The Worksheet and the Page: Barry Scott Wimpfheimer’s The Talmud: A Biography
A dog steals a cake off the coals. The cake has a hot coal stuck to it. The dog carries the cake to a haystack, eats the cake, and burns the stack to the ground. The Mishnah rules that the dog’s owner pays in full for the cake and half for the haystack, and offers no reason for the difference. The Talmud spends pages on the reason. Later, Rav Isaac takes the same fire and reads it against Lamentations, so that God, who sent the Babylonians against Jerusalem, becomes the party who started the fire and therefore owes for the damage.
Those two passages sit in the first ninety pages of The Talmud: A Biography, and they are most of the Talmud a reader of this book will study. The remaining two hundred pages are about what happened to the Talmud afterward. That is the design, and it is the right one, because Wimpfheimer has written a history of a reputation.
His scheme has three terms. The essential Talmud is the work the rabbis of late antique Babylonia produced. The enhanced Talmud is that work plus the millennium of commentary, codes, and responsa that grew on it. The emblematic Talmud is the Talmud as a name, invoked by people who may never have opened it, standing for rabbinic authority or Jewish cleverness or Jewish backwardness depending on who is doing the invoking. Academic Talmudists want the first. Traditional scholars work the second. Historians take the third.
The scheme is clean and it does honest work. It also gets more attention than it deserves, because the strongest evidence in the book is not about registers of meaning at all. It is about who may touch the object, and in what form, and at what price.
Consider what happens when the book gets to the page.
Between 1880 and 1886 the Widow and Brothers Romm press in Vilna printed an edition of the Talmud. The press is gone. The page survived, and it survived so completely that it stopped looking like one publisher’s typographic decision and started looking like the Talmud. Adin Steinsaltz (1937-2020) tried to make the text easier and drew objections that were partly about the layout. Revised Steinsaltz editions now carry the Vilna page. ArtScroll’s Schottenstein translation reproduces the same Vilna folio five or six times in a row while the English advances beside it, which wastes paper and lengthens every volume and is exactly the point. The critical editions produced by the Society for the Advancement of the Talmud copy the trick. The Responsa Project, freed by digital text from any need to imitate anything, added the option of viewing a Vilna page image, and the Talmud is the only book in that entire database that has the feature.
Then Wimpfheimer reports two sentences that ought to reorganize the whole book. In Israeli ultra-Orthodox circles the prohibition on Talmud study for women and girls is enforced, and it is enforced against the Vilna edition and its image. Girls are kept away from the Vilna Shas. They are permitted to study from worksheets onto which the same text has been pasted from a database.
Same words. Different page. Different permission.
If the ban attaches to the image, then in that community the Talmud is the image, and the words are something else. The essential Talmud, defined as the historically original content, has just been separated from the object that carries the prohibition, and the prohibition follows the object. Wimpfheimer notes this and moves on to the Choson Shas, the Vilna set that a bride’s family gives a groom at a wedding, which he says often sits unread on a shelf while certifying that the groom can study and that the bride’s family supports a man who does.
Both anecdotes point the same way. What the Talmud means in a given room is downstream of what people are allowed to hold, what it costs, what language it is in, what shape the page has, and who is watching. Meaning follows access.
Once you read the book that way, its best chapters line up. The Bavli beat the Yerushalmi in part because the Geonic academies put it at the center of a curriculum, which produced commentary, which made the text easier to enter, which produced more students, which produced more commentary. The Yerushalmi entered the reverse spiral and got harder as it got lonelier. That is an argument about entry costs. Pope Innocent IV (d. 1254), having ratified the burning of twenty cartloads of Talmudic codices in Paris under Louis IX (1214-1270), backed off in 1247 and permitted a censored Talmud instead. The Council of Trent in 1564 licensed printing on terms that included striking the word Talmud and substituting the Aramaic Gemara, which is why a generation of Jews said Gemara. These are not disputes about what the book means. They are administrative decisions about what may be printed, sold, owned, and read aloud, and the meanings follow.
Daf Yomi is the same story with the sign reversed. Meir Shapira (1887-1933) proposed at the Agudas Yisroel conference in 1923 that Jews everywhere read the same page on the same day and finish in about seven and a half years. That converts a scholastic corpus into a calendar and a text into a shared clock. Wimpfheimer’s estimate is seventy thousand participants internationally, with completion ceremonies in stadiums and a weekly Daf Yomi comic for children in Israel. Depth was the old value. Shapira sold breadth, regularity, and finishing, and the Talmud became a lay book on a mass scale for the first time in its history. He changed the schedule, not the sentences.
The book’s own object closes a loop that Wimpfheimer does not comment on. Andi Arnovitz’s 2010 work If Only They Had Asked Us cuts thousands of fragments of the Romm Vilna edition into scrolls and sews them into a garment, and Wimpfheimer ends the book with it, reading the title as a counterfactual about the Talmud that might have existed had women helped make it. The jacket of the book is also by Arnovitz. The reader holds an emblematic Talmud before opening the biography of the emblematic Talmud. The series compounds it. Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books rests on the premise that a book has a life, which is the emblematic register applied to books in general, and Wimpfheimer’s three terms are among other things a way of making that premise scholarly.
The series conceit also fights him once. His last chapter is titled “Golden Old Age,” and its argument is that more people study Talmud now than at any point in its history. Those two things do not agree. A life-cycle frame requires the subject to be near the end, and the evidence in the chapter describes an ascent. He may have had no choice about the title.
Two criticisms.
The first is about the weakest of his three words. Essential means historically original, and his own first two chapters show that the historically original object is already a compilation of generations reading and reworking each other, edited by anonymous hands that put words in the mouths of the dead to make the argument run. Recovering that layer is a modern specialist practice with a short history and contested results. It is a legitimate object. Calling it essential gives it a priority the book’s own argument withholds. The Yerushalmi comparison shows why the label costs him something: if the Bavli won partly through curriculum and commentary, then the thing that won was never the essential Talmud at all.
The second is about what the emblematic register lets him avoid.
Nicholas Donin brought Pope Gregory IX an indictment of the Talmud in 1238 with thirty-five accusations. Wimpfheimer says the accusations pointed to passages theologically problematic for Christians and to passages from the Toldot Yeshu tradition that mock Jesus and Mary. He says the Talmud names Jesus in eight places, that some of those passages appear to have entered from an oral folk genre, and that the genre carries strident and satirical animosity toward Christians. He is straight about it, and the straightness is to his credit, since the easy move was to treat Donin as a fabricator.
But the register absorbs the finding. Once every invocation of the Talmud counts as emblematic use, the accurate accusation and the invented one land in the same box. Donin had been Rabbi Yehiel’s student. He knew where the passages were. He was not symbolizing; he was quoting. A category built to explain how people who cannot read a book still fight about it works less well on the man who could read it, and the burning in the Place de Grève was a response, however monstrous the response, to text that is in the book.
The category has a related weakness at the other end. Wimpfheimer quotes Larry Charles (b. 1956), a Seinfeld writer, comparing the show to a dark Talmud with many clever people working one small question from every angle, and then extends the comparison to Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Woody Allen, and a line of standup comics, while conceding that Roth and Allen almost certainly never studied any Talmud. He calls the influence emblematic. The trouble is that nothing could count against it. If microscopic attention to the mundane and endless qualification are enough, most of twentieth-century American Jewish writing qualifies by definition, and the claim explains nothing because it excludes nothing.
A test is available and the book’s own material supplies it. Treat the emblematic register as doing causal work when an invocation by people who cannot read the text changes what somebody does. Donin passes: books burn. The Korean case passes, and it is the cleanest thing in the chapter. A Japanese popularization made with Marvin Tokayer was translated, condensed, illustrated, and rebuilt in South Korea into books that Koreans understand to be the Talmud, sold in convenience stores and book vending machines, consulted for child-rearing and business advice, and read as the secret of Jewish success. Wimpfheimer notes that this admiration runs close to the line where philosemitism turns into its opposite. Money moves, shelves fill, parents change how they raise children, and no one involved has read a page of the Bavli. That is the emblematic register with teeth. Larry Charles making a simile about his own sitcom, after the fact, changes nothing and predicts nothing.
Hold the two ends of the book together and the argument that survives is harder than the taxonomy that opens it.
An enormous, unfinished, multilingual, badly signposted book generated an interpretive labor market, and the labor conferred the authority that later justified the labor. Rashi (1040-1105) and Maimonides (1138-1204) and the Tosafists were building the thing they appeared to be explaining. Enemies then reinforced the center by aiming at it. Printers fixed the interface. Institutions fixed the curriculum. A rabbi in Lublin fixed the calendar. Each of those is a decision about access, and each one selected the readers who would get to add to the pile. Some readers become Rashi. Most never become footnotes. Wimpfheimer says so at the end, through a garment sewn out of cut-up pages, and the question that garment asks is the one his own theory of canonization implies from the first chapter.
If commentary makes the canon, then whoever controls admission to the class of commentators controls what the book will turn out to have meant.
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