Becoming the People of the Talmud

In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines the ways circumstances of transmission shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although we take for granted that Judaism is a text-based religion-its worship services founded upon the reading of holy scrolls of the Torah, its study based largely upon analysis of the written text of the Talmud-Fishman contends that many of these practices were established only in late eleventh- and early twelfth-century northern Europe. Before then, rabbinic tradition was transmitted solely through oral mediation, or Oral Torah. What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval northern Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmudreconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietism's emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena-the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud-were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.