember it while keeping it safely tucked
away in memory; they do not want it to be part of their living experience.”49 Rather
than tolerate an audience’s emotional ties to this literature and its “world,” which
Howe found problematic, he preferred to forge a new relationship through his
anthologies with Greenberg and, after the poet’s death, with other collaborators.50
This relationship, while affectively engaged, was ultimately an appreciation in-
formed by intellectual notions of historicity and connoisseurship.
Following Howe and Greenberg’s subsequent anthologies, other collections of

Yiddish literature in English translation have continued to pursue some of the
broader agendas set out in Stories. Foremost among these is the continued pre-
sentation of Yiddish literature as a subject to be encountered, like other world
literatures in translation, within the rubric of comparative literature studies. An
amateur (in both senses of the term) relationship to Yiddish poetry and prose has
become increasingly professionalized and academized.51 In addition to scholarly
introductions and other supporting materials, more recent anthologies of Yiddish
literature in English translation provide other academic apparatus, including bib-
liographic information on source texts and, in some poetry collections, the original
texts printed in Yiddish.52
At the same time, the self-consciously personal approach to selecting and
organizing anthologies of translated Yiddish literature that informs Howe and
Greenberg’s collections can be found in more recent efforts. Benjamin and Bar-
bara Harshav’s 1986 anthology American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology
offers a decidedly personal vision of this corpus, centered on the high modernism
of the Inzikhistn. The Harshavs offer in-depth selections of just seven poets, pre-
sented in nonchronological order: A. Leyeles (Aaron Glanz), Glatstein, Halpern,
Y. L. (Judd) Teller, Malka Heifetz-Tussman, Berish Weinstein, and Leivick. Sig-
nificantly, the Harshavs characterize their approach as “a kind of traveling exhi-
bition of several artists from a distant culture.”53 The notion that American Yiddish
Poetry constitutes a personal curatorial vision of a particular cultural moment is
extended by the anthologists’ decision to illustrate the volume with the work of
modern Jewish artists—including Louis Lozowick, Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer,
Abraham Walkowitz, and Max Weber—who were the seven poets’ contemporaries.
Perhaps no recent anthologist/translator has offered more strikingly idiosyn-
cratic visions of Yiddish literature than Joachim Neugroschel, especially in his first
two collections, Yenne Velt: The Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult (1976)
and The Shtetl (1979). Yenne Velt offers a diverse selection of Yiddish prose works,
from tales culled from the Mayse-bukh and told by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav to
works by the klasiker (Peretz, Abramovitsch) and Soviet modernists (Der Nister,
Moshe Kulbak, David Bergelson). These texts, ranging from short tales to complete
novels (including Abramovitsch’s Di klyatshe), call readers’ attention to works of
Yiddish literature informed by the mystical and supernatural, themes that are gen-
erally neglected in Howe and Greenberg’s prose collections and most other trans-
lations of Yiddish prose, which tend to foreground works that reflect historical and
social realities. The selections in Yenne Velt thus not only are otherworldly in
subject but present readers with an “other world” of Yiddish literature. Neugro-
schel does not offer his selections in a chronological or obviously thematic order
but groups them as stages of a mystical journey of his own design, distributed over
seven “days.” (The First Day, for example, comprises a tale from the Mayse-bukh
and short works by S. Ansky, Abramovitsch, Der Nister, and Peretz.)54 Neugro-
schel’s Shtetl collection resembles the core of Howe and Greenberg’s Stories in
its organization of selections into a narrative that traces the efflorescence and
destruction of East European Jewish small-town life. But Neugroschel’s selections
are more varied chronologically as well as stylistically, beginning with excerpts
from the Tsene-rene and Hasidic tales and also including the pioneering Maskilic
novel Dos shterntikhl by Israel Aksenfeld and Kulbak’s expressionist novel of the
early Soviet period, Montik.
An especially adventuresome translator, who has also translated prose and
poetry from French, German, and Russian, Neugroschel does not shy away from
challenging works, including the fiction of Abramovitsch, which Howe, among
others, characterized as more or less untranslatable into English. An epitomizing
example of Neugroschel’s approach, perhaps, is his “jive” translation of Sholem
Aleichem’s early novel Stempenyu, famous for its incorporation of klezmer slang:
“Di kapore zolstu vern, Yerakhmiel!” zogt Stempenyu gants oyfgelegt. “Azoy gikh
bist du gevor gevorn? E, zi it dokh take gor a klive yaldovke! Ze nor, ze, vi zi matret
mit di zikres!”55
“You’re too much, baby!” said Stempeniu cheerily. “You checked it out that fast?
Man, she is really dynamite! A righteous chick! Dig those eyes!”56
Neugroschel’s choices as anthologist and translator both reflect personal pred-

ilections and are responsive to the growing corpus of Yiddish literature available
in English translation judged against the much vaster range of all that has been
written in Yiddish. Thus, in addition to considering it his mission to call attention
to mystical and supernatural literature in Yiddish, Neugroschel has also translated
Ansky’s Khurbn Galitsye, which describes anti-Jewish persecutions that the author
witnessed during World War I.57 “Translation tends to be curatorial,” Neugroschel
commented in a 2000 interview, echoing the Harshavs, and he characterizes the
task as proactive and creative: “I really feel as if I’m like an actor or a concert
pianist. Translation is performance of a foreign text.”58
In his most recent anthology, No Star Too Beautiful: An Anthology of Yiddish
Stories from 1382 to the Present, Neugroschel has taken on limning the full “story
of the Yiddish story.” As its subtitle indicates, the collection extends the span of
Yiddish narrative beyond what is presented in most anthologies of Yiddish prose
in translation, which are typically works from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth
century, by beginning with “Virtuous Joseph,” an excerpt from the Cambridge
Codex, the earliest known dated Yiddish literary work, and concluding with an
excerpt from Chava Rosenfarb’s novel Bociany, published in 2000. Neugroschel
characterizes these six centuries of Yiddish literary activity as part of “an excruci-
atingly bumpy ride” that is as wide-ranging as it is lengthy. “One of my goals in
compiling this anthology is to show the overwhelming variety of Yiddish fiction,”
he writes in his introduction, “from its . . . medieval debut to its modern traditions
and experimentations,” thereby demonstrating how this literature “run[s] the full
gamut of human creativity.”59
At the turn of the twentieth century, modern Yiddish belles lettres was still some-
thing of a novelty. A rapidly developing national, secular literature, it aspired to
be the equal of major Western literary traditions, doing so in a language that had
no official aegis and had little more to sustain it than the urgent needs and the
vitality of its widespread community of several million vernacular speakers. For
the English reader of the time, Yiddish literary activity was at most a curiosity of
exotic and humble origins. Over the course of the past century it has emerged as
“classic” Jewish literature, prized by many admirers, Jews and non-Jews alike, as a
distinctive cultural achievement; since the Holocaust, it has been transvalued as
a “heritage” literature, a link to a murdered population and its way of life.60 Trans-
lations have played a vital role in this dynamic—not merely instrumentally, pro-
viding millions who know no Yiddish with a point of entry into its literature, but
also symbolically. As Walter Benjamin observed, “a translation issues from the
original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. . . . Translation marks [its]
stage of continued life. . . . In its afterlife—which could not be called that if it
were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the original un-
dergoes a change.”61
Each translation assigns a new meaning to the literature by articulating a
relationship between the original work and the target readership. In the process
of translation—which moves not only from one language to another, but across
time and place, cultural and literary sensibilities—the value of Yiddish literature
has been variously deemed the embodiment of Jewish continuity and of Jewish
rebellion, of avant-garde impulses and of folksstimlekhkeyt, of imaginative vision
and of ethnographic authenticity. Indeed, while the canon of Yiddish literature
has become more established over time, the nature and perceived needs of target
audiences for Yiddish literature have expanded and developed considerably,
thereby demanding changes in what is translated and how translations are pre-
sented.62
The translation’s attribute of adding value to the original is both intensified
and complicated in the case of translation anthologies, especially the ones exam-
ined here. The meanings of individual works, already transformed by the process
of translation (and by the very fact of their selection for translation) are altered
along another dimension, through their classification and juxtaposition with other
translated works. These collections provide readers a simultaneous encounter with
decades, generations, sometimes centuries of literary activity, often taking place
over an extensive geographic or ideological range. In this sense, the curatorial
element of these anthologies resembles that of art museums, where visitors can,
in a single visit, traverse art history’s full range from the ancient to the modern
over several continents.63 What Benjamin observes about the translator’s agenda
can also be said of the anthologist: “The intention of the poet is spontaneous,
primary, graphic; that of the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational.”64
Yiddish anthologies constitute an especially intense example of the distinctive,
transformative power of encountering literary works in translation collections,
given the history of this literature and its writers and readers in the twentieth
century. While these collections evince a variety of curatorial agendas, they also
reiterate certain tropes. In particular, the anthologists repeatedly characterize their
work as an effort to enlighten the uninformed—not merely sharing with them
unfamiliar literary works and their histories, but providing readers with a corrective
cultural engagement with a community (of writers, readers, and subjects) variously
regarded as exotic, evanescent, or extinct. The anthologists’ task therefore is not
limited to transmitting information or texts, but ultimately entails creating a new
means of engaging with Yiddish literature for Ashkenazim whose linguistic and
cultural vernacularity is so different (as well as facilitating an appreciation of Yid-
dish among non-Ashkenazic Jews and non-Jews). This onus is already implicit in
collections published before World War II, but it becomes explicit—and much
more daunting and more urgent—after the Holocaust. Indeed, in this respect,
anthologies of Yiddish literature in translation evince a signal shift in modes of
vernacular cultural transmission parallel to the “rupture and reconstruction” that
Haim Soloveitchik discusses with regard to Orthodox Jewish religiosity in the post-
World War II era: a shift from mimetic transmission of mores to “the new and
controlling role that texts now play” in Jewish life.65 At the turn of the twenty-first
century, anthologies of modern Yiddish literature in translation figure strategically
in a watershed period of Jewish culture marked by signal changes as great as those
that enabled the efflorescence of this literature a century earlier. As this great
period of Yiddish literary creativity moves beyond living memory, readers striving
to understand this formative moment in Jewish modern culture will turn to these
collections, perhaps more than any other resource, in an effort to link their own
notions of Jewish vernacularity with that of the past.
Notes
1. David Stern’s introduction to this book, p. 3.
2. See, e.g., Avram Nowersztern, “Yiddish Poetry in a New Context,” Prooftexts 8, no.
3 (September 1988):355–63; David Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” Proof-
texts 3 (1983):109–14; as well as the discussion of this issue in Kathryn Hellerstein’s article
in this volume.
3. This essay does not attempt to address every example of Yiddish literary anthologies
in English translation, and several categories of anthology are not addressed at all: collec-
tions of works by a single author, drama anthologies (which raise special questions of
performativity), and collections of essays, folklore, and other non-belletristic Yiddish works.
4. See Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990).
5. Elias Schulman, “Introduction to the New Edition,” in Leo Wiener, The History
of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Herman Press, 1972),
p. ix.
6. Wiener, History of Yiddish Literature, pp. 3, 10–11, 24. Worthy of further study is the
matter of how these various anthologies conceptualize Yiddish as reflected in the use of
terminology (e.g., “Judeo-German” vs. “Yiddish”) and in their chronologies of the language,
especially when, where, and how the language is described as beginning.
7. Ibid., p. xxxiii.
8. Lefin’s translation was not published until 1873; see Nancy Beth Sinkoff, “Tradition
and Transition: Mendel Lefin of Satanow and the Beginnings of the Jewish Enlightenment
in Eastern Europe, 1749–1826,” (Doctoral Diss., Columbia University, 1996), p. 219.
9. Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature, p. 22. Sholem Aleichem’s influence is
evident on Wiener’s assessment of Shomer; see pp. 172–74; 200–21.
10. Ibid., p. 257.
11. Although Wiener states in the preface to the chrestomathy that his intention is to
focus on the literary merit of Yiddish literature “and not . . . its linguistic development,”
Yiddish as a linguistic phenomenon was clearly of prominent interest to him. This is also
evident in his earlier bilingual collection of the poems of American Yiddish poet Morris
Rosenfeld, entitled Songs from the Ghetto (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898). In this volume
Wiener offered English-language prose translations facing Yiddish texts in a Germanic tran-
scription, set in Fraktur. At the back of the volume every Yiddish term used in the poems
is glossed and its source language is indicated.
12. Wiener, History of Yiddish Literature, p. 257.
In 1899 Wiener contributed translations of two short stories (complete texts, not ex-
cerpts, by Peretz and Mordecai Spector) to The Universal Anthology: A Collection of the
Best Literature, Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern, with Biographical and Explanatory Notes,
eds, Richard Garnett, et al., vol. 29 (London: The Clarke Company, 1899). In this context,
Yiddish literature is situated within world literature—here, sandwiched between “Speci-
mens of Slavonic Literature” (also translated by Wiener) and examples of Chinese and
Japanese drama.
13. The collection is anticipated, in part, by an article Frank wrote in 1906, in which she
provides an overview of works by several contemporary Yiddish writers. Among the works
mentioned are four of the stories included in Yiddish Tales. Frank’s article mentions Wiener’s
then recently published study. See Helena Frank, “On Yiddish Literature,” Jewish Literary
Annual, ed. Albert Hyamson (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1906), pp. 82–89.
14. Yiddish Tales, trans. Helena Frank (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1912),
p. 6. Frank’s introduction is dated “London, March, 1911.”
15. Samuel J. Imber, ed., Modern Yiddish Poetry (New York: East and West Publishing
Co., 1927), pp. xiii, xvi, xx.
16. Ibid., p. xviii.
17. Joseph Leftwich, ed., The Golden Peacock: An Anthology of Yiddish Poetry (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Sci-Art Publishers, 1939), hereafter Peacock 1939; Joseph Leftwich, ed., The
Golden Peacock: A Worldwide Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961),
hereafter Peacock 1961.
18. Peacock 1939, pp. xviii–xxii, passim.
19. Ibid., p. xxiv.

20. Ibid., pp. xxxiv, xxxviii, xli.
21. The selection included in this section of Peacock 1939 suggests that the first volume
of M. Basin’s Yiddish poetry anthology influenced Leftwich’s choice of poets and works.
See M. Basin, ed., Antologye: finf hundert yor yidishe poezye, ershter band: 1410–1800 [An-
thology of Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry, vol. 1: 1410–1800] ([New York]: Farlag
Dos yidishe bukh, 1917).
22. A similar, though far less elaborate schema appears in Frank’s Yiddish Tales, which
concludes with a folk tale (“The Clever Rabbi,” pp. 581–87). Such an arrangement calls to
mind art-song recitals, in which performers conclude an evening of classical Lieder or arias
with songs from their own national or ethnic heritage (e.g., Bidú Sayaõ singing Brazilian
folk songs or Jessye Norman singing spirituals), thereby offering a public celebration of
Volksgeist on par with “high” art.
23. Peacock 1939, p. xxii.
24. Peacock 1961, pp. 15–19, passim.
25. The 1961 edition of Peacock retains the same organizational principles (and pref-
atory agonizing over the challenges posed therein) and many of the same selections as the
1939 edition, though with differences that Leftwich notes. Although the corpus of Yiddish
poetry had grown considerably since the first edition of Peacock, Leftwich’s revised anthol-
ogy is more selective and more avowedly subjective in its inventory. While adding some
recent poems, he eliminated quite a few more from the first edition, so that the revised
version is considerably shorter than the original (the 1939 edition is 907 pages; the 1961
edition is 713 pages). Leftwich characterizes this difference as motivated both by the desire
to offer a more personal selection and by a decision to omit the verses written by authors
(such as Sholem Aleichem and Moshe Nadir) who are primarily known as prose writers,
as well as by poets of lesser quality, those whose work constitutes “mere versifying.” More-
over, all translations in the 1961 edition are Leftwich’s translation; those by other translators
that appear in the 1939 edition were removed or replaced.
26. Peacock 1961, p. 20.
27. See, e.g., David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Mod-
ern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
28. Peacock 1961, p. 31.
29. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York:
Viking, 1954); hereafter, Stories.
30. Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” p. 110.
31. According to Edward Alexander, Stories “helped to get Howe his appointment at
Brandeis” and marks “a turning point in his career,” foreshadowing his best-known work,
World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They
Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Alexander sees Stories not
only as an act of cultural rescue on Howe’s part, motivated by remorse over the destruction
of East European Jewry during the Holocaust, but also as key to the development of Howe’s
personal Jewish secularism. See Edward Alexander, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 78–87, passim.
32. A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969); Voices
from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972);
Selected Stories: I. L. Peretz (New York: Schocken, 1974); Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by
Soviet Yiddish Writers (New York: Schocken, 1977).
33. Irving Howe, “Translating from Yiddish,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 15
(1974): 233. Howe discusses here the process of preparing translations for A Treasury of Yiddish
Poetry, which involved a somewhat different dynamic than the preparation of Stories.
34. Leo W. Schwarz, ed., The Jewish Caravan: Great Stories of Twenty-five Centuries
(New York: Rinehart and Co., 1935), p. xi.
35. Stories, pp. 1, 3, 2.
36. Ibid., pp., 1, 2, 15.
37. Scholars attribute the authorship of this introduction (and those of subsequent
volumes) to Howe (see, e.g., Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” p. 110;
Alexander, Irving Howe, p. 79). As the introduction to Stories is signed by both men, Green-
berg’s contribution must not be entirely discounted, though the prevailing sensibility is
surely Howe’s.
38. Stories, pp. 2, 3.
39. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in
Eastern Europe (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950). For a discussion of the history of this
publication, see Jeffrey Shandler, “Heschel and Yiddish: A Struggle with Signification,”
Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2 (1993): 268–84.
41. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Jewish Little-Town
of Eastern Europe (New York: International Universities Press, 1952). For a discussion of
the history of this publication, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s introduction to the 1995
edition of Life Is with People (with the subtitle The Culture of the Shtetl) published by
Schocken Books.
42. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Imagining Europe: The Popular Arts of American
Jewish Ethnography,” in Divergent Centers: Shaping Jewish Cultures in Israel and America,
ed. Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001),
pp. 155–91.
43. Stories, p. 601.
44. These illustrations first appeared in an earlier collection of Yiddish fiction in En-
glish translation: Sholem Aleichem, Inside Kasrilevke (New York: Schocken, 1948).
45. Stories, p. 92.
47. Stories, p. 28.
48. Stories, pp. 8, 10, 21.
49. Howe, “Translating from Yiddish,” p. 231.
50. Howe discusses this issue at length in the epistolary introduction to The Best of
Sholom Aleichem, an anthology he coedited with Ruth Wisse (New York: New Republic
Books/Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979). E.g.: “The writer universally adored
as a humorist . . . turns out to be a self-conscious, disciplined artist rather than merely a
folk-voice (or worse yet, the ‘folksy’ tickler of Jewish vanities).” (pp. vii–viii)
51. A telling example of this shift can be seen in comparing two English translations of
Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye monologues: Tevye’s Daughters, trans. Frances Butwin (New York:
Crown, 1949), and Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. Hillel Halkin (New
York: Schocken, 1987). The more recent version, the inaugural volume of the Schocken Li-
brary of Yiddish Classics series, offers an academic presentation of the texts, based on the
Folksfond edition and with a scholarly discussion of the history of the work, translation ques-
tions, and textual varioria. The earlier version offers no such academic discussions and inter-
sperses a selection of the Tevye monologs with other Sholem Aleichem stories. This approach
is “evocative of, and perhaps even modeled on, the experience of those of Sholem Aleichem’s
original audience who would have read these episodes individually as they first appeared in
various newspapers or journals over a period of years.” (Jeffrey Shandler, “Reading Sholem
Aleichem from Left to Right,” YIVO Annual 20 [1991]: 324)
52. In particular, see Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bi-
lingual Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and Irving Howe, Ruth
R. Wisse, and Chone Shmeruk, eds., The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1987), as well as Nowersztern’s insightful review of these two collec-
tions, “Yiddish Poetry in a New Context,” pp. 355–63.
53. Harshav and Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, p. 5.
54. Neugroschel extends his anthological investigation of supernatural themes in Yid-
dish literature in a more recent collection, The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination: A
Haunted Reader (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000). The volume includes a
translation of Ansky’s drama The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, other works by Ansky,
as well as folktales, Hasidic writings, and literary works by other modern Yiddish writers
(including Peretz Hirschbein, Der Nister, Peretz, Sholem Aleichem).
55. Sholem-Aleykhem, Stempenyu: a yidisher roman, in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleykhem
(New York: Sholem-Aleykhem folksfond oysgabe, 1919), vol. 11 (Yidishe romanen), p. 136. In
his text, first published in Di yidishe folksbiblyotek (Odessa, 1888), Sholem Aleichem glosses
the following terms at the bottom of the page: klive ⫽ sheyne, matret ⫽ kukt, zikres ⫽ oygn.
56. Joachim Neugroschel, ed. and trans., The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish
Life in Eastern Europe (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), p. 293. For a discussion of this
translation, see Shandler, “Reading Sholem Aleichem from Left to Right,” passim.
57. S. An-Ski, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Set-
tlement During World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2002).
58. Jeffrey Sharlet, “An ‘Actor’ Who ‘Performs’ Texts: Talking with Translator Joachim
Neugroschel,” The Forward [English-language edition], June 16, 2000, pp. 11–12.
59. Joachim Neugroschel, ed. and trans., No Star Too Beautiful: An Anthology of
Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2002), pp. xv–
xvii.
60. On “heritage” mode, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture:
Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); David
Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1988).
61. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Re-
flections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 71, 73.
62. Although anthologies of Yiddish literature translated into languages other than
English are beyond the scope of this essay, a comparative study among these would no
doubt yield interesting results. The demands, for example, of Hebrew readers in Israel,
Russian readers (both in Russia and elsewhere), or German readers, to take but a few
examples, would yield valuable insights into the image of Yiddish literature, its subjects,
and its original readers as symbolic entities in these various societies. (On the translation
of Yiddish literature into German, see Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in
Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House,
2000), pp. 5–6.) Ultimately, these translation collections will reveal more about the target
cultures as they understand themselves vis-à-vis Yiddish culture than they will about Yiddish
literature per se.
63. This notion is discussed by Marcus Moseley in his contribution to the Introduction
to Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Lon-
don and New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 2002), ed. Jeffrey Shandler; see p. xxviii.
64. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” pp. 76–77.
65. Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction”: The Transformation of Con-
temporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994): 65.
17
galit hasan-rokem
Textualizing the Tales of

the People of the Book
Folk Narrative Anthologies and
National Identity in Modern Israel
hether it is the work of the Grimm bothers or the Finnish epic Kalevala,
Wcollecting oral folk creativity, writing it down, and publishing it in antholo-
gies is one of the most noted components in the formation of national identity in
modern times.1 These great anthologies all have their origins in a matrix of ide-
ology and politics, and those matrices not only engendered them but also endowed
them with their singular features. Certainly, this was the case with folk-narrative
anthologies in Israel. The work of Dov Noy, the preeminent scholar of Jewish
folklore and the founder of the Israel Folk Archives, produced and stimulated a
vast and impressive retrieval of Jewish lore from the major Jewish communities of
the world just at the moment when most of these communities had ceased to
exist, whether by destruction, modernization, or removal to Israel. The shifting
dialectic between this enormous anthological project and the emergence of the
modern State of Israel is the subject of this essay. This inquiry is part of a larger
effort by folklorists in many countries to deconstruct the functional connection
between nation building and folklore studies and to understand the purposes the
discipline has historically served.
Dov Noy was born in 1922 in Kolomea in the Ukraine. Although Yiddish was
spoken in his home, Noy was tutored in Hebrew as a young boy by the poet
Shimshon Meltzer, and he later learned German and Polish in the gymnasium.
Noy immigrated to Palestine in 1938, the only member of his family to do so; the
rest perished in the Holocaust, except for his brother Meir, who became a musi-
cian and ethnomusicologist. After serving in the British army in World War II,
Noy held a central position in organizing educational services for Jewish refugees
who had been sent by the British to Cyprus after trying to enter Palestine illegally.
Working with these survivors—among whom he discovered his brother Meir—
proved a turning point for Noy. The sudden and shocking awareness of the de-
struction of an entire culture created in Noy the urgent need to reconstruct the
narrative universe of these lost worlds.
After completing his doctorate at Indiana University under Stith Thompson,
324
Textualizing the Tales of the People of the Book 325
the doyen of American folktale research, Noy returned to Israel and founded the
Israel Folktale Archives (IFA) in Haifa in 1955. At the beginning, Noy worked
mostly with volunteers, who approached narrators from various ethnic backgrounds
and recorded their repertoires. The singling out of narrators was intuitive rather
than systematic, and often based on personal acquaintanceship. The recording was
done in writing by hand, and the documentation was often haphazard. Later, the
procedures of the IFA became much more systematic. Audio or video recordings
were accompanied by meticulous documentation of the circumstances of the nar-
ration as well as the narrators’ biographies. The same process of professionalization
was evident in the case of publications. The first publications of the IFA were
initiated for several reasons: to gratify the volunteers for their efforts in collecting
material; to enhance the self-image of the narrators; and to gain respectability for
an enterprise that was entirely dependent on public sponsorship. The publications,
like the collection efforts on which they were based, later became more systematic
and more formally annotated.
From the inception of the project, the work of the IFA was animated by two
contradictory impulses. On the one hand, in gathering into a central Israeli archive
folk materials that originated in widely dispersed Jewish communities, the IFA was
enacting and contributing to one of the great ambitions of the young state: mizug
galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, the process whereby Israeli society became
a melting pot for the emerging national identity. On the other hand, there was
an equivalent, but opposed, tendency of the folk material to enhance particular
ethnic identities. Rather than disappearing into the melting pot, groups were re-
inforced in their separateness by the ethnographic mirror held up to them by the
work of the folk archives. In the first two decades of the IFA’s work, the first
imperative was given preference, a fact can that clearly be seen from the institu-
tional settings and the linguistic medium in which the folk narratives were pub-
lished. Noy published much of this material in his capacity as a columnist for the
daily Omer, which was a labor-union–subsidized newspaper aimed especially at
new immigrants. The paper was written in a consciously simplified register of
Hebrew called ivrit qalah, which was designed to create a common ground for
adult immigrants who were struggling to learn Hebrew. By 1967, Noy had pro-
duced seven slim volumes based on his column. The series, Yahfi ad shivtei yisrael
[All the Tribes of Israel Together], was published by the Ministry of Education
for the promotion of the Hebrew language and was addressed primarily to the
audience of new immigrants. The series strove to create a multicultural dialogue
among immigrants from various backgrounds speaking various languages. The se-
lections were organized according to ethnicity and represented Morocco, Tunisia,
Persia, Poland, Rumania, Kurdistan, and Yemen. Although universal and fantastic
folktales with no Jewish elements whatever abound in the archives, Noy chose for
this series tales with strong Jewish markings. In particular, he sought to represent
the folk literature of the gathered exiles as a Jewish folk literature.
IFA’s own independent series of collected narratives was active between 1961
and 1978. Its core series consisted of H fi odesh hfi odesh vesippuro [A Tale for each
Month], each volume of which includes twelve narratives that were selected by
the volunteers of the archives and the contributors through a complex process of
voting. The series was organized around the cycle of the year, one of the over-
arching principles of folk culture (the other being the life cycle, which was less
clearly expressed in the publications). Smaller collections included repertoires of
individual narrators, such as Seven Folktales by Miriam Yeshiva (1963, 40 pages)
and Grandma Esther Relates by Esther Weinstein (1964, 96 pages), or ethnic rep-
ertoires such as Samaritan Legends (1965, 96 pages), Folk Stories from Hungary by
G. Bribram (1965, 48 pages), and Folktales from Sanok (Galicia) by Sh. Z. Pipe
(1967, 72 pages). For each volume, Noy provided a scholarly apparatus that noted
relevant international tale types and motifs as well as parallels in Jewish tradition,
thereby providing the necessary sociocultural context for the tales. Bibliographies
and biographical sketches of the narrators accompanied each volume. Some vol-
umes carry names of editors in addition to Noy, including his disciples Aliza
Shenhar (former rector of Haifa University and ambassador of Israel to Moscow)
and Edna Hechal (administrative director of IFA to this day), as well as Noy’s
brother Meir. Incidentally—or maybe not—the first larger collections of IFA nar-
ratives were not initially published in Hebrew. Noy’s Folktales of Israel was pub-
lished in 1963 in the prestigious series “Folktales of the World” of the University
of Chicago Press. The German volume Jefet Schwili erzählt, published by Walter
de Gruyter, included the almost complete repertoire of one narrator who was born
in Yemen (recorded by Heda Jason, then a young scholar and Noy’s student, later
an internationally recognized folklorist herself). The publications abroad stimu-
lated publication in Israel, even leading Abba Hushi, then mayor of Haifa, to
subsidize further publication activities of IFA, which eventually contributed to
making Haifa the home of the Israeli Folktale Archives, which it is to this day.
Between 1964 and 1967, the small volumes were accompanied by four length-
ier ethnic collections personally edited by Noy: Seventy-One Tales of the Jews of
Morocco (1964); The Beautiful Maiden and the Three Princes (120 tales from Iraq,
1965); Seventy-One Tales of the Jews of Tunisia (1966); and Seventy-One Tales of
the Jews of Libya (1967). This particular series, it should be noted, was discontin-
ued in 1967 after the Six-Day War, when, it appears, institutional interest in ethnic
traditions became transformed into interest in Jewish identity as embodied in the
holy sites of the newly occupied territories. In any case, some two decades later,
the four large collections were followed by My Father’s Treasure (101 Sephardic
tales, 1989; 2d edition, 1992), edited by Noy in cooperation with Tamar Alexander.
In their foreword to the new volume, the editors stressed the effects of the aug-
mented professionalism that has been introduced into Israeli folk narrative research
in the twenty years that had passed between the early series of publications and
the present volume.
Noy had firm ideas as to how a folklore collection should be sent out into
the world. The shape of the typical folk narrative anthology that Noy put together
inevitably reflected the following features:
1. A foreword presenting the cultural and ideological background of the

entire project and the conditions surrounding the publication of the
volume, especially the challenges faced by publication and the insti-
tutions and individuals who supported the project.
2. An introduction expounding on the characteristics of folk literature in

general—style, content, performance—and the individual traits of the
specific ethnic corpus represented in the volume based on the holdings
of IFA, such as the comparative evaluation of the interaction between
Jews and non-Jews as it emerges in each corpus.
3. Full narrative texts in Hebrew, translated by either the narrator or the
field worker-collector or else edited from a version in spoken Hebrew
into a “printable” register of the language.
4. A generic display of the oral narrative repertoire that clearly fore-
grounds the fictional and easily recognizable genres of folktale and
legend. Life stories, jokes, and other less clearly distinguishable genres
of folk literature are in the main dismissed or sparsely introduced. The
individual titles of the narratives seem to have originated in most cases
from the collectors or the editor rather than from the narrators. In the
larger anthologies, there are proportionately more examples of the uni-
versal and intercultural genre of the folktale, which is associated with
fantasy and entertainment, than in the smaller volumes, which include
more legends that are clearly grounded in Jewish culture and take on
historical, religious, and generally serious values. The folktales in the
smaller collections tend toward ecotypification—ecotypes (oikotypes)
being intercultural tale types that have undergone a process of cultural
assimilation, so that the resourceful princess of the international tale
type may be the daughter of the rabbi who excels in Torah studies.
5. Extensive notes accompanying each narrative. This is the site of the
most explicit theoretical statements about the project, which specifi-
cally expound the rich bibliographical and methodological achieve-
ments of the then influential geographical-historical school of folk nar-
rative research. Noy systematically and meticulously annotated the
tales according to the international type and motif indices, including
references to outstanding comparative corpora such as the Grimm
brothers’ collection of folktales, Thousand and One Nights, Disciplina
Clericalis, and others. These citations of comparative material orient
the local, ethnic texts in clear relationship to their intercultural con-
nections as well as to the international and humanistic character of
the research. Thus, the primarily particularistic character of these eth-
nic anthologies is offset by the universalistic aspects of the scholarly
annotation. The particularistic tendency remains, however, much
more visible on the surface, since the scholarly apparatus with the
comparative materials appears only in relatively small print at the back
of the book, where it is conveniently inconspicuous to lay readers. Noy
also tends to emphasize literary parallels to classical Hebrew and Jew-
ish sources—Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and others—thereby
creating a common Jewish genealogy to the ethnically diverse narra-
tives.
6. Short biographies of the narrators as well as of the collectors repre-
sented in the volume.
7. Photographs of two types: those representing the visual aspects of the

country and culture of origin, which present them as elements of cul-
tural continuity; and snapshots of collectors seated with the narrators
in Israel, thereby reflecting the processes of recording and collecting
for the IFA themselves as elements of cultural change and exchange.
The texts and subtitles to the pictures often speak in a literally familiar
idiom, referring to the field workers and narrators as members of “the
IFA family.” With photographs, they reveal a contextual awareness
directed to the wider cultural context as well as to the situational con-
text of the recording, thereby acknowledging the impact of the research
itself on the process of textualization. Noy’s forewords also refer to the
social and political conditions that interacted in the production of the
folk narrative text alongside such more traditionally recognized ele-
ments as motifs and plot structures, sources and tradition;
8. A list of bibliographical abbreviations, idiosyncratic enough to be easily
recognizable as the “Noy style manual.”
These various folk-narrative anthologies that Noy published during this period
reflected his own ideological commitments—he was a Zionist from his youth—
and those of the cultural and educational elites in contemporary Israeli society of
the time. For one thing, this was a period shaped and dominated by two events
of enormous historical disruptive force. First, it goes without saying, was the tragic
destruction of European Jewry, the extinction of the living and organic Jewish folk
culture of a large part of the Jewish people, if not its majority. The effect of this
traumatic destruction was not diminished by the fact that European Jewish culture
had been the ground from which Zionism had sought to uproot itself, and that
Zionists had fought against Yiddish as the language of Eastern European Jewish
culture—and folk culture in particular—to establish the unquestioned primacy of
Hebrew as the language of national rebirth. After the Holocaust, it was a tragic
and an ironic fact that Israel became the main locus for commemoration and
recollection of the heritage that its own founders had rejected in their struggle to
divert the path of Jewish history from the Diaspora to the national homeland. Not
surprisingly, the capacity for reclaiming the Ashkenazic folk heritage of European
Jewry was thus seriously impaired by the ambivalence projected on it as a legiti-
mate root of Israeli national identity.
Yet apart from the Holocaust, early Israeli culture was also shaped by a second
cluster of events—the traumatic displacements caused by the Israeli War of In-
dependence and the entire nexus of incidents associated with the hostile relations
that ensued between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East before the war and after
it, a nexus that includes the mass emigrations of Jews from the Arab countries in
the fifties and sixties, and the continuing Israeli–Palestinian conflict to this day
and its effects upon the popular perception of the folk culture of Jews from Arab
lands. In certain respects, that perception was even more ambivalent and problem-
atic than the ambivalence that informed the reception of European Yiddish cul-
ture. Because the Jewish folk culture of the Middle East seems to have interacted
more dialogically with the native folk cultures of its host societies than did the
folk cultures of European Jewry—a fact that may have been derived partly from
the lengthier historical stability of the Jewish presence in the Middle East—the
Jewish folk culture of the Middle East was often perceived as Arabic (not Jewish)
culture. As that perception was exacerbated by the actual historical conflicts be-
tween Jews and Arabs, and with Palestinians in particular, the language, folk be-
liefs, narrative motifs, proverbs, costumes, and numerous other components of the
folk life of the Jewish emigrants from Arab countries were identified with those of
the enemy, and that identification played no small part in creating an almost
impervious barrier against their inclusion in the newly forming Israeli national
identity. Only in the late seventies, as a result of the sociopolitical unrest caused
by economic and social discrimination against the edot hamizrahfi , the Jews of
Middle Eastern origin, did the barrier begin to crack slightly. Even so, it led
primarily to a major change in national leadership, but it did not significantly
change the larger picture of cultural rejection (nor did its brief softening during
the optimistic days of the budding peace process during the last decade). To be
sure, there also exists a common popular (mis)conception to the effect that the
Ashkenazi culture of the Israeli political and cultural elite deliberately sought to
obliterate, even exterminate, the Sephardic, Oriental cultural heritage of Middle
Eastern Jewry. This misconception should stand corrected, I hope, by the preced-
ing analysis of its larger context. The tendency in Israeli public discourse to a
parallel conceptualization of the two traumas—the destruction of European Jewry,
on the one hand, and the ongoing enmity between Jews in Israel, including a
number of wars, on the other—as twin manifestations of archetypal anti-Semitism
only underscores the degree to which Middle Eastern Jewish folk culture was
perceived as part of the enemy culture of the Arabs.
To understand the processes through which these various diasporic folk cul-
tures were assimilated within modern Israeli culture, it may be helpful to invoke
the parallel concepts introduced by the titles of two now classic theoretical works
of the recent past, both of which focused on the narrative, fictional aspect of the
construction of national identity. I am referring here to Hobsbawm and Ranger’s
Invention of Tradition and to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities2—two
phrases that similarly attempt to identify the making of national identity as a com-
plex interaction of strategies and tactics (to cite Michel de Certeau’s terminology)3
in the public and in the private dimensions of culture, which aim at managing
and deploying discontinuous, destroyed, and traumatized identities from the past.
The relevance of these terms to the case of the construction of national identity
in Israel not only is obvious but also highlights the degree to which the Israeli
case is an example of universal insight.
To understand what is perhaps more singular about the Israeli case, it is
necessary to take into account the more general treatment of cultural sources in
the Israeli cultural imagination and consciousness. The status of such sources in
modern Jewish culture has been constructed mainly by engaging two kinds of
discourses from the past: classical sources, namely, the foundational, canonical
texts, mainly from the ancient and medieval periods, and mainly from the religious
tradition of Judaism, most of which were written in Hebrew or Aramaic, the two
languages of “high” Jewish culture; and the ethnic sources comprising much of
what we have been calling in this essay the folk and popular literary tradition,
whose texts were written mainly in the various Jewish languages that Jews created
for themselves and used as their daily language in the various centers of the Di-
aspora.
The introduction of these two kinds of sources—or “roots,” to use Kapferer’s
idiom—to generate the “sentiment of national unity” tends to appear, as theore-
ticians such as Kapferer have shown,4 in cultural formations that are simultane-
ously characterized by competitive erasure of each other and double exposure. In
the first two decades of the State—during the fifties and sixties—the combined
conditions of collective trauma and cultural hegemony, along with specific ideo-
logical preferences, led to a clear privileging of the first tendency, namely, com-
petitive erasure, over the second, double exposure. Indeed, from its outset early in
the century, the programmatic formulation of the systematized rebirth of Hebrew
culture had focused on the vitality of the classical heritage. In his comprehensive
cultural program for reclaiming Hebrew literature from all its historical strata to
construct what Itamar Even-Zohar has called a literary polysystem of Zionist cul-
ture, Hfi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik already included the transposition of Jewish folk
culture from contemporary non-Hebraic ethnic articulations and their translation
into Hebrew and Aramaic.5 While Bialik elegantly argued for the centrality of folk-
literary expression within the classical corpus of Jewish literature—aggadah, in
particular—he also argued for a radical substitution of the Diaspora folklore by a
new Zionist canon and the supplanting of the former within the body of the latter.
Bialik’s powerful vision has informed Israeli cultural practice in virtually every
sphere: from the teaching of history to the printing of stamps, from the choice of
hiking routes for camping trips to the naming of streets in cities, not to mention
such more routine cultural practices as Israeli theater and advertising. One result
of this practice has been the effective collapse of temporal difference in the chro-
nology of the literary canon, its effective synchronization, a phenomenon that is
reflected in such practices as referring to Israeli soldiers as “modern Maccabees,”
or calling the adversaries of the state by such names as Amalek and Haman, or
by applying the historical mythology of David and Goliath or, most famously, of
Masada, to contemporary military and political crises. These strategies for con-
structing national identity utilize ancient texts as repositories of collective memory
and also illustrate the way in which collective memory and national identity can
effectively overlap with the actual physical topography of the country. Parallels
between the narratives found in canonical Jewish texts (and even semicanonical
ones, such as Josephus) and the recent events of our century are reinforced by the
resettlement of sites in the historical land where the legendary narratives of the
past supposedly occurred. The contemporary cultural uses that have been made
of such narrative events as the battles connected with the figure of Bar Kokhba
and the story of Masada are topics that have already merited extensive research by
recent scholars.6
Within the context of these dominant tendencies in using ancient Jewish
sources as archetypes for constructing an Israeli national identity, Noy’s folkloric
anthological project stands out as a relatively early attempt to do something very
different—namely, to pay considerable attention to the inherent tension between
ethnic particularity and Israeli universality. By systematically listening to folk and

popular voices as indices to individual cultural codes, Noy was able to sharpen
awareness of the multivocality of the Israeli national voice and to highlight its
different registers, and thereby to slow down the effort to create an instant new
Israeli identity. In contrast to the popular stereotype epitomized by Yisraelik, the
perky little sabra boy in shorts and sandals with a tembel on his head—a caricature
created by the Hungarian-born cartoonist Dosh—Noy introduced through his an-
thologized folktales an alternative cast of many characters who were, in fact, far
more familiar to most Israelis and thus capable of being identified with. In effect,
Noy’s project, which acknowledged the severe extent of cultural loss that was
indeed the loss of many Israelis at the time, may have been the first documented
recognition of the unhappy fact that the then dominant voice of Israeli culture
had pushed aside more than one cultural repertoire. Further, the victims in this
process were not only the voices of Middle Eastern Jewry, whose culture was
identified as the enemy’s because it was perceived through the lens of the Arab–
Israeli conflict, but even the voices of Ashkenazi culture itself, whose heterogeneity
had been similarly erased, by mythologically sustained revivalism of a pre-Diaspora
fantasy and by the need to repress the horror of the Holocaust.
To combat this process of erasure, Noy’s anthologies presented to their readers
particular ethnic voices—such as those of the Yemenites and the Rumanians—
individually, that is, within their native contexts, and simultaneously, as though
they represented the twelve tribes of ancient Israel—namely, as separate families
within a larger corporate entity. He thus masqueraded the ethnic as the tribal.
This strategy was directed not only toward Jewish ethnicities but also toward Arab
and other non-Jewish populations, such as the Bedwi, Druse, and Samaritan, in
line with Itzhak Ben-Zvi’s agenda to find Jewish roots for all the indigenous in-
habitants of the land of Israel. The geographical land itself thus served as the tenor
of the metaphorizing process through which contemporary ethnic groups were
transformed into ancient tribes.
The briefest, though most pointed, articulation of this strategy is the very title
Yahfi ad shivtei yisrael [All the Tribes of Israel Together], which, as was noted
earlier, was given to one of the minor series of anthologies that were written in
ivrit qalah, “easy Hebrew.” A far lengthier and more comprehensive articulation
of the strategy can be found in the introductions to the larger collections, partic-
ularly in the comprehensive program that proposed to publish an epic of twelve
volumes, each of which was to be entitled “Seventy-One Tales of the Jews of. . . .”
Indeed, the very decision to publish the series in twelve volumes is virtually suf-
ficient in itself to expose the mythologizing, narrativizing, fictionalizing program
underlying the project—even if the project came to a premature end after only
four volumes were published, a fact that tends to conceal its openly stated original
purpose of transforming modern Israeli ethnicity into ancient Israelite tribalism.
It is worth repeating that the project, which was funded by the Ministry of Edu-
cation and the Jewish Agency, was called to a halt after the Six-Day War, when
projects of national identity construction began to shift ground and take a new
direction based on the settlement of the land. This early project was also quite
different from the official ethnic revival that began in the mid-seventies, after
demonstrations initiated by youths of North African descent. Indeed, one of the

nearly direct products of the social unrest in the seventies was the relatively ex-
tensive funding of research projects dealing with the history and culture of the
edot hamizrahfi , the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa.
What has happened to the anthology project since then? The most recent
development is a plan to publish five future Israeli Folktale Archives anthologies,
but in English and in America. The plan, co-directed by Noy with the Israeli-
American folklorist Dan Ben-Amos, bears witness to major professional and ideo-
logical shifts in the field. The proposed language of these new anthologies, as well
as the planned site for their publication, suggests a desire (if not a need) to address
a new audience—to a large extent, the international readership of folk-narrative
scholars, and partly perhaps an American (and possibly European) audience of
Jewish readers, but certainly not a native Israeli community of readers. Both
choices serve to contest the openly Zionist objectives of the earlier publishing
projects that were conducted mainly in Hebrew and in the State of Israel. Further,
the decision to organize the new series in five volumes was made primarily not
because five is a conventional formulaic number in traditional Judaism and its
culture, but to accommodate the five language groups that are the focus of the
volumes—Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Judeo-Iranian, and mis-
cellaneous groups. This focus on language groups reflects a theoretical shift from
a content-focused approach to a performance-centered one, a shift that is also
reflected in the far more precise recordings that are now made of narratives in
comparison with those done in the fifties and sixties.
From its beginnings to its current status, then, the Israeli project of folktale
anthologizing directed by Noy and his students has been closely related to the
changing fortunes of national identity construction within the larger cultural con-
text of contemporary Israel. In this, the Israeli case is not different from that of
other modern nations that, as I noted at the beginning of this essay, often shared
as one of their primary components analogous projects connected to the collection
of oral folk tradition. Yet unlike their famous predecessors, the folktale anthologies
of the brothers Grimm or the Finnish Kalevala, Noy’s various projects have never
managed to achieve a national canonical status. There are several reasons for this.
Noy’s anthologies came into existence at a time when the state, the national entity,
already existed, not when it was still an idea or fantasy, which was the case with
most of the earlier nationalist anthologies. Further, the various texts of fantasies,
dreams, and miracles that constituted a good part of the material in the early
folklore anthologies failed, it would seem, to connect sufficiently to the realistic
pragmatism that very much infused the cultural atmosphere in the first decade of
Israel’s existence as a state—even though comparably miraculous and fantastic
material has since then assumed a role in Israeli public and political discourse
and even, at times, tried to dominate it. The central cultural institutions may also
have been sensitive to the relative strength of the subversive rather than the con-
solidating potential of the project, and thus rejected it instead of canonizing it.
Nonetheless, the great national projects of folktale anthologies in nineteenth-
century Europe and Noy’s Israeli anthology project share one singular feature:
both eventually gave birth to new academic fields, namely, the study of folklore
in its various national traditions. Forty years after its inception, even after having
to overcome many obstacles that lay on the path to its recognition as a legitimate
intellectual and academic discipline, the faculties of humanities in all major Israeli
universities include scholars of folk-narrative literature, some of whom are inter-
nationally acclaimed figures.7 The focus of these scholars’ research varies—from
fieldwork-based studies of contemporary material to more historically inclined
scholarship dealing with ancient Hebrew texts—but in nearly all cases, this re-
search has served to create highly interesting interdisciplinary junctures, particu-
larly in Jewish studies. Two institutions, Haifa University and Ben-Gurion Uni-
versity, have created partial programs for folklore studies. The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem offers a full-fledged undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral program
in Jewish and comparative folklore. The Israel Folktale Archives has itself become
a division of Haifa University; the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew Uni-
versity of Jerusalem publishes an annual journal, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folk-
lore. The folktales of the Jews have indeed made their way from the mouths of
the people to the stacks of the national library.
Notes
Prooftexts 19 (1999):71–82 䉷 1999 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
1. The best-known European collections are those of the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm
Grimm, which were preceded by a number of earlier collections, especially of folk songs.
The Finnish author Elias Lönnrot based his epic collection Kalevala on orally performed
epic songs. These activities took place in the first half of the nineteenth century. John M.
Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago, 1983);
Linda Dégh, “What Did the Grimm Brothers Give to and Take from the Folk?” in Nar-
ratives in Society: A Performer-Centered Study of Narration (Helsinki, 1995), pp. 263–82;
Brynjulf Alver, “Folklore and National Identity,” in Nordic Folklore, ed. R. Kvideland and
H. K. Sehmsdorf (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), pp. 12–20; William A. Wilson, “The Kalevala
and Finnish Politics,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 12 (1975):131–55; Väinö Kaukonen,
Lönnrot ja Kalevala (Helsinki, 1979).
2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (London, 1983; rev. ed., 1991); The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm
and T. Ranger (London, 1983); for a critical view, see Charles Briggs, “The Politics of
Discursive Authority in Research on the ‘Invention of Tradition,’ ” Cultural Anthropology
11 (1996):435–69.
3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Cal., 1984), pp. 38–39:
“[S]trategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power . . . , elab-
orate theoretical places . . . capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which
forces are distributed”; “Tactics are procedures that gain validity in relation to the perti-
nence they lend to time . . . or the polemology of the ‘weak.’ ”
4. Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Po-
litical Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington, D.C., 1988), p. 1.
5. See the essays “Hasefer haivri” [The Hebrew Book] and “Lekhinusah shel
haaggadah” [On the Anthologizing of Aggadah] in H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik, Kol kitvei
[Collected Works] (Tel Aviv, 1983), pp. 232–44. On the polysystem of early Hebrew literature
in Palestine, see Itamar Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Studies,” Poetics Today 11 (1990):97–191.
6. Notably, Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of
Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995).
7. Galit Hasan-Rokem and Eli Yassif, “Jewish Folkloristics in Israel: Directions and
Goals,” Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division D, vol. 2
(Jerusalem, 1990), pp. 33–62; Dan Ben-Amos, “Jewish Folklore Studies,” Modern Judaism
11 (1991):17–66.
18
david g. roskies
The Holocaust According to

Its Anthologists
t the center of their single-minded effort to extirpate the Jews of Europe, the
AGermans turned the conquered territories into a dystopia. Within a few select
ghettos—Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin, Cracow, Bialystok, Vilna, Terezı́n—they concen-
trated Jewish populations from far and wide; villagers and city-folk, the pious and
politically active, east and west, the law-abiding and the criminal class, the apos-
tates and the atheists, a veritable babble of tongues. When ghettos proved insuf-
ficient to effectuate their master plan, the Germans built special camps, some
primitive, some state-of-the-art, and from the south of France to the Pripet marshes,
from Riga to Salonika, the surviving Jews were transported there to labor, to starve,
and to be ground into ash. The apotheosis of the German dystopia was the Institut
zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt, the final repository for the plundered
Jewish books and cultural treasures, a diabolical caricature of a future encyclopedia
on the vanished Jews of Europe.1
One way that the Jews responded to their forcible concentration was through
the creative anthology. At three known points on the Holocaust compass—War-
saw, Lodz, and Auschwitz-Birkenau—the very subjects of this coerced ingathering
compiled anthologies whose aim it was to encompass the temporal and spatial,
the linguistic and societal contours of the German blueprint. Just as the literature
of and on World War I attempted to reflect the multinational and intergenerational
scope of this first total war, which just yesterday had divided all of Europe along
the Western, Eastern, and home fronts, so the aim of contemporary wartime an-
thologists was to reflect the pan-Jewish scope of this unprecedented slaughter.
By September 1939, European Jewry, both east and west, had become so
thoroughly secularized that there was never any question of adopting or adapting
the classical anthological models. Those responsible for chronicling the destruc-
tion did not assemble a latter-day Miqraot gedolot, in which the only ontological
reality was that of the sacred text as interpreted by the sanctioned commentators.
If anything, the operative category in wartime was encyclopedic, as the staff of the
ghetto archives assembled eyewitness accounts, diaries, autobiographies, personal
335
letters, official and underground documents, statistics, questionnaires, mono-

graphs, novels, short stories, plays, reportorial fiction, poems, songs, jokes, music,
charts, maps, photographs, and graphic art. Indeed, an Encyclopedia of the Lodz
Ghetto was very nearly completed, with concise definitions from A to Z, designed
for postwar consumption. Meanwhile, in Warsaw, Emmanuel Ringelblum hand-
picked the staff of his underground archive, code-named “Oyneg Shabes,” to com-
pile the data and to begin writing a comprehensive social history of Polish Jewry
in extremis. Ringelblum gave pride of place to the sixty-odd monographs he had
commissioned, each documenting the life and death of a different Polish-Jewish
community.2
Not every collaborative effort was designed to be anthological, but every war-
time anthology was both collaborative and anonymous. The Chronicle of the Lodz
Ghetto, 1941–1944, as its abridged version is known to English readers, achieves a
single reportorial tone although it was compiled by a stellar group of German-
Jewish, Polish-Jewish, and Polish-Yiddish intellectuals laboring day in, day out, to
cover every aspect of ghetto life. It is a seamless work, a remarkable testimony to
absolute group discipline and unity of purpose. Lódź Ghetto: Inside a Community
under Siege (1989) represents the very opposite editorial principle. Here the reader
is exposed, albeit in English translation, to the unique style and sensibility of a
dozen or so voices—that of Moravian-born Oskar Rosenfeld, Prague-born Oskar
Singer, Polish-born Jozef Zelkowicz, the anonymous young man who recorded his
ghetto experiences on a copy of the French novel Les vrais riches, not to speak of
Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski himself, the king of the ghetto. The intent of the
editors Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides is to create a chronological collage, from
August 24, 1939, until the liberation of a Judenrein Lodz by the Red Army, which
cuts and pastes across generations, ideologies, languages, and various media
(sketches, oil paintings, photographs), and draws its material from Jewish and
German sources alike.3
The encyclopedia, the collaborative chronicle, the collage: each is a compi-
lation of authentic wartime data. The mark of authenticity insofar as writings of
the Holocaust are concerned is their strict adherence to chronology, to a clear
demarcation of Before, During, and After. Ringelblum was acutely aware of this
when deciding the scope and assigning the specific tasks of the Oyneg Shabes
archive. He devoted one entire research project to “Jewish Participation in the
September 1939 Campaign,” not only in order to chronicle the extent of Jewish
involvement in the defense of Poland (a central tenet of his ideology), but also to
recapture an important narrative that later events would otherwise have eclipsed.
Aware of the cataclysmic changes occurring all around them, Ringelblum and his
staff dedicated their efforts to rendering a sense of durational time. Soon after the
war, some literary gleanings from the Oyneg Shabes archive were published in
Communist-ruled Poland, most notably Peretz Opoczynski’s Reportorial Sketches
from the Warsaw Ghetto (1954), which provided a microscopic view of the ghetto’s
social organism and a chronological overview of how this part-for-the-whole (be it
the courtyard, the delivery of mail, the culture of smuggling) was transformed over
time.4 Among the realistic prose offerings anthologized in Leyb Olicki’s Tsvishn
lebn un toyt [Between Life and Death] (1955), the most impressive by far are Leyb
The Holocaust According to Its Anthologists 337
Goldin’s “Chronicle of a Single Day” and two works by the veteran novelist Ye-
hoshue Perle: “The Destruction of Warsaw,” his detailed chronicle of the Great
Deportation; and “4580,” the anatomy of a Jew who is turned into a number.
Had Ringelblum lived to oversee the publication of his archive, the chronol-
ogy of occupation, concentration, disease and starvation, accommodation, mass
destruction, and resistance would have been its organizing principle. What a
shame that editor Joseph Kermish lost sight of this or any other clearly defined
principle when compiling To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! . . . , 772 pages
of densely printed text, which provide the richest sampling to date of Ringelblum’s
colossal project. Worse yet is what happens in the process of translation. Readers
of this Oyneg Shabes anthology may experience what it’s like to decipher a hodge-
podge of archival materials in a foreign tongue. The English ranges from passable
to butchered; the juxtaposition of material is idiosyncratic and lacks internal con-
sistency; references that cry out for annotation are left unglossed. Israel Lichten-
stein’s last testament, a moving and memorable document, concludes as follows
in Kermish’s anonymous translation:
Wish we were the redeeming sacrifice for all other Jews the world over. I do
believe in the survival of the People. Jews shall not be wiped out. We the Jews
of Poland, of Czechia [sic!], of Slovakia, of Lithuania, of Latvia, we are the re-
deemers for the entire People of Israel in all other lands. (p. 59)
Compare this rendering by Lucy Dawidowicz:
May we be the redeemers for all the rest of the Jews in the whole world. I believe
in the survival of our people. Jews will not be annihilated. We, the Jews of Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, are the scapegoats for all Israel in all the other
lands. (A Holocaust Reader, pp. 296–97)
As even this briefest of excerpts makes clear, the demarcation of time in au-
thentic wartime writings was fraught with convenantal meaning. Indeed, the first
creative anthology produced during wartime was specifically designed to bond the
ideologically committed youth of Jewish Warsaw through a sense of convenantal
time. Payn un gvure in dem yidishn over in likht fun der kegnvart [Suffering and
Heroism in the Jewish Past in the Light of the Present] (1940) is a 101-page mim-
eographed anthology of literary responses to catastrophe from the Crusades until
the Jewish self-defense during the Ukrainian civil war and the battle for Tel Hai.
This anthology rests its case on modern literary texts that actualize the past within
the present, notably Isaac Lamdan’s expressionist poem “Masada” (1929). Three
years later, Yitzhak (Antek) Zukerman, the co-editor and translator of this anthol-
ogy, was inspired by Lamdan’s poem to take up arms in a desperate last stand
against the Germans.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the point of end-time, the crucible of despair, yet the
desire to bear witness was the last to die. How else can one explain the writings
of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish men assigned to “special duty” at the gas
chambers, or the almost executed plan of “publishing” a literary-historical miscel-
lany titled Auschwitz in January 1945? Of the latter—to have included poems,
eyewitness accounts, and documents pertaining both to the camp itself and to life
in the ghettos—only the introduction survives, which reads, in part:
; ;
~wnhyg ja' ~[d !wp r[ywj
; ~[d @a; .sywra;
; jXyn !yna;d !wp
; qydyb[l !l[ww rym `!syyww rym
sa'ww [la; rya ,gnwnpa'h yd q[wwa; jpra;ww” `!byrXygpywa qyjna;hngyya lwwyy;j r[d ja'h
“larfy [mX” r[d !yy;z ; sa'd la'z ,[!yy;z] hdwwtm $yz !lyww rym “.!yy;ra; r[ha;
; jmwq
; d .twrwd [dnymwq yd ra;p r[r[zdnwa
sa'ww rwd !Xyga;; rj a; !wp ywdyww yd !yy;z la'z sa'
$yz !ba'h syp [Xyjyka;r [nyy;z sa'ww ,[ba; ; gpywa !yy;z wc !sqa;wwr[d ![wwyg jXyn zya
@a; ja'h jyy;c yd sa'ww ~wjr[ryjra;m !wp jsa;l r[r[wwX r[d r[jnwa ; !ka'rbygr[jnwa
(195 :[1946] 27 r[j[lb-a'wwyIy) .jgyyl[gpywra; s[cyylP [nyy;z
We know: We will not come out of here alive. On the gates of this hell the Devil
has inscribed with his own hand: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter herein.” We
wish to confess our sins; this will be our proclamation of “Hear O Israel [the Lord
our God, the Lord is one]” for all future generations. May this serve as the con-
fession of a tragic generation that was not equal to its task, whose rachitic legs
buckled under the heavy weight of the martyrdom that the age had placed upon
its shoulders.
These anonymous, collective chronicles, written in the first-person plural, have

rightfully been dubbed Megiles oyshvits, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, by the historian
Ber Mark. For even as they bespeak the desperate desire to atone for the moral
degradation that attends “survival in Auschwitz,” they have recourse to Dante and
reveal a spark of literary ambition.
Underground anthologies produced in wartime required absolute group dis-
cipline, a common culture, and a common goal. It is no wonder that the surviving
“scrolls” of Auschwitz were written in a fluent Yiddish by young Polish Jews just
one step removed from the heder and house of study, whose last words of confes-
sion and condemnation were addressed to the Yiddish Diaspora. The Auschwitz
miscellany was apparently intended for the YIVO Institute, “the archive of Jewish
suffering.” A similar unity of purpose, to rouse the conscience of the Polish-
speaking community living in freedom, informed the writing of Z otchłani [De
Profundis] (1944), a slim anthology of poems by Czesław Miłosz, Mieczysław Jas-
trun, Jan Kott, and others. The underground Jewish National Committee, an as-
sociation of Zionist parties operating out of (officially Judenrein) Warsaw, smug-
gled a copy to the West, where it was republished in 1945. What even these
prescient young poets and prose writers could not have imagined, as they raced
against time in Auschwitz and Warsaw, was that the communal mandate and
universal human values they upheld so courageously would not survive the lib-
eration.
The demarcation of time was the first thing to go. In an effort to work through
the collective trauma, the surviving Yiddishists blurred the distinction between the
culture that was irrevocably lost and the response to that destruction from afar.
The first Holocaust anthology to appear in Yiddish was Kiddush hashem (1948),
subtitled “a collection of selected, oftentimes abbreviated reports, letters, chroni-
cles, testaments, inscriptions, legends, poems, short stories, dramatic scenes, essays,
which describe acts of self-sacrifice in our days and also in days of yore.” No
attempt was made to verify the record, for “legend is truer than fact.” Rather, this
massive, latter-day seyfer, or sacred tome, was to restore the lost collective by pre-
senting the material in order of community, making it that much easier for the
mourners to locate their unmarked graves and to celebrate the heroism of their
lost sisters and brothers. Equal emphasis on the survivors as on the martyrs further
underlined Jewish continuity. And the reversed chronological order underscored
the greater scope of the present catastrophe over anything that had ever happened
before.
With the notable exception of Poland, where a Marxist, and therefore histor-
ically driven approach to the Jewish destruction prevailed, postwar attempts to
anthologize the literature of the Holocaust were guided by liturgical considera-
tions. Shmerke Kaczerginski’s Lider fun di getos un lagern (1948) represents one
of the earliest efforts to collect and record the lyrics and music of Yiddish songs
from the Holocaust. Although Kaczerginski always identifies the names of his
informants, tries to credit the original author(s), and provides a thumbnail sketch
of their specific Sitz-im-Leben—whether the concert hall, the ghetto streets, the
work battalion, or the camp barracks—the songs are nowhere listed either by point
of origin or by author. Instead, they are grouped thematically, impressionistically.
And although many songs are contrafacts, new lyrics set to old melodies, only the
most obvious prewar source is given: “Afn pripetshik,” “Tumbalalayka,” “Tango.”
Worse yet, the editing of the song texts was entrusted to the American-Yiddish
poet H. Leivick. Still laboring under early Romantic conceptions of the Volk,
Leivick took the liberty of improving upon the texts. The grit and vulgarity have
been expunged, along with local dialect and grammatical infelicities. Fortunately,
this song culture lives on, as I discovered from a recent interview with Leah Holtz-
man (née Swirsky) in Ramat Gan, Israel. One two-hour conversation yielded miss-
ing stanzas, much relevant data, and all the melodies to her eight songs that appear
in the Kaczerginski-Leivick volume. Most important, I learned that the melodies
were all borrowed: five from popular Russian songs, one from Polish, and only
one from the prewar Yiddish song repertory. (Swirsky’s “Look at the Moon,” writ-
ten five days before the liberation, was composed to be read and not sung.) Ka-
czerginski’s informant remembered the lyrics, however, with remarkable accuracy,
and even today, when the surviving women from her work battalions get together,
they sing the songs that Leah wrote.5
Before we abandon the authentic corpus of wartime writing, it is worth taking
inventory of what little was deemed appropriate for postwar consumption. The
songs traveled best, popularized by live performers as diverse as Emma Schaver
and Pete Seeger, and pressed into service at Holocaust commemorations the world
over. Nowadays one can even hear ghetto songs performed at klezmer concerts,
and I will have more to say later about their radical recontextualization on the
dramatic stage. Diaries are the next most viable genre. Like lyric poetry, diaries
preserve an individual voice, allowing readers to identify with a personal narrative.
Only in recent years has the reportage, or journalist sketch, a central genre in the
literature of the Holocaust, begun to make its way into anthologies—although
Zelkowicz, Opoczynski, and Auerbach have hardly become household names.
Least accessible are the most overtly “Jewish” forms of self-expression, such as the
few surviving sermonic texts: Kalonymus Shapira’s Esh kodesh [The Holy Fire]
(1941–42) and Issachar Teichtal’s Em habanim semeikha [A Joyful Mother of Chil-
dren] (1943).6 It requires a staggering amount of annotation simply to lay bare their
denotative—let alone, referential—layers of meaning. In general, the more time-

and culture-bound a wartime text proves to be, the shorter its bookspan. Herein
lies the paradox facing anthologists of the Holocaust. For if the destruction of
European Jewry in the years 1939 to 1945 is not rendered as a time- and culture-
bound event, how else can one make sense of it?
Among survivor communities, the Zionists had the most profound stake in histor-
ical memory.7 For them, the end of one war was the beginning of another. Amer-
ican Zionist intellectuals were particularly well situated to access the unprece-
dented outpouring of testimonies in Yiddish and Hebrew. As director of the Joint
Distribution Committee in the American Zone of Germany, the veteran anthol-
ogizer Leo W. Schwarz was able to do his own fieldwork among the inmates of
the DP camps and to consult with the first scholars of the Holocaust who were
stationed in Europe, Lucy Dawidowicz and Philip Freedman. While acknowledg-
ing his debt to Niger’s Kiddush hashem, Schwarz’s The Root and the Bough (1949)
takes a fresh look at The Epic of an Enduring People (the subtitle of his book).
Dedicated to “The Sheerith Hapletah,” the anthology concludes with “Homecom-
ing in Israel,” a collective journal of Kibbutz Buchenwald. Still more explicit in
its ideological focus is Marie Syrkin’s literary-historical compilation, Blessed Is the
Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance (1947).
The “liturgical” impulse, shared by Schwarz and Syrkin, is to deny the terrible
finality of the Holocaust by incorporating it into a coherent “epic” or “story.”
Another, less blatant way of achieving the same purpose is by limiting one’s choice
to a single genre, say, lyric poetry, and then to obliterate all temporal boundaries.
Anthologies of lyric verse, redolent with the stock phrases of Jewish lamentation,
and barely distinguishing between the living and the dead, the literature of the
Holocaust and the literature on the Holocaust, can double as a secular liturgy. In
Kadia Molodowski’s anthology of Yiddish Holocaust poetry (1962), an anemic se-
lection of eleven “Martyrs” precedes an overrepresentative sampling of vicarious
survivors. Excluded from the latter, presumably because they are not sufficiently
“Jewish,” are the Soviet-Yiddish poets and the sensibility of American-Yiddish mod-
ernism. Most problematical is the status of the survivor-poet Abraham Sutzkever,
represented by four poems, only one of which, his popular ballad “Mira the
Teacher,” was written in the Holocaust proper. In a comparable collection of
Hebrew verse (1974), edited by Natan Gross et al., the two bona fide poet-victims,
Yitzhak Katzenelson and David Fogel, are lost within a chronological ordering of
too many poets, whose diction and literary allusions are heavily liturgical.
No one would deny the Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking survivor community
the right to mourn, or to enlist the poems of and on the Holocaust for liturgical
ends. Yet the succor they offer comes at a price. As Molodowski knew only too
well, the prophet whom Yiddish poets heeded was sooner Marx than Moses, while
the greatest poems in the Yiddish secular prayerbook—Peretz’s “A Night in the
Old Marketplace,” Halpern’s “A Night,” Markish’s “The Heap,” Greenberg’s “Me-
phisto”—were poems of blasphemy. As for Hebrew verse, the most oft-quoted poet
in the Holocaust is the one who is missing from the Gross anthology—H fi ayyim
Nahfi man Bialik—presumably because he died in 1934. Instead of dredging the
bottom of the barrel to demonstrate the depth of the Israeli poetic response to the
Holocaust, it would have been more honest to acknowledge the break that oc-
curred between the generation of statehood and those European-born poets who
came before.8
Then we have anthologies of Holocaust verse that mix and match Before,
During, and After; “truth” and “lamentation”; Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and all
the languages of Europe. Here, almost anything goes. Milton Teichman and
Sharon Leder include both poetry and prose fiction in their Truth and Lamen-
tation (1994) and do accord special status to authentic wartime writing. As a de-
scriptive model, however, the distinction between “truth” and “lamentation,” be-
tween the facts and the meaning of the facts, does not work, because it is obeyed
mostly in the breach. After spelling out their feminist and modernist agenda, the
editors deliver a generous sampling of women writers, writing about women, and
a strong esthetic preference for the ironic, understated, poetic voice. The culture
of American English departments, in other words, is the final arbiter of taste.
Teichman and Leder wisely limit their choice to works that engage the historical
reality of the Holocaust; therefore, Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” for all its feminist and
modernist credentials, is excluded from the canon. Not so anthologist Hilda Schiff.
In her compilation of Holocaust Poetry (“119 poems from 59 poets,” 1995), the
inclusion of Plath’s poem is defended on the grounds that it “embodies an instance
where Holocaust imagery abounds, some might say is exploited, in the service,
not of the Holocaust itself, but of the poet’s parental vendetta, showing how Ho-
locaust terms have become absorbed in everyday language” (xxiii–xxiv). Heeding
these guidelines, the editor ought to have cast her net even wider and included
some poetry from black and Chicano “ghettos.”
Needless to say, no poem in either New Critical anthology is burdened with
a date or any bibliographical data. And this is where the greatest lie is perpetrated.
The autobiographical referent of Plath’s poem is obvious to the point of absurdity,
so that pairing it up with Natan Zach’s “Against Parting,” a bitterly ironic portrait
of a Holocaust survivor, is fair game. Both are typical of “Second Generation”
responses to the Holocaust. But elsewhere in her anthology, under the heading of
“Rescuers, Bystanders, Perpetrators,” Schiff pairs Miłosz’s “Campo di Fiori,” his
courageous poem written on the Aryan side of Warsaw and first published in the
underground anthology Z otchłani, with Denise Levertov’s exoneration of Adolf
Eichmann (“During the Eichmann Trial”). An editor who uses sleight of hand to
suggest such a moral equivalency is guilty, in my book, not only of falsifying
history, but also of sacrilege.9
The problem with these anthologies of Holocaust poetry is essentially the
same: they all respond to the utopian impulse in the anthological imagination,
whereas what is needed here is precisely the opposite. Any anthology that purports
to be “about” the Holocaust should attempt to mimic the claustrophobia, the
containment, the exclusivity, the dystopian quality of the thing itself. Every an-
thology is an imagined community on the printed page, where the generations
magically engage in dialogue, where materials differing in origin and audience
are seamlessly joined. But an anthology devoted to the systematic destruction of
European Jewry—an event that from a late twentieth-century perspective already
verges on science fiction—cannot be allowed to define a totality that did not exist
in a state of nature. Unless the anthologist wishes to be truly encyclopedic, to
include every poem by every poet who ever dealt with the subject, however
obliquely, there is nothing to be gained by having Sylvia Plath “speak” to Czesław
Miłosz, or by allowing every Yiddish versifier who was living comfortably in New
York City to feed off the moral stature of the martyred poets of Europe. An en-
cyclopedia of Holocaust poetry, moreover, would have to begin with those hun-
dreds of murdered poets who wrote in Yiddish and Polish in a poetic idiom far
removed from the postwar sensibilities of America, England, or Israel. Bringing
them to life again—that alone would be a utopian venture worth pursuing.
Anthologists, as distinct from encyclopedists, are faced with draconian choices.

Holocaust anthologists must further choose either to pursue a strictly historical
approach, allowing chronology and the facts on the ground to dictate the order
and selection of materials, or to follow a metahistorical blueprint, displacing the
Holocaust in space, in time, or in both. Each approach entails a different set of
priorities, a different sequence, and above all, a different literary canon.
Published by and for the Reform movement in North America, Albert H.
Friedlander’s extremely influential Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust
Literature (1968) reflects the seismic shift in postwar consciousness from the his-
torical to the ecumenical axis. It is also, not coincidentally, the first anthology to
give Elie Wiesel a dominant voice. Because Reform is of German provenance,
this anthology understandably shifts the order of Holocaust priorities from Eastern
to Western Europe, from history to theology. Wiesel’s tale of Elijah the Prophet
as a Hungarian-Jewish deportee makes up the prologue, while the book concludes
with a Judeo-Christian dialogue on God “after Auschwitz.” Sandwiched between
is the central theological chapter of the Reader, titled “The Great Silence,” which
moves from the complicity of the gentiles to the silence of God. “Can God speak
out if man is silent?” asks Friedlander in his introduction. “When we believe in
man,” he replies, “God speaks through man. And when our fellow man fashions
the darkness of hell at Auschwitz—God hangs upon those gallows.” The latter
image alludes to the famous (excerpted) chapter in Wiesel’s Night (1956, 1960),
which describes a public hanging in Buna-Monowitz as a travesty of the crucifix-
ion.
Friedlander’s Reader admirably serves the esthetic and theological needs of its
interpretive community: second-, third-, and fourth-generation American Jews. If
Yiddish proper makes but a symbolic appearance, during a lyrical interlude of
“Songs of the Night, the Art and Music of the Shoah,” it is because the only
usable Eastern European Jewish past is one that foregrounds the individual. Oth-
erwise, two brief selections stand in for authentic wartime writings: the obligatory
Diary of a Young Girl and Chaim Kaplan’s The Scroll of Agony. What Friedlander
accomplishes, then, by framing his anthology with Wiesel’s fiction on the one
hand and Holocaust theology on the other is to recontextualize the literature of
and on the Holocaust within the existentialist worldview of the individual facing
a godless void. The Franco-Jewish writers fare especially well within such a frame-
work: Piotr Rawicz at one extreme, Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart at the other.
Rather than pick and choose, edit and translate, with one’s interpretive community
held firmly in view, an alternative, more radical approach is to turn the process
around, viz., to harness the integrative power of an anthology in order to create
an interpretive community. Thus far there have been three main attempts to do
so in English, each piggybacking on the anthologist’s prior research: Lucy S. Daw-
idowicz’s A Holocaust Reader (1976), my own The Literature of Destruction (1989),
and Lawrence L. Langer’s Art from the Ashes (1995).
A Holocaust Reader follows the exact contours of Dawidowicz’s epoch-making
The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, which is to say, it brings together all relevant
sources: the precise unfolding of the “Final Solution” as revealed and concealed
by official German documents; the ordeal of German Jewry as expressed in its
public stance toward the Third Reich; the ordeals of the ghettos in Eastern Europe
as reflected in their songs, reports of social welfare and cultural activities, Rabbin-
ical decisions, and political broadsides; the ordeals of the Judenräte, as reflected
in their official documents; the ordeals of deportation, as revealed in diaries, tes-
taments, letters, appeals, and contemporary reportage; and finally, the “ordeal of
desperation,” as revealed in the calls-to-arms, the communiqués from the battle-
front, the eyewitness account of the surviving commander. In a brief but indis-
pensable introduction, Dawidowicz instructs her readers on the manifold dangers
that attend the study of Holocaust documents. “To extract the full value of any
document,” she writes in her uniquely authoritative voice,
the historian must first screen it for defects. He must try to establish its genuine-
ness and authenticity. He must verify its credibility, accuracy, and veracity, study
the internal evidence of its language, style, and content, and confront it with
other, often contradictory, evidence. The documents of the Holocaust should,
indeed must, undergo such scrutiny and examination, for they too suffer from
the defects spawned by subjectivity and partisanship, bias and prejudice. (pp. 9–
10)
Holocaust documents, according to Dawidowicz, are different in degree but not

in kind from comparable documents written in secrecy, in extremity, in duplicity.
No one is spared her historian’s rigor: neither Ringelblum nor Czerniakow (the
first chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat); neither propagandists nor pietists.
Dawidowicz, preceded by the historian of the Judenräte, Isaiah Trunk, and
succeeded by the historian of the Lodz ghetto, Lucjan Dobroszycki, brought about
a fundamental shift in the order of scholarly priorities, from the exhaustive doc-
umentation of the Final Solution—of what the Germans did to the Jews, when,
and why—to an examination of the Holocaust itself—the complex internal re-
sponse of the Jewish victims, particularly in Eastern Europe. Riding on her coat-
tails a decade later, I set out to reclaim the multilingual canon of Jewish responses
to catastrophe in the light of the Holocaust but not superseded by it.
In Against the Apocalypse (1984), I trace the development of an aboveground,
cumulative literary tradition. My primary sources are earlier anthological attempts
at Jewish self-understanding, from the Kinot for Tisha bAv and Jonas Gurland’s
Leqorot hagezeirot al yisrael (1887–92), to Gutkowski’s and Zukerman’s Payn un
gvure (1940), Israel Halpern’s Sefer hagevurah (1941–50), A. M. Haberman’s Sefer
gezeirot ashkenaz (1945), and S. Niger’s Kiddush hashem (1948), not to mention
the thousand or so yizker-bikher, memorial volumes for the murdered European
Jewish communities. What defines a text as “canonical” within this vast body of
writing is its intertextuality, its pious or parodic reference to earlier responses to
catastrophe. As of the 1890s, with the rise of militantly secular ideologies, such
references were increasingly eclectic. There emerged, I argue, two distinct schools
of Jewish literary response to catastrophe—the one metonymic and neoclassical,
which tended to prey upon Jewish texts exclusively, and the other mythic and
apocalyptic, which cast a wider net, embracing Christian symbols and sancta as
well. One line of development led from Mendele to Bialik to Sholem Aleichem
to Ansky to Glatstein to Agnon to A. M. Klein, while another described an apoc-
alyptic arc from Lamed Shapiro to Isaac Babel to Moyshe-Leyb Halpern to Avigdor
Hameiri to Isaac Lamdan to Uri Zvi Greenberg to Piotr Rawicz. Together, they
define the mental curriculum required to “read” catastrophic events archetypally,
through the polished lens of Jewish collective memory.
Now that two generations have passed since the end of World War II, and
sufficient groundwork has been laid publishing, translating, and evaluating au-
thentic wartime writings, I could describe the literature of the Holocaust as a
closed chapter of Jewish literary history; closed and utterly distinct, because of the
enormous amount of individual talent and collective energy that went into shaping
an anthological response commensurate with the catastrophe itself.10 Each major
ghetto had its underground archive. Each archive had its resident chroniclers who
labored, day in, day out, to encompass the genocidal slaughter in its temporal and
spatial totality. As the first anthologist to roam free among the sheymes, the sacred
fragments of this wartime geniza, I selected those exemplars of literary art that also
succeeded in finding the part that stood for the whole, whether by enlisting a
neoclassical or an apocalyptic approach: Opoczynski’s “House No. 21,” Goldin’s
“Chronicle of a Single Day,” Perle’s “4580,” Shayevitsh’s “Lekh-lekho,” Sutzkever’s
poetry from the Vilna ghetto, Katzenelson’s Song of the Murdered Jewish People,
and, above all, Rachel Auerbach’s “Yizker, 1943.”
Although only four out of twenty chapters of my anthology are devoted to
authentic wartime writings, these four constitute its core. I would even say they
justify the whole endeavor. Such is the anthological power of these texts that they
redefine the artistic canon both forward and backward. It is impossible to reread
Sholem Aleichem’s tales of Kasrilevke without being reminded of Opoczynski’s
reportorial fiction from the Warsaw ghetto, or to think of Bialik without hearing
the echoes of his pogrom poems reverberate in the poetry of Shayevitsh, Sutzkever,
and Katzenelson—just as it is impossible ever again to recite the Memorial Prayer
on Yom Kippur without the mediation of Rachel Auerbach.
The Literature of Destruction is a primer in Jewish collective memory. De-
signed to be “Jewish” both in form and substance, it advances a neotraditional
mode of reading by means of a glossary, intertextual references, and explanatory
notes that appear alongside the text, in a Latin facsimile of Rashi script. What
such a textual apparatus gains in depth, however, it sacrifices in scope. While it
presents a descriptive model broad enough to encompass the early short stories of
Aharon Appelfeld, or the poetry of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, and Nelly Sachs (all
of whom I foolishly omitted), it is not catholic enough to make room for the
concentration-camp prose of Tadeusz Borowski, the philosophical essays of David
Rousset and Richard Antelme, or the psychoanalytic cartoon art of Art Spiegel-
man.11 In point of fact, I could not cast my net much wider than I did because
the method of creating meaning through creative memory is extremely labor-
intensive. Each writer must first be situated within a nexus of language, genre,
stylistic register, poetic and parodic tradition—in short, requires a crash course in
Polish, German, French, Israeli, or American culture. Even if I possessed the
requisite knowledge and linguistic competence to do so, I would still prefer to
situate the literary response to the Holocaust within an anthological framework of
Jewish collective memory alone, both for the sake of reconnecting a severed link
in that chain, and for the sake of an imagined future.
Lawrence L. Langer sets out from a completely different point of departure
and has a fundamentally different goal in mind. With a consistency of vision
second to none and a rigor of judgment that rarely misses its mark, he has fash-
ioned an apocalyptic countermodel, first in such critical studies as The Holocaust
and the Literary Imagination (1975) and The Age of Atrocity (1978), and most
recently in Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (1995). For Langer, the
Holocaust is emblematic of ultimate Evil, the Jews are viewed not as heroic “sur-
vivors” but as victims of massive psychic trauma, of modern technology gone mad.
His is a vision as global as mine is hermetic, as subversive of hope as mine is
insistent upon continuity.
From first to last, Langer’s approach to the Holocaust has been guided by the
principle “Abandon all cultural and ethical conventions, ye who enter herein.”
Langer sees the accumulated weight of the past as merely a hindrance in con-
fronting the radical otherness of “the Holocaust experience.” He evinces, more-
over, an ever-growing skepticism about literature and art per se. Just prior to com-
piling this 694-page anthology, Langer promoted the use of video testimonies of
former Holocaust victims in his prizewinning book Holocaust Testimonies: The
Ruins of Memory.12 Langer makes a similar case in Art from the Ashes by giving
primacy to documentary and historical writings that eschew an artistic design. In
this way, he forces the reader first to confront the unmediated “truth” of the
Holocaust. Through the multilingual scope of his anthology, its texts originally
written by Jews and gentiles alike in German, French, Italian, Polish, Czech,
Hungarian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, in addition to English, Langer refuses to privi-
lege any one culture. His generic sweep, finally, is extremely diverse and includes
courtroom testimonies, eyewitness accounts, letters, diaries, reportorial fiction, es-
says, short stories, novellas, prose poems, lyric poetry, and one full-length drama.
He concludes with reproductions from the artists of Terezı́n.
What Langer values most about authentic wartime writings, to which he pays
much greater attention here than in any of his prior work, is its immediacy, its
unmediated quality. Hence, he selects those passages from the diaries and jour-
nalistic prose of Abraham Lewin, Jozef Zelkowicz, and Avraham Tory that treat
the most horrific events in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Kovno ghettos, respectively. By
the same token, Langer chooses those of Sutzkever’s poems that express the poet’s
moments of radical self-confrontation. Rather than present a potpourri of poets,
Langer wisely focuses on six who have consistently struggled to find “a form for
chaos by including chaos as part of the form”: Abraham Sutzkever, Dan Pagis,
Paul Celan, Miklós Radnóti, Nelly Sachs, and Jacob Glatstein. Significantly, the
poets are put in next-to-last place.
Because, for Langer, the Holocaust is self-contained, defying analogy, it de-
mands a strictly mimetic order of priorities. After one establishes “The Way It
Was,” one may sample the journals and ghetto diaries written by those who knew
what was happening in front of their eyes but could not apprehend the full extent
of the horror. Then and only then may one move on to fiction, drama, and poetry,
leaving graphic art for last. A work is judged by its success in rendering the radical
otherness of the Holocaust, and indeed, most of Langer’s selections are justified
in terms of his goals. A good example is the meticulously written fictional memoir
“The Season of the Dead” by Pierre Gascar, a writer whom Langer introduced to
American readers. There is one writer, however, who works against Langer’s own
professed values of truthfulness, and that is the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol,
whose drama Ghetto is the longest single text in Langer’s anthology.
As a dramatic, self-contained setting, the Nazi ghetto is every playwright’s
dream. The Aristotelian unities of time and place come ready-made, courtesy of
the SS. (Two out of the four plays included in Robert Skloot’s anthology of The
Theatre of the Holocaust are set in the Lodz ghetto.) Here, as in all of Western
drama, conflicts abound between members of different social classes, nationalities,
generations, or genders. Sobol’s drama, commended for its “theatricality,” seems
to pass Langer’s mimetic standard with flying colors. The well-worn device of
writing a play-within-a-play invites the audience, in Langer’s words, “to experience
simultaneously history as performance and performance as history.” But what new
truths about the Holocaust are revealed by this English adaptation of a contem-
porary Israeli play, complete with original lyrics by Broadway lyricist Sheldon Har-
nick?13 That the surviving Jews of the Vilna ghetto defied their fate through cre-
ative vitality? Surely Sutzkever’s poetry is testimony enough. That the ghetto
populace and leadership were faced with “choiceless choices”? Virtually every
other selection in Langer’s anthology makes the same point. Or is it Sobol’s bold
leap from past significance to present meaning? The destruction of European
Jewry is here reduced to a morality play at best, a piece of agitprop, at worst, which
pits power against powerlessness; the former is represented by SS officer Kittel and
his Zionist-Revisionist lackey Jacob Gens, while the anti-Zionist chronicler of the
ghetto, Herman Kruk (erroneously called Herschel in the play), represents the
humane alternative to the exercise of raw power. Small wonder that Sobol recasts
the Vilna ghetto into a Brechtian cabaret.
The truth-claim of a work of the historical imagination such as Sobol’s Ghetto
has little to do with its verisimilitude or theatricality. History is not performance,
and (this particular) performance is not history. The only reality accurately re-
flected—or refracted—in Sobol’s play is that of present-day Israel. It “speaks” most
eloquently to a politicized theater audience that shares Sobol’s vision of a brutal-
ized present versus a sentimentalized Yiddish past.14
As someone who insists that Holocaust literature be judged on its own terms,
be answerable to its own poetics, Langer ought to be held responsible for checking
Sobol’s sources, for explaining why the portrait of Kruk, the play’s main protagonist
and mouthpiece, diverges from his Diary of the Vilna Ghetto; for noting how the
Yiddish and Hebrew productions actually performed in the ghetto differed from
Sobol’s grotesque-sentimental songfest. (The historian must labor to verify the
“credibility, accuracy, and veracity” of each text, wrote Dawidowicz, “study the
internal evidence of its language, style, and content, and confront it with other,
often contradictory evidence.”) And if the bottom line reveals more debits than
credits, Langer ought to reconsider whether including so flawed a drama was really
worth it, just to be able to claim that all main literary genres have been duly
covered.15
Ultimately, Langer pays a high price for his consistency of vision and rigor of
judgment (with the exception of Sobol’s play). The individual works appear
stripped of their cultural context and do not answer to creative memory. As in his
critical studies, Langer repeatedly exhorts his readers to renounce their normal
reading habits. Writers of Holocaust fiction, he asserts, “know the limitations of
their art, when the issue is mass murder. The evil they need to portray is so unlike
Satan’s, the suffering so remote from Job’s, that the very categories inspiring their
literary ancestors prove useless to them” (p. 238). Kafka and Camus, Faulkner and
Joyce are likewise dismissed as inadequate guides to Holocaust fiction. Rather than
engage in a hermeneutic wrestling with the past for the sake of the future, that
future is dead-ended.
Consider this: Langer’s first survivor-author is Ida Fink, who writes in Polish
and lives in Israel. She is about as “displaced” a writer as they come. From her
collection A Scrap of Time, Langer does well to select “A Spring Morning,” a story
about a man who tries to save his child from death. The story is spare to a fault,
as naked as biblical narrative. And indeed, when the story is done, the reader
schooled in the Hebrew Bible immediately recognizes its antecedent, the terrible
Akedah, here invoked in two ways: the father is first seen carrying his child along
the road to death, like a sacrificial offering, and only then does he urge her to
walk away from the procession of the doomed; and the event takes place on “a
spring morning,” as it is written, “So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass
and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac” (Gen. 22:3). The final
tableau of the father once again carrying the child, now dead, is a heartrending
reversal of the patriarch whose son was spared by the intervention of a heavenly
angel and the substitution of a ram. This is as surely the intention of Ida Fink as
Shayevitsh meant his “Lekh-lekho” to counter God’s command to Abraham to
“Go forth” from his native land. As Katzenelson wrote The Song of the Murdered
Jewish People to be a countercommentary on Bialik’s poems on the Kishinev po-
grom. As surely as Bialik repudiated the liturgy commemorating the Chmielnicki
massacres and the Crusades. As surely as the Crusade chronicles redefined the
meaning of the Temple sacrifice in the light of Jewish mass martyrdom.
The literature of and on the Holocaust derives its unique power from the
deliberate—and desperate—ingathering of all these possibilities. Writers and an-
thologists alike selected from the vast corpus of Jewish and world literature what
could be brought to bear on the twin subjects of destruction and resistance—
however futile—to destruction. This radical concentration of cultural resources
expressed the personal desire and the collective need to counteract the German
drive for global conquest, which was predicated upon the forced ingathering of
European Jewry in preparation for their final slaughter. One was a creative, life-
affirming, response to the murderousness of the other.
Anthologies Cited
Adelson, Alan, and Robert Lapides, eds. Lódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege.
New York: Viking, 1989.
Anonymous. “The Auschwitz Miscellany.” YIVO-bleter 27 (1946):194–97.
Apenszlak, Jacob, ed. Z otchłani: Poezja ghetta i podziemia w Polsce [De profundis: Ghetto
Poetry from the Jewish Underground in Poland]. 2d ed. New York: Association of
Friends of Our Tribune, 1945.
Brown, Jean E., Elaine C. Stephens, and Janet E. Rubin, eds. Images from the Holocaust:
A Literature Anthology. Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC Publishing. Co., 1996. [This volume
appeared too late to be included within the purview of my essay.]
Dawidowicz, Lucy, ed. A Holocaust Reader. New York: Behrman House, 1976.
Dobroszycki, Lucjan, ed. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1984.
Friedlander, Albert H., ed. Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature. New
York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1968.
Gross, Natan, Itamar Yaok-Kest, and Rina Klinov, eds. Hashoah bashirah haivrit: Mivhfi ar
[The Holocaust in Hebrew Poetry: An Anthology]. With an intro. by Hillel Barzel.
Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz hameuchad, 1974.
Gurland, Jonas, ed. Leqorot hagezeirot al yisrael [To the History of Jewish Persecution]. 7
vols. Jerusalem: Kedem, 1972; orig. pub. 1887–92.
Gutkowski, Eliyohu, and Yitzhak Zukerman, eds. Payn un gvure in dem yidishn over in
likht fun der kegnvart [Suffering and Heroism in the Jewish Past in the Light of the
Present]. Warsaw: Dror, 1940.
Haberman, A. M., ed. Sefer gezeirot ashkenaz vetsarfat [The Persecutions in Germany and
France, 992–1298]. Jerusalem: Ophir, 1971; rep. of 1945 ed.
Halpern, Israel, ed. Sefer hagevurah: antologiya historit-sifrutit [The Book of Valor: A
literary-Historical Anthology]. 3 vols. 3d ed. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1977.
Kaczerginski, Shmerke, and H. Leivick, eds. Lider fun di getos un lagern [Songs of the
Ghettos and Concentration Camps]. New York: CYCO, 1948.
Kermish, Joseph, ed. To Live with Honor and Die with Honor!: Selected Documents from
the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (Oneg Shabbath). Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem, 1986 (actually published in 1988).
Langer, L. Lawrence, ed. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Mark, Ber, ed. The Scrolls of Auschwitz. Trans. from the Hebrew by Sharon Neemani and
adapted from the Yiddish original. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985.
Molodowski, Kadia, ed. Lider fun khurbn, taf-shin–taf-shin-hey [Poems of the Holocaust,
1939–45]. Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1962.
Niger, S., ed. Kidesh hashem [Kiddush Hashem: A collection of selected, oftentimes ab-
breviated reports, letters, chronicles, testaments, inscriptions, legends, poems, short
stories, dramatic scenes, essays, which describe acts of self-sacrifice in our own days
and also in days of yore]. New York: CYCO, 1948.
Olicki, Leyb, ed. Tsvishn lebn un toyt [Between Life and Death]. Warsaw: Yidish-bukh,
1955. With a foreword by Ber Mark.
Roskies, David G., ed. The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Phil-
adelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989.
Schiff, Hilda, ed. Holocaust Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Schwarz, Leo W., ed. The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People. New
York: Rinehart & Co., 1949.
Skloot, Robert, ed. The Theatre of the Holocaust: Four Plays. Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1982.
Syrkin, Marie, ed. Blessed Is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1947.
Teichman, Milton, and Sharon Leder, eds. Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on
the Holocaust. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Notes
1. For a recent study of the Jewish response to the systematic German plunder of
Jewish books, see David E. Fishman’s English-Yiddish monograph “Embers Plucked from
the Fire”: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna (New York, 1996).
2. Excerpts from the Encyclopedia in Hebrew translation appear in Yediot beit lohfi amei
hagetaot, nos. 7, 8, 9–10, and 11–12 (1954–55). It was later fully exploited by Nachman
Blumental in his valuable reference work, Verter un vertlelkh fun der khurbn-tkufe [Words
and Sayings from the Holocaust] (Tel Aviv, 1981). The best account of the activities of the
Oyneg Shabes archive is still Ringelblum’s own, written in January 1943. For a slightly
abridged translation, see my The Literature of Destruction (Philadelphia, 1989): 386–98. For
Ringelblum’s social-historical mandate, see Samuel D. Kassow’s forthcoming article, “Two
Ghetto Diaries: Herman Kruk and Emanuel Ringelblum,” in The Individualization of the
Holocaust, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Robert Shapiro (New York, 1997).
3. Under the strict tutelage of the late Holocaust historian Lucjan Dobroszycki, the
editors included only authentic wartime materials from the surviving ghetto archive, the
writings of deportees unearthed in Auschwitz, or from diaries reconstructed by survivors
immediately upon liberation. This unfortunately excluded the short stories of Isaiah Spiegel,
available at that time only in their revised, postwar versions. But see, now, Isaiah Spiegel,
Proza sipurit migeto Lodź [Yiddish Narrative Prose from the Lodz Ghetto: 16 stories edited
from rescued manuscripts with introductions and a series of oral interviews with their au-
thor], ed. Yechiel Szeintuch (Jerusalem, 1995). Josef Zelkowicz, the major Yiddish writer
in the Lodz ghetto, is finally receiving his due. See the first attempt in any language to
collect his writings: Bayamim hanora im hahem: reshimot migeto Lodź [In Those Night-
marish Days: Reportorial Sketches from the Lodz Ghetto], ed. Michal Ungar, trans. Aryeh
Ben Menahem and Yosef Rav (Jerusalem, 1994).
4. Peretz Opoczynski, Reportazhn fun varshever geto [Reportorial Sketches from the
Warsaw Ghetto], ed. Ber Mark (Warsaw, 1954).
5. For non-Yiddish readers, the most accessible selection of Yiddish songs from the
Holocaust is We Are Here: Songs of the Holocaust, ed. Eleanor Mlotek and Malke Gottlieb,
with singable translations by Roslyn Bresnick-Perry (New York, 1983). A scholarly study on
this subject, with new song texts in Yiddish and Polish, is Gila Flam, Singing for Survival:
Songs of the Lodz Ghetto, 1940–45 (Urbana, Ill., 1992).
6. See Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman
Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, N.J., 1994), and Harav Issachar
Shlomo Teichtal, Em habanim semeikha, 2d ed. (Jerusalem, 1983). For a very provocative
discussion of Teichtal’s book, see Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, “Confession on the Brink of
the Crematoria,” The Jerusalem Quarterly 34 (Winter 1985):126–41.
7. See Israel Bartal’s essay in the present volume.
8. The same uncritical approach characterizes the companion volume to this anthol-
ogy, Hanna Yaoz’s study of Hashoah beshirat dor hamedinah [The Holocaust in Hebrew
Poetry of the Statehood Period] (Tel Aviv, 1984).
9. Schiff also presents a caricature of Emanuel Ringelblum and a fallacious biography
of Abraham Sutzkever.
10. This line of argument is developed more fully in two subsequent studies of mine:
“The Library of Jewish Catastrophe,” in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory,
ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 33–41, and “Ringelblum’s Time
Capsule,” in D.G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, IN, 1999):
26–40.
11. My original plan had been to end The Literature of Destruction with “Hagerush,”
a short story by Appelfeld about a Hasidic anti-pilgrimage. Appelfeld, however, refused
permission to have it translated. In this instance, the anthologist’s design for “canon for-
mation” clashed with the authorial design for self-canonization. Appelfeld, to put it simply,
wishes to be known abroad on the strength of his later novels and novellas, which, sadly
for my enterprise, partake much less of classical sources than do his earlier short stories.
Stymied by Appelfeld’s refusal, and at a late stage in my own work, I was sent scram-
bling to find a new way to end. That is when I decided to move beyond the European
continent and return my story to its point of origin—the covenantal relationship of the
Jewish people to the land of Israel. To this end, I concluded with three different responses
to the Israeli War of Independence: Natan Alterman’s ballad “The Silver Platter,” Abba
Kovner’s “Battle Bulletins” from the front, and S. Y. Agnon’s “Kaddish for the Fallen Sol-
diers of Israel.” The loss of Appelfeld was more than compensated for.
For a reading that contextualizes the poetry of Dan Pagis within Jewish literary history,
see Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Dan Pagis—Out of Line: A Poetics of Decomposition,” Proof-
texts 10 (1990):335–63.
12. So far as I know, mine was the only dissenting voice. See David G. Roskies,
“Through a Lens, Darkly,” Commentary (November 1991):58–59.
13. After revising the play numerous times and for different audiences, Sobol published
a definitive Hebrew edition of Ghetto in the Or-Am series of theater scripts, 2d ed. (Tel
Aviv, 1992). Comparing this Israeli version with the English adaptation that appears in
Langer’s anthology is so depressing a task, that I leave it for others to do.
14. See Yael S. Feldman, “Zionism: Neurosis or Cure? The ‘Historical’ Drama of
Yehoshua Sobol,” Prooftexts 7 (1987):145–62.
15. Another literary text that lies is Arnost Lustig’s story “The Lemon,” anthologized
by Teichman and Leder. Set in the Lodz ghetto, it describes the confrontation between
two Jewish boys, the cynical Chicky and the morally vulnerable Erwin. Lustig dramatizes
Chicky’s cynicism by having him say, “They [i.e., the deported Jews] went up the chimney
long ago.” The most basic fact about the Lodz ghetto, as distinct from all the others, is that
no one, with the possible exception of Rumkowski, had any idea about the gas chambers
and crematoria. The responsible anthologist, therefore, must either flag this as an example
of “poetic license” or choose another story. In Lustig’s case, any story set in Terezı́n, where
he himself was interned as a child, would have been preferable.

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The Anthology in

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright 䉷 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The anthology in Jewish literature / edited by David Stern.

PN842 .A58 2004

his book began as a workshop entitled, “The Anthological Ontology in Hebrew

I. ANCIENT ISRAEL AND CLASSICAL JUDAISM

II. THE MIDDLE AGES

III. THE MODERN PERIOD

Jacob Elbaum is Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

James Kugel is Meisler Professor of Bible at Bar Ilan University.

Hannan Hever is Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Zipora Kagan is Professor of Hebrew Literature Emeritus at Haifa University.

Mark W. Kiel is Rabbi at Congregation Bnai Israel in Emerson, New Jersey.

Eliezer Segal is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada.

Jeffrey Shandler is an assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers

Eli Yassif is professor of Hebrew Literature at Tel-Aviv University.

The Anthology in Jewish

rom the Talmud to the latest collection of contemporary American Jewish

ANCIENT ISRAEL AND

Anthology in the Torah

its composition is understood in modern scholarship. In the next section we look

by skillful arrangement of the material. Somewhere in this lengthy process, ma-

The Redactors’ Thinking

The Analogy of Prophetic Literature

The Units Underlying the Homiletic Speeches

instructive example of exegetical harmonization. R. Abiathar (a third-century Palestinian

Wisdom and the

here existed in ancient Israel a particular notion, “wisdom,” which uniquely

teorological calculations (I Enoch 72–82). So what we think of as science was

Such thematic organization notwithstanding, it seems likely that these prov-

weighed and studied and made many proverbs

wisdom he constructs like a ray of afternoon sunlight seeping in under the

It is almost as if Qohelet cannot stand the symmetry, the poetry, of wisdom.19

It is important to spell out the consequences of the change heralded by such

multaneously demonized by one group of interpreters while pronounced

to invalidate them” should a person wish to decide a dispute in favor of the

authoritativeness, although it could be used as an argument for the Mishnah’s

The Question of Codiﬁcation

The classic period for the adoption of source-critical methods in researching

Recently Shamma Friedman has attempted to demonstrate that the origins of

The Mishnah as Pedagogical Text

The Mishna consists of several layers of legal teaching corresponding to consec-

material independent of the Mishnah that it contains, this would be a cumbersome

[The] contemporary Hellenistic climate where systematic and well-thought-out

Roman, Persian, and Syriac Parallels

Gaius continues by providing us with a detailed description of mancipation,

senatorial decisions—he presents a summary of these sources rather than citing

There is no reference here to ancient practices or to the history of the Mishnah’s

A more exact parallel to Gaius’s practice would be those mishnayot in which

Gaius clearly identiﬁes himself as a Sabinian, and in opposition to the Proculians,

The Mishnah as Philosophy

Mishnah’s authors as “philosophers” and deﬁnes the Mishnah as “philosophy.” As

In other words, the Mishnah’s genre cannot of course be determined by a form-

Given today’s knowledge, it is no longer possible unequivocally to determine

Whether this introductory statement (which, it should be noted, appears as a sep-

phylacteries, on ritual fringes, on the laws of Hanukkah or Shavuot, nor does

he Babylonian Talmud deﬁes attempts to categorize it according to the stan-

The Talmud as Commentary

The Talmud as Legal Literature

The Talmud as an Anthology

of the Tosefta, or with the Palestinian Talmud.16 Furthermore, it seems entirely