Derrida Went First: Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, 2004 to 2023
Fourteen documents make a career visible, and because several of them treat the same passages and the same theorists, the changes between them can be counted.
The spine is five. An article in Prooftexts in 2004, “‘But It Is Not So’: Toward a Poetics of Legal Narrative in the Talmud,” written while its author was a graduate student. A Columbia dissertation from 2005, “Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud,” advised by David Weiss Halivni (1927-2022). An article in Dine Israel in 2007, “Talmudic Legal Narrative: Broadening the Discourse of Jewish Law,” which is the dissertation’s first chapter rebuilt for a law journal. A monograph from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories, in the Divinations series. And an article in the Jewish Quarterly Review in the summer of 2023, “The Mishnah’s Reader: Reconsidering Literary Meaning.”
Nine shorter documents fill the gap between the book and the article, and they change the argument. A memoir piece, “The Shiva,” in Michael Socken’s Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-First Century (2009). An editor’s preface and a chapter, “Interrupting Birth Control,” in The Wisdom of Bat Sheva, a memorial volume for Beth Samuels that Wimpfheimer edited for KTAV. A review of Richard Kalmin in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2010). A contribution to the JQR review forum on Daniel Boyarin’s Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (2011). A chapter in the Brill volume Talmudic Transgressions (2017). A chapter in the Oxford collection Fatal Fictions (2017). And a chapter in Studies in Rabbinic Narratives for SBL, dated 2021 and not yet verified.
The 2004 article changes where the story starts. The nine change what the story is about.
The floor
Prooftexts publishes Jewish literary history. It is the friendliest room in the field for theory, and the young Wimpfheimer used it. He announces his method in the body: the surprise at Rava’s rage motivates a reading inspired by the strategies of deconstructionist criticism. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) appears seven times, twice as an adjective. The students supplement the teacher in the Derridean sense. Freeplay gets four pages and then a rejection, on the ground that the community of interpreters is the community of adherents and so freedom is a nonissue. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) supplies knowledge as power in a footnote. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) appears once, in a footnote, for “The Force of Law.”
Robert Cover (1943-1986) is absent. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) is absent. Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) is absent. Stanley Fish (b. 1938) is absent.
The frame that made Wimpfheimer’s name arrives with the dissertation, one year later, at fifty-three mentions. The frame he published first never appears in the tally again. That is the first discard, and it precedes the famous one.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in 2004 sits in two footnotes. Note 33 runs the psychoanalytic parallel at length: Dora is the analysand and Freud the analyst, but it is Dora’s case study that creates Freud’s scholarship, and Freud’s refusal to let the analysand write the story is the parallel to Rava’s rage. Note 36 extends it to Freud’s publisher, who overrides the controlling ego of the text’s primary scholar the way the Stam overrides Rava. Eighteen mentions, all below the line.
That corrects the received account, which was mine. Freud gets tried at footnote scale in 2004, promoted to the body at thirty-four mentions in 2005, and then removed from the refereed rabbinics track. A man tests a move where it costs little and likes it enough to run it at chapter length.
The room and the year
Two forces move through this file and they leave different signatures.
The room governs what a piece can carry. A law journal, a theory-friendly series, a memorial volume, a Brill Festschrift, an Oxford law-and-literature collection, and JQR have different appetites, and a scholar who writes for all of them will hand each one a different apparatus.
The year governs what the man will defend. Some moves leave and never come back in any room, which rules the room out as the cause.
The test is repetition. If a feature vanishes from one venue and returns the moment the venue changes, the room did it. If a feature vanishes from every venue at once, the room did not do it.
Nine additional documents make that test possible for the first time.
Freud, placed rather than abandoned
Freud appears thirty-four times in the dissertation. Chapter One sets the talmudic story of the lovesick man beside Freud’s 1910 case study “Wild Psycho-Analysis” and reads them together for several pages. A middle-aged woman arrives at Freud’s office with a friend and a diagnosis from a suburban physician: her anxiety comes from lack of sexual satisfaction. She wants Freud to say whether that is true. Wimpfheimer argues that she comes to psychoanalysis the way the lovesick man’s representatives come to the rabbis, seeking a body of knowledge that will answer yes or no, and that Freud declines to answer as asked. The analyst is a judge who will not rule. Around the passage sit Shoshana Felman (b. 1942) on Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and a reading of Flaubert through Bourdieu.
Freud appears zero times in 2007. Nothing replaces him. Zero in 2011. Zero in 2023.
I read that as a decision about Freud. The nine documents say it was a decision about rooms.
Freud comes back twice. He appears three times in the editor’s preface to The Wisdom of Bat Sheva, and there he carries the piece: mourning and melancholia read onto Tosefta Sotah 15:11-14 and onto the death of Beth Samuels. He appears once in “Suborning Perjury,” the Oxford chapter, alongside Judith Butler (b. 1956), Jerome Bruner (1915-2016), and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002).
Zero in every refereed rabbinics venue from 2007 forward. Present in a volume he edited and in a law-and-literature collection edited by legal scholars.
So the instrument was placed rather than dropped. In a room where nobody will check the reading of Freud’s case notes against Freud scholarship, the reading runs. In a room where a rabbinics reviewer cannot check it and would not credit it, the reading stays home. The psychoanalytic apparatus survives elsewhere in demoted form too: Felman appears twice in the book’s notes and once in the bibliography, cited for The Juridical Unconscious rather than for Lacan.
The same pattern governs the rest of the apparatus. “Interrupting Birth Control” carries Michael Satlow thirty-four times and Foucault twice, and carries none of the theorists on the spine list. The topic assigns the citations. The Kalmin review runs Jacob Neusner (1932-2016) six times and recommends a hermeneutics of suspicion about rabbinic power. The Boyarin review forum runs Bakhtin thirteen times and Boyarin twenty-five, because the book under review is about carnival. Across nineteen years the theorists rotate with the subject and the venue. Two things do not, and they come later.
One qualification about the Divinations inference, which I made and still think holds. Boyarin (b. 1946), Virginia Burrus, and Derek Krueger edit a series where psychoanalytic reading is common. If a journal’s caution had taken Freud out of the 2007 article, the monograph is where he comes back, with two hundred and forty pages and a friendly series editor. He did not come back. That is an argument from plausibility rather than testimony, and the direct question has an answer that Wimpfheimer holds.
Fish on the shelf
Fish sits in the dissertation’s bibliography in 2005 and is never cited in the body. He is absent from 2007. Absent from 2011. Absent from all nine intervening documents: the memoir piece, the preface, the birth control chapter, the JAAR review, the JQR review forum, both 2017 chapters, and the SBL chapter. In 2023 he organizes the argument, where affective stylistics supplies the method and Fish’s chair and telephone book supply the opening moves.
Eighteen years, listed and unused, across rooms of every kind. A law journal, a theory series, a memorial volume, a religion journal, a Brill Festschrift, an Oxford press collection, an SBL volume. No room called for him, which means no room suppressed him.
Then the corpus changes and he arrives. From 2004 through 2011 the claim is that talmudic legal narratives are a genre and that reading them as statutes destroys them, which is a claim about stories and therefore easy. In 2023 the claim is that the Mishnah, casuistic law with the narrative squeezed out, is a writerly text that requires an active reader to produce its meaning. He took the least literary document in the canon and claimed it, and reader-response theory is the tool for that job and for no earlier one.
Andrea Nightingale did the same thing with the same author. Fish sits in her 1993 bibliography and nowhere in her argument. Two scholars in two fields, a decade apart, keep the same book on the shelf until a problem calls for it.
Purim and the poskim
The dissertation opens on Megillah 7b. Rava gets drunk on Purim, slaughters R. Zeira, revives him, and is turned down the following year with the line that gives the introduction its title. Wimpfheimer uses the story to show four constituencies flattening one joke: Alfasi deletes it, R. Ephraim of Kila Hamad converts it into a rule against drunkenness, Ephraim Zalman Margolioth converts it into a rule about limits, and modern scholars flatten it for reasons of their own.
The 2004 article does not have it, which serves as a control, because 2004 is where the Rava material starts. Its Rava is the Rava of Bava Metsia 97a, angry at his students and then ashamed in his own courtroom. The drunk Rava of Megillah is a dissertation acquisition.
Dine Israel does not have it. The 2011 book has it at three times the dissertation’s length, in Chapter One, with material that exists nowhere earlier. Bakhtin on carnival arrives to explain what Purim is. Scholars are cited for the proposition that the biblical Esther was composed to give religious meaning to a carnival that already existed, which makes the authors of Esther spokesmen for authority reining in an unruly day. And then the observation that has nothing to do with late antiquity: rabbinic overexertion of the laws of Purim has produced contemporary communities in which costumed clowns read the Megillah with more precision than the weekly Torah reading, which he calls farcical.
And then it is gone. Purim appears in none of the nine later documents. The joke lives in one room, at full length, once.
The address to poskim runs the same way and then reverses. Neither the 2004 article nor the dissertation addresses anyone practicing law today. The 2004 article ends on readers and latent meanings. The dissertation’s concluding statement discusses the Stam, rabbinic authority, the academy and the marketplace, and stops. The Dine Israel article ends somewhere else: the study of talmudic legal narrative could redefine Jewish law by making its practice self-conscious about its own exercises of power, and practitioners of Jewish law could broaden their horizons to include non-legal discourses in halakhic decision-making. That is new in 2007. Dine Israel is a journal of Jewish law whose readers include people who decide things, and its editor, Suzanne Last Stone, is thanked in the article’s first footnote for editorial suggestions that improved its final form.
The book drops it. Narrating the Law ends on the hope that readers will critique the reading strategies dominating both traditional and critical understandings of the Talmud. The phrase “practitioners of Jewish law” does not occur in it. The nine later documents do not restore it. The 2017 Brill chapter runs the other way and attacks Mishpat Ivri for treating Jewish law as an object, on the ground that object-essentializing is what buttresses the field’s claim to relevance in Israeli jurisprudence.
One journal, one accommodation, later reversed on the merits.
This is the closest thing in the file to a fingerprint. The single article whose editor is thanked for suggestions is the article that loses Freud, loses Purim, and gains an address to practitioners. Everything else called peer pressure here is anticipation rather than correction. A man wrote for six kinds of room and packed a different bag for each one before anybody told him to.
He polices himself in the open at least once. “Interrupting Birth Control” contains a passage naming his own feminist impulse and Satlow’s property reading as over-skepticism about the rabbis.
The Halivni line, withdrawn
Halivni goes from forty-seven mentions in the dissertation to twelve in the book, and the book’s conclusion claims a source criticism that draws on compositional history in the service of textual poetics, separating talmudic layers as a first step in literary analysis rather than as a tool for charting ideational evolution. That sentence is Halivni’s instrument turned to a purpose Halivni did not have.
Halivni appears three times in 2004: once in the opening survey, once in the acknowledgments as thesis advisor, and once in the note explaining what the Stam is. Three, in a piece written under Halivni’s supervision, for a journal that would have accepted forty-seven or three with equal indifference. Shamma Friedman (b. 1937) appears fourteen times in the same article.
The nine hold the rate. Three in the memoir piece, two in the Kalmin review, three in the review forum, one in the Brill chapter, one in the SBL chapter, none in the Oxford chapter. Friedman tracks him at the same scale or higher.
Forty-seven in a dissertation is a genre requirement. Twelve in a book is a book. Three is what the man does when nobody is grading him, and three is what he does for nineteen years. The instrument was taken and the debt was paid at the customary rate.
What rose and fell
Bakhtin is the only theorist on the spine list with an arc rather than a switch. Zero in 2004. Twenty in the dissertation. Present in 2007. Fifty-eight in the book. Thirteen in the 2011 review forum, in a room organized around Boyarin’s carnival. One in 2017, in a note that back-references Narrating the Law. Six in the 2021 SBL chapter. Zero in 2023.
That is the shape of a frame a scholar builds with, defends in public, cites back to, and then sets down. Cover, Geertz, and Bourdieu, at fifty-three, twenty-nine, and twenty-six in the book, do not appear in the nine at all. They belong to one project.
The anxiety thesis has a longer life than I credited. It is in the 2004 article, where Rava’s outburst performatively demonstrates rabbinic anxieties and the fear that the shared task of teaching could diminish the hierarchical status of a rabbinic scholar. It is intact in the 2011 conclusion, where rabbis outside their areas of authority act in ways that testify to feelings of powerlessness and cultural instability. It is running in 2017, in “Suborning Perjury,” where Joshua reacts violently because he cannot tolerate unbridled charisma, where Moses has no anxiety about his own authority, and where rabbinic charisma is less stable than charisma grounded in divine grace. The 2021 chapter drops the vocabulary and keeps the reading: editorial war, and an offer that cannot be refused.
Thirteen years, not seven. The break comes in 2023, in the same article that turns the frame over, and when the anxiety goes the power goes with it. There is no anxiety in the 2023 article and no power in it either.
The verdict on readers inverts at the same moment. Through 2011 the interpretive tradition is the antagonist, and the antagonism is already there in miniature in 2004: traditional scholars since the Stam pretend that Rava had never erred, that no correction had taken place, that no one was ashamed. They ignore the text’s decision to tell a story about the law. Later the Palestinian Talmud’s editor fabricates a counter-narrative with a phallic name to shut down a position he dislikes, and the Stam mobilizes R. Yitshak to convert a myth of rabbinic power into a myth of impotence in a way that by Wimpfheimer’s own account is untrue to the story.
In 2023 he writes that fear of reverting to earlier rejected approaches should not prevent one from recognizing the ways in which talmudic reception, rather than distorting the Mishnah, may respond accurately to invitations from the primary text. A talmudic interpretation may be ahistorical, out of keeping with the passage’s original intent, and still take up the analytic work the Mishnah invites. Neusner, handled as a cautionary case in the Kalmin review, comes back rehabilitated.
Same man, same activity, opposite verdict, nineteen years apart.
Altitude
The aggression did not go anywhere. It changed altitude and it changed target.
The 2007 polemic is against a tradition and it sits in the body, where a tradition cannot answer. The 2010 review recommends a hermeneutics of suspicion about rabbinic power, aimed at a habit of the field. The 2017 Brill chapter attacks Mishpat Ivri, a school. The 2023 polemic is against three named living scholars and it sits in the notes, where they can reply. Footnote 23, the longest in the piece, works through Elizabeth Shanks Alexander’s use of Jean Bottéro (1914-2007) on Hammurabi’s Code and argues that Bottéro says something different from what she takes him to say, since his math-table analogy holds that the ancient student would not have arrived at a principle at all. Avraham Walfish reads religious depth into a legalistic corpus that may not warrant it. Leib Moscovitz argues his negative case and then concedes what he has to concede. Narrower, sourced, answerable.
What never moved
The philology, demoted twice and never dropped. The 2004 notes collate Florence II I 8, Hamburg 165, Cremona ebr. T. IV 10, Vatican ebr. 115 and 117, Munich 95 and Escorial G-I-3, and settle the Rabbah/Rava orthography with Friedman. The dissertation carries a hundred and fifty pages of manuscript synopses in twelve appendices. The book carries its readings on an eclectic text with the witnesses in the notes. The 2023 article cites MS Kaufman as its base, records that the three Italian manuscripts have two cases where later tradents added a third, and lets Saul Lieberman (1898-1983) settle a reading that the printed editions transform. Four footnotes where there was once a third of a volume, and the same hands on the same manuscripts underneath Derrida in 2004 and underneath Fish in 2023.
And the operation, which never changed at all. In 2004 the engine is two adjacent Rava stories that read each other, anger and shame, mirrored so that the emotional marker in one supplies the reading of the other. Wimpfheimer’s word for the marker is gratuitous: a detail the legal argument does not need, whose presence obliges the reader to supply a context that justifies it. In 2007 and 2011 the engine is Cover’s juxtaposition of Deuteronomy 21 against the Genesis narratives, two texts whose contrast obliges the reader to supply what neither will say. In 2023 the engine is Stephen Wald’s legal couplet, two adjacent cases whose small difference obliges the reader to work out the concept that separates them.
Four sets of names, one move. He has been reading contrast that conscripts the reader for twenty years, and the names are the part that changes.
The weather
One correction of scale. What reads as personal development belongs partly to the field’s calendar.
Andrea Nightingale published “Writing/Reading a Sacred Text: A Literary Interpretation of Plato’s Laws” in Classical Philology in 1993, eleven years before the Prooftexts article. She refuses the treatise reading of the Laws, insists that a lawcode’s packaging shapes its reception, and runs Austin’s constative and performative distinction over Plato’s preludes to show that explanatory sentences do coercive work in a room that forbids reply. Her Athenian and Wimpfheimer’s Stam occupy the same structural position: the voice that closes the conversation while appearing to open it.
S. J. Claassens published “The So-Called ‘Mesopotamian Law Codes’: What Is in a Name?” in the Journal for Semitics in 2010, the year before Narrating the Law. Her question is whether casuistic collections that lack systematization, completeness, and any evidence of binding force earn the word code, and she reviews three accounts of what the cuneiform collections were doing instead: rule of law, scribal school exercise, royal propaganda.
Nobody here is reading anybody. Between the early nineties and 2010, classicists, Assyriologists, and Talmudists arrive independently at the same suspicion about legal corpora, which is that the legal reading is a genre assignment made after the fact and that it costs the text most of what it contains. Wimpfheimer’s 2004 program, breaking law’s monopoly on meaning while insisting that the normative details remain the necessary background, is his corner of a move underway in three fields at once.
Two verdicts
The rooms governed the apparatus and the address, and he fitted them himself. Freud runs at chapter length in a dissertation, disappears from every refereed rabbinics venue, and returns in a volume he edited and a collection edited by lawyers. Purim gets three pages and a jab at costumed clowns in Divinations and appears nowhere else. The address to poskim appears in the one journal that has poskim among its readers and is later reversed on principle. Satlow and Foucault arrive with the birth control chapter and leave with it. One editor is thanked, in the one article where three features move at once, and that is the whole of the direct evidence for pressure applied from outside.
Time did something the rooms cannot explain, because it happened in all of them at once. The theory count falls while the difficulty of the corpus rises, which is the opposite of the usual direction, and it is the strongest evidence in the file that nobody wore him down. In 2004 the young scholar names his procedure, tells you it is deconstructionist, spends four pages on freeplay before rejecting it, and reads two stories. In 2023 he names Fish once and works the Mishnah.
The removals that stick are the ones he performs on himself, and they have a common property. Derrida went first, because the vocabulary was there to prove he had read it. Freud left the refereed track, because a talmudist reading Freud’s case notes is doing something a rabbinics reviewer cannot check and a psychoanalysis reviewer would not accept. The anxiety thesis lasted longest and died last, and it asked him to know how third-century Babylonians felt. Each removal takes out a claim he could not defend on his own ground.
What survived nineteen years is the manuscript work and one move about contrast. Those are the two things he could defend from the beginning.
Notes on evidence
Counts for the dissertation and the book are from full-text extraction. Counts for the 2004 Prooftexts article are hand counts from extracted text and are accurate within one or two on the two largest figures. Two documents in the later batch, “The Shiva” and “Suborning Perjury,” had no text layer and were hand-counted from page images. The Brill chapter was available as a two-page preview, so its counts are partial and should not be treated as final.
2004 Prooftexts: Freud 18, all in notes 33 and 36. Bakhtin 0. Cover 0. Geertz 0. Bourdieu 1, note 66. Halivni 3. Friedman 14. Fish 0. Derrida 7 including two uses of Derridean. Foucault 1. Boyarin 2. Rubenstein 4. Purim absent. No address to poskim. Anxiety present.
2005 dissertation: Freud 34, Bakhtin 20, Cover 53, Geertz 21, Bourdieu 25, Halivni 47, Friedman 42, Fish in bibliography only. Purim present. No address to poskim. Anxiety present.
2007 Dine Israel: Freud 0, Bakhtin present, Cover present, Fish 0. Purim absent. Address to poskim present. Anxiety present.
2009 “The Shiva”: Freud 0, Bakhtin 0, Cover 0, Geertz 0, Bourdieu 0, Halivni 3, Friedman 3, Sperber 3, Fish 0. Purim absent. No address to poskim. One personal use of anxiety, not the thesis. Memoir register, no theory apparatus, first person throughout.
2009/2010 editor’s preface, The Wisdom of Bat Sheva: Freud 3, all others 0, Fish 0, no address to poskim, anxiety absent. Freud carries the piece.
2009/2010 “Interrupting Birth Control”: Freud 0, Bakhtin 0, Cover 0, Geertz 0, Bourdieu 0, Halivni 0, Friedman 0, Fish 0, Foucault 2, Satlow 34, Neusner 2, Lieberman 1, Boyarin 1. Purim absent. No address to poskim. Rabbinic anxiety 0, the one hit being Bradley on Roman fathers.
2010 Kalmin review, JAAR: Freud 0, Bakhtin 0, Cover 0, Fish 0, Halivni 2, Friedman 2, Neusner 6. No address to poskim. Anxiety absent.
2011 Narrating the Law: Freud 0, Bakhtin 58, Cover 53, Geertz 29, Bourdieu 26, Halivni 12, Fish 0. Purim present and expanded. No address to poskim. Anxiety present.
2011 “The Dialogical Talmud,” JQR review forum: Freud 0, Bakhtin 13 including four adjectival uses, Cover 0, Geertz 0, Bourdieu 0, Halivni 3, Friedman 4, Fraenkel 3, Lieberman 3, Boyarin 25, Rubenstein 1, Fish 0. Purim absent. No address to poskim. Anxiety absent.
2017 “Footnotes to Carnal Israel,” Brill: Freud 0, Halivni 1, Friedman 1, Boyarin 1, Balkin 2, Schlag 1, Fish 0. Partial counts from preview.
2017 “Suborning Perjury,” OUP: Freud 1, Bakhtin 1 in a note back-referencing Narrating the Law, Cover 0, Geertz 0, Bourdieu 0, Halivni 0, Fish 0, Butler 1, Bruner 2, Gadamer 1, Boyarin about 15. Purim absent. No address to poskim. Anxiety present.
2021 “Conflict over the Essential Nature of Law,” SBL: Freud 0, Bakhtin 6, Cover 0, Geertz 0, Bourdieu 0, Halivni 1, Friedman 2, Fish 0, Barthes 3, Butler 1, Dworkin 2, Lyotard 1, Boyarin 10, Hidary 11, Fraade 8, Furstenberg 6, Yadin 3, Fraenkel 5, Lieberman 3, Neusner 1. Purim absent. No address to poskim. Anxiety absent.
2023 JQR: Freud 0, Bakhtin 0, Cover 0. Fish organizing. Eco, Barthes, Perry, and Sternberg in. Neusner rehabilitated. Anxiety absent.
Comparanda, kept out of the chronology. Nightingale 1993: Fish once in note 34, bibliography only. Austin heavy, Searle heavy, Morson 3, Detienne 2, Popper 1, Vlastos 2. Claassens 2010: Bottéro heavy, Roth heavy, Westbrook heavy, Finkelstein 3, Malul 5, Levinson 3.
The method, for repetition: extract full text from each document, count named theorists and signature phrases across all of them, and compare, since the argument rests on what appears and disappears rather than on impressions.
The open question stays open. Whether Wimpfheimer cut the Freud material himself or was advised to, he has the answer.
A note on register. The book transliterates rabbinic names in full scholarly apparatus, Rabbâ and Rab Zêrā and Mĕgîllâ, which is Penn’s house style for the series. The 2004 article and the 2023 article do not. Every stage of this career includes a decision about how many readers to keep out, and the transliteration is one of the places that decision is visible on the page.
Sources
Barry Wimpfheimer, “‘But It Is Not So’: Toward a Poetics of Legal Narrative in the Talmud,” Prooftexts 24 (2004): 51-86.
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, “Legal Narratives in the Babylonian Talmud” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005).
Barry Wimpfheimer, “Talmudic Legal Narrative: Broadening the Discourse of Jewish Law,” Dine Israel 24 (2007).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, “The Shiva,” in Michael Socken, ed., Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-First Century (2009).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, editor’s preface and “Interrupting Birth Control,” in The Wisdom of Bat Sheva (KTAV).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, review of Richard Kalmin, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2010).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, “The Dialogical Talmud,” Jewish Quarterly Review review forum on Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (2011).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, “Footnotes to Carnal Israel,” in Charlotte Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, and Moulie Vidas, eds., Talmudic Transgressions (Brill, 2017).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, “Suborning Perjury,” in Richard McAdams, Martha Nussbaum, and Alison LaCroix, eds., Fatal Fictions (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, “Conflict over the Essential Nature of Law,” in Studies in Rabbinic Narratives (SBL, 2021, date unverified).
Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, “The Mishnah’s Reader: Reconsidering Literary Meaning,” Jewish Quarterly Review 113:3 (Summer 2023): 335-367.
Sigmund Freud, “Wild Psycho-Analysis” (1910), Standard Edition XI.
Andrea Nightingale, “Writing/Reading a Sacred Text: A Literary Interpretation of Plato’s Laws,” Classical Philology 88 (1993): 279-300.
S. J. Claassens, “The So-Called ‘Mesopotamian Law Codes’: What Is in a Name?” Journal for Semitics 19/2 (2010): 461-478.
When was the Talmud Finished?
The Babylonian Talmud names no author and carries no date. It runs to something near two million words, and about half of it is spoken by nobody. Named sages make short statements. Around those statements sits an anonymous voice that asks the questions, raises the objections, proposes the answers, and decides what the named men must have meant.
Who spoke in that voice, and when, is the central unsettled question in the academic study of the Talmud. The answer determines what world the book belongs to, which comparative literature is admissible in reading it, and which languages a scholar has to learn before he can be taken seriously. Nothing in Talmud study rides on more.
The traditional answer is short. Bava Metzia 86a says that Rav Ashi and Ravina were the end of hora’ah, authoritative instruction. Sherira Gaon (d. c. 1006), writing from Pumbedita in 987 to Jacob ben Nissim of Kairouan, fills that out with archival material. Rav Ashi died in 427 by the traditional reckoning. Ravina died in Kislev of the Seleucid year 811, which Sherira gives as December of 499. After Ravina there was no hora’ah. There were the Savoraim, who explained what had been left unsettled and offered rulings close to hora’ah without adding anything of their own. Sherira names some of them. Seder Tannaim ve-Amoraim ends the Savoraic period with Rav Gida and Rav Simona. Maimonides took Rav Ashi to have composed the book. On this account the Talmud is a fifth-century work with a short editorial tail.
Academic Talmud study has been dismantling that account for a century, and the dismantling has a technique behind it. Abraham Weiss (1895-1970) worked on the sugya as a composed literary unit. Shamma Friedman (b. 1937) gave the field one of its foundational methodological statements in a massive 1977 study, “Pereq Ha-Isha Rabbah in the Babylonian Talmud: A Critical Study of Yevamot X with a Methodological Introduction”. Its methodological introduction supplied criteria for separating the anonymous discursive stratum from attributed tannaitic and amoraic material and demonstrated how the anonymous layer frequently interprets earlier dicta according to assumptions that were not necessarily those of their original authors. He later applied the method systematically to the sixth chapter of Bava Metzia in his Talmud Arukh. David Weiss Halivni (1927-2022) reached the same terrain from a different direction across the volumes of Meqorot u-Mesorot, beginning in 1968 and running for four decades, and gave the anonymous men a name. He called them the Stammaim, after stam, the anonymous.
Halivni’s claim is that the Stammaim are the authors of the Talmud. On his model, transmission preserved terse rulings and lost the argumentation that produced them. The Stammaim reconstructed the lost reasoning, and where they got it wrong the forced explanation shows in the text. They then arranged what they had built. The apparatus that makes the Talmud feel like a conversation is theirs.
Then the dating. Halivni moved the Stammaim later across his career, and in the summation that Jeffrey Rubenstein translated as The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud in 2013 he puts the Stammaitic era at 550 to 750. He treats the Savoraim of the Geonic sources as the last of the Stammaim, around 700 to 750. He holds that the Talmud was never closed by any decision or agency, and that it closed on its own around 770 when sages began writing independent books. That is three centuries of anonymous editorial work after the death of the last named Amora.
An arithmetic objection to the late dating circulates. Count the generations of named Babylonian Amoraim. There are six or seven. Give each generation thirty years. Start the clock around 220, or be generous and start at 250. You reach 430 or 460. So the attributed material ends in the middle of the fifth century, exactly where Sherira put it, and a very late redaction requires a century and a half or more of undocumented work by men who left no names.
The trouble is that the objection describes the late-stam position. These men have no names because they fall outside the chain of transmission that generates names, so counting generations of named figures tells you nothing about how long unnamed men worked. The tradition has a label for the interval and Sherira supplies names for some of them. To land, the objection would have to say that a long stretch of undocumented anonymous editorial labor is implausible on its face, which is a claim about plausibility and can be met with other claims about plausibility.
The arithmetic has two other soft spots. Thirty years per generation is a choice. Rabbinic generations are teacher to student, and Rav Ashi is said to have led Sura for something near sixty years. Loosen to forty and the named chain reaches past 500 on its own, which shortens the gap from one end while weakening the calculation from the other. And the traditional sources do not agree with each other. Sherira begins the Savoraim after the death of Rav Yose, Seder Tannaim ve-Amoraim begins them after the death of Ravina, and the two do not fall in the same year. Dorot ha-Rishonim puts Ravina’s death in 475 against Sherira’s 499. The endpoint of the named period is a reconstruction from tenth-century testimony about a fifth-century event.
The resistance to the Stammaitic model comes from elsewhere, and its most effective form belongs to Robert Brody of the Hebrew University. In an essay published in the first volume of Iggud in 2008, Brody makes four points. Some anonymous material is early, because Amoraim address it and argue with it. The Palestinian Talmud, whose redaction is placed toward the end of the fourth century, contains a substantial anonymous component, and portions of that material are shared with the Bavli, which means anonymity by itself carries no chronological weight. Attributions drop off in transmission, so a statement can be anonymous because a name fell away rather than because a late man wrote it. And the gap between the plain sense of an Amoraic statement and the anonymous interpretation of it does not establish distance in time, since contemporaries misread each other constantly. Brody also observed that the Stammaitic hypothesis has become the foundation for an entire secondary literature, which means that a great deal now rests on a claim that has never been proved.
Moulie Vidas of Princeton pressed a different objection in Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud in 2014. Vidas noticed that the anonymous voice sometimes strips attributions on purpose, to hold the received tradition at a distance and to mark its own voice against it. If anonymity is a designed effect, then the layering that source critics read as chronology may be an artifact of the composition rather than a record of it. Daniel Boyarin (b. 1946) called this an upsetting of the applecart, and he was right about the scale of it. The distinction between building blocks and construction turns out to be one of the things constructed.
Richard Kalmin framed the question in its blunt form as the title of a book in 1989 — The Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud: Amoraic or Saboraic? Nearly forty years on, the field has a consensus about method and no consensus about dates. The stammaitic toolbox is the source-critical method in general use. The chronology it is supposed to underwrite remains contested, and the contest runs along a rough geographic line, with more resistance in Israel and more acceptance in America.
Now the part that has changed the stakes.
Over the past twenty-five years a subfield has grown up around reading the Bavli against Sasanian Persian material. Yaakov Elman (1943-2018) at Yeshiva University drove it. Shai Secunda, who holds the Jacob Neusner chair at Bard, gave it a programmatic book in The Iranian Talmud in 2014. Geoffrey Herman reconstructed the exilarchate in its Sasanian setting in A Prince without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era and traced Persian narrative parallels in essays such as “Ahasuerus, the Former Stable-Master of Belshazzar, and the Wicked Alexander of Macedon”, Kalmin wrote Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine in 2006, Jason Mokhtarian systematically examined the Bavli’s encounters with Persians, Sasanian kings, and Zoroastrian priests in Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran, and Carol Bakhos and Rahim Shayegan’s 2010 edited volume The Talmud in Its Iranian Context helped consolidate the emerging enterprise. The claim is that Babylonian rabbis lived inside a Zoroastrian empire, argued with Persian legal categories, and can be read against Middle Persian sources the way Palestinian rabbis have long been read against Greek and Roman ones.
The chronology decides how much of that reading is available. Put the anonymous layer at 600 or later and the Bavli is a document of the late Sasanian world, and reading it well requires Middle Persian, the Pahlavi legal compilations, and Zoroastrian jurisprudence. Put it at 500 and the Bavli is a late antique Jewish text with Persian contact rather than Persian formation, and the comparanda shift back toward Palestinian rabbinics, Syriac Christianity, and Roman law. The chronology decides which competence a young scholar must acquire to be hired.
A specialist in late Sasanian material has a professional stake in a late Bavli. A traditionalist has a stake in Sherira. A man whose commentary rests on the Stammaim has a stake in the Stammaim.
The Persianists are also not uniform. Yaakov Elman repeatedly read fourth-century amoraim, especially Rava and Rav Nahman, against Sasanian legal and cultural material, most systematically in “Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition” and in studies of Babylonian Jews, the Iranian economy, and Sasanian law. The comparison does not necessarily require a late Talmud. It does require confidence that legal traditions attested after the rabbis preserve institutions and doctrines already current in their world. The chronological problem is real but uneven. Elman made extensive use of the Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān, or Book of a Thousand Judgments, a law book generally dated to the first half of the seventh century, while other Middle Persian Zoroastrian compilations survive in forms redacted in the early Islamic centuries. Shai Secunda has repeatedly emphasized the methodological difficulties involved in putting the Bavli beside Iranian sources, beginning with “Talmudic Text and Iranian Context: On the Development of Two Talmudic Narratives” and developing the problem at length in The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context. The hazard runs no matter where one dates the stam: a parallel is historically useful only if one can make a plausible case that the Iranian tradition itself existed at the relevant time rather than simply reading later Pahlavi literature backward into fourth- or fifth-century Babylonia.
What could move the question? Four things.
The Geonic testimony can be worked harder. Sherira had archives. What he had, what he inferred, and where his two recensions differ are all recoverable questions.
Language can be tested. If anonymous editorial work continued into the middle of the eighth century, the Talmud sat in Iraq through the Arab conquest of 637 and a hundred years of Islamic rule. Scholars have long noted how little the Bavli shows of either. The absence of Arabic vocabulary and the near absence of Islam are the strongest available arguments against the very late end of Halivni’s range.
Aramaic dialectology can be pushed. If the anonymous layer is separated from the attributed layer by two or three centuries, the two should differ in ways that a corpus study can measure across manuscripts.
And Vidas’s challenge can be tested. If the anonymous voice removes attributions for literary effect, the cases can be counted and the criteria for identifying them stated. A few good examples establish a possibility. A large sample would establish a rate, and a rate would tell the field how much of its chronology is an artifact of its object.
Notes
Bavli Bava Metzia 86a on Rav Ashi and Ravina as the end of hora’ah. Sherira’s letter is edited by B. M. Lewin, Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon (Haifa, 1921); an English translation by Nosson Dovid Rabinowich appeared in 1988. The Ravina dating and the discrepancy with Dorot ha-Rishonim are discussed at Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. Savora, Savoraim.
Shamma Friedman, “Pereq ha-Isha Rabba ba-Bavli,” in Meḥqarim u-Meqorot, ed. H. Z. Dimitrovsky (New York, 1977).
David Weiss Halivni, Meqorot u-Mesorot, multiple volumes from 1968; The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, translated and edited by Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially chapter one on the dating and identity of the Stammaim.
Robert Brody, “Stam ha-Talmud ve-Divrei ha-Amoraim,” in Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, vol. 1, ed. Baruch J. Schwartz, Avraham Melamed, and Aharon Shemesh (Jerusalem, 2008), 213-227.
Moulie Vidas, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud (Princeton University Press, 2014).
Richard Kalmin, The Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud: Amoraic or Saboraic? (Hebrew Union College Press, 1989), and Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and “This, but also That: Historical, Methodological, and Theoretical Reflections on Talmudo-Iranica,” Jewish Quarterly Review 106:2 (2016): 233-241, part of a forum in the same issue.
Carol Bakhos and M. Rahim Shayegan, eds., The Talmud in Its Iranian Context (Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
Yaakov Elman, “Talmud ii. Rabbinic Literature and Middle Persian Texts,” Encyclopaedia Iranica.
Geoffrey Herman, A Prince Without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era (Mohr Siebeck, 2012).
From Robert Brody’s page at academia.edu:
1.Were the Geonim Legislators? [Hebrew] כלום היום הגאונים מחוקקים?
38 pages
2.On the Sources for the Chronology of the Talmudic Period / [Hebrew] בירור המקורות לכרונולוגיה של תקופת התלמוד
34 pages
3.The Anonymous Talmud and the Words of the Amoraim [Hebrew] סתם התלמוד ודברי האמוראים
21 pages
4.Review: Research on the Halakhot Literature of the Geonic Period / ספרות מחקר הגאונים מתקופת ההלכות[Hebrew]
15 pages
5.On Dating the Anonymous Portions of the Babylonian Talmud לתיארוך החלקים הסתמיים של התלמוד הבבלי [Hebrew]
12 pages
6.Two Traditions with Regard to a Particular Passage in Mishna Sheqalim [Hebrew] / ושתי משנה ישראל ארץ של בתלמודה גרסותיה
11 pages
7.Review of The Biblical Commentary of Rav Samuel Ben Hofni According to Geniza Manuscripts by A. Greenbaum [Hebrew] לשרידי פירוש התורה של רב שמואל בן חפני גאון
11 pages
8.The Conclusion of Seʿadya Gaon’s Prayerbook / [Hebrew] גאון סעדיה רב של התפילה סידור סיום
10 pages
9.Review of Introduction to the Code of Maimonides Mishneh Torah by I Twersky להערכה נכונה של ‘משנה תורה’ להרמב”ם [Hebrew]
9 pages
10.Concerning A Geonic Version of the Sugya הבא לי גיטי [Hebrew]
7 pages
11.Review of Auf welche Weise wurde die Mishna geschrieben? Das Antwortschreiben des Rav Sherira Gaon (Texts and Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Judaism, 9), by M. Schlüter, [Hebrew]
5 pages
12.TWO LEXICAL NOTES ON MISHNAIC HEBREW / [Hebrew] שתי זוטות לקסיקולוגיות בלשון חכמים
4 pages
13.Review of The Pluralistic Halakhah Legal Innovations in the Late Second Commonwealth and Rabbinic Periods [Hebrew]
4 pages
14.BNote on the Conclusion of Se’adya Gaon’s Prayerbook / ל’סיום סידור התפילה של רב סעדיה גאון’ [Hebrew]]
4 pages
15.On the New Fragment of “‘Essa Meshali” / לקטע החדש של ‘אשא משלי’ [Hebrew]
3 pages
16.Morning Benedictions at Qumran? / ברכות השחר בקומראן [Hebrew]
3 pages
17.Maimonides’ Halakhic Decisions Based on the Jerusalem. Talmud in Opposition to the Babylonian Talmud. [Hebrew]
18.How Many Editions of his Book of Oaths (Kitab al-Ayman) did R. Hayya Publish? [HEBREW] בכמה מהדורות פרסם רב האיי את ספר השבועות