This collection of articles by some of the leading scholars of midrash and rabbinics reflects the various current methodological approaches to the study of Tanhuma-Yelammdenu literature (TYL).
The beginnings of this volume can be traced back to the 2012 annual conference of the European Association of Biblical Studies and the international meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Amsterdam. Most of the contributions to this volume are a direct result of sessions that were held at this joint meeting. Other contributions originated in papers presented at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in 2013 in Jerusalem and at the 2014 meeting of the European Association of Jewish Studies in Paris. All the sessions held at these important meetings were dedicated to the late midrash, including TYL, a topic that was until recently relatively little studied in academic Jewish studies. Hopefully, these meetings contributed to the recognition of the importance of TYL and adjacent literature. TYL is a major source of knowledge about Jewish life at the end of late antiquity and throughout the Byzantine period just before it was absorbed into the wave of influence that came from Babylonia. This volume is our contribution to putting this important field, Tanhuma-Yelammedenu studies, on the map, as it were, within Jewish studies in general and within rabbinics and midrash studies in particular.
TYL reflects the Jewish society and culture of the late Byzantine period in the Land of Israel, Egypt, Southern Italy, and possibly other places. This period saw the development of the Babylonian Talmud, which eventually dominated all Jewish culture. TYL is therefore a witness to a Jewish society in which the Babylonian Talmud was not yet hegemonic, and which was, in essence, a continuation of classical amoraic culture.
TYL is also a key source for understanding the passage of Jewish literature from the Land of Israel into Europe. While based on classical amoraic literature, TYL was alive and productive, and continued to develop and rework its sources in the diaspora.
TYL also illustrates the interrelation between the early traditions that served the editors, and the literary reworkings of these traditions. We also see tension between materials of synagogual nature and the materials that originated in the elitist world of the beit midrash.
The main difficulty of arriving at an overall view of TYL is that it is an open corpus and that its limits are not yet known. It is highly fragmented, and its traditions are dispersed both geographically and chronologically in many compositions and manuscripts. This difficulty is at the core of the absence of a proper edition of this corpus, which in return makes the research difficult. We hope that the new technologies that are being developed in the field of digital humanities will help break this intractable problem.
The present volume aims to fill the immense paucity in the research on Tanhuma-Yelammedenu literature, to draw academic attention to this corpus, and to create a new wave in its study. We hope that this volume will become the beginning of a large-scale project dedicated to TYL, and that it will, first and foremost, give a shape to and make order out of the varied textual evidence.1
The volume presents a rich and wide variety of innovative approaches to the study of the TYL. Each author uses their own approach to Tanhuma- Yelammedenu studies, and we let each author introduce TYL from their perspective. However, we feel that the insights that emerge from the sum total of the contributions do create a new overarching picture of TYL and the texts of which it is comprised.
The book begins with Marc Bregman’s bibliographical and historical survey of the study of the TYL. His article in this volume builds on his monograph, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature: Studies in the Evolution of the Versions (2003), and surveys contributions to the study of TYL in the context of post-classical midrash from the beginning of the current century until the present. It also proposes lines of inquiry for further research that remain to be explored.
Following this article, the volume is divided into a few categories: textual findings, language and terminology, sources and parallels, adjacent and later literatures, and cultural context.
In the first category are articles that deal with the textual findings. Beyond the importance of the findings themselves, the results of such studies join previous works that show that the TY corpus was a prevailing literary asset in the Middle Ages in Jewish communities both in the West (Europe) and in the East (Egypt).
The prevalence of this corpus is behind its fluidity, as many additions, corrections, reworkings, and even reuses were made by local authors, users, and scribes. This also contributes to the difficulty inherent in identifying a core text that can serve as a basis for scholarly research.
The article written by Moshe Lavee is a wide-ranging and highly informed overview of the place of TYL in the cultural continuum of the Byzantine and Early Muslim periods in the Middle East. Lavee’s article is based on years of study of the Genizah corpus. His findings show that TYL played a prominent role in the Genizah communities in ways and forms previously unknown. This can be seen both from the homiletic material as well as from the documentary material (e.g., book lists) found therein.
According to Lavee, the diversity of versions and forms in the corpus is a result of the non-canonical status of TYL, especially when compared with the more canonical amoraic halakhic and aggadic material, with which TYL had to compete. Albeit, the flexibility of the TYL genre enabled it to continue – either in content or in form – in various other genres, contexts, and languages.
Andreas Lehnardt presents in his article an overview of the TY fragments found in Genizat Germania, part of a project that aims to collect and catalogue all known Hebrew and Aramaic binding fragments in German archives and libraries. Lehnardt provides a description of all the relevant fragments of TY, their transmission and their textual peculiarities. All the TY fragments identified so far in German archives and libraries are witnesses for the Buber edition of the Tanhuma (TB); they are mostly similar to the almost complete manuscripts used by Buber. Nevertheless they preserve interpolations and additions that are not found in versions that are known to us. They therefore reflect the fluidity of the text in its various European cultural settings and historical conditions. Lehnardt concludes that the study of midrash was not as widespread among Ashkenazic Jews of the Middle Ages as, for example, the study of piyyutim and the Bavli.
The volume continues with the second section, looking at aspects of the language of TYL, both linguistically and with regard to terminology. Yehonatan Wormser’s article offers a linguistic analysis of TYL, and presents three aspects: first, it looks at the connection and relation between the language of TYL and the main branches of Early Rabbinic Hebrew; second, it looks at the linguistic differences between the early layers and the late layers of TYL; and third, it compares the two late treatises – the Printed Tanhuma (TP) and TB.
The findings of Wormser show that TYL as a whole exhibits a continuation of the Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, and that Babylonian features are nowhere to be found in it. The linguistic analysis shows very clearly a distinction between the early strata and the later strata of TYL. This recognition opens more possibilities to identify other fragments that represent a relatively early stratum of TYL. According to Wormser, there is insufficient linguistic evidence for the earliness of TB in relation to TP, as was sometimes claimed. Differences of such a kind might be a matter of personal style of the editors.
In her contribution, Gila Vachman studies a peculiar terminology associated with the TY genre, the quotation of sayings in the name of Rabbi Tanhuma. Vachman shows that, in several cases, what appear as quotations of the famous sage Rabbi Tanhuma Bar Abba are in fact markers of the work from which the quotations are taken. In other words, these refer to Rabbi Tanhuma as the collector or the redactor of a given work, not as a preacher of the sermon. Within the collective and anonymous literature of the sages, this phenomenon is quite unusual, since it identifies a whole set of sermons with a single person, although many sages are quoted in it.
Vachman focuses on cases that employ the verb “to say” (
Vachman points to the beginning of an era in the midrashic literature when the midrashim start to move away from the traditional structures of fragmentary homilies attributed to a variety of sages and head toward the voice of an editor or a collector of a bigger collection. The works begin to be named after specific personae just like that of the Geonim. In other words, in this era we see the dying of the transmitter and the birth of the author.
The third section focuses on sources and parallels. TYL was not created ex nihilo, but flourished with earlier and parallel rabbinic and Jewish literature at its background. Systematic and comparative analysis of the sources that served the editors of the TY texts affords us a glimpse into the guiding principles that they employed.
Arnon Atzmon studies the relationship between pesikta-type texts (i.e., sermons for special Torah readings for the holidays) especially Pesikta de Rav Kahana (PDRK) and TYL. His study shows that the editors of TYL used PDRK as well as other pesikta-type materials that did not survive as independent compositions. The TY compositions exhibit different types of connections with PDRK (and other pesikta material) and employ different editorial strategies, and we also see that these editors did not usually make use of each other’s work. The inclusion of midrashic material that does not reflect and perhaps could not even be used in the regular triennial cycle shows the editors’ desire to collect the rabbinic material relevant to the biblical text comprehensively. Even more importantly, it is possible to distinguish different approaches among the editors of the various compositions: the editor of TP generally preferred to use material from the Mekhilta. In cases where such material was not available, he used pesikta material with little to no editing. The editor of TB, however, systematically collected pesikta material, but included it in his work on a selective basis, consistently editing the material. The editor of Exodus Rabbah made use of a substantial amount of pesikta material, but not from any pesikta compositions known to us. The editor of Pesikta Rabbati made extensive use of PDRK, at times editing the material and at times leaving the material in its earlier form.
Tal Ilan’s article discusses a Tanhumaic tradition that claims to derive from the Hasmonean past. She concludes that the Tanhuma tradition preserves authentic aspects of the story more than the versions in the Bavli and in Sifre Zuta on Deuteronomy as recorded by the Karaite Yeshuah ben Yehudah. It is a version that derives from the Tanhuma’s source but that seems to have been corrupted by Bavli influence. She argues that the name of the king was added to the Bavli story, and that the original (as found in Josephus as well) had no such name; further, the conclusion of the original story was not concerned with halakhic issues, but rather with having a happy ending, in which the king bows down to the authority of the sage, who has God on his side.
This story is an excellent example that demonstrates that the TY literature sometimes preserves very ancient traditions, and that we should not assume that its traditions are always younger and later than their parallels in other rabbinic compilations.
The next section is dedicated to adjacent and later literatures. TYL has many meeting points with adjacent literatures that share a common literary canon. The articles in this section focus on this aspect, and deal with the relationship and intertextuality between Tanhuma and other known compositions of various genres and periods, including compositions that did not survive intact.
Amos Geula reviews the relations between the TY corpus and the lost midrash called “Yelammedenu” and studies the affinity between Midrash Vayekhulu and this lost Yelammedenu. His findings show that there is a parallel between the quotations from Midrash Vayekhulu and those from the lost Midrash Yelammedenu. A thorough study of these citations, however, suggests that Midrash Vayekhulu adapts its sources in a tendentious manner, one that is similar to the tendency we find in Ashkenaz. It seems that the stage of tendentious adaptation followed a late stage of TY midrashim, and it is likely that this occurred toward the end of the 10th century. A similar phenomenon is found also in other lost aggadic midrashim known only from Ashkenaz, and their source can probably be found in Southern Italy.
Lieve Teugels deals in her article with tangential literature to the TY corpus, namely, Midrash Aggadat Bereshit (AB). This midrash has been dated to the 9th or 10th century in Southern Italy. In her article, Teugels analyzes the last chapters of AB, which, in addition to general rabbinic sayings against “Esau” and “the nations,” contain, in the form of midrash, explicit references to the persecution and killing of Jews and kiddush ha-shem (“martyrdom”). This data is put against what is known of the history of Southern Italy in the 9th and 10th centuries. The results bring us closer to answering the question of why Islam seems to be a non-existing entity in this medieval work, whereas Christianity appears as a major target of criticism.
Shalem Yahalom focuses on a still later period, medieval Provence. In his article, Yahalom follows the incorporation of TYL into the Books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy of the Rabbah midrashic collection. He proposes that these collections were initiated in Provence in the 12th century, and later continued in the study house of Nahmanides in Catalonia. The article deals with references to the Tanhuma in the works of Nahmanides.
The following section focuses on the cultural context of TYL. The cultural processes that TYL reflects are perhaps the most interesting aspect of this literature. The TY is the bridging link between the culture of Palestinian Judaism of the Byzantine period and medieval Judaism in Europe and other places. The articles in this section exemplify the advantages of the study of these processes, and look into this important moment in Jewish cultural history.
Dov Weiss argues that TYL has a tendency to refashion pre-Tanhuma material to produce dramatic and theatrical dialogues between biblical characters. In the three examples that he studies, TY authors transform indirect critiques of God (presented in a narrative form) into direct dialogical confrontations where the reader is privy to the actual transcript of the human–divine encounter.
In his article, Eric Ottenheijm analyzes the TY’s reading of the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael regarding God’s journey among the nations before offering the Torah to the Israelites. His analysis shows the way in wihch this reading fits in the TY discourse on the Torah. Executing a redaction-critical method and applying insights from postcolonial theory, Ottenheijm proposes to assess TY’s reading as a response to drastically changed conditions of the TY communities. More specifically, he suggests that these communities lived in the age of Justinian in the 5th century CE, an era of drastic changes in the legal and religious position of the Jews.
Finally, Ronit Nikolsky attemps to unfold the cultural reality behind TYL by studying the expression of emotions. She presents an approach to the study of emotions in ancient texts, and studies three instances of studying emotionality in TY texts. The first is to look into emotional words in the text; the second approach is to look into the motivation of protagonists to act; and the third approach is to attend to the author’s or editor’s clues as to what the attitude to the narrative should be. She exemplifies these three approaches by studying the TYL presentation of the biblical Joseph.
Because of the wide dissemination of the TYL genre, we find much textual evidence to it. We have therefore added a section that includes a survey of all Medieval manuscripts and fragments of Genizah and bindings containing TYL texts. The survey was complied by Arnon Atzmon.
A promising approach to Tanhuma-Yelammedenu studies is the project titled “Tikkoun Sofrim” being run out of the E-lijah Lab at The Department of Jewish History and Bible Studies of the University of Haifa. The project uses crowdsourcing to train computer algorithms to recognize handwritten texts of Hebrew manuscripts. And at present, the project is focusing on Tanhuma-Yelammedenu manuscripts in particular.