Tales of the Neighborhood: Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity 9780520928947

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Tales of the Neighborhood

the taubman lectures in jewish studies Daniel Boyarin, Series Editor 1. Biblical Prose Prayer as a Window to the Popular Religion of Ancient Israel, by Moshe Greenberg 2. Hebrew Poetry in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by Dan Pagis 3. The Promise of the Land: The Inheritance of the Land of Canaan by the Israelites, by Moshe Weinfeld 4. Tales of the Neighborhood: Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity, by Galit Hasan-Rokem The Taubman Professorship and Lectures The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies was established at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975 by grants from Milton I. Taubman and the Taubman Foundation; an equal sum was contributed by the family of Maurice Amado, Walter A. Haas, Daniel E. Koshland, Madeleine Haas Russell, and Benjamin H. Swig. Distinguished scholars in the field of Jewish studies are invited to teach at Berkeley for the enrichment of students and to give open lectures for the benefit of the public at large. Publication of the lectures is made possible by a special gift of the Taubman Foundation.

Tales of the Neighborhood Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity

Galit Hasan-Rokem

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the David and Susan Wirshup Endowment in Jewish Studies of the University of California Press Associates University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2003 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hasan-Rokem, Galit. Tales of the neighborhood : Jewish narrative dialogues in late antiquity / Galit Hasan-Rokem. p. cm. — (The Taubman lectures in Jewish studies ; 4) Includes index. ISBN 0-520-23453-7 (alk. paper). 1. Jews—Israel—Galilee—Folklore. 2. Legends, Jewish— History and criticism. 3. Galilee (Israel)—Social life and customs. 4. Rabbinical literature—History and criticism. 5. Women in rabbinical literature. 6. Folklore in rabbinical literature. I. Title. II. Taubman lectures in Jewish studies. Sixth series. gr286.g35 h37 2003 398.2'089'924—dc21

2002011200

Manufactured in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (tcf). It meets the minimum requirements of ∞ ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).䡬

In memory of my mother, Bat-Sheva (Pipsu) Hasan, née Blaugrund (1919–1956)

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CONTENTS

Preface 1. Erecting the Fence: Texts, Contexts, Theories, and Strategies 2. Peeping through a Hole: Comparing and Borrowing 3. Building the Gate, or Neighbors Make Good Fences 4. The Evasive Center: Hadrian, the Old Man, the Neighbor, and the Rabbinic Rhetoric of the Empire 5. Between Us: A Conclusion

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1 28 55

86 138

Notes

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Index of Ancient Sources and Authors General Index Index of Modern Authors

191 195 205

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PREFACE

One of my earliest childhood memories takes place in the courtyard of an old wooden townhouse in the city of Turku in southwestern Finland. It is a bright day; the women, including my mother, my nanny, our cook, and the neighbor woman, sit in the sun. At the other end of the courtyard there is a blacksmith’s workshop where horses are shod. This is the spring of 1947. One or two of the women—my mother is probably not one of them— are engaged in some domestic work, possibly peeling potatoes. They are also involved in a pleasant talk, bridging the social and ethnic differences with ease—my mother is the only Jewish woman in this group. The neighbor’s son, Jukka, drives proudly around in a model car operated by pedals. I want to take turns on the car, but Jukka refuses to release the hold over his most precious toy. I grow extremely impatient, and finally I clutch a considerable amount of his wheat-blond hair and pull it really hard. Jukka screams and instantly pays back with the same gesture. ix

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Two small children with no clothes—it is warm, remember?—roll on the round, smooth stones of the courtyard. The women move in a hurry to separate us. In order to bring peace, they turn our attention to another toy, a ring for blowing soap bubbles. Laughter is restored to the courtyard, and the bubbles carry our rainbow-colored reflections above the roof of the house out to the wide world. Today, on the site of our old courtyard there is a seven-story gray stone building adorned with a large cross. The local Methodist church shares the building with the other inhabitants. After many years I have learnt to cherish the memory of the women’s talk, of the intense excitement of the competition with the boy, and of the magic reflections in the fleeing soap bubbles. I am immensely grateful to my friends and colleagues at the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Jewish Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, who invited me to reintroduce the Taubman Lecture Series on Jewish Civilization. The Taubman Lecture Series had in earlier years featured such eminent scholars as my late teachers Dan Pagis and Shlomo Morag, and (yibbadel le-hayim arukim ve-tovim) Ya’akov Sussman. I am especially indebted to Daniel Boyarin, the incumbent of the Taubman Chair for Talmudic Civilization at Berkeley, who initiated the invitation. Daniel Boyarin, esteemed colleague and true friend, together with Chava Boyarin, also provided a warm neighborly environment, rewarding in every sense. At best I can hope these lectures may bear the stamp of the exhilarative exchanges on Rabbinic literature I have had with him through the years and especially in the warm and pleasant months of the fall of 1999 at Berkeley. As all aficionados know, the scholarly

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and social ambience of Berkeley is truly unique in its freedom, generosity, and perspicacity. I also thank Daniel Boyarin and his colleagues for being intrigued enough to invite me back in the fall of 2000 to deliver the fourth talk. The dialogue with my sometime student and now respected colleague Dina Stein from the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley has been one of the most enriching experiences of my whole intellectual life. The Berkeley visit that gave birth to these lectures, now chapters of this book, is just one pearl in a string that hopefully will go on and on and on. Bluma Goldstein, wise in letters and life, at the time the chair of the Jewish Studies Program, gave me every possible support both in administration and in friendship, including motherly care for my lost buttons and torn blouse as well as intellectual exchange on Jewish women. Chana Kronfeld’s generous sharing of her precious time for talks on poetry and life was invaluable. Other Berkeleyites whose presence and participation was of importance for the shaping of the present text are Robert Uri Alter, Chana Bloch, Carol Cossman, Alan Dundes, Charlotte Fonrobert, and Ron Handel. Linda Fitzgerald’s efficient and pleasant handling of the administrative side of my stay was indispensable. The simultaneous presence of my Jerusalem friends, teachers, and colleagues Shirley Kaufman and Bill Daleski in Berkeley was a delightful extra. The work on which the lectures are based draws of course from the source of my alma mater and longtime scholarly home, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I am always amazed at the richness and variation of scholarly expertise that I am surrounded by. Stimulating intellectual friendships, cooperation, and dialogues have nurtured my work. For this particular proj-

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ect my closest companion for over half a decade has been Oded Irshai, a marvel of learning and wisdom, my guide and fellow in the porticos of Late Antique Christian, Jewish, and pagan lives, especially, but not only, in the Galilee. Our joint research is indebted to the Federman Family Foundation to commemorate David and Paula Ben-Gurion at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University. Among the many others whose work has served as an inspiring basis for dialogue and debate are especially Israel Jacob Yuval, Daniel Schwarz, Hava Turniansky, David Stern, Ora Limor, Yaakov Elbaum, Avigdor Shinan, Joshua Levinson, and Eli Yassif. I cherish the exchanges with my estimable friend and close colleague Hagar Salamon. I thank Shalom Sabar for his leadership in advancing the Jewish and Comparative Folklore Program at the Hebrew University and for his untiring help in my search for cover art. Tali Artman, Ophir Mintz-Manor (who prepared the index for this book), Orit Segal, Anat Shapira, and Haim Weiss are a source of assistance, joy, and pride, and so are many other students of Rabbinic literature and Jewish and comparative folklore. The lectures were also presented at various seminars at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in the spring of 2000. I am grateful for the comments and amplifications extended by Roger Abrahams, Regina Bendix, Peter Stallybrass, Robert St. George, and especially my longtime friend, and in a sense mentor, Dan Ben-Amos, all of whom were also effective in making our stay there rewarding. Special thanks go also to David Ruderman, Director of the Center for Advanced Jewish Study at the University of Pennsylvania. The Einstein Forum at Potsdam was the location of further work on this book. I thank its thendirector, Sigried Weigel, and the enthusiastic staff.

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The staff at University of California Press has been efficient, welcoming, and most helpful. I thank especially Reed Malcolm, series editor, and Cindy Wathen, David Gill, Jacqueline Volin, and Ellen F. Smith for her careful editing. Two readers have supplied important corrections and additions to my original manuscript, for which I am grateful. Last but not least, my longest and closest neighborly relationship is with my partner in learning, love, and life, Freddie Rokem. Its constant renewal has amplified and deepened my enthusiasm for neighbors and other attachments. I thank him also for the gift of our 1999 stay in Berkeley, always a favorite place for us. The visits of our children Ariel and Naama with us there were pure bliss. Naama’s scholarly interest in spatial (and other) aspects of literature has become a very important source of knowledge, information, and inspiration for me. As the final words of this book are typed I hear the harsh sounds of war and oppression around. As one for whom dialogue has been not only an analytical tool for literary interpretation but also an ideal mode of communication with neighbors, not the least our Palestinian neighbors, I join hands with those who act to withstand occupation and violence, and promote a just and lasting peace. Jerusalem, August 2002

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Erecting the Fence Texts, Contexts, Theories, and Strategies

This short book seeks to explore the ways in which we can learn something about the relationship between literature and reality in Late Antique Jewish culture by reading the texts that we call Rabbinic literature, the Talmud and the Midrash. The discussion will evolve specifically in terms of narratives told in Hebrew and Aramaic, mostly in the Galilee, sometime between the years 150 and 500 C.E. These stories are short and concise, and they are embedded in discursive contexts that often emphasize non-narrative concerns such as Bible exegesis and juridical deliberation. The reason they have stimulated generations of traditional interpretation and scholarly research is, I believe, their capacity to present themselves continually as forceful and condensed signs for multiple concerns and areas of experience and expression. The same seductive complexity of these apparently simple texts opens them for study from various vantage points and theoretical outlooks. 1

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It also assures us that no one analytical procedure will exhaust all their meanings. The main theoretical concept I want to develop here is the narrative dialogue. The narrative dialogue is an analytical tool devised to explore the transport of cultural goods in terms that stretch the linear and dichotomous models of thought lying behind the concept of influence.1 Without denying the unifying characteristics of entities defined, by themselves and others, in terms of gender, age-group, class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, or other socially and culturally determined characteristics, it is necessary to state that most cultural communication constantly traverses these categories. The traffic across identity boundaries is more easily discernible in contemporary oral discourse than in discourse fixed in writing in rhetorical contexts, as the Talmud and the Midrash are. My purpose is to elicit the orality in the written, to invoke the plurality of the canonical, and by that to problematize the authority of received traditions. Dialogues may assume various emotional and intellectual tones. They may display conflict, fear, adversity, and even hatred, and they may also breathe common heritage, shared interests, friendship, tolerance, and solidarity. Attesting to the communication between individuals from various intersecting, sometimes hostile groups, such dialogues never grow out of a total indifference of human beings to each other. Approaching the text as a dialogue, and in dialogue, maximizes its character as a communicative process in situ. Thus it may be claimed to be the most suitable approach for exploring the issue of the relationship of literature and reality, texts and human lives. At this stage of literary and cultural studies few, if any, scholars suggest looking for a direct, referential relationship between

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literary texts and the realities to which they are connected. One may say that culturally and theoretically informed scholarship in the present approaches reality and literature as a mutually transforming bundle of relations. Realities form texts; texts on the other hand may be powerful agents in shaping realities. It is now also generally accepted that literary texts with historical reference reflect the realities of those who crafted them rather than of those who figure in them and about whom they seem to tell. The case of Rabbinic literature proves, however, that this simple premise may present more of a maze than a highway for interpretation. Rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity has come down to us in manuscripts and printed versions, all themselves produced no earlier than five hundred years after the projected date of the original production of the texts. The textual body of the Talmud and Midrash is immense in its scope and includes writings from Palestine as well as from Babylonia (in the region of what is Iraq today), compiled in a complete diglossia of Hebrew and Aramaic. These particular linguistic circumstances of a two-in-one language constitute an engaging field for the study of border crossing and unstable identity in Rabbinic literature that cannot be accomplished here. The generic nature of the texts is varied, but could generally be characterized as being ethnographic in its concerns, including juridical and normative discourse, rooted in an intertextual practice of Bible interpretation and quotation, as well as various forms of narrative. I hold the texts to be ethnographic in their main interest as they, like ethnographic writing, reify the Lebenswelt, the experienced world, of the society they relate to, based on dialogically narrated material. It is exactly what has

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often been stamped as the Rabbis’ lack of interest in history that I identify as their interest in ethnography: privileging the long duration of social institutions and everyday life over named historical persons and events with specific dates. The Rabbis’ textual production can be quite adequately characterized using Paul Atkinson’s description of modern ethnographic writing: “vraisemblance based on ‘intertextuality.’ . . . The persuasive force of the ethnographic argument . . . is sustained by the repeated interplay of concrete exemplification and discursive commentary. The text moves from level to level and from voice to voice.”2 Among the various expressive forms of discourse, generically identifiable narratives are those that can most feasibly be said to have been transmitted in oral communication and that pertain to the authority of collective creativity, and it is such texts that I shall analyze. Because of its own traditional character and the open-ended editorial technique invested in it, Rabbinic literature of the Amoraic period, created approximately from the third century to the sixth century C.E., is best seen in its broader context. This includes (in addition to the canon of the Hebrew Bible) other Jewish—Hebrew and Aramaic—texts, the earlier Mishnah and other Tannaitic texts, and liturgical poetry and Bible translations, as well as mystical and magical texts mostly composed somewhat later than the main body of Rabbinic literature. Another intertextual perspective includes Hellenistic and Roman texts and the texts of Early Christians, especially, but not only, those composed in Palestine and its immediate vicinity. The term used in English for the texts produced by Jews in the first five or six centuries of the Common Era, namely Rabbinic literature (parallel to the Hebrew Sifrut Haz”al), discloses imme-

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diately the patriarchal, male-dominated character traditionally attributed to these texts. Virtually all the individuals to whom particular passages are ascribed in the text are unambiguously male. The very small number of exceptions simply proves the general tendency.3 Apparently men also composed the larger units of texts, during the hundreds of years of their development. The approach to Rabbinic texts applied here brings together theoretical and methodological perspectives of the historical study of ancient texts and research in folk literature and folklore. In earlier projects I have carried out research based on fieldwork in present cultures, that is, through interviewing and observing behavior and discourse. I shall try to elaborate on the possibility of applying this experience to the study of ancient texts. Dialogue has been a central concept in folklore and cultural anthropology for more than a decade.4 In addition to the obvious methodological aspect of the mode of procuring information, the dialogical approach also brings into the research a heightened existential consciousness and a positive approach to interpersonal and intercultural communication in itself. It generates as well a critical approach to the inescapable power of hierarchies that is a part of most fieldwork situations, between individuals with unequal educational and economic conditions, although it does not, of course, erase these inequalities. It is rarely the ones who are lower in power hierarchies who study those higher up. Historical study produces a similar “inequality,” formulated by Hans Georg Gadamer and others as the hermeneutical stance of those who are acquainted with what came to pass. The feminist aspect of the present approach acknowledges, in fact celebrates, this turning of tables on the ancient patriarchal texts.

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The tradition of the systematic study of folklore in Rabbinic literature was initiated by such masters as Bernát Heller and especially Louis Ginzberg. Dov Noy, who in the late 1950s began the academic research into contemporary folklore of Jews and Israelis, has devoted several studies to its links with Rabbinic literature.5 Folklore in Rabbinic literature may be conceptualized in various ways, as scholars, notably Eli Yassif and Dina Stein, as well as myself, have recently shown in book-length studies of the topic.6 Yassif’s historical genre taxonomy, embracing Rabbinic literature in the entire continuum of Jewish/Hebrew folk narratives, strongly suggests defining literary study essentially within its own realm. Stein’s approach is characterized by an emphasized caution with regard to establishing connections between the ancient texts and reality, probably reflecting the extreme lack of contextual information concerning the work to which she devoted her study, namely Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer. Constrained by subjectivity as I am, I shall only venture to say that my own approach is stamped by an ongoing tension. I am convinced that the texts of the Rabbis do communicate some aspects of the reality of Late Antique Jewish lives, with the proviso that who those Jews were is open to interpretation. At the same time, I can see that the texts wrap us in impenetrable veils of constructions. As will be shown, the folkloristic point of view purports a reading of texts as cultural study, aiming at a dynamic comprehension of the communicative processes that construct and express group identities, while striving to trace the complex negotiations carried out with respect to their borders and overlappings. In particular, tales about women neighbors in Rabbinic

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literature are relevant to these theoretical and methodological preferences because of the conjunction of territorial and gender issues that they bring into focus. They reflect, construct, and regulate Late Antique Jewish approaches concerning differences and boundaries, as well as bonding and affiliation. In them the inseparability of the discourses of everyday life and of theological matters demonstrates the inherent ethnographic character of Rabbinic literature in all its phenomenological aspects, encompassing Aggada and Halakha. The German Jewish pioneer of cultural studies Georg Simmel observed in his work on the sociology of space that the concept of border is a necessary consequence of the correlation between groups of humans and space.7 The border, while dividing the space between two groups, also forms the closest meeting place between them. Thus borders often constitute the issue as well as the locus of strife, but they may also serve as an arena for contact and exchange. Borders are crossed and trespassed, they are set and negotiated. A semiotically highly condensed sign communicating nexus and plexus, they are the very epitome of the cultural construction of human relations in space. Simmel also coined the term “female culture” in an essay thus titled (which is in many senses dated), in which he points out the contrived character of gendered generalizations of female and male areas of expression, while himself not escaping several such generalizations.8 I shall evoke the possibility of envisioning specific domains of feminine experience in ancient texts, notwithstanding the theoretical weakness, maybe even impossibility, of such conjectures of specific “mentalities.” The inherent corrective for these looming problems is to turn to the analysis of “the

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contexts of communication and . . . explicit concepts of linguistics and other categories,” as G. E. R. Lloyd has advised in his perceptive critique of the study of mentalities.9 Neighbors have earned astonishingly little scholarly attention. Their connection is, however, the socio-spatial tie that constitutes the closest relationship beyond the family unit, and in patriarchal societies neighbors very often also belong to the same family.10 In various excavations of Late Antique houses in the Galilee it has often proven impossible to delineate clearly where the limits between family and close neighbors were on the ground.11 Thus the neighbor relationship both is based on spatial and social proximity and embodies boundaries. It is not a coincidence, I believe, that stories about neighbors tend to figure women as their protagonists. The correlation between women figures and minimal territorial passage enables those stories to articulate lesser sociocultural border crossings, while pointing at much more severe ones, which are transported into the reading by means of cultural associations and intertextuality. The Janus face of reflection and construction becomes apparent: the neighbor women of our tales may be seen as metonymic representations of neighbor women in the Galilee of Late Antiquity and as metaphors for various other kinds of “neighbor” relations at the same time. Neighbors encountered in ancient texts constitute narrative topoi when regarded in the light of literary tradition, cultural idioms when the sociocultural perspective is stressed.12 My interest in this topic was roused in the context of my work on the Palestinian fifth-century text Leviticus Rabbah (or Vayiqra Rabbah), elaborating on the biblical book of Leviticus, the third book of Moses. Leviticus Rabbah belongs traditionally to

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the “great Midrash”—Midrash Rabbah—on the Pentateuch and the Five Scrolls. Midrash Rabbah is, however, not one literary work; it stems from various periods and locations. Each of its separate books (Genesis Rabbah, Exodus Rabbah, . . . Song of Songs Rabbah, Ruth Rabbah, etc.) has a distinct compositional and poetic character. Leviticus Rabbah is a so-called homiletical Midrash, meaning that it does not elaborate on each verse of the biblical book, as does the exegetical Midrash (Genesis Rabbah, Lamentations Rabbah, Song of Songs Rabbah, Ecclesiastes Rabbah). Leviticus Rabbah is distinguished by its elaborate and unified compositional scheme and by the superb quality of its narrative style.13 Leviticus Rabbah includes no less than four narratives in which the encounter of women neighbors either is the focus of the narrative or plays a central role in it. Considering the rather marginal role of women in Rabbinic literature generally, this relative concentration of women neighbors in one text calls for explanation and interpretation. The present discussion of these texts is informed by the feminist endeavor to retrieve the representation of female voices from ancient literature, so heavily dominated by male authority and patriarchal values. While not devaluing the extent of male domination in most ancient Jewish texts, including Rabbinic literature, I tend to claim the potential presence of female voices in them based on their collective character. This argument is supported by the occurrence of genres performed by women known from other sources and by specific mention of women narrators and agents.14 The stress put here on folk narratives and the ethnography of everyday life in Rabbinic literature partially disentangles that literature from its traditional immurement in the confines of the

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synagogue and the academy (bet-midrash), a restriction largely created by later interpretative practices and academic discourse. Folk narratives in Rabbinic literature are almost always embedded in discourses that point to the synagogue (such as homiletical passages of drasha and Aramaic translations of Bible texts) or to the academy (in textual interpretation and extrapolation). Nevertheless, their character as folk narratives of various genres, with parallels inside the Rabbinic corpus and elsewhere, opens up a view of other life experiences and institutions. By these I mean mainly the family, women’s groupings (such as neighbors), uneducated people, and people from the religious and ethnic margins of the Rabbinic establishment, which in itself was not the only possible hegemonic institution in the Jewish society of the time.15 A possible interpretation of the presence of folk narratives in a canonized text is the appropriation of popular materials by a sophisticated establishment in order to draw wider audiences into its circle. This assumption necessitates adopting an unambiguous picture of center and periphery for the society in question. That kind of picture of Late Antique Galilee, positing the Rabbis explicitly in the center, has been based solely on their own texts. Comparative materials emerging from archeological and other textual sources are presently modifying this picture and introduce possible other contemporaneous centers of authority, primarily the priestly families, Kohanim.16 My approach has been, and is, designed to subvert the picture that seems to emerge from traditional scholarly readings, in which all other social institutions except for the academy and the synagogue have been overlooked as active participants in the creation of the Rabbinic texts. The discourse of the syna-

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gogue is created across its threshold, so to speak, and the wisdom of the Rabbis is intertwined with the words of wise women. And moving to larger-scale neighbor relationships, I find it necessary to upset the configuration in which the Christians and the pagans are understood as the “environment” of the Jews and the Jews and the pagans as the “environment” of the Christians.17 I ask whether the pagans had an “environment” and who would use that relational set-up today, since center and periphery seem to be determined by the cultural preferences of the scholars and there are probably no or very few scholars who would identify themselves as “pagans.”18 By analyzing the “tales of the neighborhood,” I hope to demonstrate that the neighboring pagan, Jewish, and Christian dwellers of the Galilee in Late Antiquity shared, rather than influenced, each other’s theological and narrative worlds as well as numerous cultural practices. The mutual position of neighbors is by definition symmetrical, and lacks in and of itself hierarchic structure (although there may be other factors constructing a hierarchy, such as a rich neighbor next to a poor one). This symmetry introduces into narratives about neighbors the potential of a close relationship characterized by a lack of domination yet involving contest over territory, legitimacy, and other kinds of symbolic capital by which cultural identities are negotiated.19 “Everyday life” is a primary cultural category in this analysis, from which follows a research strategy designed to encompass varied expressive modes, verbal and nonverbal, which constitute the fabric of everyday life as experienced and as recorded. In addition to the inherently media- and genre-crossing character of folklore studies, Michel de Certeau’s theoretical and method-

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ological writing has been an important inspiration for me.20 De Certeau has not only clearly stated the justification and need to study the creative moments embedded in everyday life, but has also devised a cunning theoretical basis as well as a sophisticated methodological procedure and terminology for it. Thus he has stressed the inherent embeddedness of the creativity of everyday life, which requires that every analysis of it must rip the analyzed phenomenon from its intrinsic context. De Certeau’s analysis introduces “strategies” and “tactics” as categories that assess the functional aspects of the creativity of everyday life. Although the terminology will not be applied here in detail, the general approach of his theorizing and analysis has informed what follows. I want to emphasize that I do not read everyday life in the Rabbinic texts as a total antithesis to the culture of the synagogue and the academy or to the theological dimension of the texts. Nor does it represent a contrast to the interethnic and interreligious relations in the Galilee at the relevant period. Rather, neighbors as an everyday life phenomenon appear as transformations of these other cultural domains mentioned and maintain multivalent connections with each of them and with many other discursive fields. I suggest that the narratives on women neighbors in Rabbinic literature negotiate separate identities in great proximity, maybe even a threatening proximity, and thus they process intergroup relations as “cultural idioms.” Another central set of terms in this discussion is derived from the genres of folk narratives. Folk narrative scholars have traditionally put great stress on the genre definition of the texts they have studied. The founding fathers of the discipline, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, established a historical phenomenology of the

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field on a tripartite division of genres—myth, folktale, and legend—that has had an amazingly long life in the discourse of folk narrative studies. I have elsewhere explained at length why I do not regard myth as a folk-literary genre.21 Inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and others, I consider myth a reflective process in which culture privileges certain configurations of thought that produce structures, ideologies, and contents and are embodied in them.22 These, in turn, become part of the reflective and creative process and feed into its continuation. The other two main genres, the folktale and the legend, unlike the myth, can be discerned as separate speech-acts, but have also a reflective stance with regard to reality. I shall very briefly characterize the mode of the projection of reality peculiar to each genre, although my analysis will show that they do not exist as “pure” forms in the texts but are rather interpretative stances of them. The folktale projects its plot on a world basically unlike the world of the narrator, in that the logic and reality rules in it are radically different. The narrative art of the folktale abounds in unrealistic, supernatural figures and events. What emerges is thus a fantastic world in which the improbable mingles with the probable in a way that characterizes dreams.23 These characteristics have turned the folktale into a favorite playground for psychological interpretation, grounded in the understanding that folktales are collectively transmitted projections of the inner world of fears and wishes for which psychology and especially psychoanalysis have created a cogent discourse.24 In comparison, legends are rooted in the social reality of the narrators and the audiences, their values and concepts of logic. The narrative technique in which the legend is embodied strives

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towards verisimilitude. The contents of the legend privilege well-known or easily identifiable figures, places, and dates. Everyday life, gender, territory, and boundaries as well as genre considerations are the building blocks in my discussion of the “neighborhood narratives” of Leviticus Rabbah. The immediate thematic context of the first story presented is a discussion on the prohibition against taking an oath. Thus the textual framework of the narrative displays a heightened interest in the nature and power of verbal communication. The embodiment of the transgression of this prohibition in the discourse of two neighbor women reveals a negative and anxiety-ridden approach to female speech. A similar attitude is also found in the various accusations of women as prattlers, as in the story about the overly talkative mother of Rabbi Shim’on Bar-Yohai (Leviticus Rabbah 34.16), or even worse, as witches.25 This is how the tale starts:26 Once there was woman who went to knead dough at her neighbor’s house, and in her shawl she wrapped three dinars. She sat down and put them next to her. When she was sitting and rolling out the dough, they got mixed in with the bread. She looked for them and did not find them.

At that point the peaceful, quotidian atmosphere is disturbed, and the women start to communicate in words: She said to her neighbor: Did you find those three dinars? The other neighbor had three sons. She said: I’ll bury this son if I have them. And she buried him. She asked another time: Did you find those three dinars? And she said: I shall bury another son if I am the one who has found them. And she buried him.

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She asked another time: Did you find those three dinars? And she said: I shall bury the third son if I have them. And she buried him. Said she [the neighbor of the bereaved woman, to herself, or to her husband]: Should I not go to console my neighbor? She took a bread roll and sat down. While she broke the bread, three dinars fell out. That is why people say: right or wrong— never take an oath.

The narrative confirms the ideational framework claiming that any oath, true or false, constitutes a risk and is therefore forbidden. The status of the woman’s oaths in the motivational structure of the plot is, however, completely dependent on an extremely moot point in the text itself. Namely, was the loaf from which the coins fell out brought by the visiting neighbor, as is the custom during mourning, or was the bread perhaps one which had originally remained in the bereaved woman’s house after the common baking? It is thus the oath as oath that is condemned, true or false. Scribes and editors of later versions of the same tale (editio princeps and other early printed editions, as well as Yalqut Shimoni) felt the need to disambiguate the order of the events. They thus inserted after the words “she took a bread roll” the words “and went to console” instead of the existing “and sat down.” The order of things and the identity of each person in the plot were thus clearly established by them, in sharp contrast to the multivalent and clouded formulation of the Palestinian Midrash text as it has been transmitted down to our age in manuscript.27 The narrative mode shifts radically from the seemingly realistic, peaceful everyday setting of two neighbors baking together,

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to a nonrealistic representation in which one woman looks intensely—almost hysterically—for her money, and the other resorts to a triple oath taking, actually cursing her own sons with no pertinent motivation. The unreal effect, suggesting the fantastic and highly stylized genre of folktale, lies in the accumulation of three episodes, characteristic of artistic folk prose, and their combination with the instant, magical fulfillment of the power of words. Whereas the Leviticus Rabbah version of the tale and its cognates totally lack gender confrontation, such a confrontation does appear in some of the parallel versions in other texts of Rabbinic literature, all significantly different from each other. The Palestinian Talmud, yShvuot 6.5, version includes no husband, and the fact that the coins (two in this case) are in the bread is already revealed in the episode of the baking, so that the tension and the dramatic effect that characterize the Leviticus Rabbah version are absent. (This literary superiority often characterizes narrative renderings of Leviticus Rabbah when compared to Rabbinic parallels.)28 In the version that appears in the Babylonian Talmud, bGittin 35a, a man deposits a dinar in a woman’s house; she bakes the coin into a loaf, which she then gives to a beggar. Her oath, which condemns her son to death if she has benefited from the coin, results in his death, explained by the rabbis by the fact that she gained the amount of dough which was replaced by the coin. The course of events is especially distressful since she is severely punished although she committed an act of charity. In Pesiqta Rabbati 113b ff., in a long passage devoted to the elaboration of the Ten Commandments, there is a version that, like the Palestinian Talmud narrative, reveals the fact that the di-

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nars are in the dough, too early to create a real point.29 In the Pesiqta Rabbati version the gender conflict is more evident than in the Leviticus Rabbah story that has been discussed here. It is the husband of the visiting neighbor who alerts her regarding the missing dinars as he asks for them upon her return from the baking session. It is also the husband who in this version urges his wife to make the condolence visit. The occurrence of the husband in the plot stresses the potential for a clash between the genders and creates a manifest opposition between the couple relationship and the potential female bonding of the two neighbors. The female bonding is, however, not actualized in a positive manner in any of the versions of the tale. The communication between the two women is tinged by the horror that lurks behind the oath. The ideological context, the prohibition against uttering any kind of oath, true or false, evokes a powerful cultural parallel, namely the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount from the gospel of Matthew (as Margalioth noted in his explication of the Leviticus Rabbah text): Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths: But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne: Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. (Matthew 5:33–36)

The Sermon on the Mount is a text that includes a number of intertextual references to the Hebrew Bible as well as to Rabbinic literature.30 It also seems to have been known by the rabbis.31 The

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Palestinian Midrashic reference in our tale clearly does not fit into the category of polemics or of parody. Rather, the mode of cultural dialogue here is one of shared tales, shared values, shared hopes, and shared texts. William David Davies’s monumental work on the Sermon on the Mount probes many intertextual connections with a number of Jewish sources. Following exegetic and scholarly tradition, he sets the specific passage on oaths in the context of the “antitheses,” where Jesus explicitly situates himself in the law-abiding Jewish tradition but introduces a new understanding of Scripture.32 Jesus applies here a standard Midrashic procedure of textual interpretation, and Matthew’s interaction with Galilean Jewish practice and discourse is indeed quite commonly accepted in various formulations.33 Before elaborating further on the interreligious discourse embodied in the tale of the two neighbor women, I want to situate the narrative in the textual universe of Rabbinic discourse. The Bible is the primary treasure trove of associations for Rabbinic literature. There are two powerful biblical associations that correlate baking with gender division as well as with violence and death: the unleavened bread baked by the woman of Ein-Dor for King Saul (1 Samuel 28:24), and the cakes baked by Tamar for her brother Amnon before he raped her (2 Samuel 13:8).34 Whereas the narrative of the two baking neighbor women in Leviticus Rabbah itself does not involve a gender conflict (although it emerges in several of its later parallels), such a conflict is explicitly present in the context of the chapter as a whole. The chapter opens with a reference to Leviticus 5:1: “And if a soul sin, and hear the voice of swearing, and is a witness, whether he has

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seen or known of it; if he do not utter it, then he shall bear his iniquity.” The verse from the Torah is correlated with a series of verses from other biblical books, in a manner characteristic of the homiletical Midrash: “Bear not a witness against thy neighbour without cause; and deceive not with thy lips” (Proverbs 24:28); “I have declared and have saved, and I have shewed, when there was no strange god among you; therefore ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am God” (Isaiah 43:12); “Thine own friend and thy father’s friend, forsake not” (Proverbs 27:10); “And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of the people: and they said, All that the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Exodus 24:7); “And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4).

The cultural idiom evoked by the textual mosaic of these verses is the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage between God and Israel in Sinai.35 The mode of the relationship underscored by the formation discussed here is, however, not idyllic love, but rather the tragic rupture caused by the infidelity of one of the partners of the covenant, Israel. The entire unfolding of love, betrothal, and betrayal (the worship of the calf) is staged in the mythical era of the wandering in the desert. Thus it produces a paradigm of history at the same time as it is conceived of as an early stage in the linear evolution of the national history. This metaphorical representation of theology is rooted in the so-called allegorical exegesis of the Song of Songs, well attested in several Jewish and Christian texts from this period. In that context Israel is consid-

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ered the wife who has broken the bond of marriage and is therefore rightly banished and punished. A quote from Hosea’s admonitory prophecy in the next passage of the same section of chapter 6 of Leviticus Rabbah—“But they like men [ke-adam = Adam] have transgressed the covenant: there they have dealt treacherously against me” (Hosea 6:7) referring to Adam and the Eden story—underscores the seductive character of the woman in this matrimonial drama. The same effect is attained in an even more explicit way by the application of the Hebrew verb pth, to seduce. Moreover, section 4 of the same chapter, following the section in which the narrative of the two neighbor women baking appears, correlates the sin from Leviticus 5:1 with the woman accused of adultery, the “Sotah,” based on Numbers, chapter 5. This textual framing of the tale reinforces a negative view of women and extends it to condition the readers’ perception of the women in the tale as well. The interpretation of the behavior of the woman who takes the repeated oaths would in an isolated reading of the tale text be primarily conditioned by the conventions of the genre of the folktale, allowing for extreme acts and also attributing events to the power of fate. The surrounding context of the chapter, however, underscores the woman’s utter stupidity and in particular her disobedience of the prohibition against taking oaths. Another Rabbinic text illuminating the narrative is the Halakha in the Mishnah Pesahim 3.4: Rabban Gamliel says: Three women may knead dough at the same time and bake it in the same oven. But the Sages say: Three women may occupy themselves [at the same time] with the dough, one kneading, one rolling it out, and one baking.

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Rabbi Aqiva says: All women and all kinds of wood and all ovens are not equal.

From this Mishnah passage we learn that women’s common baking may be regarded as an activity that needs to be restricted by exact laws. A fundamental principle of the interpretation of folk narratives in Rabbinic literature is illustrated by this example. Reading Rabbinic stories as folk narratives often associates them with worldviews and ideas that make it difficult to harmonize them with what has traditionally—and in my view at least partly mistakenly—been understood as the Rabbinic worldview. Their explication as an inherent part of the Rabbinic text, however, highlights ideas in them that become particularly concretized and reinforced by the Rabbinic context. It seems methodologically sound to distinguish the folk narrative from the bulk of the Rabbinic text in order to establish its connections with folk narratives in general and to listen carefully to the messages it introduces into the Rabbinic corpus. I have analyzed above the folk narrative aspects of the tale of the two baking women, paying special attention to the concept of genre. It is, however, absolutely essential to see this isolating move as a methodological device leading ultimately to an integrative interpretation of the Rabbinic text that includes the folk narratives in it. Such an interpretative stance acknowledges the fact that Palestinian Midrash literature grew in a complex society where pagans, Jews, and Christians interacted culturally and where women, men, and children carried out a common discourse in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and Syriac, among other languages.

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As an example of the shared narrative worlds I quote the following parable of Jesus from the gospel of Luke: Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and her neighbors, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the coin that I had lost. Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. (Luke 5:7–9, New Revised Standard Version)

Although the gospel of Luke is not one of those considered traditionally “Galilean,” it does include parallels of the Galilean materials of the other synoptic gospels.36 The common combination of the themes of a lost coin and women neighbors does not necessarily tell us about textual influence, but it does set the model of thought by which matters of life and death, human and divine, are experienced and narrated through tales of the neighborhood and everyday life, in a manner uniquely crafted in the Galilee in Late Antiquity. The following Midrashic parable, reflecting on the genre of parable itself, where the king does not necessarily represent God as in most Rabbinic parables, widens the interpretative range of our narrative further: It is like a king who has lost a golden coin or a precious pearl in his house—does he not find it by means of a wick worth a penny? Similarly, let not this parable be light in your eyes, for by means of this parable one comes to comprehend the words of Torah. (Song of Songs Rabbah 1.8)37

According to Daniel Boyarin, this text reveals the significance of the parable genre in Rabbinic discourse as “an explicit represen-

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tation of the culturally specific ‘meaning system,’ making reading possible.”38 David Stern deems it an expression of the Rabbis’ tendency to underrate the parable’s narrative value (“a wick worth a penny”) in order to highlight its exegetic function.39 When it is read in light of the texts from Luke and Leviticus Rabbah, a new perspective on the borders of the Rabbinic universe of discourse and its “meaning system” emerges. Whereas both Luke and Song of Songs Rabbah make an explicit referential move from the experience level of everyday life to the level of, respectively, “heavenly kingdom” and “Torah,” the narrative of the two baking neighbors communicates a religious experience from a less institutionalized but no less existentially pertinent angle. Let it be that the woman made a terrible mistake in uttering an oath. Let it be that she was thrice stupid in thrice repeating it. What the folktale communicates is the experience of women and men in an age not in vain termed by E. R. Dodds “the age of anxiety,”40 in which many coins are not found. The narrative voice of the folktale not only subverts the textual establishment of a Rabbinical hierarchy; it also enables the introduction of the voice of a human experience not always concomitant with the theological design of retribution. Thus it introduces into the theological world of the Rabbinic text an everyday experience of disillusion, which is not heretical in positing an alternative set of beliefs, but truly revolutionary in its total overthrowing of moral order. Of course, it is possible to suggest as a scholastic justification that in the Rabbinic world of ideas the seeming disproportion, if not injustice, meted out to the poor woman’s ill-fated sons (who absolutely had not sinned) will be compensated in the world to

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come. It is also possible to ponder on the potential Epicurean trains of thought embedded in Midrashic texts. Likewise it is possible to argue that by telling folktales and especially tales about women, the rabbinical authority producing the text signals a distance from its radical messages. These explanatory strategies, however, not only cancel each other out but also fail to give a real understanding for the extensive and powerful presence of folk narratives in Talmudic-Midrashic literature. A further New Testament parallel reinforces the subversive potential of the Rabbinic tale, as well as the close connection between the two narratives: He told them another parable: The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and hid [New Revised Standard Version “mixed in”] in three measures of wheat flour until all of it was leavened. (Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:20–21 is almost identical)

Interpretations seem to agree that the leaven here stands for one of the most revolutionary concepts in the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, the kingdom of heaven, in the sense of social and spiritual change. The kingdom of heaven has on the whole a privileged position in the parables of Jesus.41 In her imaginative analysis focusing on the New Testament parables that include women figures, Susan Marie Praeder has pointed out that (1) the collocation of the three measures and the flour recalls the story of the visit of the angels to Abraham and Sarah and thus also the birth and imminent sacrifice of Isaac; and (2) that the Greek word “hide,” which is not the most expected word to be used in the context, also encompasses the meaning of “bury.”42

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On the whole, the emotional and poetic tone shared by the Leviticus Rabbah tale and Jesus’ parables reminds us of Paul Ricoeur’s profound insight about the latter: “To listen to the Parables of Jesus . . . is to let one’s imagination be opened to the new possibilities disclosed by the extravagance of these short dramas.”43 One may venture, on the basis of the analysis carried out here, to correlate Rabbinic narratives to the “network of intersignification” that Ricoeur has suggested Jesus’ parables constitute. If I were pushed to venture a historical reconstruction, I would suggest that we prefer the structural logic to the chronological one. That is, although the written New Testament parables precede the written form of the Leviticus Rabbah story by a couple of hundred years, it seems likely that Jesus or any other possible author of the parables had heard a very similar story to the one told in the Midrash. The two parables were then constructed from it, rather than it being constructed from them.44 The later Rabbinic version apparently includes the meaning acquired in the New Testament rendering. But since I am not striving after a historical reconstruction, I shall be content to point at a clear Galilean narrative dialogue between groups that later became identified as separate religions. Tessa Rajak’s illuminating conclusion contributes to the understanding of the interplay between historical context and the interpretation of these texts: “But eventually neither pagan nor Jewish but Christian anxieties were to be responsible for constructing new barriers. And soon Jewry itself was actually to forget a remarkable phase of its existence, to an extent where it has become hard to believe that the Rabbinic age was for many Jews

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not a period of looking inward but rather a time when the world opened out.”45 The central images of this Rabbinic folktale present some of the shared idiomatic boundaries along which the religious difference between Judaism and Christianity is shaped in Late Antiquity. Take the signification of the bread of the Passover night: although bread signals the death of the first-born (or the FirstBorn) for both religions, it also draws our attention to the transformational nature of the difference (or even “differance” in the Derridean sense)—the body as bread and the word as body.46 And unlike the Risen Son of Mary, the three sons of the baker woman were not resurrected on the third day or ever. The cultural universe of the Rabbinic texts cannot be exhausted by taking into account only scholarly discourse, Jewish, Christian, or pagan. It is not fully understood by allowing only for an orderly universe hierarchically designed by a dominant God. An understanding of the world of Late Antique Jews has to encompass the languages of the home and the lane, the fence and the cracks, to make room for the complexity of the human experience in all its richness and pain. A further thought arises regarding the coins: Why did the woman carry them into her neighbor’s house to begin with? Does the fact that she had a shawl—worn by married women in public spaces—interpret the space between the two houses as public? What does her carrying coins from her home to the presumably adjacent house of her neighbor tell us about the experience of boundaries and identity? How does it shape her as an independent owner of money? Is it somehow related to the Mishnah text in Bava Metsia, quoting one of the founding figures of Rabbinic literature? “Thus said Hillel: A woman should not

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lend a bread to her neighbor, until she pays for it in money, lest the wheat grows dearer and produces interest [ribbit]” (mBava Metsia 5.9). I would suggest that this is a story about unstable identities and about the insecurity of borders, which, however fortified they may be, can never replace the security of human bonding. The walls of a house cannot assure the life of humans where oath taking has replaced simple trust. The implications of the instability of human boundaries on the theological construction of the borders between the human and divine realms emerge through the intersecting of a folktale and Scripture. The powerful creative thrust of the Rabbinic textual institution is marked by the fact that it seems to communicate not only what has traditionally been considered its inner discourse but also its dialogic counterparts and even its antitheses. The reading of folk narratives in Rabbinic literature not only acknowledges the inclusion of experiential and intellectual inspirations from outside the academy and the synagogue, as I have mainly claimed in my earlier work. Ultimately, it teaches us about the variety and mobility of ideas and literary creativity active at the heart of the dynamic process that we historically define as Rabbinic literature.

t wo

Peeping through a Hole Comparing and Borrowing

A Babylonian tale (bTa’anit 21b) tells about a woman who was wont to heat her oven and let her neighbors use it. When Droqart, the town where she lived in the great Rav Huna’s vicinity, was afflicted by fire, it was by her merit, not the Rabbi’s, as many mistakenly thought, that their neighborhood was spared. The Babylonian Talmud, where this tale appears, is the greatest single document of Rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity. Edited between the late fifth and the late sixth centuries, it is devised as a running commentary and elaboration of the Mishnah, which was edited in the third century in Palestine. The elaboration consists of the dialectically generated discourse of Babylonian Amoraim. The Amoraim were Rabbis of diverse schools, in both Palestine and Babylonia, who referred to the Mishnah after its canonization ca. 230 C.E., and to other earlier Palestinian texts created by the Tannaim Rabbis, as well as to the Hebrew Bible, as the cultural and textual basis for their views and creativity. 28

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The juridical discussion, which reflects academic study rather than legal practice, is richly interspersed with various discursive modes such as proverbs and maxims, narratives of various lengths and genres, and Bible exegesis. The Babylonian Talmud thus constitutes an impressive document of what I claim to be the ethnographic character of Rabbinic literature in general. This ethnographic interest of the Rabbis, I suggest, motivated the peculiar way they conducted their ongoing textual project of several generations. Unlike many known texts from the ancient world, including the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbis did not care to differentiate between genres in the editorial arrangement of their works, but this was not from a lack of genre consciousness. Applying structural criteria and ethnomethodological, culturally specific genre decoding, Dan Ben-Amos has claimed that Talmudic-Midrashic literature displays systematic genre marking of narratives.1 Occasional compilations of proverbs, hagiographic legends, narratives of dream interpretation, laments, and medical lore also prove a differentiating approach to genre.2 The scarcity of explicit internal information about the procedures of the editing of the text does not allow us to state with certainty what the intentions were. The text, as it emerges in its multiple modes of existence, in variant manuscripts and printed editions, projects a complex and multivocal world, designed to communicate a Lebenswelt, a life-world of collective experience of several generations. The short story summarized above serves me to engage the Rabbis themselves as direct witnesses for what I dare call their ethnographic interest in crafting the textual world of the entire Rabbinic literature, Talmud and Midrash, Palestinian and Babylonian. The story makes a concise ad hoc comparison of the mer-

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its of the learned man and the woman posited in the world of baking and cooking. It thus implies a gender division of those realms. But at the same time it imparts quite clearly the powerful multivocality of the discursive world that embraces both experiences. Cynthia Baker has excellently argued in her doctoral dissertation against interpretations of texts and archeological sites that construe a clear gender division of public as well as private spaces for Palestine, and more specifically for the Galilee, in Late Antiquity.3 Rather than suggesting that the Rabbis were oblivious to gender (which they were not), her analysis clarifies the need to see Rabbinic literature as merely a partial document with reference to everyday life situations. An important aspect of her discussion concerns the collation of textual and material evidence. Her reading of the texts, however, makes little use of the literary or poetic character of texts. Her argument is based mainly, although not exclusively, on the juridical and ritual discourse of early Rabbinic judicial discourse, Halakha. I would like to suggest that her conclusions might be further substantiated and diversified with regard to everyday life in general by an additional reading of narrative texts of the Rabbinic corpus. The reading of texts suggested here does not conflate texts and material findings, although that may be a useful procedure in itself, but rather stresses the poetics of Rabbinic literature and especially their ethnographic perspective. This should not be understood as a call to view Rabbinic texts as fieldwork journals, but as texts created by the Rabbis out of an ethnographic interest in their own culture. It is myself that I view as the field worker, conducting interviews with subjects that are veiled not only by differences of culture— the standard filter of most fieldwork situations—but also by the gap in time.

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An analysis of the narratives concerning neighbor women in Rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity reveals how their semiotic complexity and symbolical richness enable us to learn from them about conceptualizations of gender, territory, identity, and boundaries. It is impossible to maintain that they express the totality of Jewish culture of the time. But it is likewise faulty to claim that they serve only as the mouthpiece of a small elite within well-defined boundaries of cultural practice and ideology. The interpretative focus on the topic of women neighbors and the communicative mode of the folk narrative embedded in Rabbinic literature construes them as significant sites for comparing this cultural and literary corpus with others, whether contemporaneous and neighboring or more distant in time and space. It is for such comparisons that traditional folk narrative research has crafted abundant bibliographical and methodological tools. In addition to constituting sites for comparison, these tales also emerge as possible constructions of narrative dialogue in which there is cultural borrowing—a term I much prefer to the linear concept of influence. It is often as neighbors that groups borrow from each other. Borrowing indicates the acknowledgment of the boundary, but it also defeats the efficacy of the boundary by pointing at its osmotic porosity. In the very same chapter of the same tractate of the Babylonian Talmud where Rav Huna’s neighbor is praised for her benevolent neighborly deeds, there is another narrative displaying a less pleasant side of the relations between women neighbors: It was the habit of the wife [of Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa] to heat up her oven every Sabbath eve with very much smoke, for the sake of shame [since she was poor and had no money for food]. She had a mean neighbor woman, who said [to herself]: I

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know, for sure, that they have absolutely nothing in the house. So what is all this about? She went and knocked on their door. [The wife of Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa] was ashamed and withdrew into the chamber. A miracle occurred so that [the neighbor] saw the oven full of bread and the basin full of dough. Said the neighbor: Woman, woman, bring the peel [a long-handed tool used by bakers to move bread in and out of an oven], the breads are being scorched. Said she: That is exactly what I went to bring [from the chamber]. (bTa’anit 24b–25a)

The neighbor woman tries to provoke Rabbi Hanina Ben Dosa’s nameless wife to complain about her poverty or at least to disclose it. The poor woman’s reticence earns her the miracle of the bread. The obvious affinity of the Ben-Dosa tales to the narrative traditions about Jesus (first-century charismatic rabbi, miraculous production of bread, exemplary poverty, etc.) invites specific further study.4 The narrative context in the Hanina Ben Dosa series in the Babylonian Talmud underscores, however, another aspect of interpretation. In the following tale of the same hagiographical chain, the saintly rabbi’s wife actually asks her husband about a possible change in their meager economy. The answer, illustrated as a vision of a golden table in the world to come, conveys squarely the message that “the meek will inherit the celestial kingdom,” and the wife’s aspiration is set aside. The joined reading of these two adjacent stories shows that the mean neighbor plays a discordant role in the relation of the couple. Trying to accentuate the poverty that serves as a topic for disagreement between husband and wife, her interference may be interpreted as a rival female bonding that threatens the patriarchal order embodied in marriage.

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Comparative folk narrative research, designed to trace cultural borrowings, may further widen the perspective of interpretation. The “evil neighbor woman” is a well-known stereotypical figure of the European and Mediterranean folktale. Her characteristic role in the plot is to provoke the “good neighbor woman” to tease her husband into some venture with the purpose of finding riches. In some cases the venture succeeds, whereupon the “evil neighbor woman,” usually already “rich and stingy,” sends her own husband on the same path. That, however, serves to end the plot with “poetic justice,” and the evil neighbors are in the best cases ridiculed while in the worst they end in misery, pain, and so on.5 The story described here thus points at a traditional, well-grounded, and cross-cultural idiom of female bonding as a powerful ferment upsetting close social relations. At this point I wish to turn to the Palestinian Amoraic Midrash literature rooted in the Galilean society of Late Antiquity, and read a story found in the largest of the Amoraic Midrash works, Genesis Rabbah, elaborating on the book of Genesis. Genesis Rabbah constitutes part of the Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch and the Five Scrolls, which, although traditionally printed as one work, is composed of separate books.6 Genesis Rabbah is generally held to be the most ancient of the Midrash Rabbah components, edited in the early fifth century. However, the dating, especially the relative dating of the separate Palestinian Aggadic Midrash books, tends to be conjectural and uncertain. The compositional poetics of the work have earned it the title of exegetical Midrash, that is, a text that successively elaborates on the biblical verses in a given book (similarly to Song of Songs Rabbah, Ecclesiastes Rabbah, and Lamentations Rabbah).

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It is thus important to note the specific verse in question that constitutes the most direct interpretative context for the narrative I wish to examine, namely God’s exhortative question addressing Adam: “Have you eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded you that you should not eat?” (Genesis 3:11b). It may also be useful to remind ourselves that the next verse in Genesis quotes Adam as follows: “The woman whom Thou gave to me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (3:12). A parable about a woman who entered the house of the wife of a snake-tamer to borrow some vinegar. She said: How does your husband treat you? Said the other: He treats me with great generosity, except for one barrel filled with snakes and scorpions which he does not let me control. Said the first one: All his finest jewels are in it and he wants to marry another woman and give them to her. What did [the wife] do? She pushed her hand inside [that barrel] and [the snakes and the scorpions] started to bite her. When her husband came home he heard her screaming, and said to her: Have you perhaps touched that barrel? This is like the question: “Have you eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded you that you should not eat?”7

In this parable the folktale stereotype of the mean neighbor woman, mentioned above, is introduced in a concentrated form to convey the message of female bonding as a conflict to marriage. Although not made explicit here, the carryover from the folktale motif indicates that the borrowing neighbor is motivated by jealousy. The negative female stereotype explicitly serves the patriarchal norm and is in this case enhanced by the scriptural framework referred to, namely the Eden narrative. The intertextual

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link between the canonical, mythological story and the folktale episode cum parable, garbed as an everyday event between two neighbors, serves in the interpretative and narrative complex of the parable to reinforce the role of the woman as the villain of the Creation story in Genesis.8 The primordial serpent is domesticated and locked inside the snake-tamer’s barrel, indicating the ability of men to overpower the great seducer, in contrast to Judith Hauptman’s interesting observation that Rabbinic laws suggest men’s generally weak sexual integrity needs to be controlled by women.9 Daniel Boyarin has rightly pointed out that the correlate for the snake-tamer’s wife in the Genesis story is Adam, and the husband stands for God.10 I would, however, beg to disagree with his claim that in the parable Eve is made invisible rather than accused for seducing Adam to sin. Indeed, on the exegetical level the mean neighbor woman takes over the role of the snake, but she could also be understood to function as a parallel of Eve, who entices Adam, that is, the snake-tamer’s wife. Midrash texts, like folk narratives, can rarely be understood as carriers of an exclusive meaning. In this case the effect of the subtle gender crossing in the parable with reference to the verse also conveys a redoubled accusation hurled on women. Boyarin, in addition to other earlier research concerning this parable, has concentrated on its relationship to the story of Pandora in Hesiod’s work.11 Beyond the diachronic intertextual links with both biblical Hebrew and classical mythical Greek motifs, however, the story also reveals intimations of “local knowledge”12 about customary behavior of neighbor women, such as the borrowing of simple victuals. The synchronic aspect of comparison is further substantiated by the fact that borrowing

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of household and food items is also a standard mode of behavior of neighbors, especially women, in Hellenistic literature from the first centuries of the first millenium of the Common Era.13 In addition to its literal meaning, the sour quality of the borrowed substance, vinegar (≈mwj), evokes a number of symbolic meanings. Wine is associated with the consummation of love and marriage, so that vinegar may be linked with the deterioration of both. Further, the woman wanting to borrow the sour substance of vinegar also brings a sour, or rather bitter, fate upon her neighbor. It has been suggested that vinegar symbolizes sexual passion and in the story is thus a sign for the dangers of (misdirected, I assume) passions in marriage.14 Genesis Rabbah, as well as the later Midrash Tanhuma, both compare the parenting of a son to wine—of a daughter to vinegar.15 Following my interpretation that focuses on the explosive power of female bonding for patriarchal institutions, I see vinegar as a metaphor for the social ferment whose slow but expanding effect sends its anxiety-ridden vibrations through this text. Notably, another favorite shared occupation of women neighbors is baking,16 as in the Leviticus Rabbah story discussed in chapter 1, or checking on the neighbors’ bread, as in the tale of Rabbi Hanina Ben-Dosa’s mean neighbor. In baking too a central transformative process occurs through the fermentation of yeast, applied by Jesus as a metaphor of social and spiritual revolution in the parable on the woman and the yeast (or leaven). Let us briefly return to Rabbi Hanina Ben-Dosa in the Babylonian Talmud chain of tales discussed above. In a story following the narrative of the neighbor woman who is shown the miraculous bread and the narrative of the golden table, Ben-

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Dosa’s daughter reports anxiously to her father that by mistake she lit her Sabbath candle in vinegar instead of oil.17 As we might expect, Rabbi Hanina Ben-Dosa allays her worry: “Whosoever makes the candle burn in oil will let the candle burn in vinegar.” Miraculously the candle then burns throughout the whole Sabbath and suffices for the ceremony of Havdalah, at the turn of the day of rest to the week of labor. Thus Hanina Ben-Dosa’s charismatic sanctity serves not only as a powerful antidote to the mean neighbor woman’s provocation, but also neutralizes the mistaken and unholy presence of vinegar in the Sabbath lamp. The theological resonance of the theme of the neighbor women is found in the saintly figure of Hanina Ben-Dosa and his status as mediator between the human and the divine. Male authority visibly engages divine power to avert the destabilizing workings of female fermentation. Ben-Dosa, in addition to the association with the miracles of Jesus, reminds us of the classical holy men of Late Antiquity in Peter Brown’s revolutionizing study, The Cult of the Saints.18 Brown’s work has been a major inspiration for studying the lives of “simple people” of Late Antiquity, showing how theologies are crafted in marketplaces rather than in churches, in homes rather than at academies, and in intimate cooperation across gender boundaries. In the Genesis Rabbah text the theological perspective of the narrative is embodied in the rhetorical double exposure called mashal, or parable.19 The implications of the relationship, or rather the tension, between folk narratives and parables in Rabbinic literature have some bearing on the issues discussed here. Parables in Rabbinic literature, as well as in the New Testament,

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are a central rhetorical-narrative genre explicitly crafted to convey didactic and theological messages. Unlike the folktales and the legends of the corpus, they are seemingly devoid of mimesis, although earlier research has pointed out their use of reality elements from the contemporary courts of imperial royalty and provincial nobility.20 Parables also add another aspect of comparison to our discussion, or actually two. On one hand the basic rhetorical move in the parable consists of comparing, as both its Greek and Hebrew names disclose. On the other hand this comparison more often than not introduces alongside the things compared an aspect that is at least as important, that which is the incomparable and the incompatible. It may thus serve as an important verbal device for shaking the textual authoritative system at its foundations. It is not in vain that the legendary biographical romance “The Life of Aesop” renders the Greek fabulist a liberated slave, and thus a marginal figure, and ends his life in an execution by the citizens of Delphi.21 The themes and motifs of many parables invite yet another kind of comparison. Some Rabbinic parables engage conspicuously well-known narratives, such as the famous fox standing in front of the fenced vineyard in Ecclesiastes Rabbah, found in Aesop’s as well as in later collections of fables.22 The mean neighbor woman of the Genesis Rabbah parable discussed above is, as has already been mentioned, likewise an easily identifiable folktale motif in Mediterranean and European folk narrative lore. Such shared tale types and motifs in Rabbinic parables also intimate the possible distribution of these tales independent of their didactic application as parables in that society. That these tales have a potential narrative existence separate from their parabolic

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function lays bare the conjoining of narrative and theology underlying the genre. Daniel Boyarin and David Stern have both argued that Rabbinic parables differ from typical allegories in their intersecting of textual, social, and theological realities, not so much as separate domains of discourse, but rather as a unified vision of the world ruled by God and communicated by Torah. Boyarin has stressed the role of parables as semiotic condensations of the intrinsic intertextuality of Midrash.23 This insight could also be geared to pointing at the crack in the mirror of the genre, coded in the prefix “inter”: the dividing line between different texts and the gap between Scripture and its interpretation. The latter gap especially is a central source of unrest and creativity of Rabbinic literature. Stern’s work has accordingly emphasized the tension between narrative and exegesis as the major constructing as well as deconstructing element of Rabbinic parables, which qualifies them as highly powerful expressions of divergent, paradoxical, and heterodox views.24 The favorite subgenre of the Rabbinic parable, the royal parable, wherein God is substituted by a human king, seems to correspond well with ancient Near Eastern perceptions of the divine king as well as with the majestic visions of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible.25 Its specific narrative and rhetorical mechanism is, however, peculiar to the theological complexity of Late Antique Jewish literature, in the wake of the destruction of the temple, the extermination of the axis mundi projected on Jerusalem, and the massive human suffering caused by Roman occupation. One of the major moral test cases of Rabbinic theology lies in the clash between the supposedly omnipotent God and powerful human sovereigns who are able both to eradicate the Almighty’s

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abode and to inflict incessant suffering and shame on His chosen people. Numerous Rabbinical texts bear witness to the fact that any simple theodicy formula such as “Israel sinned, so it should be punished” did not alleviate the inner agitation caused by the historical experience. The royal parable, in which the two rival authorities, the king and God, are effectively superimposed, highlights the theological dilemma. Naturally, an apocalyptic theology, suggesting instant redemption, such as Christianity, poses a powerful antidote to the existential ambiguity that in contrast persists as the very hallmark of Rabbinic literature. The following royal parable from Lamentations Rabbah articulates the clearest theological message of all the Rabbinic tales about women neighbors. It also shows the Rabbinical echo to the discourse in which others, mainly Christians, utilized the retribution scheme to prove the error of Judaism: It is like a king who married a woman and wrote her a large marriage-settlement [ketubbah]. He wrote her: So many bridalchambers I am building for you; so much jewelry I make for you; so much gold and silver I give you. Then he left her for many years and journeyed to the provinces. Her neighbors used to taunt her and say to her: Hasn’t your husband abandoned you? Go! Marry another man. She would weep and sigh, and afterward she would enter her bridal-chamber and read her marriage-settlement and sigh [with relief]. Many years and days later the king returned. He said to her: I am amazed that you have waited for me all these years! She replied: My master the king, if not for the large wedding-settlements you wrote me, my neighbors long ago would have led me astray.26

The indigenous genre of the rabbis, the royal parable, dictates an interpretative paradigm in which the king almost always

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stands for God, his wife (or son, servant, etc.) for the people of Israel. In the genre of the mashal it seems therefore rather clear that the neighborly relations stand for interreligious relations. The provocation and teasing of the neighbors, and especially their attempt to split the marital bond of the protagonists, function as the theological challenge of the neighboring religions, especially of Christianity, aimed at denying the “monogamous” claim of Israel to a privileged relationship with a universal God. The affinity of the teasing neighbors in this parable with the provocative neighbor of Rabbi Hanina Ben-Dosa and with the deceitful borrower of vinegar illustrates well the intertwining of theological discourse with everyday life and folk narratives in Rabbinical literature. This ethnographically disposed theological discourse is maybe not found exclusively in Rabbinic literature, but it is one of its most identifiable qualities. Returning to the interreligious aspect of the parables, it may also be useful to recall that the radical ideology and the radical social practice of the early Christian communities challenged the family as an institution.27 Thus the depicting of the theological allure that Christianity with its promise of imminent redemption as seductive neighbor women must have resonated for Jews in post-destruction and post–Bar-Kokhva Galilee with a number of familiar social and spiritual experiences. It could not have passed unnoticed by Jews in the Galilee, even from Rabbinic circles, that unlike Rabbinic Judaism early Christianity appointed women to active roles in the community as well as in the church. Thus, at the period of the editing of Genesis Rabbah in the fifth century, the challenge of the neighbor women to the disadvantageous situation of the king’s wife hits two nails at one blow: the lower status of Jews in a Christianized empire and the lower status of

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women in Rabbinic society. It is thus logical to propose that it is Christianity that is evoked by the figure of the scheming neighbor woman who tries to sever the links of the legally married wife, Israel.28 My investigation of folk narratives and parables, as well as of the Jewish and Christian narrative dialogue, is guided by the idea that cultural borrowing can best be studied by a comparative methodology. I shall return now to Leviticus Rabbah, the work that houses the story of the two women neighbors baking discussed in chapter 1. (A similar envious female neighbor from this work will be encountered in chapter 4.) An explicit reference to the religious and ethnic complexity of the Galilean society of Late Antiquity, in which the literary masterpiece of Leviticus Rabbah was conceived and crafted, is articulated in the following text, composed of a sequence of parables in which women neighbors figure as well: Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai taught: The Israelites are prominent because they know how to gratify their Creator. Rabbi Yudan said: Like the Samaritans. The Samaritans are clever businessmen. One of them went into the house of a woman and asked: If you have an onion, give it to me. When she brought him one, he said: What’s an onion without bread? When she brought him one, he said: What’s serving food without drink? So he ended up eating and drinking.29

The text concerns the religious superiority of the Israelites/ Jews, which is characterized by their ability to appease their Creator and Master. The rhetorical device of insistent self-praise characterizes the situation of political insecurity combined with

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spiritual uncertainty. Somewhat paradoxically, the praise to the Israelites is articulated by comparing them to Samaritans. The Samaritans who had been converted to Judaism (Cutheans) were the closest others from the point of view of the religious rulings of Halakha and also constituted the stable local others—unlike the massive inconstant presence of Roman soldiers in the various regions of Palestine, mainly south of the Galilee.30 The ability to appease the Creator is thus presented as an ironic praise, in which both the object of appeasement and those who practice it are shown in a somewhat amusing light. The genre of the story about the Samaritan is actually a joke, reminding us of stories told to this day in the larger Mediterranean area. Between the Maghreb and Iran, the clever scoundrel Djuha, Hodja Nassaradin, and his parallels in Italian, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Maltese, and the Jewish languages of the area, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian, and Judeo-Spanish, trick their way from story to story, from one language to another.31 East European Jews cast in these stories the figures of Hershele Ostropoler, Naftoli Graidinger, and their like.32 As far as I know, this may be the earliest recorded Jewish narrative of the subgenre of jokes of the clever scoundrel, and thus the oldest forefather of Hershele Ostropoler was a Samaritan! The Samaritan’s ability to obtain food with some humorous cunning is, like the folktale scoundrel’s tricks, regarded with a loving smile and admiration, yet mixed with some anger and bitterness. In the present context another instance rings a bell: the parable of the Good Samaritan as an exegetic elaboration of the biblical “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” ˚wmk ˚[rl tbhaw (Leviticus 19:18), in Luke 10:25–37 (quotes from the Hebrew Bible are italicized):

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And, behold, a lawyer stood up to test him [Jesus], Teacher, he said, what must I do to inherit eternal life? He said to him, What is written in the law? What do you read there? He answered, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. And he said to him, You have given the right answer; do this and you shall live. But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, And who is my neighbor? Jesus replied, A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.

The parable then describes how a priest and after him a Levite pass by the man and do not help him, and continues: But a Samaritan, while traveling came near him and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.

Jesus ends the parable with the conclusive didactic question: Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers? He said, The one who showed him mercy. Jesus said to him, Go and do likewise.

The biblical word for “thy neighbor,” r[r in the text that Jesus quotes from Leviticus, ˚wmk ˚[rl tbhaw, and then explicates in a typically Midrashic manner, would not be the one designating a neighbor in Rabbinic Hebrew or Aramaic. However, its Greek counterpart (plaßion both in the Septuagint translation of

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Leviticus and in the New Testament quotation), which has entered the English translation as well, clearly bears the meaning of adjacent dwelling. The parable of Jesus produces an interesting exercise in intercultural exegesis, aptly performed in a dialogue with a “lawyer,” that is, an expert exegete of the Law. The Torah dictum in its literal Hebrew form is not restricted as to location or identity, but rather connotes a universal “other.” The Levitical context may, however, suggest an intra-Hebraic norm. Jesus’ Midrash initially underscores the element of identity implicit in a neighbor, following the Greek rendering, claiming the traditional interpretation to encompass only one’s own kind, ethnically. He then suggests overthrowing the traditional meaning by returning to the original universal meaning. Employing the figure of neighbor as understood in its Greek extension, he restores the Levitical dictum to its original universality and makes a revolutionary statement at the same time. The textual tactic is evidently most effective when addressing an audience versed in the Greek translation of the Bible as well as in the Hebrew original. Serge Ruzer has recently discussed with great erudition the whole issue of “the Double Love Dictum” (Leviticus 19:17–18 and Deuteronomy 6:5). He has pointed out that in Matthew and Mark the quote of the Leviticus commandment is uttered by Jesus himself, whereas in the Luke story it is the lawyer who quotes it.33 Ruzer has, however, no interest in what is my main focus here, namely the Samaritan as the object of the dictum and as the embodiment of the ideal of neighborly solidarity. The Samaritans are employed by the New Testament, here and in numerous other instances, as the stranger within. Sometimes they mark the boundary, as when, in Luke 9:53, they refuse to

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welcome Jesus into their village since he is on his way to the emblem of their hatred, Jerusalem. Reading that passage as the background for the parable of the Good Samaritan actually illustrates in this case too the turn from “Love Thy Neighbor” to “Love Thy Enemy,” one of the transformations of the Levitical dictum traced by Ruzer. Similarly the meeting of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well near Samaria in John 4:7–9 touches on the interreligious complexity that I am addressing in my tracing of the narrative dialogue of Christian and Jewish texts: When a woman of Samaria came to draw water Jesus said to her: “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples were gone away to the city to buy food.) Then the Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? Jews do not associate (sygxrantai) with Samaritans.” (emphasis added)

The last sentence, which is also translated “do not use dishes Samaritans have used,” is bracketed by the New Revised Standard Version, and many ancient authorities lack it. In any case it is impossible to know who is the interlocutor, the woman in the story, the narrator, or the evangelist. The story ends with Jesus accepting her catering for him despite the skeptical astonishment of his followers. The quote from John is not introduced only to point out that the Leviticus Rabbah narrative disagrees with the Samaritan woman’s ethnographical observation about the character of the relations between Samaritans and Jews, although it may humorously understate that “they eat our food while we don’t eat theirs.” Note that I assume the woman in the humorous Leviti-

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cus Rabbah tale is Jewish—though the Samaritan represents the Jewish people on the allegorical level. The comparison of the two texts mainly demonstrates the narrative dialogue between these two tales of women, men, Samaritans, Jews, food, and God. In verse 12 of John 4 the Samaritan woman provokes Jesus—“Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” (emphasis added)—and adds a further dimension of blurring the borders between Samaritan and Jew, the shared forefather. Surprisingly, Jesus raises the fence between Jews and Samaritans in his somewhat enigmatic postulation in a verse that has roused a host of polemical and apologetic interpretations: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). But this, one of the strongest identity assertions of Jesus the Jew, is soon replaced in the same chapter by the vision of future spiritual worship superseding both centers of ritual, Samaria and Jerusalem. The complete obfuscation of boundaries is represented in the verse from John 8:48 where the Jews are quoted calling Jesus a Samaritan. The picture becomes even more overwhelming when the substantial research on Samaritans in Rabbinic literature is consulted.34 One of the more painful questions raised, and not solved, is the degree of the participation of Samaritans in the destruction of Jerusalem (which they obviously abhorred) by Roman troops in 70 C.E. and even more so in the destruction of Bethar in 133. Thus the humorous tone of the Midrashic tale of the Samaritan and its thematic association with the narrative in John foments ideas about direct parody. Such text-to-text interactions have been investigated by Israel Yuval in medieval as well as Late

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Antique Jewish and Christian materials.35 Yuval’s model of interpretation assumes that the texts preserved suffice to explain the—in his view mainly polemic—dialogues between the discourses of the two religions. This, however, would not account for the multifarious complexities of gender, territory, ethnicity, and religious identity being constructed across the texts of the New Testament and Midrash that have been mentioned. A wider network of communication, including numerous oral speech acts, has to be taken into account. I consequently suggest widening the scope from the linearly intertextual mechanisms of parody and polemic to an overall narrative dialogue. The shared themes and motifs demonstrate a shared narrative universe transmitted, not in a one-to-one relationship from a text to another, such as John’s evangelist to Leviticus Rabbah, but through numerous speech acts of anonymous individuals, women and men, throughout the Galilee, Samaria, and maybe even Judea of the time. If we have defined Samaritans as the typical neighbors from a Jewish point of view at the time, the staging of two women neighbors in the narrative following the “Samaritan joke” not only seems suitable, it also reinforces the initial intuition guiding this research, namely that women neighbors in Rabbinic tales serve also as more or less metaphorical transformations of other neighborly relationships. Like most parables, it lacks any humorous tone and is all the more replete with didactic rhetoric. Said Rabbi Aha: There is a woman who knows how to ask [includes also the sense of “borrow”] and there is a woman who does not know how to ask. The woman who knows how to ask approaches her neighbor, and knocks on the gate even if it is open, says to her: Peace on you my neighbor, how fare you, how

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fares your husband, how fare your children? Should I enter or shouldn’t I? If you have a certain tool, would you lend it to me? And the answer is: Yes. The woman who does not know how to ask approaches her neighbor; even if the gate is latched she opens it and says: If you have a certain tool, would you lend it to me? And the answer is: No.36

In this parable the figure of the neighbor is reduced to a single function, the one we have already become acquainted with as a well-known literary topos in both Hebrew and Greek texts of the period: to be neighbor women means to borrow from each other. Men may guard their fences fervently, but between women borrowing is considered normal and the ability to conduct a good borrowing relationship is positively valued in the text. This further reinforces the overriding suggestion of this study that stories about women, especially women neighbors but not only them, serve specifically as signs for cultural interchange and the communication across identity boundaries. Reading the Leviticus Rabbah parable about the two borrowing women, the able one and the inadequate one, with the Jewish-Christian narrative dialogue in the Galilee in mind, elicits the reference to Matthew 7:7–8: Ask and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you: For everyone who asks receives; and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks the door will be opened.37

Here the door is transformed from the simple doorway between human spaces to the ultimate gate between human and divine spheres, which the teaching of Jesus aims to open for the believers, those who know how to ask. Incidentally, this same scrip-

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tural passage also includes the famous parallel to Hillel the Elder’s words: “In everything do to others as you would have them to do for you; for this is the law and the prophets.”38 The parable of the two neighbor women in Leviticus Rabbah is followed by another one recited by Rabbi Hunya in which two kinds of tenants are compared in a similar fashion: There is a tenant who knows how to ask and there is one who does not know. The one who knows how to ask combs his hair, cleans his clothes, bears a nice countenance. When he goes to his master he asks: How fares the land, and he answers: May you be lucky and enjoy its fruits. How fare the oxen, and he answers: May you be lucky and enjoy their fat. How fare the goats, and he answers: May you be lucky and enjoy their kids. What do you want? If you have ten dinars could you lend them to me. He says: If you want twenty, take them. The one who does not know how to ask, his hair is tousled, his clothes soiled, he bears a bad countenance. He went to his landlord to ask him. And he said: How is the land faring, he answered: May it yield what we threw in it. How do the oxen fare, he said: weary. How do the goats fare, he said: weary. He asked, what do you want. He said: If you have ten dinars could you give them to me. Said he: Go and get me my property that you keep.”39

In addition to the obvious parallels of Jesus’ various parables of husbandmen and tenants, the plot of this parable recalls a wellknown folktale type current in various Jewish oral traditions also related to the “evil neighbor woman” stereotype. A poor woman who praises her situation is rewarded, usually with the agency of the prophet Elijah; whereas her bad neighbor, jealous of the other’s gain, meets the prophet and complains, and as a result she looses whatever she owns.40 The typical circumstance for this

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episode is the eve of Passover, when the irreconcilable difference between lack and abundance becomes particularly heightened. The locus classicus for the actualization of this tension is the “Ha Lahma Aniya,” “This is the bread of poverty,” in the ritual reading of the Haggadah. Likewise the custom of charity for Passover, “Qimha de-Pasha,” in which wealth is shared with the needy, addresses that issue. Passover is also the holiday on which the imminence of possible redemption is particularly mentioned and ritualized, by reiterating the redemption from Egyptian slavery and by opening the door for the prophet Elijah, about whom it is written: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Malachi 4:6). And, consequently, the Passover rituals and texts are those in which Jewish and Christian texts intersect and interact in the most intricate, creative, and painful ways, as has been shown masterfully by Israel Yuval.41 Some salient New Testament parallels may further illustrate the intertextual aspects of the Leviticus Rabbah fable of the two tenants. Jesus’ parables in Matthew 20:1–15, 21:33–38, 25:14–18 all relate to the various workers, the good and the bad ones, and their respective, appropriate rewards. Most of them have parallels in the other synoptic gospels as well.42 The joke on the Samaritan, the parable of the neighbor women, and the parable of the two tenants are demonstrably interwoven in textual circumstances that highlight various marginal and lower-class figures and their intergroup discursive conduct, while at the same time folk narrative constructs are quite clearly referred to. Folk narratives, being shared cultural goods, bring into relief intergroup relations, and in our case

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seem to have served especially to express Jewish and Christian proximity and connections in the Galilee of Late Antiquity. Notably, the concrete example brought in Leviticus Rabbah for the allegorical worthy tenant is David, based on the Psalms verses 19:2–3, 19:13–14, and 25: 11, in which he exalts God and prays for the forgiving of his sins. This passage constitutes the formulaic “happy ending” characteristic of the final sections in Leviticus Rabbah, which often refer to messianic hopes and promises, here coded indirectly in the figure of King David, the ancestor of the Messiah.43 The chapters of Matthew (22:43–44) and Mark (12:36–37) that include Jesus’ exchange with the scribe on the verse from Leviticus, also contain a Midrash by Jesus on David based on Psalms 110:1: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.” However, the mention of King David as the sinner who begs for the forgiving of his sins makes a counterpoint to the various marginal figures of the narratives preceding it in the Midrash section to create the social message of messianic teachings, projecting equality into human relations in the utopian future. The message is also clearly discernible in the New Testament and in early Christianity. In any case, the heritage of David, from whose loins the Messiah is presumed to spring forth, is certainly one of the major contested areas between Jews and Christians, and thus Midrashim on that subject reveal the common theme as well as the line of demarcation between the two groups. We have thus witnessed the compass of the idiom of the neighbor women in the Midrashic literature to cover three main areas of boundaries: gender, territory, and religion. In the gender issue neighbor women articulate ferment within the stable hierarchies built on the imperviousness of marriage. Through the

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systematically negative characterization of the “neighbor woman” looms a potentially revolutionary female bonding, which is to some extent materialized in social formations of some Early Christian circles. Shared territory creates a need to consolidate the boundaries between Jew and Samaritan. But numerous discursive practices, from Rabbinical Bible exegesis and a parabolic joke to Jesus’ legendary acts and his parables, point at the recurrent collapse of the separation. And finally, the religious discourse of the two main religions of the Galilee in the second, third, and fourth centuries, Judaism and Christianity, has reached us in two distinct trajectories, separated by language and interpretative tradition.44 A reading of Rabbinical literature that tests the assumption of narrative dialogue seems to enable us to construct a universe of discourse and communication in which much of the creation of texts overlaps and transgresses the boundaries set by generations of scholastic tradition bound between the covers of books. Judith Lieu has summed up the complexity of this dynamic in the following words: “Not only were Judaism and Christianity not the homogenous entities the polemical writers present, but the situation of both the Jews and the Christians changed radically through the centuries and so too must have varying patterns of relations between them.”45 Neighbors are accessible for comparisons as well as for borrowing. Thus they may become objects for jealousy, but also for admiration and for imitation. The possibility for comparing may open the eyes to problems inside the house, so that its dwellers may be inspired to introduce changes. Bonding across the fences of neighboring domiciles thus carries the potential of change, maybe of revolution.

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When all is said and done, the idiom of the neighbor women lingers with me and prompts the following questions: Did the ferment metaphor grow out of a comparison with the visible expansion of women in pregnancy? Was the transformational relationship between wine and vinegar, the fermented and the still actively fermenting, conceptualized as the parallel of, respectively, regular blood and menstrual blood, male blood and female blood? The Eden narrative and the destruction of the temple—time immemorial and time out of joint—feed narratives in which baking bread and eating it are not mere representations of history and identity, but the most significant arenas in shaping them through the body. The individual body as well as the collective, the female as well as the male. Consider the following possible riddle: What is it that goes unborn into a grave and comes out newborn? Bread baked in an oven, of course. The famous “euphemism”—if one can say so—of the Rabbis, calling the womb a tomb (necessarily unaware of this rhyme) comes to mind.46 The refraction of discourses as dynamic interactions between the conjectured Rabbinical center of the academy and the synagogue and its even more conjectured peripheries—such as women, “simple folk,” early Jewish-Christians—will be the topic of the next chapter, focusing on a third tale of women neighbors from Leviticus Rabbah.

three

Building the Gate, or Neighbors Make Good Fences

Rabbi Shim’on Ben [Bar] Yohai said: “Peace is the greatest blessing as it contains all the other blessings.” [As it is written] “The Lord will give strength unto his people: the Lord will bless his people with peace.” (Psalms 29:11) Rabbi Ishmael taught: “Peace is so great that the Holy One allowed the [Holy] name written in sanctity to be blotted out by water to make peace between husband and wife.” Rabbi Meir used to sit and teach on Sabbath nights. There was a woman who used to sit and listen to him. Once his teaching was extended, and she waited until he had completed his lecture. She went home and found that the candle was already extinguished. Her husband said to her: “Where have you been?” She replied: “I was sitting and listening to the teacher.” Said he: “I swear by so and so, that you will not enter [this house] until you have gone and spat the teacher in his face.” So they were separated one week, a second and a third. Her neighbor women told her: “Since you and your husband are angry at each other let us go with you to hear the teacher.” Seeing them, 55

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Rabbi Meir was informed by the Holy Spirit [i.e., he envisioned the whole situation]. And he asked: “Is there a woman among you, who knows the charms of healing for the eye?” The neighbors told her: “Now, if you go and spit in his face, you’ll be released from your husband’s ban.” When she went and sat in front of him, she withdrew from him. She said to him: “Rabbi, I do not really know the charms of healing for the eye.” Said he: “Spit in my face seven times and I shall be cured.” She spat in his face seven times. He told her: “Go, tell your husband ‘You said once and I spat sevenfold.’ ” His disciples said to him: “Should Torah be thus disgraced? Would it not have been better if you had asked one of us to utter the charms of healing?” He told them: “Is it not enough for Meir to be equal to his Maker? For Rabbi Ishmael has taught: ‘Peace is so great that the Holy One allowed the [Holy] name written in sanctity to be blotted out by water to make peace between husband and wife.’ ”1

Everyday life, folk narratives, boundaries between groups, and intergroup narrative dialogue are some of the main issues raised in this analysis of Rabbinic tales about neighbor women. I have focused my work on Leviticus Rabbah, a Rabbinic text from Palestine, presumably edited in the fifth century, but including traditions that may go hundreds of years back. Before analyzing the third narrative on women neighbors in Leviticus Rabbah, it may be useful to recall in brief the genre distinctions that have been applied so far. The first tale discussed, about the two women baking, embodied what I called, following folk narrative research tradition, a folktale.2 The women are completely anonymous, and although an easily recognizable everyday life situation is initially portrayed, the plot soon swirls into a phantasmagoric mecha-

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nism, of the sort in which our worst fears and aggressions rule rather than our sense of reality. The second story—about the two neighbor women, one who knows how to ask and one who does not—and its narrative context were characterized by the symbolical mode of the mashal, or parable. Indeed, an everyday reality was very vividly presented in each of the three narratives of the sequence in which this story is included—the humorous tale of the Samaritan, the tale of the two women, and the tale of the two tenants. But because of the two-tiered reference system of the parable, their function as models for ideological constructs outweighed the mimetic effect conveyed by the tale. It is the genre of the legend that needs to be recalled in introducing the third of the neighbor women tales of Leviticus Rabbah.3 The legend presents itself to the listening or reading audience as a story of something that has happened in an identifiable time and place, and often with identifiable persons. It therefore exerts a more compelling epistemology of reality than the folktale and the parable. This is about something real, its poetics declare. Subsequently, legend, as a folk-narrative genre, accompanies and motivates distinct cultural practices, such as pilgrimage, celebrations, and what will be relevant for the present discussion, healing. The earlier discussion has touched on the construction of boundaries and their blurring, between women and men, between Samaritans and Jews, between owners and tenants, between Jews and Christians. Most of these issues will be shown to be pertinent for the story of Rabbi Meir and the woman as well, but at the story’s heart lies the interface and boundary between the Rabbinic text-authoring establishment and the Jewish society

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in and with which the text is authored. The analysis of this narrative is thus relevant to the debate in some earlier work about the social base of the creative process of the Talmudic Midrashic literature.4 I suggest that Rabbinic creativity is characterized not just by its openness to ideas engendered outside the academy and the synagogue, but even to actual textual proficiencies fostered in the society as a whole. Consequently the Rabbinical establishment can be viewed both as an enclave in and as a metonymy for the Jewish societies within which it performed. The massive presence of folk narratives thus does not point at a permissiveness or oversight of the patriarchal Rabbinical authority resulting in the inclusion of “lower” registers of creativity than the supposedly highbrow interests of the Rabbis. Rather, folk narratives are one of the multiple favored idioms of communication that the educated interlocutors commanded. Combining formal juridical discourse and multifarious modes of Bible exegesis, folk narratives as well as individually crafted literary genres, the Rabbis constructed their peculiar cultural and emotional history, consisting of the interweaving of the ethnographic with the psychoanalytical and the historical perspectives. This textual practice cannot be deemed a fortuitous slip, since it was repeated in two major manifestations, the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds, and in numerous Midrash compilations earlier and later than the Talmuds. It is impossible to speculate about a deliberate authorial selection of the Rabbinic discursive mode, but we are left with a number of theoretical options, not necessarily mutually exclusive, to elucidate the poetics and politics of Rabbinic text production.

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A structural and functional explanation may be of some use. The perpetual mobility of authorial hegemony, from Jerusalem to Yavneh, to Tsippori, to Tiberias, and from Palestine to Babylonia, as well as the existence of parallel centers of authority in the Galilee and in coastal Caesarea, in Palestine and in Babylonia, seems to me to be at least one of the keys to this formidable riddle. In a historical situation where localization inevitably outweighed long-distance communication, Jewish identity, no longer upheld by a political power structure, was forged through a discourse resilient enough to implement a common search for identity under markedly diverse circumstances. The dynamic between a more or less canonized textual center and a dialectically gyrating textual emergence through dialogue with various partners seems to me to be the process that engendered Rabbinic culture. The dialogue among multiple centers and the inherent mobility of those centers, as well as the layering of diachronic authority, are imprinted in every single Rabbinic document, and all the more in the textual totality of the corpus. The result is a web of life, as I have called it, whose yarns are laden with ambiguity as their prevailing textual-emotional mode. This is true for Halakhic deliberation, always requiring pragmatic decisions, rather than delineating an unambiguous course of behavior. This is true for the multilevel interpretations of the Bible, inviting the sixty-nine other countenances of Torah at every one exegesis supplied. This is also true for the succinct poetics of the Rabbinic narratives, relying heavily on intertextuality and on the polysemy of words, both capable of generating numerous interpretations. The theological encounter with Christianity explains the need to sustain ambiguity, to refrain

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from redemption, and, in Freudian terms, to postpone satisfaction. Rather than being rejected, anxiety is turned into a powerful cultural intensity. These seem to me the characteristics that have perpetuated the Rabbinic texts’ accessibility and significance in various contexts of loss and desire, and charged them with their peculiar energy, constantly reproduced in new interpretative traditions. The views of some scholars, who have suggested that folk narratives were included in Rabbinic texts out of an almost manipulative urge to translate higher spheres of thought to reach simple people (such as women and children) and to educate them, seem to me reductive. For these scholars the epitome of Palestinian Midrash literature, and of Leviticus Rabbah especially, consists of preaching—that is, of transforming a complex register of ideas and norms to a simpler one for purposes of customizing.5 My view of the texts as highly complex cultural signs naturally dismisses such views, without however claiming the contrary view, that Rabbinic literature consisted of a closed and elitist circulation system of texts, from the academy and back to it. It is thus important to remind ourselves of the concomitant existence of other socializing institutions, as private as the family and as public as the urban and rural parrhesia, both salient contributors to, as well as recipients of, considerable parts of Rabbinic texts.6 How to harmonize the selective ritual and social politics demonstrated by the Rabbis in their Halakhic rulings and the view of textual construction that I profess them to have had? The key could lie in the concept of tradition and its sacredness, stemming from the idea of revelation situated in the past and sustaining all present creativity. Similar to the status of narratives in much later Jewish cultures, such as the German Jewish Pietists of

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the twelfth century and the East European seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Hassidism, Rabbinic culture regarded narratives as intimations of revelation. The biographical tales of the rabbis themselves attained a special rank among narratives. They served as the basis for the practice of imitatio Rabbii that was ordained as a cultural model. The multiple genre composition of the canonized Hebrew Bible and its relatively uninhibited approach to the private lives of national and religious heroes set the model for further narrative creativity. Narratives of earlier generations became symbolic vehicles for climbing the ladder of holiness to get closer to the original point of departure, the Sinaitic revelation that was posited as the source of ethnic and religious identity. The destruction of the Second Temple constituted another major point in the past from which time flowed to the present and demanded mediation between the idea of a stable identity and incessant change. The Rabbis developed a heightened interest in the ethnographic aspects of life, expressed in the successive existence of institutions such as the family, in order to construct a dialectical method to encounter the moments of loss and the imminent disappearance of the ethnoreligious identity they served. It is the stable fabric of social life, rather than single moments of historical significance, and it is collective texts, rather than the outstanding expressions of individual gift, that withstand the threat of identity being erased. This is how the Rabbis’ peculiar ethnographic bent should be understood, I think. Through this substantial cultural enterprise, Rabbinical literature constructs and deconstructs itself endlessly in its textualization of identity. The story quoted above reveals, on the one hand, that there are open channels between the various forms of expressive cul-

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ture, between the ones identified strictly with the Rabbi as person and institution and those marked as women’s. On the other hand, it articulates the potential and actual contrasts between the worlds of Rabbis and lay-men and -women. It involves yet another cultural category that has engendered strong theory building, namely the human body, while it also brings into focus gender relations and the concepts of private and public embodied in the home and the synagogue and/or the academy. The story of the woman and Rabbi Meir in Leviticus Rabbah tests couple relations as the symbolic focus of the general topic of the chapter—peace. There is an almost identical parallel version in the Palestinian Talmud, in tractate Sotah dealing with the laws regarding the woman accused of adultery, a fact of some consequence for the interpretation. The Talmud version is considered by many the more “original” of the two, but that perception has as little proof as it has bearing on the interpretation. Irrespective of the chronological issue, the Sotah intertext adds interesting dimensions to the interpretation of the tale in Leviticus Rabbah. The section holding the tale opens with Rabbi Shim’on BarYohai’s maxim that “Peace is the greatest blessing as it contains all the other blessings.” It is followed by the well-known verse Psalms 29:11, “The Lord will give strength unto his people: the Lord will bless his people with peace,” emphasizing that peace is the real basis for strength. It should be mentioned that Rabbi Shim’on Bar-Yohai was known to have anti-Roman sentiments, but exercised them mostly in ascetic isolation from the world in a cave, rather than by bellicose acts like those supported by his mentor Rabbi Aqiva during the Bar-Kokhva uprising. The development from belligerent to meditative may be interpreted as a reaction to the calamitous outcome of the rebellion. Signifi-

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cantly, the public sphere is avoided here by interjecting the issue of peace into more intimate spheres, namely between married spouses. The narrative is presented midway in the section to substantiate Rabbi Ishmael’s claim that God prefers peace between spouses to the honor of his own name. It is important to remember that in Jewish culture, which prohibits any visual representation of the divinity, the name of God had become a sacred emblem of divine power, and even an active agent for exercising that power. The allusion to the erasure of the holy name evokes Numbers 5:13–31, where the unpleasant ritual of testing a woman accused of adultery by bitter water is prescribed.7 God’s name is assumed to appear on the scroll used to prepare the “bitter water” (or the “cursing water”) that, when imbibed by the woman, will purportedly distinguish between a sinner and an innocent woman: “And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out with the bitter water” (verse 23). This magic of words correlates with the Late Antique Middle Eastern treasure trove of magic texts constituting a subculture common to Jews, Christians, pagans, Gnostics, and others. According to Shaul Shaked, who has specialized in Babylonian magic bowls, Jews held a privileged position in the manufacturing of the bowls and in their inscribing.8 The texts on the bowls, as well as those on the magic papyri found in Egypt, disclose a wealth of Hebrew words and Jewish cultural associations. The active Jewish participation in the regional culture of magic is especially interesting as a contrast to the various Rabbinic traditions that, according to Judith Hauptman, forswore the practice of the “bitter waters” ritual as part of the Rabbis’ conscious efforts to improve women’s status and rights.9

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The motivation for initiating the test of the woman accused of adultery is formulated in Numbers without regard for the woman’s actual behavior, based merely on a whim of the husband’s jealous mind: “And if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled; or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not defiled” (verse 14). His appeasement is sought at no small emotional and social cost for the woman. Some Rabbinical sources convey the idea that the ritual was not applied in their period, and there are no testimonies of its application in biblical times either. One short Rabbinical account, the story of Karkomit in mEduyyot 5.6 is doubly circumscribed: the person in question is a slave woman, and the water may have been a dummy or in minimal quantity.10 Elsewhere it is explicitly stated that in the time of Rabban Yohannan Ben-Zakkai, when the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., the practice was terminated, apparently since its realization was connected with the sanctuary. This, however, seems to indicate that it was in active use at some time in the past. The internal motivation given to the termination of the practices was the increase in the number of adulterers, explicitly referring to the male ones. The bitter water was supposedly ineffective in the case of a woman whose husband himself was an adulterer. Moshe Halbertal has explained the mechanisms by which he believes the Rabbis demonstrate a distinguishing approach to the issue of the accused woman and considerably circumscribe the possibilities to indict her.11 The texts and practices concerning Sotah clearly highlight the indeterminacy and dilemmas that are the results of the commit-

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ment to apply the ancient Biblical text in a reality permeated by new values. At the same time they also inform us about the violently pervasive character of jealousy, if only allowing for its discursive expression with regard to male feelings. Observe that jealousy is a powerful and problematic attribute of the inherited biblical God. The Leviticus Rabbah narrative can be construed around a tight set of oppositions that render the text especially fit for structural semiotic analysis. The Talmud version specifies that the woman used to listen to Rabbi Meir’s voice. His voice figures prominently in the major text of the early Rabbinical period, the Mishnah, compiled by Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi (the Patriarch) in the Galilee around 230 C.E. He often emerges as the individual voice (symbolically termed “Tanna Qama,” “the first Tanna”) in juxtaposition to the collective “Rabbanan,” “our rabbis.” The mention of his voice as what attracted the woman introduces a strong element of gender crossing, for in Rabbinic literature it is a woman’s voice that is usually thought to be so alluring that it is compared to her sex.12 The narrative is constructed on a sophisticated interweaving of mimesis, verisimilitude, and ideology. Voice and speech represent the aural sign system, but also carry cultural and sexual surplus meanings. The literal meaning of the Rabbi’s name—Meir, “the illuminating” or “the one who gives light”—introduces another central sign system, the visual, light being significantly one of the central topoi of the kerygmatic aspects of the New Testament.13 The contrast between Rabbi and lay is articulated visibly by his being the only individual in the story that has a name. The mention of Meir’s name not only provides the narrative with the reality connection characterizing the

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legend genre, but also highlights the identity of the men of the word, in counterdistinction with the anonymity of those who do not create cultural goods in the form of texts. Moreover, Rabbi Meir is associated in Rabbinic literature with complicated relations with women, such as his wife, Beruriah, and her sister, who was sold into prostitution as a Roman captive. In order to redeem the sister he gets entangled in an intricate operation involving subtle gender and religious identity crossings and transgressions that Daniel Boyarin has treated in a thoughtful culturally and theoretically informed analysis.14 Boyarin sees the present story, however, as an illustration in the debate on the Rabbis’ approach to women’s Torah study, a rather marginal issue in the story, it seems to me.15 The Talmud version of the story enhances the aspect of verisimilitude, characteristic of the legend genre, by specifying the location, a synagogue in Hammah, near Tiberias. Hammath Tiberias is the site of one of the most magnificent fourth-century synagogues excavated in the Galilee to date; it may still have been visible when Leviticus Rabbah was edited in Tiberias.16 The fourth-century sanctuary, however, was built on the ruins of a mid-second-century synagogue, paralleling the period of Rabbi Meir.17 Rabbi Meir’s memory may have been associated with the site of the new synagogue by those who knew about the ruins of the older one. Incidentally, Hammath Tiberias houses to this very day one of the most popular destinations for Jewish pilgrimage in the Holy Land, the tomb of Rabbi Meir the Miracle Maker (Rabbi Meir Ba’al Ha-Ness), conflated with the Tannaitic Rabbi Meir, the hero of our tale, from medieval traditions onward.18 As is the custom at such sites, healing powers are attributed also to Rabbi Meir’s tomb.

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The specific timing for the events in the tale, Friday night, is pointed out as a preferred time for married sex in rabbinical sources, and especially for those belonging to the rabbinical class (mKetubbot 5.8; the obligation concerns, however, primarily the husband!). Notably, the candle often figures as a symbolical representation for female sexuality (recall the form of ancient ceramic candles).19 In the context of the story it embodies the extinguishing of the domestic marital light by the light of the illuminating Rabbi Meir, indicated by the meaning of his name. The perception of this obviously serious event is problematized and rendered ambiguous since it has happened through listening to sacred and authoritative texts. The rupture between texts and practice, mentioned above, makes itself felt now regarding the lecture itself. The two institutions, the synagogue and the house of study on one hand20 and the home on the other hand, are here set against each other. The religious center of social life is revealed at once as outwardly extremely authoritative, but also as inwardly defensive and unstable. In strong opposition to the standard evaluation of gender roles and space in Rabbinic literature, it is the woman who moves between the two realms, whereas her husband stays immured in the house. He, however, has not been able to ensure the stability of the domestic light. And one asks oneself why he did not join his wife to listen to the rabbi’s lecture . . . The mobility of the woman reinforces on one hand Cynthia Baker’s argument against unambiguous gender divisions of space in Late Antique Galilee.21 Her analysis is based on reading Rabbinic, mostly Halakhic, texts, as well as archeological findings. On the other hand it is exactly the free mobility of the woman between private and public space, between her home and

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the site of learning, that seems to cause the upheaval in her life. But I will suggest that the crisis should not necessarily be understood as unpleasant, from the woman’s point of view. The outraged husband threw out his wife, uttering a forceful oath, and forbade her to come back until she went and spit the rabbi in his face. The enticing verbal performance of the rabbi is juxtaposed with the forbidding and rejecting words of the husband. The oath that he utters constitutes in and of itself a problematic mode of speech, as was noted in the discussion in chapter 1 about the two baking neighbors. Two male ways of speaking seem to upset the system. The rabbi’s lecture, representing Torah and sacred learning, paradoxically enough overthrows the institution of marriage. The husband turns to the prohibited, or at least marginalized, speech act of taking an oath, in order to reinstitute marriage. Significantly, the written account conceals the exact wording of the oath and replaces it with a periphrasis. But in the husband’s jealousy we are reminded again of the dubious procedure proposed in the Torah to search the ways of a woman whose husband for some reason has thrown a fit of jealousy. Verbal discourse emerges as a powerful and at the same time unstable means of constructing social realities. This by itself is a threatening fact for a text-centered culture. The husband’s acting out of rage indeed echoes the agitated atmosphere reflected in the biblical text of Numbers that is the point of reference of the story—directly in Leviticus Rabbah and indirectly in the Palestinian Talmud. His act of throwing his wife out reflects his suspicion regarding the reasons for her delay. She is thus sent to spit on the teacher in order to renounce any possible relationship she may have with him. And we are reminded of the ritual of halitsa.22

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If a man dies without offspring, his brother should marry the widow, in levirate, and the offspring will be considered that of the dead brother (Deuteronomy 25:5–6). If, however, the surviving brother refuses to take her, the ritual of halitsa takes place, which includes the widow’s loosening his footwear (“halitsa”) as well as spitting in his face (Deuteronomy 25:9). The spitting in the face thus signifies a ritual of separation between a man and a woman. The husband, although absent from the lecture, seems to react adequately on a number of levels, according to Rabbinical law. The Mishnah text in the tractate of the accused adulteress provides the following rule: “If she enters with him [a strange man] into the house of secrets and stays with him enough to commit impurity, she is forbidden to [enter] her home” (mSotah 1.2). This is what the husband’s reaction projects into the tale. Of course, neither synagogue nor bet-midrash could be characterized as “house of secrets,” especially when the “secrets of Torah” are being shared with a seemingly nonexpert audience.23 However, the semantic indeterminacy of the space mentioned in the Mishnah prescription and the variation in the location of Rabbi Meir’s teaching in different versions point at the fact that the real locus of transgression and boundaries in these cases is the body, more precisely the female body. The length of the period of exclusion, three weeks—not included in the Talmud version—seems well chosen by the narrator. It introduces a number of relevant discourses of juridical, Halakhic character, which pack the text with multiple meanings in addition to the focal association with the topic of the accused adulteress. The first associative link concerns the maximum period that a man is allowed to withdraw sexually from his wife without having to actually divorce her, as stated in the Mishnah:

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“The man who abstains from taking care of his wife [sexually and economically], to the extent of thirty days, should appoint a provider for her. After that he should let her go and pay back her dowry” (mKetubbot 7.1). Thus three weeks may just mark the limit. The period of thirty days also correlates to the thirty days that are the absolute maximum after which a woman who has been wedded in levirate marriage—that is with her dead husband’s brother—has to be released in the event that the sexual consummation of the marriage has not occurred. These cases demarcate the limits of the husband and signal the potential transgression implied by his behavior in the tale. But the period of three weeks also evokes possible boundary crossing by the wife. According to the law regarding the rebellious wife referred to in the Tosefta (an approximately contemporary companion compilation of the Mishnah): “Our rabbis stipulated that the Bet-Din [council of judges] should warn her for four and five weeks [literally Sabbaths] one after another.”24 If she does not terminate her rebellion, she will be divorced. The Palestinian Talmud deliberates what rebellion is, and the main issues are refusal to participate in sex and in work. The woman in the story seems to have discarded both the cooking of the Sabbath meal and the sabbatical sex in favor of the pleasure of listening to Rabbi Meir. Both the husband and the wife verge upon the limited period, but they do not actually cross it. The co-textual framework thus strongly associates with the concept of the marriage as a mutual arrangement of obligations, among which accessibility for sexual relations seems to be the main one. The narrative zooms in on the critical moment when the balance of intimacy is upset because of the intervention of a third party—the usual story—and this third party is Rabbi Meir,

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the constitutive voice of the Mishnah, in which all those rules are set down! The rules of this tale, set by the sophisticated interplay of terse emplotting with resonant intertexts, seem to indicate a subversion from within, a structural rift in the moral tissue, and maybe also in the logical mechanism, of Rabbinical authority. The narrative is a prime example of Rabbinic creativity: it combines erudition in Halakhic matters with folkloristic motifs, such as the treble, reinforcing the Halakhic information I have referred to. It thus creates a significant textual arena, in which the Rabbinical text interacts with everyday life and cultural practice. The interaction is far from seamless. The tale oscillates agitatedly between several points of view. The main one seems, at least to begin with, to be the woman’s. It is her presence on the narrative scene that focalizes the plot. It is, however, unclear how she feels about the estrangement from her husband. Is she perhaps relieved to get rid of the man whom she seems to have preferred to spend her Friday night apart from? This is the moment when the women neighbors appear in the narrative. They may sympathize with her yearning when they suggest a return to the rabbi. The neighboring women appear in the story when the protagonist is already estranged from her husband, and thus are not necessarily the cause of the rift between the two. On the other hand, we may well assume from the language that the woman used to attend the preaching at the synagogue in her neighbors’ company. It is, however, her own attraction to the rabbi that is highlighted as the cause of her neglecting to be home on time for Friday night marital entertainment, rather than female solidarity, which rivals the couple relationship. Unlike some of the nar-

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ratives analyzed in the earlier chapters, the neighbor women here seem to advise the protagonist how to get her man back rather than instigate her separation from him. The women neighbors appear basically as a support group, encouraging the protagonist to satisfy her spiritual need while thrown out by her husband, but also to take advantage of the occasion to fulfill her husband’s order when that is suggested by the rabbi’s explicit invitation to be spit at. Their speech is reported as a collective act, somewhat calling to mind the exhortations, admonitions, and advice of the chorus in Greek tragedies. Offset by a parallel act of the rabbi’s students later in the story, the gender perspective of both groups is heightened. Similar to the Greek chorus, the women articulate the knowledge of “the tactics and the ruses of the practice of everyday life.”25 The neighbor women as a group thus represent expertise in what is generally thought of as a nonexpert cultural category of culture, namely everyday life. It appears that this expert knowledge consists of delicate balancing between normative behavior and individual initiative for creative problem solving. Note the dialectical relationship between the open-ended everyday-life-wisdom on one hand and the dynamic interpretation of the Bible, restrained by the canonized text, on the other hand. Rabbi Meir captures the whole situation in a flash granted him by the Holy Spirit (compare New Testament An pneAmati, e.g., Matthew 22:43 on David’s inspiration while writing the Psalms). This instance naturally extends beyond the woman’s point of view and sets Rabbi Meir apart, on a higher plane than any of the other human figures in the plot. Any suggestion that it would seem unusual that God gets involved in such private matters

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would be refuted by the Rabbinical tradition that pondered on God’s occupation after the creation was completed, the solution being that He is busy matching human couples.26 Whereas the teaching is posited on the axis of hearing, the healing is on the axis of seeing. It is important to stress that numinous experiences of the sacred often involve intense fusion of the two senses in synesthesia.27 The stress on the convergence of those two sign systems, together with the reference to the holy spirit, mark a heightened presence of categories of the sacred in the tale in conjunction with impurity and the trespassing and destabilizing of the social order. The sacred is thus not presented as a contrast to those anxiety-ridden fields of experience but rather as their cultural context. The discourse of religious teaching and the discourse of cultural practices related to popular healing as well as to magical protection emerge from one authoritative person, Rabbi Meir. The seeming contrast between the two is, however, erased by the Halakhic examples of Sotah and halitsa. Both Rabbi Meir and the women seem in any case to assume that healing by charms and spitting is a female occupation. Indeed, spitting is a standard folk medical procedure practiced mainly by women to this day.28 Rabbi Meir’s disciples seem, however, not to accept that gender division, also bridged by Jesus in the New Testament. And maybe there the gender crossing is truly not a mere breach of the etiquette, but a downright social rebellion against its codes. The woman in the story hesitates, not so much because of the awesome intertextual correlations, but apparently because of the awesome authority of the rabbi. However, she finally consents to his exhortations. As indicated earlier, spitting, in addition to its

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cross-culturally attested function in folk medicine, also recalls the “bitter water” of the test for an accused adulteress, in which she imbibes liquid rather than discharging it. Here in the story too the wife undergoes a test and, having passed it, is supposedly reintegrated into her marriage. The spitting act apparently terminates the relationship between Rabbi Meir and the woman, but first it allows for the materialization of an extremely intimate and taboo-laden moment between the two. Women’s saliva is in other texts associated with blood, specifically menstrual blood and the blood of the leprous woman (mNiddah 4.3). The bodily intimacy of the spitting may also associate with intercourse, or at least deep kissing. Typical of the gender crossings that characterize Rabbi Meir here and in other contexts, in this act of intimacy the body fluid is passed from the woman to him, reversing the usual structure of the exchange of liquids between men and women.29 The complexity of this text is further enhanced by the fact that Rabbi Meir is the mouthpiece or the originator of some of the most anti-feminist Halakhic pronouncements in the Mishnah, especially the Mishnah regarding the Sotah—the woman accused of adultery. Another Rabbinic tale regarding the transgression of multiple identity boundaries correlates intercourse and spit directly. In a story about Rabbi Joshua, who visits a noble Roman lady in matters of public interest, it is told that his disciples waited for him outside. When the rabbi’s behavior seemed to indicate intimate contact between the rabbi and the foreign woman, his disciples were able to interpret all signs in trust of his innocence (bShabbat 127b). The rabbi asked the disciples how they had interpreted the fact that he immersed after the meeting, an act possibly indicating that he was purifying himself from sexual intercourse.

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The disciples proposed that some of the lady’s saliva had touched him while she spoke, necessitating immersion for purification. The disciples’ scolding of Rabbi Meir for having allowed the learning, Torah, to be defiled through the supposed defilement of his body by the woman’s spitting is in the Talmud version augmented by their suggestion of an alternative method for reconciling the husband to his wife—namely, that they give the husband a good beating. Rabbi Meir responds with his utterly meek yet deeply proud, almost arrogant words: “Is it not enough for Meir to be equal to his Maker?” The suggested comparison is that, like God, who is prepared to have His holy name blotted out in order to restore peace in the jealous man’s household, Rabbi Meir offers his body, actually his face, for treatment with liquids. Comparing his body with God’s name, Rabbi Meir’s conception of himself comes dangerously close to the image of the teacher who was identified as the Son of God, allowed himself to be humiliated, and became later the Lord (and the Logos) for his disciples and followers. The Hebrew verb used by Rabbi Meir in the Leviticus Rabbah version of the tale is “hwç,” which actually indicates identity rather than just similarity, unlike the Palestinian Talmud version, which reads, in a less provocative manner, “Will not Meir’s honor be like his Maker’s?”30 The human body compared to God’s name as his visible “body” is thus the site of the most complex cultural and symbolical interactions in this story. The boundaries of identities cut through the individual bodies with gender crossings that involve the woman as well as Rabbi Meir. The relevant intertextual links associated with biblical as well as Mishnah and Tosefta texts focus on the needs of the body and on rituals exerted through the body, such as the mutual sexual obligations of husband and wife.

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The interreligious narrative dialogue activated by this story also involves the body. The spiritual division between Jews and Christians invests a great deal in matters of the body.31 Certainly the major theological chasm between them is around the possibility of God’s embodiment. Conflicts regarding sociocultural practices address the management of the body, such as circumcision, issues of hygiene and purity (washing hands before meals, menstruation, etc.), dietary restrictions, and the like, in the New Testament as well as in the writings of the early churches. One of the most obvious aspects of the Jewish-Christian narrative dialogue leading from this story to wider textual circuits crystallizes around the body in the form of the discourse of healing. It is discernible primarily through the association with one of Jesus’ miraculous cures, namely recovering the vision of a blind man by spitting into his eyes (Mark 8:22–25; see also John 9:6). The Rabbinic treatment of the same motif seems to aver that the spitting cure was then, as it is today, part of current folk medical practices, which, although often accomplished with the help of sacred powers, are not limited to divine healers. The close association, then as today, of such healing methods with the cult of holy men and women is, however, indicative of the theological potential of the topic as well as its germaneness to folkloristic study. Unlike Rabbi Meir his disciples represent a voice that challenges the authority of women in matters of healing, an authority widely attested in Rabbinical texts elsewhere, in the Palestinian as well as the Babylonian sources.32 But the disciples may also signal anxiety over the lack of clarity regarding the boundaries between the rabbinical establishment and the community, which is experienced as unstructured and chaotic. The disciples’ re-

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sponse to the bewildering confusion of society is, according to the Talmud version, open aggression, the wish to beat up the husband. Apparently young and unmarried, they mistakenly believe that the intricate matters of cohabitation can be solved by force. The blurring of boundaries is marked in the story not only by the blatant gender crossings and the exposure of the body, but also by the emergence of the category of healing, folk medicine, in the synagogue. The healing stories of the New Testament are a good example of how healing can be turned into a subversive activity and may be perceived as a threat to authority. Dina Stein has brilliantly argued that magic is not a category imported into the Rabbinic texts from some alien universe, but rather constitutes part and parcel of the Rabbis’ world of ideas.33 She also shows how, time and again, this cultural category leads to a probing of boundaries, turned now outward and next time inward. Magic is one of those categories that make it impossible to imagine Rabbinical culture (or any other culture) as an entity contained in essential terms and that invite the application of metaphors such as the ever-turning warp, used to describe the emergence of the universe in modern physics. We can never fix Rabbinic culture in any of its stages. Each reading of the texts introduces us into the heart of a dynamic process in which the Rabbinic culture was woven in thousands of threads of language, poetry, and creativity. The work of interpretation consists of following as many threads as possible into the fabric of the texts themselves, and into the myriad interfaces with which they may have interacted and with which they, as texts, continue to interact. Folk medicine introduces in Rabbinic texts clear signs of boundary marking. The “cure” suggested by Rabbi Meir for his

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eyes consists of spitting and uttering a charm. Naturally the charm part worried the Rabbis most, as an only somewhat controllable play with their dearest coinage—words. Rabbi Aqiva in the Mishnah Sanhedrin lists among those who have no part in the world to come those “who read a charm on the injury quoting the verse ‘I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee’ ” (Exodus 15:26b; mSanhedrin 10.1; yPeah 1.1).34 Rabbi Aqiva, Rabbi Meir’s teacher, groups the reader of a charm with no petty lawbreakers: those “who deny that the resurrection of the dead is written in the Torah, and that the Torah is of divine origin, and the Epicurean.” The use of the verse of the charm involves the same transgression delicately hinted at in the tale discussed here, namely identifying the healer with the only true healer, God. The magic of words is precarious. Of course the quoting of the verse could be understood as an unambiguous declaration of God as the one and only healer. But as it becomes the direct speech of the human healer, it technically equates him or her with God. And for the Rabbis the use of words could never be merely technical. The Tosefta version of this item on the list is of some interest here: “one who reads the charm on an injury, because it is said ‘I will put none of these diseases upon thee, . . .’ and spits.”35 When folk healing is thus discussed in the context of explicitly theological matters, such as the belief in the world to come, a tendency to solidify the boundaries is clearly discernible. These are harsh condemnations of healing practices related to charms as well as to spitting, which were both introduced into the synagogue by Rabbi Meir in the story in Leviticus Rabbah. The image of radical transgression emerging from the collation of the

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Mishnah and Tosefta texts on one hand and the story from Leviticus Rabbah on the other, interprets the unhappy marital situation of the couple as an emergency, almost medical, justifying extreme methods. It also presents Rabbi Meir, the true healer of the story, as one whose approach to the laws is unregimented, motivated by direct divine inspiration. A melting of boundaries seems to recur, however, as the Rabbis project folk-medical practices onto various pragmatic contexts. Even the provisos concerning the Sabbath seem to be flexible when a real need turns up. Thus: Rabban Shimon Ben Gamaliel says: A thing that can be carried on the Sabbath may be applied when reading a charm for the eye, or on snake and scorpion bites but one should not read a charm concerning demons. Rabbi Yossa says: A charm concerning demons may not be read even on a weekday. (Tosefta Lieberman Shabbat 7.23; see also yShabbat 14.3)36

And in close association with our “case”: A charm is uttered on the eye and the bowels and snake and scorpion bites and [oil] is brought to the eye on the Sabbath. It happened once that Rabbi Aqiva [or: one who was at the academy of Rabbi Aqiva] was hurt in the eye [or: attacked by the Evil Eye]. And they passed a cup on him on the Sabbath. (yShabbat 14.3)

Medical conditions push people to their limits. Even the most rational may resort to unconventional means in the case of an unbearable pain or vital danger. The Rabbis seem in general to have had pretty similar guidelines. As a result practices that according to the Rabbis may be considered marginal and thus traditionally categorized as folk medicine, including magic, are often sites of

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abstruse transgressions of boundaries, of individual as well as of group identity. The use of Chinese medicine in the West, or in Israel the mutual soliciting by Jews and Moslems of each other’s medicine-men and -women, dream interpreters, or diviners respectively, are similar cases. Narratives concerning healing by means deemed borderline—so that they necessitate rabbinical deliberation—thus emerge as discourses probing the limits of the collective subject, in our case of the Rabbinical culture of Late Antique Galilee and its frame of reference, the larger Jewish culture of the same time and place. Rabbi Joshua Ben Levi had colos [colic].37 Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Jonathan prescribed to him to grate cress on a Sabbath and mix it with old wine and drink it, in order to avert danger. The son of his son had bela [possibly croup].38 A fellow came and uttered a charm in the name of Jesus Pandira and he was able to breathe again. He was asked [by Rabbi Joshua Ben Levi]: What [whom, whose] charm did you utter? And he said: So and so. Said he: He should rather have died. But is not this a case of “an unpremeditated word uttered by the emperor”? (Ecclesiastes 10:5 [i.e., a case where advantage may be taken from a bad thing in order to save life]) . . . When he [the healer] was leaving he [the patient] asked: What did you say for me? He said: So and so. He said: What would have happened to me if I were to die without hearing those words, would it then have been like the case of “an unpremeditated word uttered by the emperor”?39

The problem articulated by this story reverberates forcefully in the Talmudic corpus, and the paradoxes of belief and identity generate complex narratives. An identity crisis is imminent in every severe case of disease, while the perception of the self as a

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unity of body and soul is threatened. Rabbinic tales, however, tend to project this anxiety on the unified perception of collective identity. The following story is perhaps the Rabbinic text that thematizes most explicitly the negotiation of boundaries in healing. Rabbi Eleazar Ben Damma was bitten by a snake. Yaakov from Kefar Samma came to heal him in the name of Jesus Pandira, and Rabbi Ishmael would not let him do so. He [Eleazar Ben Damma] said: I will prove [from a biblical text] that he is allowed to heal me. But before he had time to present the prooftext, Ben Damma died. Rabbi Ishmael told him: Blessed are you, Ben Damma, that you left the world in peace and did not transgress the fence of the Rabbis. Since it is written: “and whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him” (Eccl. 10:8).40 But did not a snake bite him [already]? Indeed, that a snake will not bite him hereafter [next world]. And what was he going to say [as prooftext]? “Which if a man do he shall live in them” [in Leviticus 18:5, regarding the laws of the Torah, meaning live for them and not die for them]. (Tosefta Hullin, Zuckermandel, 227; yShabbat ch. 14.4. Also: yAvodah Zarah 2.2)41

The final statement of the narrative, the quote “Which if a man do he shall live in them,” maintains an ambiguous status, a declaration as well as a question, attesting to the indeterminacy of the matter. On one hand, the resolute borders for Jewish identity are dictated by textual authority, “the fence” or “the hedge of the Rabbis.” But although Ben Damma’s case thematizes the harsh reality of the fence, its textual framing shows that there are both gates and loopholes in the fence. These are often conveniently embodied in narratives about figures removed from

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the authoritative center, such as women. On the other hand, the borderlines are characterized by their functional resiliency in everyday situations, and by a constant negotiation of boundaries as well as identities. The son of Joshua Ben Levi’s son survived, and the textual disapproval of his grandfather did not affect the situation. The supposed prooftext that Ben Damma was going to quote to legitimize his resorting to extreme means in order to stay alive ends with the resolute monotheistic assertion “I am the Lord,” echoing the second command “Thou shalt have no other gods.” But the story ends with the words motivating the choice of a transgressive mode of healing. Although Rabbi Ishmael has the last word on the scene of the events, the textual arena challenges his words by superimposing the verse.42 The two tales about curing in the name of Jesus show amply that the Jewish culture of Late Antique Galilee retains a clear knowledge of the traditions regarding the miraculous healing by Jesus. This knowledge may be based on oral traditions stemming from the beginning of the second century as well as by recourse to versions of gospel texts circulating there at the time of the production of the Rabbinical text.43 In his discussion of the conflicts between Jesus and various Jewish groups the New Testament scholar Graham N. Stanton has commented: “Sociologists have often observed that the closer the relationship between groups, the more intense the conflict.”44 Consequently, he claims that the Jewish group that Jesus had the strongest affiliation with was the Pharisees rather than the Essenes, the resistance fighters, or the Sadducees, which have been more conventionally suggested. Stanton’s relevant observations could be extended to early Christianity in the Galilee, Caesarea,

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and Antiochia (all mentioned in Leviticus Rabbah) and reversed to include the Jewish reaction to Christian narratives, rules, and practices. I would, however, suggest widening the perspective to include not just the conflicted interactions but the dialogic, comparing, and borrowing ones too. The story of Rabbi Meir and the woman, as read in its cultural and textual framework, suggests that the interdependence of praxis and text emerges as the main issue that subverts the Rabbinical system from within, while it also is its very raison d’être. Applying an ancient text in a given present demands enormous effort, causing the regulating system to subvert itself in extreme cases such as halitsa and Sotah (both, significantly, involving sex and women), respectively differently dealt with by the Rabbis. Whereas early Christianity seeks to dispose of those points of tension, Rabbinic culture draws its energy from the maintenance of ambiguity. Returning to the tale of Rabbi Meir, is it then possible that the tale directs a subversive look at two ancient rituals concerning women upheld by the Rabbis, if not in practice at least in their discourse, namely Sotah and halitsa? Incidentally, or not, both of those institutions are also directly criticized in the New Testament.45 And does the concentration of the tales of women neighbors in Leviticus Rabbah construct and impart a heightened sensitivity to the neighbor-like cultural interfaces evoked by the stories’ own contextual and intertextual resonance? Having said all this, I am left with the crucial question regarding the intertextuality of Leviticus Rabbah with New Testament texts. Does this text harbor a specific tradition characteristically interacting with Christian and Judeo-Christian traditions, or would any other Late Antique Jewish text yield the

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same communicative network? It would also be useful to investigate the possible link between such a tradition and the Galilean priestly traditions and their challenge of Rabbinic authority, especially in the elaboration on the priestly code of Leviticus. Is it possible that while attacking the destabilization of the text of the Torah by Jesus and his followers, the Rabbis also became conscious of the fact that they too destabilized it by the practice of Midrash, creatively appealing to the indeterminacy of the ancient text? The women neighbors that I have brought into the limelight of this discussion seem a powerful idiom to maintain the dynamics of erected fences, peepholes, and gates, in a universe of discourse constantly negotiating cultural identity, while at the same time growing into its main mode and site of existence. One more remark to bring back the concept of narrative dialogues. The story of Rabbi Meir and the woman also transports us from the intertextuality of Leviticus Rabbah with the synoptic gospels to the intertextuality with the next generation of early Christian texts. The canonized Acts of the Apostles and the Apocryphal Acts, composed about the same time as the Aggadic Midrash literature of Palestine, are the ones that seem most relevant here. Paul plays a central role in stories on the “Apostolic Love Triangle” (Kate Cooper’s keen formulation), where a woman, charmed by his seductive rhetoric, converts and often leaves her marriage as a result.46 This plot structure includes Lydia, the purple-cloth dealer, in the Canonical Acts and culminates in the dramatic tale of Thecla in the Apocryphal Acts.47 A similar knowledge of the bittersweet erotic savor of religion and learning permeates all these stories. We should therefore not be astonished by the following particulars. Saul/Paul’s conversion on the way to Damascus is a highly illuminated—literally—ex-

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perience, and it results in a temporary loss of vision, miraculously cured by Ananias after three days (Acts 9:3–12). Paul’s career, like Rabbi Meir’s, is afflicted with imprisonment, from which he is delivered by miracles. And who but Rabbi Meir is among the Rabbis known for his journeys in Asia Minor? It goes perhaps without saying that the differences in the dialectics of these stories, with the multiple ideological and emotional systems of their respective traditions, are not less interesting than the similarities. This topic definitely deserves a wider discussion than can be accomplished here. The peculiar emotional history, consisting of the interweaving of the ethnographic with the psychological and the historical perspectives, enables the maintenance of ambiguity as the prevailing idiom of the Rabbinic textual mode. This is what has made it especially accessible and meaningful in various contexts of loss and desire, without having to resort to imminent redemption.

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The Evasive Center Hadrian, the Old Man, the Neighbor, and the Rabbinic Rhetoric of the Empire

The tale about Hadrian, the old man, and the neighbor and her husband is one of the most distinct examples of folktales among the narratives of the Palestinian Aggadic Midrash Leviticus Rabbah. Also, as a prime example of the sophistication of Rabbinic literature, it on one hand teaches us about the considerable efforts invested by the Rabbis in the incorporation of folk narratives into their writings, and on the other demonstrates the collapse of the dichotomy between folk literature and “high” literature in the writings. My analysis of the tale will explicitly address the different contexts of interpretation: the literary, the genre, the comparative, and the historical.1 The literary context of interpretation investigates the links of the narrative with its wider textual environment. The genre context explores the embodiment of a folk lit86

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erary genre in the text. The comparative context correlates the tale with parallel stories in Jewish as well as other cultures; and the historical context of interpretation situates the narrative in the epistemological complex of historical consciousness.2 Hadrian, let his bones rot, was walking up from Tiberias to the Land of Israel when he saw an old man planting saplings. Said Hadrian: Old man, old man, up at sunrise free at sunset—had you toiled in your youth you would be free of toil in your old age. Said the old man: By your life sir, I have toiled sunrise and sunset and what He wants He does. Said Hadrian: By your life old man, if these saplings yield in your lifetime, let me taste them. The old man was fortunate and the saplings yielded in his lifetime. So he filled a basket with figs and went and stood in [Hadrian’s] presence. Said [the emperor]: Who are you? And he replied: I am the old man whom you passed by and told, if these saplings yield in your lifetime let me taste them. Said [the emperor]: Empty his basket and fill it with dinars. That having been done to him he went home and told his family. When the neighbor heard that, she went and said to her husband: Son of dark, son of dark, have you heard that this king loves figs? Her husband asked her: How do you know? She told: Our old neighbor filled his basket with figs, and it was filled with dinars. So he got up before daybreak and filled his saddlebag and loaded the donkey and went and stood in the emperor’s presence. When he was asked “who are you” he told them: I have heard that this king loves figs. [The emperor] told [his servants]: Go and make him stand at the gate of the palace and every one who happens to pass by throws [one of his fruits] in his face. That having been done to him he went home and told his family. They told him: Praise your Creator that they were figs rather than citrons, and that they were ripe rather than unripe. (Leviticus Rabbah 25.5; Munich MS)

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THE LITERARY CONTEXT

This narrative is embedded in Leviticus Rabbah, chapter 25.5, a chapter that sets out to explicate the verse “And when you shall come into the land and shall have planted all manners of trees for food, then you shall count the fruit thereof as uncircumcised; three years unto you: it shall not be eaten of”(Leviticus 19:23). The chapter is one of those termed by Joseph Heinemann thematically heterogeneous, one in which compositional integration has not been completely achieved.3 It is possible to discern two parts of unequal length, each devoted to half of the verse. The first part relates to “And when you shall come into the land and shall have planted all manners of trees for food,” and the second one to “then you shall count the fruit thereof as uncircumcised; three years unto you: it shall not be eaten of.” Like the folk narrative of the son who dies on his wedding night in Leviticus Rabbah 20.3—also included in a chapter that visibly divides into two parts—the tale here may have the function of bridging the two parts.4 While the story is not exactly situated at the thematic dividing line, it is possible to demonstrate that it embraces the themes of both parts of the elaborated verse. The method of including thematic and linguistic allusions to the wider context of the Bible chapter where the verse belongs, or even from the passage from the prophets or the apocrypha paired with it in its ritual reading in the synagogue (haftarah), is standard procedure in Leviticus Rabbah narratives.5 The same phenomenon has been diagnosed in Rabbinic narratives in general.6 The verse quoted from the “longer version” of the Ten Commandments is conjoined with the following verse: “She is a tree

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of life for them that lay hold upon her” (Proverbs 3:18a), evoking a series of sermons of the petihta (proem) form based on the conjunction.7 The Proverbs chapter opens with the verse “My son, forget not my law” (3:1a). That is followed by a comparison according to which the Learning is more valuable than earthly goods:8 “For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold” (3:14). It is, however, also implied that the keeping of the Torah may lead to material profit: “So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine” (3:10); “Length of days is in her right hand and in her left hand riches and honour” (3:16). The homiletic discourse of Leviticus Rabbah at this point oscillates between two possibilities. One is the requirement to actually study the Torah, as in: “Rabbi Huna in the name of Rabbi Aha, my son the Torah should not be for you like one who has a grown-up daughter whom he wants to keep for another, but rather ‘if thou wilt receive my words’ (Proverbs 2:1).”9 The second is the alternative requirement to support economically others who study. The second message seems to be the predominant one, and it may disclose the character of the audience for the oral sermon that may have preceded the written version. The exhortation of supporting other Torah students is rooted in a verse from Deuteronomy. The portion of “Ki Tavo” opens with the following: “And it shall be, when thou art come in unto the land which the Lord thy God gives thee for an inheritance . . .” (Deuteronomy 26:1a). This conditional clause is followed by a list of the main commands regarding one human being’s relations with another and with God. In an impressive and interactive ritual God announces through Moses and the

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Levites: “O Israel, this day thou art become the people of the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 27:9b). The Israelites then “Amen” one after another twelve commandments formulated as awesome curses, partly repeating the Ten Commandments, partly sharpening them or adding to them. The homilist engages the final verse of the ritual text that lays on Israel the responsibility to actively preserve the commandments: “Cursed be he that confirms not all the words of this law to do them” (Deuteronomy 27:26a). The Palestinian Amoraic sages in the Leviticus Rabbah passage underline the fact that Scripture says “Cursed is he who confirms not” rather than “studies not.” They thus create a distinction between confirmation that obliges everyone and studying that obliges only a few. The selective character of the Rabbinic class is thus inferred from the verse, while the responsibility for every Jew for their economic maintenance is motivated by it. It is also clear that the national definition of Jews of the period implies a diversified activity of different Jews in relationship with Torah. The unlearned “Am Ha’arets” can thus be included in the national definition.10 Moreover, the homilies are intended to clarify to those who do not study what their obligation is as a legacy of the mythological oath taken by their mythological forefathers. Thus the Midrash: “Said Rabbi Huna: whosoever faults and is doomed to die let him study the Torah . . . and if he doesn’t know how to read or to memorize, let him become a provider of the community or a collector of alms and he will be saved,”11 drawing on the verse “For wisdom is a defense and money is a defense” (Ecclesiastes 7:12a). The other part of the same verse is of course downplayed: “but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom gives life to them that have it” (Ecclesiastes 7:12b). But

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even though Rabbi Huna’s homily clearly communicates a hierarchy topped by those who study, this chapter does not stress the hierarchy but rather highlights the possibilities available for all to partake, through economic support of those who study, in the confirmation of the Torah as articulated by Deuteronomy. The same message is formulated in an even clearer manner in the Palestinian Talmud passage that the Leviticus Rabbah passage seems to quote:12 Rabbi Aha said in the name of Rabbi Tanhum the son of Rabbi Hiyya: One who has studied and taught and kept and performed and had the capacity to support and did not support is included in the curse. Rabbi Yirmiyah said in the name13 of Rabbi Hiyya Bar Abba: One who has not studied, nor taught, nor kept, nor performed and did not have the capacity to support but did support, is included in the blessing. (ySotah 7.4, p. 21d)14

Consequently, in paragraph 3 of the Leviticus Rabbah chapter, the Israelites are compared with God: “As thy Lord God first took to planting, so shall you when you enter unto the land first take to planting ‘And when you shall come into the land and shall have planted all manners of trees for food . . .’ ” (Leviticus 19:23a). In paragraph 4 the homilist associates verses regarding settling in the land and planting vine and olive trees, concentrating on15 “And it shall be, when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he swore unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildest not: And houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not: Then

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beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage” (Deuteronomy 6:10–12).16 This passage is associated with Ecclesiastes 2:4–8, containing similar motifs. Paragraph 5 of the Leviticus Rabbah chapter is the immediate context of the narrative. It opens with a homily related to the following verse from Job: “Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or who has given understanding to the heart [to the rooster]” (38:36). A parable in Aramaic recited by Rabbi Levi compares God to a hen and the Israelites in the wilderness to her chicks hiding under her wings. As they entered the Land of Canaan they grew up, and the mother pecked their heads and sent them out to find their own food in the dung heap:17 “When he had let them enter into the land Moses told them: each one of you should take a shovel and dig in the mountain and plant a plant,” concluding with the verse from the Torah portion of the chapter, “And when you shall come into the land . . .” Immediately after this short petihta comes the story of Hadrian and the old man who plants fig trees. But the inspiration taken from the text from Job does not end here. The story bears a strong relationship not only to the verse that is explicitly quoted but also to those following it in Job and even to the general message of the whole chapter. The chapter, Job 38, is the opening section to God’s answer from the storm to Job’s great questions. The text stresses God’s domination of the world and his special care to every single detail of creation and its sustenance. Specific attention is paid to the cyclical nature of growth (verse 27). The second part of God’s answer to Job mentions a bird for whose eggs God himself cares (39:13–18). But the most interesting connection to the tale is created by the verse in which God is explicitly mindful of the ripening of fruits with ref-

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erence to the year cycle and the stars: “Canst thou bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion: Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in this season or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?” (38:31–32). The Job interpretation of Rabbi Levi Ben Gershom or Gershonides (RLBG) enhances the connection to our tale: “Could you stop what the Pleiades are able to bring forth from trees and growing fruits, since it is when the Sun enters the Pleiades that she is in Aries and that is when the trees and the fruits give their sap. . . . Mazzaroth is one of the constellations of the southern sky and it was seen for a very short period in the land in which Job resided.” The texts, Job, Leviticus Rabbah, and the medieval commentator, thus communicate a solid worldview, according to which God influences trees and their fruits by activating the stars and the constellations that induce the cycles of growth. The Job chapter articulates a cosmic perspective of a complex mechanism of growth that sets off the planting of the old man as a miniscule event in a much larger, centrally dominated, scheme. These are some of the textual interfaces of the tale by which its deeper meaning can be disentangled. The remaining part of the Leviticus Rabbah chapter, paragraphs 6–8, deals entirely with the uncircumcised fruits. Paragraph 6 creates a connection between uncircumcised fruit and the circumcision of the flesh, further associating the seeds of the earth and human seed, resonating the deeds of the old man who plants for his seed, his children, and their children. The final paragraph ponders the textual proximity in the Pentateuch of the matters of uncircumcised fruits and sexual prohibitions (“And whosoever lies carnally a woman . . .”; Leviticus 19:20) and praises the patience of waiting three years for the fruit, comparing it to postmenstrual abstinence from sex.

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The discussion of the literary context of the tale encompasses an analysis of the narrative structure itself. As Jonah Fraenkel has noted, the story is divided more or less symmetrically into two distinct parts.18 The internal division of each half of the story into episodes is, however, not symmetrical. In the first episode of the first half, Hadrian meets the old man in the latter’s territory, on the land which he tills and plants. The emperor initiates the conversation. Hadrian and the old man are the only dramatis personae of the first episode. The second episode is removed to the emperor’s palace, to which the old man goes in response to the emperor’s invitation in the preceding episode. The emperor’s initiative (and power) thus still is the activating force of the narrative mechanism. The second episode refers briefly to the presence of the emperor’s servants, who bestow the reward in gold for the figs, again following the emperor’s orders. The first half of the narrative concludes with the old man’s return to his family with the good news. The second half of the story, following logically from the announcement scene at the end of the first half, is a little more complex in its structure as well as in the number of figures. Its episodes are: the woman urges her husband, the husband goes to the palace in the dark, his discussion with the emperor’s servants, his meeting with the emperor, his humiliation, and the reaction of his family. The symmetrical structure of the narrative resonates in its language and contents as well. The two first episodes at the beginning of the first half, where mainly the emperor and the old man appear, are especially balanced in their style. At their end the stance of the old man, his absolute trust in God, proves to be not only ethically superior but also worthwhile. The moral of the

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narrative here emulates the way morality and profit are presented in the chapters from Proverbs and Deuteronomy as quoted in the Leviticus Rabbah paragraphs. The theme of studying Torah that is central in the homilies of the chapter is, however, more or less absent in the story. The opening formula of the tale is well known from other Palestinian Amoraic tales: “Hadrian, may his bones rot, went up from Tiberias.”19 The balanced rhetoric is especially audible in the first exchange between the emperor and the old man when the emperor expresses himself proverbially: “up at sunrise free at sunset,” which he himself immediately interprets: “had you toiled in your youth you would be free of toil in your old age.” The metaphor of youth as the morning of life is extant in numerous cultures, especially in proverbs.20 Hadrian accepts the old man’s ethical proposition countering the emperor’s proverbial view with a similarly proverbial one of his own: “I have toiled sunrise and sunset and what He wants He does.” The implied comparison between the Master of the Universe and the master of the empire establishes a justification for a similar hierarchical harmony in the empire as does God’s rule in the world according to the book of Job as quoted above. Thus the words of the old man, the words of the emperor, and the literary context of the homily on Job produce the message that hierarchy serves everybody’s best interests. The praise of the harmonious world order indeed totally overrides the wish implied in the opening formula, “may his bones rot.” Even if we presume that the formula may have been routinely added at a later stage, the enlightened emperor of this tale is flagrantly dissonant with the image of the destroyer of Bethar, who proclaimed the decrees against major Jewish practices such as circumcision.

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The rule of harmony permeates the slightest details of the narrative language. Thus the Aramaic expresses the act of planting in the reduplicated natsiv nitsavin. The words for “up at sunrise” and “toil” are reduplicated in the emperor’s and the old man’s speech. The verb “do” (avad) makes a direct connection between God (ma de-ba’a avad) and the ripening of the fruits (avdan elin nitsavata), to materialize the vision of a divinely regulated cosmic order, as in Job. Moreover, this verb embodies also the moral implications of the cosmic order in both cases, “that having been done to him” (itaved lei ken), the reward of the old man as well as the humiliation of his neighbor. Another dominant verb in the stylistic making of the tale is “to stand” (the Aramaic qam). In all the other versions of the tale in manuscripts and printed editions alike, except for the Munich MS quoted above, the story opens with a much more explicit contrasting of the old man who stands and Hadrian who walks. The old man indeed walks to the palace, but he then stands at its gate.21 Another Leitwort (to use the terminology of Bible scholars, notably Martin Buber) is the word for “darkness.” The emperor uses it in the proverbial expression to describe early rising, the old man to describe his conduct. In the second episode the connotations of the word deteriorate as the wife calls her husband “son of darkness,” and he eagerly arises in the dark of the night to gain his profit.22 The stylistic discussion cannot be exhausted without referring to the figs, whose symbolic effect in the text will be discussed later. Suffice it to say here that their erotic meaning is laid bare by the direct reference to unripe figs, pagim, referring to the hapax legomenon in the Song of Songs 2:13 “green figs.”23 The old age of the planting man and the explicit eroticism of the figs cre-

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ate an additional point of tension in whether they really will ripen for him. The characteristic balanced style of the first half of the story is upset in the second half, thus shaping the complete structure of the narrative as a mirror reflecting itself distortedly. As the balanced style vanishes and a number of other destabilizing effects emerge, the shift in style predicts the ending of the plot. The woman curses her husband, “son of darkness,” and he will stand at the palace gate until dark. The neighbor does not take his basket like the old man but indeed his saddlebag, a double construction that by its very size and structure connotes greediness, all the more when a carrying animal is added to the expedition. His departure in the dark of night again connotes eager greediness rather than the industriousness implied in the emperor’s use of the same idiom. Quite clearly the main structural thematic opposition in this tale seems to be one of class, whereas those of nation and religion, present by implication, are rather downplayed. But the opposition of gender is presented unabashedly. The woman’s negative characterization makes her the agent of the dynamics of the plot in the second half of the story, paralleling the narrative role of the emperor in the first half. The moral tale teaching us the value of hard work and trust in God changes into a crude joke. The deeper meaning of this change within the narrative demands an analysis of the genre context of the interpretation of the text. THE GENRE CONTEXT

This tale is richly paralleled in folk literature all over the world, but mainly in the Mediterranean cultures.24 Notably, its plot is di-

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vided between two recognizable international folktale types: “Planting for the Next Generation” (designated AT 928), a wisdom novella on “clever acts and words,” and “Thank God They Weren’t Peaches” (AT 1689), a humorous tale on “the stupid man.” I mention this not for mere classificatory purposes but in order to show how the concept of genre can be engaged in interpretation. The dual plot typology points at the heart of the narrative’s structural and thematic complexity, especially revealed as a duality of genres. On one hand we have a moral tale, a genre that has been characterized as “halfway between legend and the realistic folktale genre of the novella.”25 On the other hand it is also a humorous tale, almost a joke, with its characteristically surprising conclusion and punch line.26 In addition to these two genre perspectives embedded in the narrative, it also encompasses the genre of historical legend, introduced especially by the presence of Hadrian.27 The conglomeration of two (seldom more) folktale types is a well-known and well-researched phenomenon in folk narrative tradition.28 In the tale of Hadrian and the old man the complexity of the genre and the plot as a conglomeration of types is interwoven with the stylistic sophistication of the Rabbinic narrators and authors to create a multileveled and multivoiced discourse, in which varied messages follow each other. In order to clarify the significance of the intergeneric conglomeration for the narrative it may be useful initially to point out the specific associative powers of each of the separate genres involved here. Each genre aspect is embodied in one of the figures of the tale more than in the others. Thus the moral tale focuses on the old man, the humorous or comic tale on the couple, and the historical legend on Hadrian.

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The moral tale is constructed around the encounter of the old man and Hadrian. The old man is a stereotypical hero of the moral folktale: he is anonymous, modest, hard-working, Godfearing, and trusting, accepts his fate ungrudgingly, and expects no reward for his deeds. Hadrian again is cast as the perfect folktale ruler: a clever judge, who once in a while roves among his subjects (sometimes in disguise), rewarding the righteous and punishing the evil. The plot of the moral tale is accomplished in the first half of the narrative. Tens if not hundreds like it exist in Rabbinic literature without a comic sequel like the one constituting the second half of the presently discussed narrative. The moral tale reinforces the norms embodied by its protagonist, here the old man, by activating a simple plot formula that proves moral behavior is not only good but also profitable. But the simple, often bordering on simplistic, plot also often leads to obvious discrepancies with lived reality. The key to the present genre conglomerate may lie in the presence of elements in the narrative that are especially reminiscent of such discrepancies, and rather than play them down, these elements stir them up, calling for a confrontation with cognitive and emotional mechanisms not provided by the moral tale alone. The comic or humorous tale or the joke, whatever the term we may choose, all are equipped with a conclusion that evokes laughter.29 The comic tale engages mechanisms of surprise and incongruence,30 in order to materialize in narrative the ambivalent and oppositional nature of discourse, cognition, perception, emotions, or society—according to the scholarly field of the specific interpreter of the narrative. The end of the story serves as a moment of (comic) relief from the ambivalent tension permeat-

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ing the story, and thus also as temporary release from the powers dominating the lives of the narrators and the audiences alike.31 As already mentioned in the discussion of the literary context of interpretation, this tale involves a number of oppositions and tensions: national and religious, those of age, gender, and class. The most visible ones in the text are the oppositions concerning age, class, and gender, whereas the national and religious oppositions seem unnaturally indistinct for a tale that, after all, recounts Hadrian’s visit to the Galilee. If we presume that folk narratives, because of the anonymous and collective authority and subjectivity that they communicate, are a privileged site for expressing subversive themes and therefore also call for subversive interpretations, then this is all the more true for comic and humorous tales. They frame the subversion and the sedition in a “nonserious” mode that does not altogether commit the narrators. Satire and parody, popular among scholars of Late Antiquity, are humorously tinged genres that address specific textually institutionalized authorities, so that the subversion is more openly expressed than in folk narratives.32 One has to admit that the humor coloring the tale of Hadrian and the old man is not especially refined, since it employs physical violence, however mild, and the public affront of its victim.33 This fact contrasts all the more the two parts of the narrative, the first part being characterized by harmony and appeasement. The gender aspect of the tale is also blatantly crude. The humorous part of the narrative employs the stereotypical figure of “the bad neighbor woman” extant in folk tales from ancient times to the present, as has been discussed in earlier chapters of this book. Her more or less fixed behavior consists of visiting the neighbors, borrowing objects from them, sometimes supporting other female

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neighbors and performing household jobs, such as baking, together with them. She is sometimes unpleasantly inquisitive and nosy, like Rabbi Hanina Ben-Dosa’s neighbor and may intervene in a neighboring couple’s life in a way that may damage them (see chapter 1). The behavior model appearing in this tale, leading to the humiliation and physical suffering of her husband, is typical in the cases where her acts are motivated by jealousy and greed to procure goods or advantages that her neighbors have.34 In most cases the appearance of the female neighbor in folktales marks an antifeminist bias on a very explicit level of the narrative. As in this tale, these women peep into other people’s lives, thus acquiring information that feeds their jealousy and greediness, as a result of which they send their husbands to pursuits that end in pain and shame. In the Munich MS version discussed here, the wife does not actually react personally at the final stage of the tale, but in all other versions her characterization is aggravated by the ironical words by which she welcomes her ailing husband. The laughter released by the Schadenfreude aimed at the unsuccessful trickster is in this case also the derision of the husband who does not maintain his dignified status in the patriarchal society and commits the fatal error of taking his wife’s advice. The historical legend seems at first sight the least important genre aspect of this narrative, its only visible presence being the name of Hadrian. Nonetheless, his presence is (literally) dominant, since he is the only figure who appears in both halves of this divided story and he is unquestionably the most powerful person of the tale, both politically and as a figure in the plot. His importance in the tale beyond his concrete acts in the plot is also enhanced by his pervasive and complex intertextual presence in

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Rabbinic literature, and especially his powerful presence in the historical consciousness created by it, as well as by Roman historiography. The Munich MS version presents a minimal display of Hadrian’s role as emperor, actually providing his mere name. The next question to be probed is therefore the changing balance between the various genres mentioned, moral, comic, and historical, in other versions of the tale. Comparative questions have been the traditional hobbyhorse of folk narrative research, and the field has numerous methodological resources for dealing with them.

THE COMPARATIVE CONTEXT

The comparative context may be conceptualized as a circle with one narrative at its center and other versions surrounding it within the circle. A study can be carried out with any of the versions at the center—the choice is determined by the context of the research, in this case the narratives on women neighbors in Leviticus Rabbah. The international tale type, a major tool for comparison, serves as an intertextual conflux where the various versions hold both latent and manifest formal and thematic affinities, while the connection is not necessarily rooted in genetic relations between them.35 It is natural, or rather most convenient, to begin the comparison from the closest versions, in this case the different manifestations of the same tale in the same chapter in other editions and versions of Leviticus Rabbah itself.36 The version set at the center of our discussion is, following Jonah Fraenkel, the Munich MS. The fol-

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lowing version, from the printed editions of the same Midrash, also appears in other compilations, especially Ecclesiastes Rabbah.37 Hadrian, may his bones rot, was wandering in the paths around Tiberias when he saw an old man who was digging holes for planting saplings. He said to him: Old man, old man, up at sunrise free at sunset. Said the old man: I have toiled sunrise and sunset and what the Master of the heaven finds good, He has done. Said he: Old man, how many years old are you today? Said he: A hundred years old. Said he: And you at the age of a hundred stand there and dig holes? Do you believe that you will eat their fruits? Said he: If I am fortunate I shall eat of them, and if not: as my forefathers have toiled for me, am I toiling for my descendants. Said he: By your life, if you are fortunate enough to eat of them, let me know. After some time the figs ripened. Said he [to himself]: This is the time to tell the king. What did he do? He filled a basket with figs and came up to the palace gate. He was asked: What do you want? Said he: Let me in to the king’s presence. When he had entered said he: What do you want? Said he: I am the old man whom you passed by when I was digging holes for planting saplings, and you told me ‘If you are fortunate enough to eat of their fruits, let me know’. Here, I have been fortunate enough to eat of their fruit and these figs are of that fruit. Then said Hadrian: I order you to put forth a golden chair and seat him on it. Said he: I order that you empty his basket and fill it with dinars. Said his servants to him: Do you bestow all this honor on this old Jewish man? He told his servants: His Creator honors him, shouldn’t I honor him? The wife of the neighbor was a woman of tricks. She told her husband: Son of darkness, can’t you see that this king loves figs and he reimburses them with dinars. [The servants] went in to the king’s presence and told him: An old man stands at the palace gate and carries a saddlebag full of

104 / The Evasive Center figs. So [the king] asked him: What do you want? Said he: I have heard that the king loves figs and reimburses them with dinars. Said he: I order you to put him in front of the palace gate and whoever enters or exits should throw [a fig] in his face. In the evening he was released and went home. He told his wife: All of this honor I owe you. Said she: Go and tell her [his mother] the good news that they were figs and not citrons, and that they were ripe rather than unripe.38

In this version the bipartite division seen in the Munich MS competes with another, tripartite division, creating a more dynamic plot structure.39 At the first encounter between the emperor and the old man, Hadrian initiates their dialogue. The two are the only active personae of the first episode. The second episode at the palace is divided into three parts: the preparatory welcome by the servants, the face-to-face encounter between Hadrian and the old man, and the bestowal of the material reward and the signs of honor to the old man. The third episode is the most complex one, especially regarding the cast, and it is divided into five parts, completely overthrowing the structural balance of the first half of the narrative. The five parts are the neighbor’s wife’s dialogue with her husband, the man’s exchange with the king’s servants, the face-to-face encounter between Hadrian and the man, the humiliation scene, and the final dialogue between man and wife. The full opening formula of this version is well known from other Leviticus Rabbah narratives: “A story of two men who were entering the paths around Tiberias . . .” (Leviticus Rabbah 22.4, Margalioth, 508),40 and, similarly, the man who digs holes is discernible in the following: “A story of a man who was standing and digging . . .” (Margalioth, 504).41 Also, the style of this version is

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generally more formulaic in character than that of the Munich MS: there are the systematic alliterations of ts in the first sentences; the round number of a hundred in the age of the old man; the proverbial answer of the old man: “If I am fortunate,” etc., confronting the emperor’s authority with collective authority. The explicit mention of “the Master of the heaven” in the old man’s reply to Hadrian, absent from the Munich MS version, makes concrete the structural parallel as well as the theological contrast of God in the world and the emperor in his empire. The literary context of the homilies on Job is thus recalled in a complex way.42 The second episode is more dynamic in this version, including a word play connecting it to the first. The old man’s actions are at this stage preceded by the characteristic folk-narrative rhetorical question. This stylistic device is repeated before the neighbor’s parallel action in the third episode, the rhetorical similarity intensifying the contrast in motivation between the two. The dramatic structure of the encounter with the emperor is also repeated in both cases: the servants question the men carrying fruits, then they are brought before the emperor. The second episode involving the old man moves in a constant line upward and inward, through the palace gate to the emperor’s presence and then to the throne-like golden chair. The old man repeats the emperor’s words from their first encounter, but the emperor himself now converses using many imperial terms, aptly quoted in the tale in Greek, which distinguishes his discourse from what was earlier performed in the old man’s territory. The second episode is rounded up symmetrically with the servants. Their amazement at the emperor’s behavior underlines the exceptional character of the ruler’s behavior towards the old man.43 But their reaction also serves to elicit the

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emperor’s words, in which he emerges almost as one of the “righteous of the nations”:44 “His Creator honors him, shouldn’t I honor him?”45 The servants’ voice represents the collective opinion reflecting on the imbalance in the harmonious hierarchy of social structure caused by the old man’s rise to the golden chair. The old man’s disproportionate, and thus destabilizing, movement toward the top is of course guided by the emperor himself. The impetus for the destabilization of the system grows indeed from the very center of political power, the emperor who also is the catalyst of the narrative plot. The third episode opens with the blunt characterization of the neighbor’s wife as “a woman of tricks.”46 The wording does not indicate clearly whether the couple are neighbors to the king or the old man. Since the old man’s return to his home is not told in this version, one could think of them as the emperor’s neighbors, which would explain how they knew firsthand what had happened. On the other hand, most other versions of the tale type, in Hebrew as well as other languages, render the loser of the last scene the neighbor of the winner of the scene before last. Contrary to the old man’s moderately paced movement upward, the neighbor is abruptly thrown up and even more so down, lower than his point of departure. The derisive tone of the conclusion is heightened by its being from the mouth of the wife and by including the degrading, almost infantile, “go and tell her,” his mother. Each of the genre aspects discussed above regarding the Munich MS version seems to be carried further in this version. The moral tale moves all the way toward a theological appreciation of the situation, by mentioning God as a factor in the plot. The Greek imperial terminology relating to the emperor and his court highlights the generic aspect of the historical legend. And giving the last lines

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to the woman and inserting another woman, the mother, in those lines, sharpens the irony and poignancy of the comic aspect. As indicated by Margalioth, the story in Ecclesiastes Rabbah 2.20 is identical to the one in the printed editions of Leviticus Rabbah, since the latter apparently has been copied from it. But it is worthwhile to look at the different literary context of the verse that follows: “Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labour which I took under the sun. This is also vanity” (Ecclesiastes 2:20). The relevant verse in Ecclesiastes Rabbah is thus from a later passage of the same chapter that was extensively quoted and elaborated in Leviticus Rabbah 25.4. Without trying to determine the chronology of the different tale versions or which compilation borrowed from the other, some details are worth our attention. In Leviticus Rabbah the story is embedded in a homiletic context that deals amply with the topic of planting, which suggests its inclusion at a systematic editorial stage. The chapter also includes numerous references to Ecclesiastes 2. In Ecclesiastes Rabbah the story is chained to one word in the actual verse 20 of that chapter 2 of Ecclesiastes, despair, translated by the editor who has apparently linked the story to the chapter as toil, thus creating an association with the proverbial uttering of the old man. However, two verses before the one elaborated contradict the message of the tale: “Yes, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun; because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me: And who knows whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? Yet shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have shown myself wise under the sun. This is also vanity” (Ecclesisastes 2:18–19). Since Ecclesiastes Rabbah is in its composition an exegetical Midrash rather than, like Leviticus Rabbah, a homiletical one, the succession of the elaboration on the separate verses is less consequential. Still, it

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seems that the textual environment in Ecclesiastes Rabbah is a little more problematic than the one in Leviticus Rabbah. Many renderings of the story in medieval compilations and anthologies seem to have been acquainted with both ancient versions. The Midrash Ha-gadol is closer to the Munich MS, although it retains some idioms not found in it but extant in the printed version of Leviticus Rabbah. The same is true about the story in Sefer Ha-ma’asiyot (The exempla of the rabbis).47 An interesting and strange version from the literary point of view is that of the Midrash Tanhuma,48 however replete it may be with serious discrepancies of logic. The verse context is akin to that of the Leviticus Rabbah, namely: “And when you shall come into the land and shall have planted all manners of trees for food” (Leviticus 19:23a). In both Tanhuma editions the prose style is supple medieval Hebrew prose, and many details witness that later historical consciousness and other Rabbinic accounts regarding Hadrian’s role in Jewish history have inspired the wording: A story about Hadrian the king who was passing on his way to war, and was moving with his troops to fight a city that had rebelled against him, as he found an old man planting saplings of fig trees. He fought the war for three years, came back after three years, what did the old man do?

But though the narrator here has included the formulaic number recalling the Lamentations Rabbah and the Palestinian Talmud renderings of Hadrian’s war against Bethar,49 the connection to Judea or the Galilee is not made explicit, nor is there any negative word about the emperor; even the conventional curse is omitted. The logic of the story is also faulty, as when the wife suggests the

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husband impress the emperor by filling his basket with figs and apples, since apples are hard fruits that could cause him serious pain: He told her: that I listened to you and honored him with the gift and they hit me in the face, unless [if] I listened to you and threw in the basket some hard fruits, I would have been hit in the face and all over my body with them, and why is this? To teach you the lesson that evil women cause the fall of their husbands, thus one should never refrain from planting.

The medieval narrator has lost the effective punch line and substituted it with a directly misogynous phrase, less emphatically communicated by the ancient tale. Hitherto the discussion has touched upon such versions of the same story as can with certainty be deemed to bear a genetic relationship with the Leviticus Rabbah tale of Hadrian and the old man. These are, in the jargon of folk-narrative research, versions. Widening the comparative scope, we shall now look at some stories, termed variants, that, however similar in content and structure, should not necessarily be considered genetically connected with it.50 The terminology in and of itself may not be of interest, but the diverse options for considering the relations of similarity and variation of tales are significant when we study the transformation of folk narratives in cultural and intercultural contexts. The closest parallel to the tale of Hadrian and the old man in Jewish tradition includes only the first half of the plot, that is, only tale type AT 928, “Planting for the Next Generation.” The fullest version of this story is in the Babylonian Talmud (bTa’anit 23b), and it moves the chronological setting almost a century earlier, to the days of Honi the Circle-Maker, who is the protagonist

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of the story. Wondering about the Psalms verse 126:1, “we were like them that dream,” which he understands to refer to a seventy-year-long sleep—the length of the Babylonian captivity—Honi sees a man planting saplings of carob trees that bear fruit only after seventy years. The man replies to Honi’s question in the same way as the old man did to Hadrian, that he plants for the next generation, whereupon Honi falls in a seventy-year-long sleep. He wakes up to see the grandson of the man whom he saw planting the carobs enjoying their fruits. At the same time Honi experiences utter estrangement, as all his contemporaries as well as his own son have passed away, until he wishes to die. In a shorter version of the story in the Palestinian Talmud the trees are olives (yTa’anit [Ta’aniyot] 3.10, 63c). The message of the Honi story is, however, radically different from the one on Hadrian and the old man, as summarized in the proverb “Company or death” (meaning if one has lost all one's companions, it is better to die), appearing in the Babylonian Talmud. The common motif between the two tales is the very act of planting by an old man accepting the fact that the fruits may be reaped by the next generation. Both tales express their specific messages through miracles: in one case the fast fruition of the figs, in the other the unnaturally long sleep. It is impossible for me to incorporate the abundant comparative material compiled in archives and books with regard to the two folktale types in question.51 However, I would like to use some of the immense material to demonstrate the interpretative potential of the comparative method in folk-narrative research, a potential not always made use of by comparative scholars.52 In addition to the above-mentioned tale types, AT 928 and AT 1689, there are a number of motifs that mark the intertextual re-

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lations of the tale from Leviticus Rabbah with cross-cultural comparative material.53 The material is vast and geographically widely distributed, from India through the Iranian and Arabic Orient, in Slavic, Roman, and German languages, from the Middle Ages to contemporary tale collections. I find it useful to focus the comparative discussion on two distinct cultural areas: the Middle East, with most texts in Arabic, and Italy, including its Latin heritage. This choice is determined by a priority given to the local context of the two cultures represented in the narrative in Leviticus Rabbah.54 If I could find ancient Greek or Syriac versions of the story, they would be of interest for the comparison.55 Among the Middle Eastern narratives related to the two types, AT 928 and 1689, three subgroups are discernible. Two of them are of less interest for the present discussion—the tales about the man who retorts cleverly to the ruler asking him about planting in old age,56 and about men who bring a ruler an exceptionally big fruit or vegetable, the first being rewarded and the second punished.57 The third group consists of tales that include only the second part of our tale (AT 1689) and the protagonist of these comic tales is often the trickster Nasreddin Hodja (Djuha).58 In one widely distributed tale about the trickster, a direct connection to our tale is that his wife recommends that he take quinces to the ruler (usually Timur-Lenk, but sometimes an anonymous bey, qadi, sultan, or halif), but he prefers to take figs. When the ruler reacts by ordering the throwing of the fruit at his face, the Hodja praises God loudly, and when asked, explains the background to his strange behavior.59 Two tales are of special interest with reference to the tale from Leviticus Rabbah. One, from a European anthology from the early nineteenth century, has as the ruler Harun A-Rashid, the

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standard wise judge of the “Thousand and One Nights” traditions, and resembles the subgroup of the wise retorts, which I have otherwise considered less relevant for this discussion:60 Harun A-Rashid saw an old man planting a tree.—Old man, he said, I would understand if you were building, but planting a tree at your age? How old are you?—Thirty years old.—You are lying.—No, sir, I don’t count the years under the rule of the Umayia dynasty, prior to the rule of your dynasty.—But how come you plant without a hope to see the fruits?—I am planting for the coming generations, as my predecessors have planted for me. The khalif gave him a thousand ducats.—The ruler of the believers, said the old man, through the miracle of your generosity the tree that was supposed to bear fruit after twenty years, gave fruits already now.

In this tale we may discern the sophisticated wit characterizing Arabic adab literature, slightly different from the tale of Hadrian and the old man, in which a real miracle of early fruits occurs. Of all the Middle Eastern parallel materials, however, the tale that comes closest to the Leviticus Rabbah narrative is in J. E. Hanauer’s book on the folklore of the Holy Land, which encompasses Palestinian traditions from the beginning of the twentieth century.61 When out riding one day, the Caliph Harûn er Rashid noticed a very venerable-looking old fellâh planting a fig tree. Accosting him, the Commander of the Faithful asked why he was taking the trouble to plant a tree of the fruit of which he could hardly hope to taste. “O Emír el Mûmenín,” replied the greybeard. “Inshallah, I may be spared to taste the fruit of this tree, but if not, my sons

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will do so, even as I have eaten the fruit of trees planted by my father and great-grandfather.” “How old are you?” asked the monarch. “One hundred and seven,” exclaimed the husbandman. “A hundred and seven!” exclaimed the Caliph in astonishment, and added, “Well, in case you really do live to eat fruit from this tree, be sure and let me know.” Several years passed, and Harûn had quite forgotten the incident, when one day he was told that an aged peasant desired an audience, saying that by the Caliph’s own command he had brought him a basket of figs. Having ordered the man to be admitted, Harûn was surprised to find that it was the same fellâh he had once seen planting a fig tree, who now brought him some choice fruit from that very tree. The Commander of the Faithful received the gift most graciously, making the old man sit beside him on the diwân, and commanding a robe of honour to be put on him; he gave him a gold dinâr for each fig, and then dismissed him with honour. When the old fellâh had left the Presence, the Caliph’s son El Mamûn asked his father why such grace had been shown to an illiterate peasant. “My son,” replied Harûn, “Allah Himself has honoured him, so I was bound to do the same.” The old fellâh returned to his village in high glee, and there extolled the liberality and condescension of the Prince of Believers. Now next door to him lived a jealous and avaricious woman, who envious of her old neighbour’s good fortune, resolved to outdo him, and therefore worried her husband till, for peace, he filled a large basket with figs and presented himself at the door of the Khalifeh’s palace. When asked what he wanted, he answered that as the Commander of the Faithful was famed for his impartiality and had so richly rewarded his neighbour for a few figs, he had also brought some and hoped to receive a similar reward. On hearing this reply the guards reported the case to Harûn, by whose orders the foolish man was pelted with

114 / The Evasive Center his own fruit. Angry and hurt, he went home and divorced the wife whose folly had exposed him to such shame.

Unfortunately Hanauer does not indicate exact sources. A continuous local tradition should however be considered as a possible explanation for the similarity.62 Some versions of the types under scrutiny have been collected from contemporary Jewish oral narrative tradition.63 All the relevant tales in the Israeli Folktale Archive (IFA) were told by Jewish narrators born in Islamic countries, most of them Arabic speakers. Of the two tales where the whole conglomerate of both tale types occurs one is of Moroccan, the other of Iraqi origin.64 The story as it was told by David Eliyahu, born in Iraq, will be quoted verbatim from the archive: Riding on his noble horse the king lead his troops to the battle. On his way he met an old farmer who was planting a fruit tree. The king approached the old man and asked him: “When will this tree bear fruit?” “In about six or seven years!” said the farmer. “Do you consider enjoying its fruits?” the king asked further. “That is in God’s hands,” replied the farmer. The king was defeated in the war and was taken captive. After some years he was returned to his own country and so he passed again through the village where he had met the old farmer who was planting a fruit tree. Now the same old man was standing and picking the first fruits from the tree he had been planting when the king had gone to the war. The king stopped and asked the old man: “Is this the tree that you were planting when I went to the war?”

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“Yes, my lord the king,” replied the farmer and gave the king a basketful of beautiful fruit. The king accepted the basket with the fruit from the farmer and asked him to come next day to his palace. When the farmer arrived at the palace, the king ordered that the fruits be placed in one side of the scales and the other be filled with gold and precious stones. When the scales were balanced the king gave all the gold and the precious stones that were in the scales to the farmer. Happy and content the farmer returned to his home and told his wife what had happened. The farmer’s wife who was a chatterbox told everything to her neighbor and she started to talk her husband into taking some fruit from his orchard, more beautiful than the first fruits of their neighbor, and to present it as a gift to the king. Maybe the king will pay their weight in gold as he did to their neighbor. The husband reaped the most beautiful fruit and brought them to the palace. But the king understood that the farmer had done so only because he envied his old neighbor and thus he told him: “This poor gift does not satisfy the king. You must pay to the state treasury another fifty golden dinars.”65

The peculiar motif of this tale, the like of which I have found nowhere among the numerous texts that I scrutinized, is the extreme turns that occur in the fate of the king. Thus in this tale one of the major oppositions running through this tale type, that between ruler and dominated, is drastically rebalanced. Since the present articulation of the tale lacks any ethnic or religious markers, it is hard to say what the narrator “gained” by sending the king to captivity. Maybe it was just the wish for social justice. But if we dare see the king as a transformation of Hadrian, his humiliation as a captive could strike a great deal of happiness—

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indeed more than the humiliation of the neighboring farmer— in those in whose historical consciousness he was remembered by the formula “may his bones rot.” The parallel stories from the Italian and Latin cultures constitute another intertextual sphere of interest for our discussion.66 In some of them Jesus and his disciples wander in Europe in complete anachronism, typical of the genre of the religious folktale.67 The earliest recorded occurrence of the first tale type in this region is encoded in a line by Virgil: “Graft thy pears, Daphnis; thy children’s children shall gather fruits of thine.”68 The earliest record of a tale close to the second type must be the one quoted by Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars, in chapter 60, while telling the life of Tiberius.69 A few days after he reached Capreae and was by himself, a fisherman appeared unexpectedly and offered him a huge mullet; whereupon in his alarm that the man had clambered up to him from the back of the island over rough and pathless rocks, he had the poor fellow’s face scrubbed with the fish. And because in the midst of his torture the man thanked his stars that he had not given the emperor an enormous crab that he had caught, Tiberius had his face torn with the crab also.70

One may ponder on the actual connection between the name of Tiberius and the Galilean town that bears his name as a connecting element of the two traditions. The fact that there is such a similar tale placing a Roman emperor in a Latin historical text reinforces the aspect of the historical legend in the genre composite.71 It is therefore timely to discuss the historical context of the tale.

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THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The time: between 117 and 138 C.E.; the place: the Galilee; the actors: the emperor Hadrian and his entourage, a certain old man and his family, his neighbor, her husband, and their family. The narrator, true to Midrashic practice, determines the location but discards the dating. The dating provided is thus ancillary to the one “historical” person mentioned, Hadrian, who we know became emperor in early August 117. We also know that he visited the province of Judea in 130, when a coin was struck to commemorate his adventus.72 An earlier visit, in 117, has been suggested, but the documentation is not as firm.73 This tale provides a prime example with which to probe the relationship between history and fiction in Rabbinic narrative. It is readily observable that the Rabbis were not interested in reporting historical events in the mode known from contemporary Greek and Latin historians such as Polybius, Tacitus, Cassius Dio. Theirs was an openly ideologically tinged historiography, designed on the one hand to perceive the unfolding of God’s power in the makings of men and on the other to expound the timeless fabric of social behavior and creativity of their society in an ethnographic perspective. Isolated historical events, such as the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem or the death of Bar-Kokhva and the coterminous destruction of Bethar, were reported with rich folk narrative apparatuses and with declared moral and theological corollaries. This of course makes Rabbinic narratives anything but devoid of historical information. Their historicity is of a kind that makes it absolutely necessary to uphold views such as the one expressed by Joshua Levinson, main-

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taining the inseparability of the literary work and its historical context.74 And Glen W. Bowersock has stated that “For the historian, it is paradoxically the fiction of the age that eloquently confirms the outlook of the many historical figures who spoke for it, like Galen, Marcus Aurelius, Cassius Dio, and Origen. It is the fiction that delivers dreams of real historical significance.”75 The specific nature of Rabbinic literature does not seem to allow for a clear-cut distinction between the categories of history and fiction, yet the distinction has guided much of the work done on Rabbinic narratives. My aim is to correlate the analysis of this specific narrative with what has been perceived as the cumulative historical sensibility regarding Hadrian’s rule in the Graeco-Roman sources on one hand and the Jewish sources on the other. My discussion of the tale in its “historical context” does not aim at separating it from other possible contexts of interpretation, such as the literary, the generic, and the comparative contexts, and no specific epistemological priority is assigned to it. I stress that divulging the hermeneutic circle and its complexities does not untangle the aporia, the irresolvable complexity of historical consciousness as constructed partly by narratives like the one discussed here; it may, however, slightly cut through its obscurity.76 It is nonetheless useful to keep in mind that the conventional usage of “historical consciousness” is usually posited alongside, in opposition, contingent to, and in diverse complex relations with other textual categories, especially narrative ones.77 The focus on the figure of Hadrian is prescribed by the ample textual and intertextual, as well as archeological, data representing him and attesting to his firm presence in historical con-

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sciousness. These include numerous items in Rabbinic literature as well as many structures erected by him or in his honor, among them several in Judea and the Galilee.78 The fact that the category of history is elicited in discussing a tale that mentions a person with a distinctively public status is concomitant with the fact that the concept of history has developed with reference to politeia as a framework for collective consciousness with clear political, social, and cultural dimensions. It is that collective consciousness that is conceived of as the subject of history, retaining the double meaning of subject both as its agent and as its theme. At the same time it is important to remember that genre also constitutes a formative aspect of historical consciousness.79 My literary analysis coincides with some studies of historical consciousness by employing the semiotic concept of codes by which, according to those studies, it is possible and even necessary to interpret the materials from which historical consciousness is constructed.80 Elucidating the codes as an interpretative key on one hand, and accentuating the existence of fundamental gaps of information about the past on the other hand,81 may serve to correlate the interpretation of historical consciousness and literary texts. Indeed, for me the most intriguing detail in the Leviticus Rabbah tale is its characterization of Hadrian in stark contrast to the assumed historical consciousness of the potential readers of the text (unless we need to adjust the set of assumptions we have about those readers). Although the opening formula echoes the conventional cursing epithet accompanying his and his distant predecessor Titus’ names in most of their Rabbinic occurrences, the emperor behaves radically differently from his actions in most other Rabbinic historical legends concerning him.82 Indeed, the

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Hadrian of our tale resembles much more the “enlightened” emperor characterized in Roman sources than the archfiend of Jewish historical legends.83 Hadrian’s enlightened mind is represented in the tale through his emulation of God’s justice, implied in the manuscript version quoted above and made explicit in the printed version of Leviticus Rabbah. This apparent ambiguity of Hadrian’s character has intrigued many scholars before me. Some, for example Moshe David Herr, have conjectured a historical change in the Jewish image of the emperor caused by the forceful smothering of the Bar Kokhva uprising.84 Peter Schäfer has presented an especially systematic approach to the ambiguity of the representation of Hadrian in Jewish sources; however he rejects Herr’s historical explanation.85 As a textual scholar Schäfer criticizes earlier historians for disregarding the ideological and theological ramifications of the early sources and especially for employing Rabbinic texts as historical sources.86 Hadrian’s positive image in some Rabbinic texts is the topic of the concluding chapter of Schäfer’s book, where he reviews six narrative texts.87 Schäfer gives way here to the theoretical complexity evident in all discussions of the historical aspects of Rabbinic literature, including the present one. On one hand he denies the historical validity of the Rabbinic sources; on the other hand he makes an effort to accommodate them to historical details known from other sources in order to substantiate the relevance of the historical context for the story. In his short discussion of the story about Hadrian and the old man, he consolidates the connection with the possible historical context—without, however, claiming that the event itself took place—to the city of Tiberias mentioned in the tale.88 Hadrian is imprinted in the very struc-

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ture of the city by the erection of the Hadrianeon to celebrate his visit there.89 Schäfer also refers to the Talmudic allusion to Hadrian’s vineyard sprawling between Tiberias and Tsippori (yTa’anit [Ta’aniyot] 4.8, 68d–69b), which could be engaged as a realistic motivation for his meandering in the area.90 Schäfer interprets the narrative as the rabbis’ paradoxical coping with the failure of the Bar-Kokhva rebellion. To him the negative characterizations of Hadrian in Rabbinic literature are created as a later reflection on the events, whereas the paradoxical—that is, the positive ones—are those born out of the immediate context of the events.91 He thus overturns Herr’s chronology of the positive and the negative stories. One of Schäfer’s examples for a negative characterization is the fall of Bethar and the death of Bar-Kokhva. In that story Bar-Kokhva is not less of a villain than the emperor, who is actually made (somewhat ironically) the mouthpiece of God’s power.92 It seems to me that it is equally possible to claim that the acquiescent approach to the failure as divine justice meted out against Bar-Kokhva’s outrageous haughtiness is what stamps that story as a later theodicy. Schäfer tends to consider Hadrian’s policies in Judea and the Galilee as reconciliatory, and thus he rejects the views of historians who describe them as open provocation.93 The most extremely positive Jewish reaction to Hadrian relates to the messianic expectations that were launched at his accession as emperor. Schäfer points out that the clearest literary expression of such hopes is to be found in the Jewish Sibylline texts.94 These texts are also the basis for Martin Hengel’s treatment of the ambiguous Jewish reactions to Hadrian.95 Among the Rabbinic texts relating positively to Hadrian, the most relevant for comparison for the tale of the old man and the saplings is a non-narrative Midrashic comparison between Hadrian

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and Solomon.96 We are reminded of the fact that, starting with the Bible itself, but especially in medieval Hebrew narratives, King Solomon is the paragon of the wise judge meting righteousness to his subjects,97 the role assumed by Hadrian in this story. The comparison may thus echo the cultural information about the structural analogy of the two in their narrative roles,98 since folk narratives may have constituted a major source of information for the Rabbis as for everyone, regarding the image of the emperor. As the story of Hadrian and the old man also appears in Ecclesiastes Rabbah, it is noteworthy that there is another story from that Midrashic work among Schäfer’s “positive” evidence, in which Hadrian interrogates Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Hananiah regarding the resurrection of the dead (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 12.5). Such tales of dialogue between an emperor and a sage, and this one especially, display an ethnocentric positive view of the foreign ruler as one who acknowledges Judaism as the source for true wisdom.99 The positive image of the other serves thus to bolster the collective image of their own group. Yet another of the stories quoted by Schäfer is associated with our discussion: It was said, when Hadrian went up the hill of Hammat Gerar he found a little Jewish girl on top of the cliff of Hammat Gerar. He asked her: Who are you? She answered: I am a Jew. So he stepped down from his carriage and bowed down in front of her. The great men of the empire were angry with him: Why did you disgrace yourself by bowing for this lowly creature, so dirty and soiled. Said he to them: You stupid ones, all peoples will bow for them as it is written: “Thus says the Lord . . . to him whom man despises, to him whom the nation abhors, to a

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servant of rulers: kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship, because of the Lord that is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, and he shall choose you.” (Isaiah 49:7)100

Although not at all as artistic in its quality as the story of Hadrian and the old man, this story shares some of its motifs, such as the ruler’s meandering in the vicinity of Tiberias (Hamat Gerar) and his surprising honoring of a somewhat marginal figure (an old man, a little girl). His act of honoring simple Jewish figures posits these tales in a dialectic relationship to those in which he speaks with famous sages, constructing another example of the social multivocality of Rabbinic literature.101 What then is the historical context in which we may interpret the complexity of Hadrian’s image in Rabbinic literature? Of course, as already noted above, the historical context or contexts cannot and should not be isolated from the other contexts of reading—the literary, the generic, and the comparative—but should rather be viewed as diverse angles from which the discourses of the past are produced.102 It is important to bear in mind that the Janus-headed image of Hadrian is not singularly Rabbinic, but permeates all of Roman historiography. It is thus characteristic of Hadrian’s historical image, not to say of his person. Hadrian’s unique position in any discussion of the epistemology of historiography rests on far more than the equally unique novel by Marguerite Yourcenar, Hadrian’s Memoirs, which refers directly to the ancient historiographical tradition about the lost autobiography of this emperor.103 Nevertheless, the cultural stature of this modern work of art, as well as of its author, who was in her time the only woman in the Academie Française, has

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made it into a complex and important sign of the persistent interest in Hadrian. Yourcenar’s Hadrian is the embodiment of certain traits that modern culture has often presented as its own, such as mobility, ambiguity, and self-reflexivity. Thus it is all the more important to stress that these very characteristics mark the way he is described by the sources closest to his own period that have survived to our times. Anthony Birley too in his biography of the emperor confirms the blurred boundaries of historiography and fiction with regard to Hadrian by referring to Yourcenar.104 By cautiously correlating his own historiographical intuition and her artistic one, albeit based on thorough study of the sources, he brings together historical image, historical consciousness, and historical fiction in one unified discourse. Birley’s sharpest transgression of the distinction between historiography and fiction occurs exactly when he discusses borders and crossing them. Pondering the causes for the death of Hadrian’s beloved Antinous, he refers to Cassius Dio, who quotes the emperor’s vanished autobiography to the effect that the youth fell into the Nile, but at the same time he expresses his own determined view that Antinous was sacrificed as a result of omens and prophecies. The latter possibility is also raised in the other major ancient source for Hadrian’s life, the Historia Augusta (hereafter cited as HA).105 Birley suggests that Antinous himself may have reacted to the imminent shameful change in his status once he turned from a loved youth into a passive homosexual adult partner by tragically ending the emotional turmoil that would have resulted from Hadrian’s resisting the termination of the relationship. Birley’s somewhat surprising corroboration of his intuition is as follows: “Not merely a great

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novelist but one of the leading Hellenists of modern times came to the same conclusion: that Antinous’ position had become untenable and he sought a way out.”106 I am convinced that the methodological border crossing, important enough for Birley to reflect on, does not occur fortuitously when the discussion addresses the transition from life to death. Equally significant, I think, is the fact that the discourse here also concerns Hadrian’s own transgression of Roman ethos, immersing himself in the Greek classics and adapting the Hellenic customs of a beard and homosexual love. The historical sources regarding the last issue are especially brief (HA) or quote rumor (Cassius Dio). Birley admits that when intuition becomes method, there is no reason to prefer his to the erudite novelist’s. Birley’s book reveals yet another facet of the vagueness and the destabilization characteristic of Hadrian and his life. Throughout the book Birley’s accomplished historiographical rhetoric is interspersed with stylistic markers encoding not facts but rather conjecture. Thus he combines facts known about other events and persons to construct contexts in which Hadrian may have participated. Phrases like “he may have been,” “he may have known” are the rule rather than the exception.107 This technique attains a combined stance of modesty and skepticism with regard to the ancient sources, sources that in and of themselves are full of contradictions, ambiguities, and marks of genre and editing that approximate fiction. The ancient sources on which all modern biographers of Hadrian rely consist of texts from the third century that have survived in later works.108 Both Cassius Dio and the Historia Augusta mention a vanished autobiography of this emperor. His literary tal-

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ent has left its stamp, especially in the short poem on the whereabouts of the soul after death, quoted in the HA, to which I shall return later. The HA itself contravenes the major Roman historical convention followed by such as Tacitus, Livy, Polybius, and Cassius Dio, as its fictional dimension is intensified by numerous names of authors, most of which are usually deemed inauthentic.109 What is of interest for the present discussion is that the creative mixture of genres displayed in Hadrian’s biographies is at least partly an outcome of the complex historical image of the man—a complexity that is also displayed in the Rabbinic texts referring to Hadrian. One point that seems to be agreed on by all is that Hadrian was a frequent traveler, hence the title of Birley’s biography: Hadrian, the Restless Emperor. Hadrian was, of course, not the only Roman emperor to have stayed away from the imperial capital for long periods of time. But the length of his absences, the wide orbit of his travel, and the fact that in the main he did not spend this time in conquests or combat lend a special character to his globe-trotting. In particular, his long sojourns in the Hellenistic east signaled preferences with regard to cultural taste and life-style, as noted above. The long periods of absence from Rome probably influenced the construction of Hadrian’s historical image. Arnold I. Davidson, in his essay on the epistemological dimensions of history, stresses the fact that fiction feeds on absences and gaps. In Hadrian’s case one important gap emerged through his absence from the conceived center of the historical consciousness of Rome, the city itself.110 Another grew from his conspicuous rejection of Roman mores and ethos. Turning to the Jewish tales on Hadrian, it is not surprising that they articulate his absence from Rome as a presence in Judea

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and the Galilee. Mostly, his presence is embodied in acts of harm, destruction, and violence directed toward the Jewish population, creating a representation typical of colonial oppression. But in the tale of Hadrian and the old man the image of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled is somewhat more complex. Generally speaking, from a provincial point of view the itinerant Hadrian represents a destabilization of the imperial center. The center of power that is supposedly in the city of Rome sends out to the province not only its military fists and arms but also its very head. The intra-Jewish perspective, in which the center is situated in the homeland, is thereby further reinforced. When Hadrian then adopts the moral code of the Rabbis and even proclaims God’s justice, he has become a veritable tool for overturning the real colonial power relations in the narrative. It is not the colonized Jews who act in “mimicry”—to borrow Homi Bhabha’s more than famous coin111—but the emperor who mimics his oppressed subjects. This technique of taming the conqueror is quite frequent in Midrashic narratives of Roman rulers, including emperors who quote Scripture in order to motivate their cruel deeds!112 Incidentally, the Palestinocentric view of Hadrian’s career is not limited to the Rabbinic sources. Birley in his book, in the wake of generations of historians, attaches a special, portentous meaning to Hadrian’s battle with the Jews, including those in exile (Babylonia and North Africa) as well as those in Judea and the Galilee. The chapter that he has titled “Athens and Jerusalem” is set in the book between the chapters “Death in the Nile” (Antionous’ death) and “The Bitter End.” The subduing of the BarKokhva uprising is articulated in terms of draining the last energies of a loss-stricken emperor rather than a glorious victory.113

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The implications of this for the tale of Hadrian and the old man, together with the generic complexity of the tale, naturally present a text calling for multiple readings. The literary context of the tale, as well as its first half, communicates an approval of the harmony that results from the peaceful preservation of hegemonic relationships. The old man brings the firstlings of his produce to the emperor and receives his due reward. On the surface, the second half of the tale reinforces the same message, since the falsely motivated mimicry of the old man’s acts is ridiculed and punished. An extra punch is gained by validating gender hierarchy in throwing negative light on the female neighbor who instigates her husband’s actions. But another reading of the text is also called for. The old man who brings the fruits to the emperor may possibly be violating the law of orla, prohibiting the enjoyment of fruits in the first three years of fruition. This law occupies a special role in the literary context of Leviticus Rabbah chapter 25. The fruit destined according to Jewish law for sacred offering, he submits to the emperor. But even if there is no strict Halakhic violation, he not only seems to concur with Hadrian’s rule, possibly including the transformation of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina, and the Temple to the idol’s abode, but also profits from this course of events. The neighbor woman, on the contrary, acts out the understandable feelings of people under foreign occupation to subvert the laws of the conqueror. Her limits, defined by gender in a patriarchal society, force her to be contingent on her husband, and as a result her ruse fails. The failure of sedition toward the authority of an occupying tyrant does not, however, diminish its inner justification. In the distorted mirror of colonial hegemony the image of the humiliated man at the palace gate may give birth to a local hero.

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The political context of the tale enables a discussion in terms of “public transcript—hidden transcript” theorized by James Scott,114 which is especially relevant here since this concept has been applied in the analysis of Rabbinic literature. Scott argues that situations of national and class conflict produce a double code of a hidden script of the weaker side in opposition to the public script of the stronger. Daniel Boyarin has interpreted the positions of the sages to the Roman rule in this manner. He shows that whereas some of them act out the complete hidden transcript by becoming martyred, others choose the trickster’s alternative to cope with the situation, a mediation of the opposites that opens up new possibilities.115 Inspired by Boyarin’s work, Joshua Levinson has applied the same model to the analysis of the Roman arena, where the public script expresses the Roman perspective and the hidden script the Jewish one.116 These analyses, especially Levinson’s, take for granted that the division of the scripts is always between Romans (public) and Jews (hidden). Demonstrably, the tale discussed here opens up a possibility for a different grouping of the transcripts, revealing power structures inside the Jewish society. Also, the public and the hidden transcripts need not necessarily be posited in different texts, but can be located in different readings of the same text. Thus, one reading of the tale here manifests the public script that approves of the peaceful coexistence achieved by accepting the machinations of hierarchy. This reading complies with the policy of some of the leaders of the Jews in the Galilee in the wake of the BarKokhva revolt, identified in the early third century especially with Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi, the Prince.117 The other reading demonstrates the call for subversion of the order that has grown out of collaboration with the ruling Romans. Possibly the tale

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gives voice to the bitter experience of the resistance to the Romans. Thus the suggested mode of resistance is really nonviolent, more of an unsuccessful attempt to con the emperor. The neighbors of the old man, wife and husband, act out the demand that the fruit and the revenue of the land belong to those who work it, in face of the colonial power that seizes lands and demands taxes to be paid for their crops. The internal Jewish hegemonic voice fixes this demand on the marginal figure of a woman, and sharpens its repudiation of her acts by qualifying her as the heavily stereotyped neighbor woman.118 Once again the folk narrative in Midrash, through its dynamic dialectics of authority and subjectivity, makes it possible to eat the cake (or rather the figs)—to express opposition to the Roman rule—and to have it—to live in peace under the Romans.119 LITERATURE, HISTORY, AND LIFE

Having delved into the various reading contexts of the tale, I want to return to the literary context in order to make the hermeneutic circle explicit and to further reduce “the dichotomy between text and context, between literature and reality.”120 My reentry into the literary context is through symbol, the most total and semiotically most complex of all figures of discourse.121 The old man brings figs to Hadrian.122 Since the beginnings of Hebrew literature, figs have been distinctly associated with the tension between the sexes: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:7). The neighbor’s wife’s act thus echoes the act of Eve.123 In biblical love poetry the fruit of the fig tree explicitly denotes the time of erotic

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arousal and fulfillment: “The fig tree puts forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away” (Song of Songs 2:13). This legitimizes the prominently active femininity extant in the Song of Songs that the feminist Bible scholar and theologian Phyllis Trible has interpreted as a theological restoration for the rupture of the Fall,124 of the kind that also characterizes the active female neighbor. The sexual connotations of the fruit also produce a potentially humorous effect when thrown at the face of the husband, so that the upper and the lower parts of the body get mixed in a way characterized by Mikhail Bakhtin as powerfully comical and “carnivalesque.”125 In a more innocuous mode the fig is also simply the sweetest of fruits, as attested in the parable of Jotham (Judges 9:11). The fig is also one of the seven kinds of produce that symbolize the blessing bestowed on the Promised Land of Israel, potentially a collective representation for the people of the promise, as may be manifested in this tale coping with foreign domination. In many other verses of the Hebrew Bible the season of ripe figs, in themselves or in connection with other fruits, symbolizes a stable world (Joel 2:22; Zechariah 3:10; Proverbs 27:18); likewise, their absence symbolizes destruction (Isaiah 34:4; Jeremiah 8:13; Habakkuk 3:17; Haggai 2:19). The verse from Proverbs (27:18) “Whoso keeps the fig tree shall eat the fruit thereof: so he that waits on his master shall be honoured” reads almost as the epitome of the relationship between the old man and Hadrian of the first half of the story.126 Turning to the immediate interreligious context of Jewish and Early Christian Galilee, we are reminded of some of the parables of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels. The parable of the sprouting fig

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tree (Matthew 24:32) is recited by Jesus upon his exit from the temple, at the outset of his forceful prophecy of the future destruction of the temple and the whole country: “Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is nigh. So likewise you, when you shall see all these things, know that it is near, even at the doors.”127 The clearly visible life cycle of the fig tree and its fruits, green in the summer and naked in the winter, provides a ready sign for time passing, contrary to the evergreen olive that symbolizes immutability and eternal values. The associative link between the prophecy of Jesus and the destruction sown by Hadrian’s army in Judea and the Galilee evokes a double perspective of the tale conditioned by the historical and ideological context of reading. For those who view the fate of the country and its population in the wake of the Bar-Kokhva revolt and its suppression as an absolute destruction, the tale of the old man and his fig trees fulfills Jesus’ prophecy in that Hadrian now rules the country. For those who emphasize the economic, social, and cultural renewal in the next generation, the story may be read as an outright protest against the words of that prophecy, contesting its validity. Not only is the destroyer also a ruler with whom daily existence may be negotiated, but there is even hope for revenue. A similarly dynamic view of the history of the region motivates the following passage of the Palestinian Talmud regarding another of the seven fruits of the blessing, the olive: “Rabbi Yosi said: In earlier times when olives were rare, since evil Hadrian had come and destroyed the entire land, but now when olives are plenty . . .” (yPeah, 7.1, 20a). The other fig parable of Jesus comes even closer to the tale of Hadrian and the old man: “He spoke also this parable: A certain

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man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none. Then he said to the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down, why cumbers it the ground? And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it. And if it bear fruit, well; and if not, then after that you shall cut it down. And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath” (Luke 13:6–10). This parable appears in the Gospel plot during the period of Jesus’ teaching in the Galilee. There is no explicit epimythia to the parable, but in keeping with the preceding co-text, it concerns the importance of repentance, although the parable is more tolerant than the direct command “but except you repent, you shall all likewise perish”(Luke 13:3b, 5b). We may further learn from this parable that the fig tree is a tree that demands patience, which confirms Hadrian’s skepticism and intensifies the miracle in the success of the old man to actually live to see the fruits. The parable likewise implies a hierarchical relationship in which the positive belief in the ability of the fig tree to produce fruit belongs to the underdog, as in the narrative from Leviticus Rabbah. Compared with the other three narratives on women neighbors in Leviticus Rabbah, in this case the collation with Jesus’ parables is maybe less illuminating for the reading of the Rabbinic tale. The parallel motifs are not compelling enough to corroborate a hypothesis of direct oral or written transmission. Likewise, the social interface dealt with in this story is not, as in the other three, the various religious or social groups in Galilean society, but rather the imperial center embodied in the emperor and the province populated by Jews. This center is conceptual-

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ized as unstable, restless (to borrow Birley’s phrase), and despotic. But the closer others, the neighbors, do not necessarily vouch for solidarity in face of the dominant power. Indeed, the encoding of various readings in the tale itself as to its literary, contextual, and generic correlatives tell the tale of tension and insecurity between various groups in the Galilee. This tale does not seem to confront, quote, or refer to Christianity in the mode that was shown to be the prevalent ideological negotiation in the three other narratives. This may lead to the conclusion that the folk narrative conceptualization of Christianity in the allegedly fifth-century Midrash compilation of Leviticus Rabbah reflects an earlier situation where Christianity is the religion of neighbors not the religion of rulers. It is, however, too early to generalize regarding the folk-narrative repertoire of the entire compilation, or to decisively infer the age of the folk narratives of the Leviticus Rabbah as earlier than the fourth century. Nonetheless, such a possibility seems to emerge, and it also provides an explanation for the relatively low polemical tone, in favor of a sharing of traditions and a narrative dialogue between the Jewish and the Christian neighbors in the Galilee. As to Hadrian, a short anecdote from the HA will prove that the stories told in the province were not necessarily different from those that circulated in the formal center of the empire in Rome. After all, many of the authors of Rome’s literature were born in the provinces, and the emperor himself was a native of Spain. These stories are thus part and parcel of the centrifugal dynamics of an empire in a constant process of disintegration even while it is fortified, as by Hadrian’s politics of abandoning the provinces further to the east in order to solidify the Mediterranean and west European parts of it.

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The HA, one of the main sources for the life of Hadrian, although not always regarded with great respect as a historical source, tells a story that nobody, it seems, has yet correlated with the tale of Hadrian and the old man: He surpassed all kings by his gifts. Often he bathed in the public baths, even when everyone was present, as a result of which the following bathing-joke became well-known: on one occasion he had seen a certain veteran, known to him in military service, rubbing his back and the rest of his body on the wall; he asked why he had the marble scrape him, and when he learned that this was done for the reason that he did not have a slave, he presented him both with slaves and with the cost of their maintenance. But on another day when several old men were rubbing themselves on the wall to arouse the emperor’s generosity, he ordered them to be called out and to rub each other down in turn. He was indeed, the most ostentatious lover of the common people. So fond was he of travelling that he wanted to learn further, at first hand, about everything that he had read concerning the different parts of the world.128

The structural affinity of the bathing-joke and the Midrashic tale is striking: the ingenuous individual is rewarded far beyond his expectations. When this becomes known somebody less innocent tries to capitalize on it by mimicking the previous person’s acts, but the wisdom of the emperor reveals the stratagem, and the frauds are punished and physically humiliated in public. Hadrian was an emperor whose life was to a great extent told in anecdotes and other folk narratives. His generosity was widely known, as was his firm action against those who tried to con him. The tale in Leviticus Rabbah is part and parcel of the tale of an

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empire with an unsteady and mobile center that could be interpreted and experienced as evasive. Only half of the story of Hadrian’s life is told by “the last great historian” of the empire, whereas the second half of the HA is apparently composed by a group of unknown authors, which according to some included Hadrian himself.129 The texts relating to Hadrian’s ambiguous personality are not first and foremost personal texts but cultural records. The Rabbinic narrative of Hadrian and the old man, its divided structure, and the multiple readings it invites testify that the discourse of the empire does not necessarily emerge only in the formal center or in the imperial language. Thus the Midrashic HebrewAramaic text may be considered as a legitimate branch of the wide foliage of Roman imperial discourse. The humorous anecdote is a most suitable genre for coping with inadequacy and contradictions. Through anecdotes, Rabbinical texts infused their peculiar mode of articulation of history with multiple potentials of counterhistory.130 By imparting an ethnographic view of Amoraic creativity, my readings have reconstituted a lost world and created another. By concentrating on the tales of women neighbors in Leviticus Rabbah, these readings have constructed and imparted a heightened sensitivity to neighborlike cultural interfaces, evoked by the stories’ contextual and intertextual networks. In the process of Rabbinic literature, discourse constantly negotiates cultural identity, while at the same time it grows into its main mode and site of narrative existence. As Henri Bergson has noted in his famous book on laughter, humor incarnates life’s heroic existential struggle against automatism and petrification.131 It is its life urge that Rabbinic lit-

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erature expresses through its humorous tales. The one literary pearl that most seem unequivocally to attribute to Hadrian tells us that he too knew something about the vital connection between being alive and joking: animula vagula blandula, hospes comesque corporis, quo nunc abibis? in loca pallidula rigida nubila— nec ut soles dabis iocos. Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer, Body’s guest and companion, To what places will you set out for now? To darkling, cold and gloomy ones— And you won’t make your usual jokes.132

five

Between Us A Conclusion

The tales of the neighborhood that have been the focus of this book tell about the “neighborhood” of the Galilee in the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era. This neighborhood was at the time the birthing-ground for major religious and cultural formations that would prove consequential for many groups and peoples on a number of continents. Our entry into this milieu through the concept of a neighborhood has stressed small-scale processes, such as human relations and everyday life, rather than the major events of the period. The way religion and concrete details of reality are interwoven in the tales that have been discussed should, however, make it clear that religion is not shaped and decided only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study. Rather, substantial contributions are found in quotidian negotiations of bread and wine, birth and burial. These concrete spheres of action, many of which meet in the home and its close vicinity, are major sources for the articu138

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lation of root metaphors in the symbolic language and ritual practices of religions, especially those that have concerned us here, Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Yet a line from home to synagogue and church does not sum up the complex ways that this semiotic works; the opposite direction is equally significant. To use a metaphor from the tales themselves, not only do the neighbors invite the woman to the synagogue with them, but they also return home from the synagogue, filled with the words of the preacher. We will obviously never be able to reconstruct the discursive universe of these societies in their entirety. The poetics of metonymy, representing like by like and whole by part, as well as the poetics of metaphor, in which a more transformational representation is effected, are thus essential not only for the narrators and writers of the period but also for our interpretation of them. The four preceding chapters were generated in response to a like number of tales from Leviticus Rabbah in which women neighbors appear in more or less central functions. The texts have not served as hooks for hanging up discussions in which theoretical issues were elaborated. Rather, one of the main objectives of this research has been to read these ancient texts in the light of contemporary theoretical thinking so that the texts themselves may become more accessible for a variety of readers. The order in which the tales are discussed does not precisely follow their order in Leviticus Rabbah itself; the two first tales have been reversed. Otherwise, however, the discussion follows the linear composition of the original work. More significantly, in each chapter different bundles of social relationships have been brought together and unwrapped, and various theoretical

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issues have been highlighted, according to the character of the texts. In the first chapter, where the tale of the two women neighbors baking is at the center, the primary relationship represented in the narrative is that between the two women themselves. The interpretation employs the concept of genre in folk literature to indicate other fields of cognition and experience, such as the moral and theological question of retribution. Introducing narrative dialogue as the central theoretical concept of this work conveys the intergroup relevance of the moral and religious questions raised by the tale, especially as revealed in the common semiotics of the Talmudic-Midrashic and Early Christian universes of discourse, represented primarily by the New Testament and Leviticus Rabbah. Notions of locality, territory, and boundaries are correspondingly key motifs of the narrative and open up the complexity of the deliberation on the relations between narrative and reality. Contemplating narrative dialogue, in contrast to the application of traditional comparative methods, offers a heightened regard for contextual conditions, and above all the identification and construction of a subject position. In the second chapter we reach the Leviticus Rabbah narrative, a parable, after detouring through several intertextually related passages from the Talmudic-Midrashic literature. Here issues of gender relations, especially troublesome ones, are at the forefront of the discussion. The conflict between female bonding and marital loyalty encodes social as well as theological predicaments. The intergroup relations imparted span both Christians, as religious partners of dialogue and debate, and Samaritans, as territorial kin. The relevance of the New Testament texts for the narratives of Leviticus Rabbah, particularly those on women

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neighbors, becomes even clearer than in the first chapter. A texthistorical question thus creeps into the mainly interpretative and semiotic analysis: Were the narrators and editors of the Galilean Rabbinic text that we focus on actually acquainted with versions of the Gospel narratives and parables? The question itself cannot be definitively resolved without further, deeper, and wider study of the Leviticus Rabbah text in general, but many signs of a positive answer loom in the present study. This question is triangulated from additional perspectives in the third chapter, where the social relationships pondered, in addition to a further heightened gender conflict, form the interface as well as the boundaries between lay people and the Rabbis in the Galilean Jewish society as reflected in Palestinian Midrash literature. The category of folklore, especially as embodied in folk medicine, enters the discussion. Here qualms about the folkloristic conceptualization of specific areas of experience and cultural management, also recognizable in contemporary academic praxis, gain significance as folk medicine is projected on groups outside the sphere of their own group. Women, Christians, and other others may resort to folk medicine, possibly understood as magic, whereas the “we” of the narrative and editorial authority of Leviticus Rabbah, as well as some other rabbinical texts correlated to the tale, impart a complex relationship to the possibility. The category of folklore thus appears as a collectively articulated mode of signaling difference and otherness. The presence of Christians as the adjacent group of others may also refer to the socially revolutionizing aspect of the new religion. In the fourth chapter the panorama of the social relations unfolding in the narrative is widened to straddle the local Galilean

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world and the whole Roman Empire, as represented by the very top of its hierarchy, the emperor. The methodological tools were stretched maximally in this chapter to include the aspect of literary context, the context of genre, as well as comparative, intertextual contexts on various planes, finally focusing primarily on the historical context. The relationship between narrative and reality is thus transposed from the primarily ethnographic to the historical, while the interdependence between these two discourses is highlighted. In the discussion on the historical context, focusing on the fascinating figure of Hadrian, several contentions regarding existing views on the relationship between literature and history are raised. Finally, I find it useful to quote at some length some passages from Yuri Lotman’s seminal and revolutionizing work, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, that seem highly pertinent to my study. Lotman’s sophisticated formulations regarding the relationship between territory, boundaries, and identity summarize some of the ideas that have inspired and motivated me in the present work better than I can ever dream of saying them. One of the primary mechanisms of semiotic individuation is the boundary, and the boundary can be defined as the outer limit of the first-person form. . . . Every culture begins by dividing the world into “its own” internal space and “their” external space.1 In the centre of the metastructure is “our” language, but on the periphery it is treated as “someone else’s” language unable adequately to reflect the semiotic reality behind it: it is like the grammar of a foreign language.2 But the hottest spots for semioticizing processes are the boundaries of the semiosphere. The notion of boundary is an ambiva-

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lent one: it both separates and unites. . . . The boundary is bilingual and polylingual. The boundary is a mechanism for translating texts of an alien semiotics into “our” language, it is the place where what is “external” is transformed into what is “internal.”3 An important criterion here is who is perceived as the subject in the given system.4 The extreme edge of the semiosphere is a place of incessant dialogue . . . there is constant exchange, a search for common language.5

In Lotman’s terms, the tales about women neighbors in Leviticus Rabbah move in the area he calls “the extreme edge of the semiosphere.” They process the constant transformation between “other” and “our,” by borrowing, comparing, and debating. Being on the boundary and telling about boundaries, they both separate and unite. Subjectivity is shaped in them in a continuous dynamic, and they carry out the “incessant dialogue” that searches for common language. The dynamics of neighborhood are ambiguous, as the two mentions of women neighbors in the Hebrew Bible demonstrate clearly. On one hand, there is the almost malicious injunction of Exodus 3:22, exhorting the Israelite women to despoil their Egyptian neighbors—euphemistically garbed as borrowing (note the medieval commentary of Ibn-Ezra: since women neighbors were more apt to borrow than men!). On the other hand there is the loving celebration of the neighbors of Naomi and Ruth culminating in the naming of Oved, in Ruth 4:17, in the verse that ac-

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tually winds up the narrative in the most feminist of the books of the canon.6 The texts on women neighbors in Leviticus Rabbah expose the literary and intellectual qualities of tales that complicate ambiguity into a richly multivocal performance on gender and territory, identity and boundaries, contrast and dialogue.

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE 1. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Narratives in Dialogue: A Folk Literary Perspective on Interreligious Contacts in the Holy Land in Rabbinic Literature of Late Antiquity,” in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land—First–Fifteenth Centuries C.E., ed. Aryeh Kofsky and Guy G. Stroumsa (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1998), 109–29. 2. Paul Atkinson, The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality (London: Routledge, 1990), 103. See also Galit HasanRokem, Web of Life: Folklore in Rabbinic Literature and Midrash (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000; Hebrew original, 1996), 7–8. 3. David Goodblatt, “The Beruriah Traditions,” Journal of Jewish Studies 26 (1975): 68–85; Tal Ilan, Jewish Women in Graeco-Roman Palestine (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1995) and Mine and Yours Are Hers: Retrieving Women’s History from Rabbinic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Miriam B. Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender, and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian

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146 / Notes to Pages 5–8 Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 4. See, e.g., Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, eds., The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 5. Noy’s work is reviewed in Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 1–7. 6. Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline Teitelbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Hebrew original, 1994), 70–244; Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life; Dina Stein, Maxims, Magic, Myth: Folk Literary Perspectives on Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, forthcoming). 7. Georg Simmel, Selected Writings (Simmel on Culture), ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 137–74. See also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 99: “Any determinable and hence demarcated space necessarily embraces some things and excludes others.” A feminist perspective from a more Durkheimian vantage point has been propounded in Shirley Ardener, ed., Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (London: Croom Helm, in association with the Oxford University Women’s Studies Committee, 1981); see especially Shirley Ardener, “Ground Rules and Social Maps for Women: An Introduction,” 11–34: “The fact that women do not control physical or social space directly does not necessarily preclude them from being determinants of, or mediators in, the allocation of space, even the occupation of political space” (17). Shaye D. J. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) applies the anthropologist Frederick Barth’s argument that “an ethnic group was made by its boundaries” (8). 8. In Georg Simmel, On Woman, Sexuality, and Love, trans. Guy Oakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 65–102; abridged version in Simmel, Selected Writings, 46–54. 9. Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 139–41. 10. For the treatment of the topic in folk literature see Heidi Rosen-

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baum, “Nachbar, Nachbarin,” in Enzyklopädie des Märchens vol. 9, ed. R. W. Brednich et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 1104–9. 11. Cynthia M. Baker, “Rebuilding the House of Israel: Gendered Bodies and Domestic Politics in Roman Jewish Galilee, c. 135–300 C.E.” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University, 1997; forthcoming, Stanford University Press). Also pertinent is Santiago Guijarro’s conclusion regarding the sociology of space at the time: “The great majority of the inhabitants of Galilee were members of nucleated families. . . . The houses in which these families lived consisted, as a rule, of a single room, both in urban and in rural areas” (“The Family in First-Century Galilee,” in Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor, ed. Halvor Moxnes [London: Routledge, 1997], 42–65; quote at 60; emphasis added. 12. Vincent Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 238–39; inspired by the “symbolic forms” of Gananath Obeyesekere, The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformations in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 274–84 (in turn inspired by Ernst Cassirer and Susan Langer). 13. Joseph Heinemann, in his many works on Leviticus Rabbah, emphasized the artistic quality of the sermons and the composition of the chapters; my stress is primarily on the narrative art. 14. Compare Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, rev. ed. 1998), esp. the Preface by Susan Ashbrook Harvey, xv–xvi. 15. Oded Irshai, “Priesthood and Leadership in Late Antiquity Jewish Palestine,” in Jewish and Christian Culture in Byzantine Palestine, ed. Lee I. Levine (working title, forthcoming, in Hebrew). 16. Joseph Yahalom, Priestly Palestinian Poetry: A Narrative Liturgy for the Day of Atonement (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996, Hebrew), 56–57, and Poetry and Society in Jewish Galilee of Late Antiquity (TelAviv: Hakibbuts Hameuchad, 1999), 111–13; Rachel Elior, The Merkabah Tradition and the Beginning of Early Jewish Mysticism: Three Tem-

148 / Notes to Pages 11–14 ples and Three Visionary Priestly Traditions (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, forthcoming, Hebrew). Irshai, “Priesthood and Leadership.” 17. See, e.g., Halvor Moxnes, ed., Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as a Social Reality and Metaphor (London: Routledge, 1997), 2. 18. A fascinating lecture delivered by Gideon Bohak of Tel-Aviv University in the spring of 2001 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University answered my plea for the “pagan viewpoint.” 19. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 171–83. 20. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 21. Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 151–52. 22. ClaudeLévi-Strauss,TheRawandtheCooked:IntroductiontoaScience of Mythology, vol. 1, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 1–32; Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and trans. Annette Lavers (Frogmore, St. Albans: Paladin, 1973), 109–59. 23. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 24–40. 24. Marie-Louise von Franz, Problems of the Feminine in Fairytales (Dallas, Tex.: Spring Publications, 1972); Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage, 1977); Alan Dundes, “ ‘To Love My Father All’: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Folktale Source of King Lear,” in his Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 211–20; Max Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man, trans. Jon Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); among others. 25. Simcha Fishbane, “ ‘Most Women Engage in Sorcery’: An Analysis of Sorceresses in the Babylonian Talmud,” Jewish History 7 (1993): 27–42. See also Naomi Janowitz, Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews, and Christians (London: Routledge, 2001), 86–96. 26. The text is my translation from the London MS set by Morde-

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cai Margulies (Margalioth) as the main version of his critical edition, Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah: A Critical Edition Based on Manuscripts and Genizah Fragments with Variants and Notes (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1972), 133–35. Other versions in Rabbinic literature: yShvuot, 6.5; bGittin 35a; Pesiqta Rabbati, ed. Meir Ish-Shalom (Vienna: Kaiser 1890), chap. 22, 217–18; Sefer Ha-Maasiyot, The Exempla of the Rabbis, ed. Moses Gaster (New York: Ktav, 1968; orig. pub. 1924), 82, no. 121b; Midrash Aggadah on the Pentateuch, ed. Salomon Buber (Lvov: Panta, 1894), 10, Leviticus 5:1. 27. This may be the reason why Albeck thought the story “imprecise and obscure” (35): Hanoch Albeck, “Midrash Leviticus Rabbah,” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Saul Lieberman, Shalom Spiegel, Solomon Zeitlin, and Alexander Marx (New York: The American Academy for Jewish Research, 1946), vol. 1 (Hebrew), 25–43. In the original mixed Hebrew and Aramaic text the indefinite character of the description is further enhanced by the semantic openness of the Aramaic verb a sˇkh, which refers in these sentences to the finding of (or rather inability to find) the coins: Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990), sˇkh. The ambiguity would probably not have existed in the spoken form but has grown from the indefiniteness of vocalization of written Hebrew and Aramaic. 28. SeealsoGalitHasan-Rokem,“WithinLimitsandBeyond:History andBodyinMidrashicTexts,”InternationalFolkloreReview9(1993):5–12. 29. Miron B. Lerner, “On the Midrashim Concerning the Ten Commandments,” in Mehqerei Talmud–Talmudic Studies, ed. Yaakov Sussman and David Rosenthal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990, Hebrew), 217–36. 30. William David Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, Brown Judaic Studies 186 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1989; orig. pub. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); on the issue of oaths see esp. 241. See also David Flusser, “The ‘Torah’ in the Sermon on the Mount,” in his Jewish Sources in Early Christianity (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1979, Hebrew; 5th printing 1994), 226–34; this specific passage

150 / Notes to Pages 17–19 in the Sermon is briefly mentioned on 229. And see Samuel Tobias Lachs, A Rabbinic Commentary on the New Testament: The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav Publishing House Inc., 1987), 100–103; Lachs includes a number of references to Leviticus Rabbah (18, 19.2, 37), but not the text discussed here. 31. See, e.g., Burton L. Visotsky, Fathers of the World: Essays on Rabbinic and Patristic Literature (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1995), 82, and references there. 32. Davies, Sermon on the Mount, 239 ff., with special reference to Essene teachings. See also Anthony J. Saldarini, Matthew’s ChristianJewish Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 212, n.8; specifically on oaths, see 151–56. 33. Howard Clark Kee, “Early Christianity in the Galilee: Reassessing the Evidence from the Gospels,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 3–22, direct reference at 11; Anthony Saldarini, “The Gospel of Matthew and Jewish-Christian Conflict in the Galilee,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, 23–38; Serge Ruzer, “The Technique of Composite Citation in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:21–22, 33–37),” Revue Biblique 103–1 (1996): 65–75. 34. After I had completed drafting this book, Susan Weingarten kindly shared with me her manuscript “A Feast for Eyes: Women and Baking in the Talmudic Literature,” in which she presents an insightful analysis of the Amnon and Tamar story, based on her tracing of the ethnography of baking in the ancient world and especially in Rabbinic culture. She stresses the fact that in mKetubbot 5.5 grinding flour and baking come first in the list of works a wife must perform for her husband. Her references also include mShevi’it 5.8 where the problem of blurring boundaries between learned and am-ha-arets is correlated to the borrowing of sieves for flour between women neighbors. Her concern is mainly with the sexual associations of baking that seem to be minimally employed in the Leviticus Rabbah tale about the two baking neighbors. 35. Its occurrence in earlier Rabbinic literature, in the Tannaitic

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text of Mekhilta De-Rabbi Yishmael, has been beautifully expounded by Daniel Boyarin in his path-breaking book Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 36. Ivor H. Jones, The Matthean Parables: A Literary and Historical Commentary (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 81, elaborates on Flusser’s and Robert Lisle Lindsey’s ideas regarding an original Hebrew Urevangelium, pointing mainly at Matthew. 37. The translation is based on Boyarin, Intertextuality, 87, and David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 65. 38. Boyarin, Intertextuality, 87. 39. Stern, Parables, 67. 40. Eric Robertson Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experiences from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (New York: Norton, 1965). 41. Charles H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (London: Fontana Books, 1961; orig. pub. 1935); Flusser, Jewish Sources in Early Christianity, 153. Flusser seems to understand Jesus’ use of the term predominantly in terms of “the world to come” of Rabbinic literature (214, 223–24), but not necessarily in the eschatological sense (206). But compare Paul’s negative use of the yeast metaphor, I Corinthians 5:6–8. 42. Susan Marie Praeder, The Word in Women’s Worlds: Four Parables (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1988), 11–35, on this parable; for the discussion of the verb enAkrycen (Matthew), ekrycen (Luke), 26–27. See also Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972; 2nd. rev. trans. based on S. H. Hooke, 1962), 146–49. The number of interpretations extant on each parable of Jesus makes it quite impossible to comprise all of them. 43. Paul Ricoeur, “Listening to the Parables of Jesus,” in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 239–45; quotes at 245, 242 (orig. pub. Criterion 13 [1974]:18–22). 44. Flusser’s discussion of the parables of Jesus in comparison with Rabbinic parables is based on the idea that parables are a “langue,” in

152 / Notes to Pages 26–29 Jakobsonian terms; that is, that they are, in the terms of the folk narrative scholars Max Lüthi and Dov Noy, whom he quotes, a set system of motifs and forms; Flusser, “Jesus’s Parables and the Parables in Rabbinic Literature,” Jewish Sources in Early Christianity, 150–209. 45. Tessa Rajak, “The Jewish Community and Its Boundaries,” in The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, ed. Judith Lieu, John North, and Tessa Rajak (London: Routledge, 1994), 9–28; quote at 25. 46. See Peter Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 121: “The fact that bread and wine were given a central place in Christian ritual practice and symbolism presumably reflects consumer preference for bread, and the predominantly urban environment of early Christianity. In the countryside bread was often not eaten at all.” And even more generally: “The treatment of bread (collecting of crumbs, as for communication bread) suggests it has a sacramental nature” (Ardener, “Ground Rules and Social Maps,” 23). Jacques Derrida has often delineated the relations between Judaism and Christianity so that the “differance” is posited on the former; see, e.g., Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 55. A similar approach may be discerned in Daniel Boyarin’s Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). Here, however, the interpretation points at the differentiation as more or less symmetrical, with Christianity making a “stronger” use of transformation.

CHAPTER TWO 1. Dan Ben-Amos, “Generic Distinctions in the Aggadah,” in Studies in Jewish Folklore, ed. Frank Talmage (Cambridge, Mass.: Association for Jewish Studies, 1980), 275–301.

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2. See, e.g., for compilations of proverbs, bBava Qama 92a–93a; for hagiographic legends, bTa’anit 23a–25a; for narratives of dream interpretation, bBerakhot 55a–57b; for laments, bMoed Qatan 58b; and for medical lore, bShabbat 66b, 133b–134a. 3. Cynthia M. Baker, “Rebuilding the House of Israel: Gendered Bodies and Domestic Politics in Roman Jewish Galilee c. 135–300 C.E.” (Ph.D. diss, Department of Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University, 1997; forthcoming, Stanford University Press). 4. The genre and the image of the simple and righteous believer are the basis for a long sequence constituting a narrative chain in the manner that Eli Yassif has clearly shown to be one of the editorial principles of folk narratives in Rabbinic literature: Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline Teitelbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Hebrew original, 1994), 209–44. The other, perhaps better-known, folk saint in the same chapter is Honi the Circle Maker, who is famous not only for his legendary rainmaking but also for his equally legendary seventy-year-long sleep. I have partly documented the voluminous research into this matter by David Flusser, Martin Hengel, GezaVermesz, E. P. Saunders, Morton Smith, John Dominic Crossan, and many others in “Literary Creativity, Collective Expression, and Intergroup Dialogue in Midrash: A Folkloristic Perspective” (paper delivered at the 49th Wolfenbütteler Symposion, Interpreting the Sacred Word: Jewish Hermeneutics in the European Context, December 2000; forthcoming in a volume on Jewish hermeneutics edited by Almut Bruckstein). I have here omitted the Tannaitic framing of the narrative dealt with extensively in this paper. 5. Cf. tale type no. 676, Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications, no. 184 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 3rd printing, 1987); Heda Jason, Types of Oral Tales in Israel II (Jerusalem: Israel Ethnographic Society, 1975), 676*A; Galit Hasan-Rokem, Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives: A Structural Semantic Analysis. Folklore Fellows Communications, no. 232 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1982), 71–75.

154 / Notes to Pages 33–35 6. Meir Benayahu, “R. Samuel Yaffe Ashkenazi and Other Commentaries of Midrash Rabba,” Tarbiz: A Quarterly for Jewish Studies 42 (1973): 457–60. 7. Genesis Rabbah, chap. 19, §11, from Bereschit Rabba with critical notes and commentary by Jehudah Theodor, with additional corrections by Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 179–80. A different version is in The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan (Avot De-Rabbi Nathan) version B, translation and commentary by Anthony J. Saldarini (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), chap. 1. David Flusser, Jewish Sources in Early Christianity, ed. Hannah Safrai (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1979, Hebrew), 159, cites an anonymous folk version to point out the difference between folktales and parables that need a nimshal (epimythia): “A woman told her husband: If I had been in stead of Eve I would not have fallen like her. Her husband put a mouse in a bowl and covered it with a lid, forbidding his wife to lift it. But she, curious as all women, lifted the lid, and the mouse ran away”! 8. On the poetics of the Rabbinic parable, see David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Stern discusses mostly the parables of Lamentations Rabbah and thus not this specific parable. 9. Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 35. 10. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 84–88. Boyarin translates “snake-tamer” as “ colleague,” reading haver instead of habbar. 11. Samuel Tobias Lachs, “The Pandora-Eve Motif in Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974): 341–45; Nehama Aschkenasy, Eve’s Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 43. For a short comparison of Eve and Pandora, see also Anthony Synnott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self, and Society (London: Routledge, 1993), 39–40. And see Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New

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York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950), 136, note 88. Froma Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 53–86, points out the radical difference between the Greek and the biblical narratives on the creation of women. The relatively early work of Hermann Türck deserves special mention: Pandora und Eva: Menschwerdung und Schöpfertum im griechischen und jüdischen Mythus (Weimar: Verus-Verlag, 1931). Türck states that in Greek myth the woman is “called the evil and disaster of life” and serves as a means for the Prometheic Man to reach his spiritual heights (63). In Jewish myth, according to him, the woman is throughout an equal of man. He claims that it is especially the equality of women as transmitted by Jesus from the Jewish tradition that made Christianity so popular in the Roman Empire (64). In light of the date and place of publication the following characterization of Jesus is especially interesting: “The Jew, whose distinct sense of family and extraordinary love for children can be observed to this day,” etc. (68, in a discussion on the equality of children in Jesus’ teaching). 12. Borrowing Clifford Geertz’s idiom for intracultural ethnographic competence: Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 13. Herodas, The Mimes and the Fragments, notes by Walter Headlam, ed. A. D. Knox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 280–81, ll. 80–84, and 310, note on line 82 (“Such borrowing of commodities was frequent among neighbours: Plaut. Aul 91 cultrum, securim, pistillum, mortarium, quae utenda vasa semper vicini rogant. Theophrastus. Char. X., xxx. Iambl. V. P. Menander, 55. Menand. 136, etc. Artemid. V 53 Phaedr. Iii, 19. Etc.”); Dyskolos, ll. 471–73, ed. with English translation by W. G. Arnott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann, 1979), 258; A. W. Gomme and F. H. B. Sandbach, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, repr. 1983), 209. I thank Dr. Donna Shalev for suggesting these texts as parallels. 14. Lachs, “Pandora-Eve Motif.”

156 / Notes to Pages 36–39 15. Genesis Rabbah 26 (Theodor-Albeck edition, 246–47); Tanhuma “Hayei Sarah,” 3.3. 16. See Baker’s discussion of baking and especially of tractate Hallah in the Mishna; “Rebuilding,” 105–7. 17. In a later version of the tale, the two narratives, the miracle of the bread and the miracle of the vinegar turned to oil, are joined in one single unit: Moses Gaster, The Exempla of the Rabbis (New York: Ktav, 1924; repr. 1968), no. 163; 116–17 in the Hebrew text, 93 in the English summary. 18. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 19. See Stern, Parables. 20. Ignaz Ziegler, Die Königsgleichnisse in der Midrasch beleuchtet durch die römische Kaiserzeit (Breslau: Schlesische Verlagsanstalt, 1903). 21. Richard I. Pervo, “A Nihilist Fabula: Introducing The Life of Aesop,” in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, ed. Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance, and Judith Perkins (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1998), 77–120, esp. 98–101. 22. Ecclesiastes Rabbah 5.14; Aarne and Thompson, Types of the Folktale, no. 41*; also in Marie de France’s, Berekhiyah Ha-Naqdan’s, Lafontaine’s, and Krilov’s fables. Haim Schwarzbaum, “TalmudicMidrashic Affinities of Some Aesopic Fables,” Jewish Folklore between East and West: Collected Papers (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1989), 197–214; on this fable, 205. 23. Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 80–92. 24. Stern, Parables, 67–82. 25. Ibid., 19. Without debating Stern’s basic argument, I would suggest that his characterization of the genre may have been contextually inspired by the Midrash text in which his analysis is grounded, namely Lamentations Rabbah. The text of Lamentations Rabbah, which reinterprets the biblical mourning over the First Temple in terms of the destruction of the Second Temple, is immersed in the skeptical and pessimistic experiences of destruction, exile, suffering, and death. See also

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Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 26. Lamentations Rabbah 3.21; translation from Stern, Parables, 57. See also Stern’s fine discussion of this parable in his Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Theory (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 31–54, especially 46 ff. Parallels: Pesiqta De-Rav Kahana “Anokhi, anokhi”; Pesiqta Rabbati 21, “Eser dvarim” [sic]; Pesiqta deRab Kahana, trans. Jacob Neusner (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1987), 57–58; Ephraim Elimelech Urbach, “The Homiletical Interpretations of the Sages and the Expositions of Origen on Canticles, and the Jewish-Christian Disputation,” in Scripta Hierosolymitana 22, Studies in Aggadah and FolkLiterature, ed. Joseph Heinemann and Dov Noy (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1971), 247–75, and, on a similar parable, 263. 27. “By contrast to the Graeco-Roman and Jewish traditions we have surveyed, the early Christian movement proved to be remarkably ambiguous in its attitude to the structures of family life and to the relationship between the household and the faith”; John M. G. Barclay, “The Family as the Bearer of Religion in Judaism and Early Christianity,” in Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor, ed. Halvor Moxnes (London: Routledge, 1997), 66–80, quote at 72. And further at 74: “Thus the practical effect of the early Christian movement was not to solidify but to undermine family loyalties for a significant proportion of its adherents.” Barclay’s main source for Jewish traditions is Josephus. See also Stephen C. Barton, “The Relativisation of Family Ties in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman Traditions,” in Moxnes, ed., Constructing Early Christian Families, 81–100, who points out the antifamilial influences of Cynic and Stoic sources as inspiration for early Christianity. 28. The linguistic formula “umot ha-olam,” which designates the neighbor women in the epimythia, the nimshal of the parable, is the standard term used for Christians in later Rabbinic literature. See the parable from Song of Songs Rabbah quoted in Urbach, “Homiletical Interpretations,” 263.

158 / Notes to Pages 42–45 29. Leviticus Rabbah 5.8, from Mordecai Margulies (Margalioth), Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah: A Critical Edition Based on Manuscripts and Genizah Fragments with Variants and Notes (Jerusalem: Wahrman Books, 1972), 123. 30. Moses Gaster, The Samaritans: Their History, Doctrines, and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1925); Menachem Mor, “The Samaritans and the Bar-Kokbah Revolt,” in The Samaritans, ed. Alan D. Crown (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1989), 19–31; Nathan Schur, History of the Samaritans, Book 2: The Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Period (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 35–92. See also Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972; 2nd. rev. trans. based on S. H. Hooke, 1962), 202–5. Ronald F. Hock, “Why New Testament Scholars Should Read Ancient Novels,” in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, ed. Hock, Chance, and Perkins, 129–38. 31. Ulrich Marzolph, Nasreddin Hodscha: 666 wahre Geschichten (Neue orientalische Bibliothek, München: Beck, 1996); Matilda CoenSarano, Djoha ke dize? Kuentos populares djudeo-espanyoles (Jerusalem: Kana, 1991), 238–39: “Supa de yave.” 32. Haim Schwarzbaum, Studies in Jewish and World Folklore (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1968), in the index. Max Kadushin states that the “stories” (his quotation marks) of this passage “reflect folk experience” and “must have been intended to catch the interest of the women, speaking as it does of the housewife’s experience”; Max Kadushin, A Conceptual Commentary on Midrash Leviticus Rabbah: Value Concepts in Jewish Thought (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1987), 42. 33. Serge Ruzer, “From ‘Love Your Neighbor’ to ‘Love Your Enemy’: Trajectories in Early Jewish Exegesis and Implications for the Sermon on the Mount,” Revue Biblique (in press), is a comprehensive survey of the “love commandment” from the biblical text itself, through early Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek commentary and elaboration until early Christian (especially New Testament) and Rabbinic texts, and it serves as a valuable exegetic background for the text discussed here. See also Gillian Feeley-Harnik, The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Food in

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Early Judaism and Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984), 52–53. 34. See note 30, above. 35. Israel Y. Yuval, “Two Nations in Your Womb”: Perceptions of Jews and Christians (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved / Alma, 2000; Hebrew); forthcoming in English, University of California Press. See also his “Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages: Shared Myths, Common Language (Donatio Constantini and Donatio Vespasiani),” in Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism, and Xenophobia, ed. Robert S. Wistrich (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), 88–107. 36. Leviticus Rabbah 5.8, from Margulies, 123–24. 37. Translation: New Revised Standard Version; there is a slightly different version in the chapter following the story of the Good Samaritan, Luke 11:9. 38. Matthew 7:12 and bShabbat 31a. See also Ruzer, “From ‘Love Your Neighbor.’ ” 39. Jacob Neusner cites the text as an example of Leviticus Rabbah’s argument with Christian polemics in his Rabbinic Judaism’s Generative Logic (Binghamton, N.Y.: Global Publications, 2002), 1: 34. 40. Aarne and Thompson, Types of the Folktale, no. 750*J; Jason, Types of Oral Tales, AT 750*J; Haya Bar-Itzhak and Aliza Shenhar, Jewish Moroccan Folktales from Israel, trans. Miriam Widmann in collaboration with the authors (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 106. 41. Israel Yuval, “Easter and Passover as Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” in Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times, ed. Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, vol. 5 of Two Liturgical Traditions (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1999), 98–124. 42. Flusser, Jewish Sources. 43. Joseph Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash: The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971): 141–50.

160 / Notes to Pages 53–60 44. Jacob Neusner has been one of the first to emphasize the formative role of the fourth century in the distinct development of the two religious cultures; see his Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity, 2nd printing, with New Preface and Introduction (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1991). He credits Rosemary Radford Reuther with this insight (ix). 45. Judith Lieu, “Christian Views of Judaism,” in The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, ed. Judith Lieu, John North, and Tessa Rajak (London: Routledge, 1992), 79–96; quote at 94. 46. bShabbat 129a; bBekhorot 22a; bKritut 6a; bNiddah 21a–b, 38a, 66a.

CHAPTER THREE I thank Dr. David Satran from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, for the second half of the title to this chapter. 1. Leviticus Rabbah 9.9, Mordecai Margulies (Margalioth), Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah: A Critical Edition Based on Manuscripts and Genizah Fragments with Variants and Notes (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1972), 190–93. Cf. bMakkot 11a. 2. On the genre of folktale, especially in Rabbinic literature, see Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 41–43, 147–48, 164–65. 3. On the genre of legend, see ibid., 39–40, 147–50. 4. Ibid. 5. Joseph Heinemann and Jakob J. Petuchowski, Literature of the Synagogue (New York: Behrman, 1975), 107–12. 6. I mean parrhesia in the Rabbinic sense, that is, the public space, close to the German Öffentlichkeit. It is especially important to stress this specific meaning, since Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2001), addresses the classical Greek meaning of the word.

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7. Michael Fishbane, “Accusations of Adultery: A Study of Law and Scribal Practice in Numbers 5:11–31,” Hebrew Union College Annual 45 (1974): 25–45; Giuseppe Veltri, “ ’Inyan Sota: Halakhische Voraussetzungen für einen magischen Art nach einer theoretischen Abhandlung aus der Kairoer Geniza,” Frankfurter Judaistische Beiträge 20 (1993): 23–48; Peter Schäfer and Shaul Shaked, Magische texte aus der Kairoer Geniza (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1994), 1: 17–44 (the text JTSL ENA 3635.17 on 17–28 seems to indicate a relatively late practice of the ritual, but it would be very difficult to locate or prove it). The Midrash Decalogue includes a folktale based on the ritual, where an adulterous woman is exposed as she kisses her innocent twin who passed the test in her place. The tale also appears in both recensions of the Tanhuma for Numbers, Naso. See, for example, Midrash Tanhuma, ed. and introduction Solomon Buber (Vilnius: Romm, 1913; printed edition, Jerusalem: Lewin-Epstein, 1962); in English, Midrash Tanhuma (S. Buber Recension), trans., with Indices and Brief Notes John T. Townsend (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1997), 30–31. (See also Midrash Rabbah on Numbers; Yalqut Shim’oni.) RaShl’s commentary to the Bible text in Numbers 5.13 repeats the tale and refers to bYevamot 95a, where sisters are discussed, but the tale does not appear. The blatant signs of the folktale genre belie any attempt to pinpoint a social practice from it. The thesis of Anat Shapira on Midrash Decalogue clarifies some of the delicate complexities of the textology of this particular medieval text; Anat Shapira, “Midrash Decalogue, Paris MS 716: Critical Edition, Sources, and Literary Structure.” M.A. thesis, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1997 (forthcoming, Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik). 8. See, among others: Hans Dietrich Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986); Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987); John G. Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked, Magic Spells and Formulae: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993); Yuval Harari, “Early Jewish Magic: Methodological and Phenomenological Studies” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1998).

162 / Notes to Pages 63–66 9. Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 15–29. 10. See also ySotah 2.1 and 2.5. 11. Moshe Halbertal, Interpretative Revolutions in the Making: Values as Interpretative Considerations in Midrashei Halakha (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Hebrew), 94–112. 12. bBerakhot 24a; bKiddushin 70a; yHallah 2.1 at 8c. 13. William David Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, Brown Judaic Studies 186 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1989; orig. pub., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). The issue of light is mentioned many times in the book; see for instance p. 2. 14. Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),186–88. 15. The ambiguity toward women’s education in Rabbinic literature also characterizes Roman culture on the whole; Emily A Hemelrijk, Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Elite from Cornelia to Julia Domna (London: Routledge, 1999), 214–15. 16. Zeev Weiss, “Ancient Synagogues in Tiberias and in Hamat,” Idan 11 (1988): 34–48; Gideon Foerster, “The Ancient Synagogues of the Galilee,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, ed. Lee I. Levine (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992), 289–319 (on the Synagogue of Hammath Tiberias, 302–6); Lee I. Levine, “The Sages and the Synagogue in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of the Galilee,” in The Galilee in Late Antiquity, 201–22 (“the academy and the synagogue; these are in no way to be construed as one and the same institution,” 204). Levine deals with the story of Rabbi Meir and the woman at 206–7 (“Rabbinic ties to the synagogue in the second century are scarcely mentioned; only a few accounts note the rabbinic presence there. One instance speaks of R. Meir teaching in the synagogue of Hammath Tiberias”), but does not mention the Leviticus Rabbah source, perhaps because that does not mention a synagogue. The fact would have strengthened his claim at 207: “it may possibly be a retrojection from a later period.” 17. Foerster, “Ancient Synagogues,” 306.

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18. Avraham Ya’ari, Jewish Pilgrimages to Erets-Israel (Tel-Aviv: Gazit, 1946; Hebrew), 92 (14th-century disciple of Nahmanides), 157 (16th-century Rabbi Moshe Basolah of Pesaro), 441, 563; Avraham Ya’ari, Letters from Erets-Israel (Ramat Gan: Masadah, 1971; Hebrew), 302, 322, 337, and all the other sources from the eighteenth century onward, passim. 19. Jakob Nacht, Simle Isha (Female symbolism in ancient Hebrew sourcesandinmodernHebrewliterature)(Tel-Aviv:privatelypublished, 1959; Hebrew); Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Riddle and Proverb: The Relationship Exemplified by an Aramaic Proverb,” Proverbium 24 (1974): 936–40. 20. In the PT version the word synagogue is spelled out; according to the Munich MS of Leviticus Rabbah, it is a house of study, bet hamidrash. The London MS used by Margalioth for his edition conceals the specific designation of the setting, but it seems more like a house of study, based on the behavior of Rabbi Meir’s students. The differentiation between the two institutions in the said period remains unclear. Dan Urman, “The House of Assembly and the House of Study: Are They One and the Same?” in Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery, ed. D. Urman and Paul V. M. Flesher (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1: 232–55; Steven Fine, This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Roman Period, vol. 11 of the Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 35–36; Pieter van der Horst, “Was the Ancient Synagogue a Place of Sabbath Worship?” in Jews, Christians, and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction During the Graeco-Roman Period, ed. Steven Fine (London: Routledge, 1999), 18–43. 21. Cynthia M. Baker, “Rebuilding the House of Israel: Gendered Bodies and Domestic Politics in Roman Jewish Galilee c. 135–300 C.E.” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University, 1997; forthcoming, Stanford University Press). 22. mYevamot 12.6–7: “The Mitsvah of Halitsa [is performed thus] He and his levirate wife appear before a Bet-din . . . [S]he says: he did not wish to take me as his levirate wife, and he says: I did not wish to take her. bilshon ha-qodesh hayu omrin [They were speaking in the holy

164 / Notes to Pages 69–74 tongue (i.e., Hebrew)]. And his levirate wife approached him in the sight of the elders and took his shoe off his foot and spat in his face, such spit that was seen by the elders, saying: This will be done to the man who refuses to build his brother’s house.” Women’s saliva is in other texts associated with blood, specifically menstrual blood and the blood of the leprous woman (mNiddah, 4.3). 23. Unless Rabbi Meir’s teaching addressed some esoteric or nonnormative body of learning, such as Christianity, especially favored by women audiences. 24. Ketubbot 5.7, The Tosefta According to Codex Vienna, with variants from codices Erfurt, Genizah MSS., and editio princeps (Venice, 1521), and a brief commentary by Saul Lieberman (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1957), the Order 9, Nashim 5.7, at 73, and parallels. See also Saul Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-Ishuta: A Comprehensive Commentary on the Tosefta, Part VI, Order Nashim (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1967), 206–8. 25. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix–xx. 26. Genesis Rabbah 68, Bereschit Rabba with critical notes and commentary by Jehudah Theodor, with additional corrections by Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 771–72, and parallels in the commentary; Leviticus Rabbah 8, Margalioth’s edition, 164–66. 27. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Communication with the Dead in Jewish Dream Culture,” in Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming, ed. David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213–32, esp. 216, 227. 28. Yoram Bilu and Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Cinderella and the Saint: The Life Story of a Jewish Moroccan Female Healer in Israel,” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society 14 (1989): 227–60. 29. This is, however, to be understood on the symbolic level only, not as the concrete interpretation suggested by N. Torczyner, “Asa atsmo mitpaseq”: Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (New York: The American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), 217–22, based on a reading of the text repudiated by Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish

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Palestine (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950), 88, note 62. 30. Including the MS Munich not cited by Margalioth in his apparatus ad locam. I thank Hayim Weiss, who helped me check on this when I was far away from the microfilm collection of manuscripts of the National and University Library in Jerusalem. 31. On Jewish bodies, see Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge,1991);Boyarin,CarnalIsrael.OnChristianbodies,seeAnthony Synnott,TheBodySocial:Symbolism,Self,andSociety(London:Routledge, 1993), 11–18. Regarding menstruation in particular, see Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 32. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 151–59; Orit Segal, “Female Voices in the Talmudic Text: A Study of the ‘My Mother Told Me’ Phrases in the Babylonian Talmud. Magic, Medicine, and Female Voices” (master’s thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2000; Hebrew). 33. Dina Stein, Maxim, Magic, Myth: Folk Literary Perspectives on Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, forthcoming; Hebrew), chapter 3. 34. “[T]hose who have no part in the world to come, who deny that the resurrection of the dead is written in the Torah, and that the Torah is of divine origin and the Epicurean. Rabbi Aqiva adds one who reads in the Apocrypha and who reads a charm on the injury quoting the verse ‘I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee’ (Exodus 15:26b). To this Abba Shaul added the one who uttered the Holy Name by its letters” (mSanhedrin 10.1; yPeah 1.1 adds also those who retract their foreskins). Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 70–71, interprets the uttering of God’s name as a publicizing of the secret parts of the Torah, thus a sin of sexual character because of the sexual desire of the students for their bride, the Torah. 35. “Rabbi Aqiva says: one who undulates in his voice with the words of the Song of Songs in taverns and makes it a song has no part

166 / Notes to Pages 79–81 in the world to come. Abba Shaul says in Rabbi Aqiva’s name: and also one who reads the charm on an injury, because it is said ‘I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee’ (Exodus 15:26b) and spits” (emphasis mine): Tosephta based on the Erfurt and Vienna Codices, with parallels and variants, by Dr. M. S. Zuckermandel (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1963), Sanhedrin 12.10. See also ySanhedrin 10.1 with some additions; note especially: “Abba Shaul . . . Rabbi Mena says: Like those Samaritans who take an oath. Rabbi Ya’akov Bar-Aha said: written yod he and read in alef dalet.” I consider only Palestinian texts here. 36. Regarding the reading of charms on the Sabbath there are also the following stipulations: “Shimon Bar-Abba quotes Rabbi Hanina: who reads a charm, applies oil on the head [of the patient] and utters the charm, as long as he does not use the hand or a cup. Rabbi Yaakov Bar Iddi and Rabbi Yohannan, quote Rabbi Yannai: and uses the hand or a cup too” (yMa’aser Sheni 2.1); “Rav Yehuda quoted Rav Zeira: who has a pain in his ear applies oil on his head and utters a charm, as long as he does not use the hand or a cup” (yShabbat 6.5). 37. Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990), 479, derived from the Greek kalon. 38. Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: Putnam,1903), 175, “a choking attack.” 39. yShabbat 14.4. Also: yAvoda Zara 2.2: “Jesus son of Pandera.” The elided text reads: “Rabbi Yaakov Bar Iddi quoted Rabbi Jonathan: You may cure with everything but idolatry, incest, and murder.” 40. Note the proximity of the two quotes featured in these tales, Ecclesiastes 10:5 and 10:8, pointing at the typically close connection between narrative and exegesis in Rabbinic literature. 41. Boyarin, Dying for God, 34–36, see also notes 59 and 62 at 159. A useful source regarding the Jewish image of Jesus as magician, in spite of

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some eccentric notions, is Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God (Berkeley, Calif.: Seastone, 1998; orig. pub. 1978), on this particular tale, 63–64. See also Zuckermandel, Tosephta, 503; Ephraim Elimelech Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975); a discussion of the story of Rabbi Eleazar ben Dama from tHullin 2, 22–23, is at 116. There are also versions of this tale in yAvodah Zarah 2.2 at 40d; bAvodah Zarah 28b. Discussing the tHullin version in comparison with the Babylonian Talmud version and comparing both with the martyrdom of another Rabbi Eliezer, Boyarin (34–36) assumes that the story relates a “real” situation, i.e., that it was known that Ben Dama associated with Christians and thus the death by snake bite was earned by him even before he might have been cured using Jesus’ name. See also Rudolf and Martin Hengel, “Die Heilung Jesu und medizinisches Denken,” in Medicus Viator: Fragen und Gedanken am Wege Richard Siebacks (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1959), 331–61. The Hengels discuss the biblical and the Hellenistic Jewish background of the narratives about Jesus’ healings and suggest medical diagnoses to the diseases, as well as a theological context to the tales. At 356–57 the Ben Dama tale is quoted to prove that healing in Jesus’ name was believed to be effective even by Rabbinic Jews. 42. In a more than striking coincidence, we find Eliezer Ben Damma among the names in the list of Rabbi Nissi of Caesarea elaborating on Ecclesiastes 7:26 in the MS Vatican 291 of Ecclesiastes Rabbah, f. 230b, as quoted by Oded Irshai in his “Ya’akov from the Village of Navoraya: A Rabbi Who Fell into Apostasy,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 2 (1983), in which issues of applying Jesus’ name for healing are also dealt with. Whereas Ya’akov is given the negative attribution “the sinner,” Eleazar ben Damma is characterized by the help of the same verse as “whoso pleaseth God”! See also Davies, Sermon on the Mount, 277. This positive note in a text that is as close to Leviticus Rabbah as Ecclesiastes Rabbah is (there are numerous parallels between the two) seems to me to reinforce the interpretation of the condemnation of Ben Damma as unsettled.

168 / Notes to Pages 82–84 43. The direct reference in the gospels to curing eye problems with spit: Mark 8:22–26; John 9:6 (though this tale is less similar). This cure was well known in the ancient world, as Lieberman shows in his informative note referring to the tale discussed here: “both rabbinic and non-Jewish sources inform explicitly that saliva is a proved remedy against various eye diseases. . . . [A]s a matter of fact Plinius (Nat. Hist. XXVIII 22.76) says expressly that a woman’s fasting spittle . . . is considered a powerful remedy against bloodshot eyes. The assertion that the woman actually spat in the eye of the Rabbi is also confirmed by the otherwise unknown Rabbinic source quoted by Rabbi David Hanagid in his commentary on Aboth I, 12, 8a. A similar rabbinic anecdote is preserved in the commentary to the same Mishnah, published in Machzor Vitry, p. 473 . . . which states ‘And thy spittle is my remedy, and she spits in his eyes’ ” (Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 187–88, note 62). 44. Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 241. 45. On Sotah, see Matthew 5:31–33 and 19:7–9; John 8:3–11 (and parallels in Mark 10:3–12; Luke 16:18). On Halitsa and the institution of levirate, see Matthew 22:24–30; Mark 12:19–25; Luke 20:28–35. 46. Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Women in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996), 45–67; esp. “The Apostolic Love Triangle,” 51–65. Cooper disagrees with the view that Acts of Paul and Thecla is part of an oral tradition, as argued by Dennis Ronald MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 17 ff. The genre perspective I suggest here has also been tentatively pursued by Joshua Levinson, “The Tragedy of Romance: A Case of Literary Exile,” Harvard Theological Review 89 (1996): 227–44. 47. On Lydia, see Acts 16:14–19; on Thecla, see Acta Pauli et Theclae in Acta Apostolorum apocrypha, ed. Richard Adalbert Lipsius and Maximilian Bonnet (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972), 1: 235–72.

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CHAPTER FOUR 1. The concept of the contexts of interpretation provided the outline of my book Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). For an analytical review of the term “context” in folk narrative research, see Dan BenAmos, “ ‘Context’ in Context,” Western Folklore 52 (1993): 209–26. 2. I use the text from the Munich MS because that MS is unique in having its own full version of this story. Margalioth states that the London MS, which he usually presents as the major text, quotes only the opening of the tale and then refers the reader to Ecclesiastes Rabbah, from which the text for this tale seems to have been copied for printed editions of the Leviticus Rabbah; he too reproduces the Ecclesiastes Rabbah version. Mordecai Margulies (Margalioth), Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah: A Critical Edition Based on Manuscripts and Genizah Fragments with Variants and Notes (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1972). Because the Munich MS text not only has a complete version of this tale but is also of such good quality, especially where the narratives are concerned, Jonah Fraenkel selected it for his analysis in “The Construction of Time in Aggadic Narratives,” in Studies in Aggadah, Targum, and Liturgy in Memory of Joseph Heinemann, ed. Ezra Fleischer and Jacob Y. Petuchovski (Jerusalem: Magnes Press and HUCA Press, 1981; Hebrew), 133–62. For consistency, I also quote the homiletical portions of the chapter from the Munich MS throughout this chapter unless otherwise noted. 3. Joseph Heinemann, “ Profile of a Midrash: The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971): 141–50. Jacob Neusner characterizes all of Leviticus Rabbah as constructed upon “propositional” logic; Jacob Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism’s Generative Logic (Binghamton, N.Y.: Global Publications, 2002), 78–87. 4. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “The Snake in the Wedding Chamber: A Semiotic Reconsideration of the Comparative Method of Folk Narrative Research,” ARV: A Scandinavian Yearbook for Folklore 43 (1987): 73–87. 5. Regarding the infiltration of the materials of the haftarah from the book of Jonah into the narrative regarding Titus’ penetration into

170 / Notes to Pages 88–91 the Temple and his subsequent death in Leviticus Rabbah 22.3, see Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Within Limits and Beyond: History and Body in Midrashic Texts,” International Folklore Review 9 (1993): 5–12. 6. Avigdor Shinan has pointed out the generative function of the biblical verse for the construction of Midrashic narrative: “The Tale of the Dog and Ten Lambs,” Sinai 85 (1979): 138–64; Hebrew. Jonah Fraenkel has suggested that it is very often necessary to go beyond the quoted verses in order to understand the full function of a quote in a Rabbinic tale: The Methods of Aggadah and Midrash, vol. 1 (Givatayyim: Yad la-Talmud, 1991; Hebrew), 247–48. 7. Joseph Heinemann, “The Proem in the Aggadic Midrashim: A Form-Critical Study, in Studies in Aggadah and Jewish Folk Literature. Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971), ed. Joseph Heinemann and Dov Noy, 100–122. 8. Note the semantic shift from Proverbs, where the law is the one taught by an earthly father to his son, to the Rabbinical elaboration where the original Torati is glossed as God’s Law and the learning of it. In the Bible God is introduced into the discourse only in verse 3 and becomes central in verse 4. 9. Leviticus Rabbah 25.1, Margalioth, 566–67. 10. Lee I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1989): on the Rabbis as a class, 14; on the jurisdiction of the Nasi extending beyond the Rabbinic class, 42; on the hostility between the Rabbis and Am Ha’arets, 31. 11. Leviticus Rabbah 25.1, Margalioth, 68–69. Margalioth makes the correct observation that “the connection between this homily and the preceding one is weak,” as this is the point where the oscillation from one meaning to another occurs. 12. See Margalioth, 569; the passage is not included in the Munich MS. 13. Corrected according to the Leyden MS version. The Palestinian Talmud is as a rule quoted here from the Krotoshin edition (Jerusalem: Shiloh, 1969). Addenda and corrections may be introduced using the printed edition, The Leyden MS of the Palestinian Talmud (Jerusalem: The Academy of Hebrew Language, 2001).

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14. The Leviticus Rabbah passage is followed by two examples, Shimon the brother of Azariyah in the Mishna, and Issaschar the brother of Zebulon in the Bible, who both studied while being economically supported by their brothers. Then follows the connection to the beginning of the Torah portion “and it shall be when thou art come into the land,” which Margalioth has deemed as weak (572). 15. According to the Munich MS, this homily was recited by Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi; according to all other versions, Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin in the name of Rabbi Levi. 16. The homilist addresses only verse 11, but the narrative that follows seems to relate to the connection between 10 and 11. The homily also relates to Deuteronomy 8:7. Another intertextual connection with Proverbs chapter 3 is possible: “Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chastens his son, the Lord thy God chastens thee” (Deuteronomy 8:5), cf. “For whom the Lord loves he corrects, even as the father the son in whom he delights” (Proverbs 3:12). In parallel to the promise of the material reward mentioned above, see also Proverbs 3:10, 14, in accordance with “A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness . . .” (Deuteronomy 8:9). 17. Although Moses is the interlocutor, and he is known for using motherly metaphors (Numbers 11:12, “have I conceived all these people?”), I assume that here God is the mother referred to, as in another parable describing a bird and her chicks; see Lamentations Rabbah, ed. Salomon Buber (Vilna: The Widow and the Brothers Romm, 1899), 15, proem 20; briefly discussed in Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 179. 18. Fraenkel, “The Construction of Time,” esp. 154–58, 160. Fraenkel focuses only on the chronological aspect of the narrative structure. 19. Cf. yTa’anit [Ta’aniyot] 4.2, p. 68a; Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, ed. Bernard Mandelbaum (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1987), 402; Leviticus Rabbah 22.4, Margalioth, 108–9; Lamentations Rabbah (printed edition) 1.1; and, with slight change, in Buber, 54; and with regard to Hadrian, again in Ruth Rabbah 3.2. The formula “let his bones rot” (gzyr qdl, tvyr qdl, qtzi’a tzw’r’) is discussed by Saul Lieberman, in Studies in Palestinian Talmudic Literature, ed. David

172 / Notes to Pages 95–98 Rosenthal (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991; Hebrew), 516–20, esp. 520, note 38. The article was originally published in Tarbiz 47 (1978): 15–19. 20. Proverbs are concise articulations of collective experience in a poetic language, based on the deep structure of a conditional clause, repeatedly used by a speech community. Galit Hasan-Rokem, Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives: A Structural Semantic Analysis, Folklore Fellows Communications no. 232 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1982), 11–19. 21. Note the wordplay in Aramaic: “qam lei qamei,” repeated in the parallel episode concerning the neighbor, “oqmei.” 22. In all other versions except for Munich MS, the motif is repeated inthefactthatthehumiliatedneighborstandsatthepalacegateuntildark. 23. A. H. Finkelstein, “Studies in the Language of the Tannaim,” Tarbiz 20 (1949): 96–106 (Hebrew), deals with the unripe figs at 98, quoting Saul Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1942), 162–63, who pointed out that “she ate unripe figs (pagim)” means that the woman has committed adultery. Dina Stein has also reminded me of the following reference: Daniel Sperber, Magic and Folklore in Rabbinic Literature (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1994), 134–36, dealing with Sifre for Numbers, paragraph 137, p. 183 in the Horowitz edition, refers to a Greek custom of shaming that should explain the usage. Some instances in Talmudic-Midrashic literature and the traditional commentaries for it on the verse in the Song of Songs refer to the unripe figs as the sinners, in comparison to the grapes that are righteous: e.g., Midrash Rabbah Shir Ha-shirim (Midrash Hazita), ed. Shimon Dunsky (Jerusalem: Dvir, 1980), ad locam. 24. Margalioth, 576; The Exempla of the Rabbis, ed. Moses Gaster (New York: Ktav, 1968; orig. pub., 1924), no. 26, note at 190–91. Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, Folklore Fellows Communications no. 182 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961 [3rd printing, 1987]); see type no. 928 at 325 and no. 1689 at 474–86. 25. Tamar Alexander, Maaseh Ahuv va-Hetsi: The Folk Narrative of Sephardic Jews (Jerusalem and Beer-Sheva: Magnes Press and Ben-

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Gurion University Press, 1999; Hebrew), 221; for a comprehensive discussion of the genre, 221–79. 26. Ibid., 356, and the comprehensive discussion at 354–83. Eli Yassif’s discussion of the “comic tales” in Rabbinic literature seems to reveal a contradiction. In his monumental The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline Teitelbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Hebrew original, 1995), he claims that Rabbinic literature has included very few humorous tales (166), but on the other hand apologizes for referring to only a few of the numerous examples (168). Accordingly, the following comment seems unsubstantiated: “folktales illuminate important social and psychological aspects of society, yet are almost completely ignored by the educated culture of the period” (179). Presuming that Rabbinic literature was produced in the context of “the educated culture of the period,” the overwhelming richness of folk narrative in the corpus speaks for itself—as further shown by the fact that Yassif’s chapter dealing with Rabbinic literature is the longest in his book. 27. Yassif, Hebrew Folktale, 297–321, on the medieval Hebrew historical legend, which I find more illuminating than his discussion of the historical legend in Rabbinic literature, 132–44. 28. “Konglomerat,” Enzyklopädie des Märchens (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994) 8: 132–34; Galit Hasan-Rokem, Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives, 77, 93–95. 29. Humor is a topic that has invited research from various disciplines: folk narrative research, literary criticism, logic, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and anthropology, just to name the most conventional ones. This is not the occasion to mention all the important scholarship addressing the topic, but one example is Avner Ziv, Jewish Humor (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 30. David Navon, “Notes on Properties of Jokes: The Inappropriate Disguised as Appropriate,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore 4 (1983): 125–45; Hebrew. 31. The structural mechanism of the joke thus resembles that of the riddle, also providing momentary relief in a naturally insoluble situation, an enigma that is crystallized in the genre of the riddle that does

174 / Notes to Pages 100–102 make a solution possible. See my “Spinning Threads of Sand: Riddles as Images of Loss,” in Untying the Knot: Riddles and Enigmatic Modes, ed. Galit Hasan-Rokem and David Shulman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 118–21; and Web of Life, 62–66, 198. 32. The interpretation of the subversive potential of folk narratives is the backbone of my Web of Life. For a brilliant and theoretically informed analysis of parody in Rabbinic literature see Joshua Levinson, “Upside-Down World,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 14 (1993): 7–29; Hebrew. Levinson tends to attenuate the concept of parody further than I would, and he would perhaps see parody in the present case as well. Preferring the concept of parody minimizes the importance of the unconfined discursive space of oral communication that was especially dominant in ancient cultures, while I consider it absolutely imperative not to pinpoint all forms of literary transition and similarity within the framework of specific written works. On polemical parody see Israel Y. Yuval, “Easter and Passover as Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” in Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times, ed. Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman, vol. 5 of Two Liturgical Traditions (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1999), 98–124. For a critique of the too widespread use of the concept of parody in another context of literary scholarship of the ancient period, see Glen W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: From Nero to Julian, Sather Classical Lectures, 58 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; orig. pub. 1994), 126. 33. Richard Bauman, Story, Performance, Event: Contextual Studies of Folk Narrative, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 33–53. 34. This motif may appear in various contexts, such as the two women neighbors who meet Elijah on Passover Eve; Aarne and Thompson, Types of the Folktale, no. 676, 237–38. I have discussed some Jewish versions of the type in Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives, 71–75. 35. Hasan-Rokem, “ ‘The Snake in the Wedding Chamber,’ ” 73–75. 36. Yom Tov Lippmann Zunz, Die gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden historisch entwickelt (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffman, 1892), 191 ff.; Margalioth, Part V, “Introduction, Supplements and Indices,”

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XXVII–XL; Hermann L. Strack and Günther Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. Markus Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 313–22. 37. See note 1 to this chapter. And see Marc G. Hirschman, “Midrash Qohelet Rabbah: Ch. 1–4, Commentary and Introduction,” Ph.D. diss., Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1983 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1983). 38. The term here is pagim, the “green figs” of the King James translation of the Song of Songs 2:13. 39. I do not intend to discuss the question of which version is the earlier one or their closeness to a presumed oral performance. One should, however, remember that Olrik’s famously claimed dominant number three of folk prose may in this case also signal that the conveyor of the written version was consciously assigning folk style to the narrative. Axel Olrik, Folkdigtningens Episke Love. Folkelige Afhandlinger. Efter forfattarens död udvalgte og udgivne af Hans Ellekilde (Copenhagen: Kristiania, 1919); English translation, “The Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,” in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 129–41; also in Olrik, Principles for Oral Narrative Research, trans. K. Wolf and J. Jensen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 41–61. 40. In the London MS. 41. At this point Margalioth introduced a slight change in the London MS version, based on other manuscripts. 42. The comparison demands, of course, to be carried out on the whole chapter 25 of Leviticus Rabbah. As far as I can judge, the status of the said homily on Job does not differ in the London MS and the printed edition from what has been quoted above from the Munich MS in ways that have any bearing on the analysis of the tale in its context. 43. The reaction of the servants here recalls the structural function as well as the tone of the reaction of Rabbi Meir’s disciples in the story in Leviticus Rabbah 9.9, Margalioth, 192–93, who angrily ponder over their teacher’s readiness to take the spitting of the woman, discussed in chapter 3.

176 / Notes to Pages 106–108 44. “Hassid ummot ha-olam”; the concept is medieval, and I apply it here strictly metaphorically. 45. Again, following the line of comparison, the emperor’s comparing himself with the Creator is paralleled in the Rabbi Meir tale, where the rabbi compares himself with the Creator’s readiness to have his name erased for the sake of domestic peace. See chapter 3. 46. In addition to Margalioth’s extensive annotation quoting Lieberman, we may also suggest that following the Hebrew pah = snare, she is one who lays snares; Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990). Regarding the idiom bar-qablai, see Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950), 12–13. Serge Ruzer has suggested the possible affinity of the term for the division between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness” in the literary sphere of the Dead Sea Scrolls. See David Flusser, Jewish Sources in Early Christianity (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Paolim, 1974), 216–317. See also Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman and James C. Vanderkam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vol. 1: Dualism, 215–20. 47. Midrash ha-gadol, ed. Mordecai Margulies (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1975), Lekh lekha 20.14, 239–40; Exempla of the Rabbis, Gaster, no. 26.19. The two versions are identical, and Margalioth states that the Exempla of the Rabbis version takes after the Midrash hagadol, where it is included in the chapter elaborating on Abraham’s departure toward Canaan. The verse referred to is: “And blessed be the most high God, which has delivered thine enemies into your hand. And he gave them tithes of all” (Genesis 20:14); in the same Torah reading chapter (Lekh lekha) it is also said: “For all the land which you see, I will give to you, and to your seed forever” (Genesis 13:15). 48. In the printed edition as well as in Buber’s edition (Midrash Tanhuma, ed. and introduction Solomon Buber [Vilnius: Romm, 1913; printed edition, Jerusalem: Lewin-Epstein, 1962]; in English, Midrash Tanhuma (S. Buber Recension), trans. with Indices and Brief Notes John

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T. Townsend, vol. 2: Exodus and Leviticus [Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1997]), 307, Qedoshim §8. 49. Lamentations Rabbah 2 and yTa’anit [Ta’aniyot] 4.5 have the number “three and a half years”; Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 161. 50. Following the terminology of classical philology, the term redaction has also been used for variants. 51. The two most basic tools for carrying out this kind of work are the two international indices: for tale types Aarne and Thompson, Types of the Folktale; and for motifs Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1961). In addition I have been privileged to enjoy the rich collections at the editorial offices of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, a project of the German Academy of Science in Göttingen. I thank especially Professor Ulrich Marzolph, Professor Hans-Jörg Uther, and Dr. Christine Shoajei-Kawan for their help. For the first half of the tale see Elisheva Schoenfeld’s article, “Bäume für die nächste Generation (AaTh 928),” Enzyklopädie des Märchens (1977), 1: 1391–93. The article reflects Jewish tradition incompletely, and the Talmud and Midrash versions are quoted from secondary literature even though, as we shall see later, earlier folk literary scholars knew the primary sources in German translations. 52. An extensive exposition of the comparative method of folk literary research would not be appropriate here. The method was developed in the geographical-historical or the Finnish school, so named after its first conceivers and practitioners, Julius Krohn and especially his son Kaarle. Kaarle Krohn, Folklore Methodology: Formulated by Julius Krohn and Expanded by Nordic Researchers (Austin: Publications of the American Folklore Society; Bibliographical and Special Series 21, University of Texas Press, 1971). The book was originally published in German in Oslo in 1926. Although most of the epistemological premises of the method as such, based on an application of classical philological methods to oral literary performances in combination with mixed evolutionary and devolutionary ideas, have been discarded by now, the working tools of the school may be applied in new theoretical

178 / Notes to Page 111 frameworks. Hasan-Rokem, “ ‘The Snake in the Wedding Chamber,’ ” and “Aurora Borealis: Trans-formations of Classical Nordic Folklore Theories,” in Norden og Europa: Fagtradisjoner i nordisk etnologi og folkloristikk (Oslo: Novus, 2000), 269–85. 53. Thompson, Motif Index, J 701.1 “Planting for the Next Generation”; Dov Neuman (Noy), “Motif-Index of Talmudic-Midrashic Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1954; University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Mich., Doctoral Dissertation Series Publication No. 8792, J 701.1+). Moses Gaster applies a similar procedure in the bibliographical notes to his Exempla of the Rabbis. For the present discussion consult text no. 422 at 164; corresponding note at 264. 54. By the end of the nineteenth century comparative research had already acknowledged the relative old age of the Talmudic-Midrashic versions in the context of the history of the types under inquiry. Reinhold Köhler, Kleinere Schriften zur Märchenforschung (Weimar, 1898),1: 495–96 quotes secondary sources and refers only to the last, humorous half of the tale (AT 1689); Albert Wesselski, Narren, Gaukler, und Volkslieblinge, Bd. 1, Arlotto’s Schwänke (Berlin: Alexander Duncker Verlag, 1910), 227–28, quotes the German translation of the Leviticus Rabbah by Wünsche (Der Midrasch Wajikra Rabba . . . in Deutsche übertragen, von August Wünsche [Leipzig: Schulze, 1884]), stressing the first half of the story (AT 928); Johannes Bolte and Georg Polívka, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- u. Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1918), 3: 191, also quote Wünsche’s German translation, discussing the second part (AT 1689) as well; Ingrid Tomkowiak, Curiöse Bauer-Historien. Zur Tradierung einer Fiktion (Würzburg: Richard Mayr, 1987), 185–86, points to the tale of the Midrash as the source for medieval sermons discussing the last part of the story (AT 928). 55. Georgios A. Megas, “Pinakes Mytho¯n, Paramythio¯n kai Eutrapelo¯n Die¯ge¯so¯n Periodika. Symbole¯ eis ton Die¯thne¯ Katalogon Typo¯n,” in Laographia 21 (1963/64): 491–509, is a type index that refers only to stories from contemporary Greece for both types, AT 928 and AT 1689.

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56. Victor Chauvin, Bibliographie des Ouvrages Arabes ou Relatifs aux Arabes publiés dans l’Europe chrétienne de 1810 à 1885 (Liège: H. Vaillant-Carmanne and Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1897), “Kalilah,” 2: 208; René Basset, Mille et Un Contes, Récits & Légendes Arabes, vol. 1, Contes Merveilleux—Contes Plaisants (Paris: Librairie Orientale et Américaine Maisonneuve Frères, 1924), no. 75, 354–55. Basset lists a number of medieval sources. 57. M. Lidzbarski, Geschichten und Lieder aus neuaramäischen Handschriften (Weimar, 1896), 154–55. 58. Albert Wesselski, Der Hodscha Nasreddin (Weimar: Alexander Duncker Verlag, 1911), I. Bd. S. 227; S. 235; Ulrich Marzolph, Nasreddin Hodscha: 666 wahre Geschichten (Munich: Beck, 1996), no. 365, 158; sources, 308. 59. Köhler, Kleinere Schriften, 494–95. 60. Joseph von Hammer, Rosenöl . . . , oder Sagen und Kunden des Morgenlandes aus arabischen, persischen, und türkischen Quellen gesammelt. (Stuttgart/Tübingen, 1813), 2: 85, no. XLIX. Von Hammer quotes the Persian poet Djami (1414–92). 61. J. E. Hanauer, Folk-Lore of the Holy Land (London: 1907), 161–62. The note to this tale reads, “Tale told by a Moslem in Jaffa. [Variants of this story are legion in Syria and Egypt, but the greater number could not be fitly ranged under the headline, ‘Moral Tales.’]” 62. Cf. Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 83, where I cautiously raised a similar assumption regarding the continuity of local tradition in the case of a story existing in Talmudic-Midrashic tradition and told today by Jews from Iraq. Unlike the case discussed there, the Jewish oral traditions relevant to the present discussion reveal very slight similarity with the Rabbinic narratives. 63. As always, I am grateful to Edna Heichal, the administrative director of the Israeli Folktale Archive (IFA) at the University of Haifa. Since the material is bountiful, I do not discuss separate occurrences of each of the types, only conglomerations of AT 928 and AT 1689, as in the Leviticus Rabbah tale and the tale quoted by Hanauer. Also of great interest is the Iraqi folktale in Neuarabische Geschichten aus dem Iraq, ed.

180 / Notes to Pages 114–116 Bruno Meissner (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903), no. 35, 63–67, that combines the two tale types with another one, AT 655, “The Strayed Camel and the Clever Deductions,” extant in Lamentations Rabbah; see Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 50, 58–59, 64, 70, 73, 82–86. 64. IFA 1088 was recorded in 1959 by Issachar Ben-Ami as told by Mordechai Khalfon, born in Morocco. For technical reasons the archive has only the summary of this tale, not a complete recording. IFA 3864 was recorded by Zvi Moshe Haimowitz as told by David Eliyahu, born in Iraq, and was published in Dov Noy, ed., Jewish-Iraqi Folktales (TelAviv: Am Oved, 1965), 54. 65. It is assumed that the narrative as it was published has undergone heavy editing, stylistic and maybe also structural. The same must be assumed about the tale quoted from Hanauer. Consequently, the more contemporary tales that have been discussed here do not differ in principle from the ones in the ancient collections that also underwent editing and stylizing. 66. See, for example, D. P. Rotunda, Motif-Index of the Italian Novella in Prose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1942), 79, J2563: “Thank God they weren’t peaches!” Some of the sources referred to there bear interesting resemblance to our tale, such as the occurrence of a proverb in the tale: “Manco male, ch’elle non furon pesche”; cf. Wesselski, 1911, 228: “Fortuna che non furon pesche.” 67. Sebastian Lo Nigro, Racconti populari Siciliani (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1957), *752E. S., Pietro e il vecchio. In this story Peter doubts that the old man will live long enough to eat of the fruit of the tree that he is planting, whereas Jesus assures him that that will indeed be the case. 68. Virgil, with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1978; orig. pub. 1916; new revised edition 1935), 1: 69. The Latin original, 68: “insere, Daphni, piros; carpent tua poma nepotes.” 69. C. Svetoni Tranqvilli, De Vita Caesarum, Libri VIII in Opera, ex recensione Maximiliani Ihm (Lipsiae [Leipzig]: B. G. Teubner, 1907), Tiberius, vol. 1, cap. 60, 152; Suetonius with an English translation by

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J. C. Rolfe (London: William Heinemann, and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964; orig. pub. 1913, based on Ihm’s text) 1: 376–77. Luis da Camara Cascudo, Trinta “Estorias” Brasileiras (Lisbon: Portucalense Editora,1955), 45, mentions Suetonius in a comparative note to a Brazilian version of the same subtype, extant in Arabic traditions, that was mentioned above, in note 58. 70. Camara Cascudo points out that the tale is also extant in Italian oral traditions; the example he quotes actually combines elements from Suetonius and the Leviticus Rabbah tale, as the peasant brings figs to his feudal lord who orders them to be thrown in the peasant’s face. The peasant thanks God that he did not bring fish! Cascudo, Trinta “Estorias,” 45–46. Camara Cascudo reports as his source Vallardi, Le cento novelle antiche (Milan: 1924), 84–85, and claims that this work was originally composed in the period between 1193 and 1350. I have not seen this source. 71. One scholar has concluded from his geographical-historical comparison mentioning both major Rabbinical versions of the tale that Suetonius’ source must have been an oral Hebrew narrative! R. Besthorn, Ursprung und Eigenart der älteren italinischen Novelle (Halle [Saale]: M. Niemeyer, 1935), 108: C. Suoetoni Tranquilli quae supersunt omnia. Rec. C. L. Roth (Lipsiae, 1858): De Vita Caesarum, Liber III, cap. 60. Besthorn’s references to the Rabbinical tales are from secondary literature. 72. Anthony R. Birley, Hadrian, the Restless Emperor (London: Routledge, 1997), 232. 73. Ibid., 75. 74. Joshua Levinson, “The Athlete of Piety: Fatal Fictions in Rabbinic Literature,” Tarbiz 68 (1999): 61–86; Hebrew. 75. Bowersock, Fiction as History, 95. Bowersock on one hand rejects Artemidorus and contends that fiction holds “real historical significance” (95), and on the other hand argues forcefully against Michel Foucault’s reliance on the Oneirokritika (83) in his cultural history of human sexuality. I suggest modifications to both contentions, but even more forcefully to Bowersock’s rather surprising total disdain for the study of literary parallels in historical and literary interpretation (14, 32). 76. See Jonah Fraenkel’s resolute objection to the common usage of

182 / Notes to Pages 118–119 Rabbinic narratives as historical “sources,” Methods of Aggadah and Midrash, 1: 237–38; also Levinson, “The Athlete of Piety,” 85–86. A historian has expressed a similar view: Moshe David Herr, “The Concept of History of the Rabbis,” Proceedings of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies (1979), 3: 129 ff. 77. “For any coherent and persuasive interpretation of the Roman empire it becomes obvious that fiction must be viewed as part of its history” (Bowersock, Fiction as History, 12). This somewhat mechanistic outlook at the beginning of the book evolves into a more sophisticated approach toward the end: “Fiction became antiquity’s most eloquent expression of the nexus between polytheism and scripture” (141). 78. The prime structure to be mentioned in the context of the present story is of course the Hadrianeon of Tiberias. Also worthy of special mention is the stately, larger than life-size statue of Hadrian, which is now at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and which adorns the cover of Birley’s biography. Ferdinand Gregorovius suggested that Hadrian was disposed to build “mixed” cities of Jews, Greeks, and Syrians; he also mentions the fact that Tsippori in the Galilee bore, in addition to its Roman name Diocaesarea, the name Hadriana; The Emperor Hadrian: A Picture of the Graeco-Roman World in His Time, trans. Mary E. Robinson (London: Macmillan, 1898), 115. 79. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Dominick LaCapra, “A Poetics of Historiography: Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse,” in his Rethinking Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 72–83. 80. Carlo Ginzburg, “Die Üntersuchung der Tatsachen: Der Richter und der Historiker,” in Kultur der Evidenz, ed. Gary Smith (Potsdam: Das Einstein Forum, 1997), 7. Cf. Roland Barthes’ use of “code” in S/Z–An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, The Noonday Press, 1993; orig. pub. 1974), 18–22. 81. Arnold I. Davidson, “Carlo Ginzburg und die Erneuerung der Historiographie,” in Smith, ed., Kultur der Evidenz, 23. 82. The relationship between Hadrian and the Jews is central in all

Note to Page 120

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biographical works on the emperor, including the latest and most comprehensive one by Birley (again, with the sculpture now at the Israel Museum on its cover). There are some early studies of the issue, notably: David Spiegel, Die Kaiser Titus und Hadrian im Talmud und Midrasch bei den zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibern (Wien: D. Spiegel, 1906). See also Friedrich Münter, Der jüdische Krieg unter den Kaiser Trajan und Hadrian (Altona: J. F. Hammerich, 1821) and Moses Auerbach, Zur politischen Geschichte der Juden unter Kaiser Hadrian (Berlin: B. Harz, 1924). These two books have survived in some libraries. In the library of the Alexander von Humboldt University in Berlin, although they are extant in the catalogue, the librarian’s sincere efforts to locate them were in vain—a rather gruesome parallel to the Israeli artist Micha Ullmann’s installation at the nearby Bebelsplatz, “Library” (1995), which commemorates the Nazi burning of books at the same site on May 10, 1933. See also Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representation of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2000), 215. 83. See Lives of the Later Caesars: The First Part of the Augustan History, With Newly Compiled Lives of Nerva and Trajan, translated and introduced by Anthony Birley (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976), 57–95. The Latin version that I used is Herbert W. Benario, A Commentary on the “Vita Hadriani” in the “Historia Augusta,” American Philological Association American Classical Studies 7 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1980). Another important ancient source is Cassius Dio’s The History of Rome. Birley’s introductory chapter includes a detailed critical review of Hadrianic historiography from antiquity to the present (Hadrian, 1–9). He mentions the fact that the author(s)-editor(s) of the Historia Augusta (henceforth HA) may have had recourse to Hadrian’s autobiography, which now exists only in fragments, and the fact that Cassius Dio (who also mentions an autobiography) reached us through a Byzantine epitome (299). Birley’s biography is completely in line with Bowersock’s methodology, and he frequently refers to contemporary poets and authors of fiction. He also relies heavily on archeological finds, especially numismatic ones,

184 / Notes to Pages 120–121 which are quite abundant in Hadrian’s case because of his frequent mintings. Max Kadushin too was puzzled by “wicked Hadrian’s” conduct in the tale; see his A Conceptual Commentary on Midrash Leviticus Rabbah: Value Concepts in Jewish Thought (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1987). 84. Moshe David Herr, “Persecution and Martyrdom in Hadrian’s Days,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 23 (1972): 85–125. 85. Peter Schäfer, Der Bar Kokhba-Aufstand: Studien zum zweiten jüdischen Krieg gegen Rom, Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum herausgegeben von Martin Hengel und Peter Schäfer, vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1981). See also Schäfer, “Hadrian’s Policy in Judea and the Bar Kokhba Revolt: A Reassessment,” in A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature in History, ed. Philip R. Davies and Richard T. White (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 293–97. 86. This view is expressed in Schäfer’s introductory chapter, especially at 1–4, but also throughout the book. Although I appreciate most of his harsh criticism of Zionist (“nationalist,” in his terms) historiography of the Bar-Kokhva uprising, his critique lacks reflection on his own interpretative practice. He is especially harsh in his analysis of the use of the terms “genocide” and “mass-murder” with reference to the Roman subduing of the rebellion (with reference to Yeivin, 2; to Yadin, 3, 179, 192; to S. Appelbaum, 4). See also his acclaim for Glen W. Bowersock’s “A Roman Perspective on the Bar Kochba War,” in Approaches to Ancient Judaism, ed. W. S. Green (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 2: 131–41. 87. Schäfer, Bar Kokhba-Aufstand, 236–44; the narratives are, in the order Schäfer discusses them, Midrash Tehillim 93.6; Genesis Rabbah 63.7; Midrash Tannaim, 262; Seder Eliyahu Zuta chap. 15, p. 199; Leviticus Rabbah 25.5 (“our” text); Tanhuma, Buber’s edition, Mishpatim §7. 88. Schäfer refers only to the printed version. 89. Ibid., 48, note 81.

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90. Ibid., 139. At 179–80 Schäfer assumes that there is a connection with state-owned land, and makes the astute observation that “between Tiberias and Tsippori” is a formulaic way to describe a large area rather than an exact localization. 91. Ibid., 242. 92. Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 160–69. 93. Schäfer, Bar Kokhba-Aufstand, 47: “naiv-unbekümmert die Psyche des jüdischen Volkes unterschätzt habe.” See also Bowersock, “A Roman Perspective.” 94. Schäfer, Bar Kokhba-Aufstand, 49, note 83. 95. Martin Hengel, “Hadrians Politik gegenüber Juden und Christen,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 16/17 (1984/85): 153–82. Hengel widens the scope by comparing Hadrian’s relations with the Jews with those with the Christians. In what sounds like a direct reply to Schäfer, whom Hengel quotes frequently, he systematically applies terms like “exterminated” (“vernichtet,” 175, note 101), “war of extermination” (176), and once even the parallel of genocide, “Ausrottungskrieg” (171), when he describes Hadrian’s and the Roman army’s methods in subduing the Bar-Kokhva uprising. Hengel quotes Cassius Dio’s moving account of the enormous numbers of dead, concluding in the phrase “And Judea turned into wasteland” (178). Hengel shares Schäfer’s endorsement of Bowersock’s work on the topic. Cf. the Rabbinical statement that Hadrian brought about massive destruction in the Galilee—“In the early days when olives were scarce as Hadrian had come and destroyed the whole country” (yShevi’it, 7.1 f.20a)—a situation that had totally improved by the time the statement was made. 96. Genesis Rabbah 67.3, in Bereschit Rabba with critical notes and commentary by Jehudah Theodor, with additional corrections by Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 685. 97. Yassif, Hebrew Folktale, in the index at “Solomon.” 98. Compare Harun A-Rashid (or er-Rashid) in notes 60 and 61. I am consciously applying here Propp’s terminology for the dramatis

186 / Notes to Pages 122–125 personae; Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, rev. and ed. Louis A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977; orig. pub. as Morfologija skazki [Leningrad: Academia, 1928]). 99. Another perspective is that of the universal appeal projected on Jewish learning in those dialogues; see Marc (Menahem) Hirshman, Torah for the Entire World (Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999; Hebrew), 150–64. 100. Midrash Tannaim, for Deuteronomy, ed. David Tsvi Hoffmann (Tel Aviv, 1964; reprint of 1909 Berlin edition), 262. 101. The concept of multivocality is one of the central terms in discussing Rabbinic literature in my Web of Life. 102. Again, I want to recall Joshua Levinson’s perspicacious discussion in “The Athlete of Piety.” 103. Marguerite Yourcenar, Hadrian’s Memoirs, trans. from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1957). 104. Birley, Hadrian; at 9 in the introductory chapter and at 314 in note 13, he mentions the discussion among historians on Yourcenar’s success in shaping this historical figure in fiction. Birley reinforces the strong impact of the novel on historians as well as their debate about its reliability. Benario, the editor and translator of the HA, also makes a point in his introduction that Yourcenar “is remarkably successful in evoking the character of the man” (13). See also Jan Scholtmeijer’s suggestion that “the HA is best read not as history but as a historical novel”; quoted in David Konstan, “The Invention of Fiction,” in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative, ed. Ronald F. Hock, J. Bradley Chance, and Judith Perkins (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1998), 13, n. 26. 105. Birley, Hadrian, 247. 106. Ibid., 249. Birley quotes Ulrich von Willamowitz-Mollendorf from the 1930s and Yourcenar, as well as a book by Wilfred G. Lambert, published after Yourcenar’s novel. 107. Ibid.: “There is no indication of the time of the year and it must

Notes to Pages 125–130

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be a guess that he left Egypt in the spring” (256); “Whether Hadrian’s health was improved by his stay in Egypt is not clear. . . . There may be a hint of this on the reverse of a coin issue from the mint at Rome,” etc. (257); “Hadrian went from Egypt to Syria, probably sailing along the coast,” etc. (259); “Hadrian may have installed a new governor in 131” (260); and numerous other examples. 108. Ibid., 3–5. In addition, as noted, Birley has made particular use of archeology and numismatics; see note 83 to this chapter. 109. See the introductions to the HA texts in Benario, Commentary, and Birley, Lives of the Later Caesars, in which the complex nature and sources of the work are described. One should not, however, neglect Goodman’s view that the biographies of Hadrian and the Antonine Caesars are the most reliable part of the HA; Martin Goodman, The Roman World, 44 B.C.–A.D. 180, Routledge History of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 1997), 5. 110. See Catherine Edwards, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City, Roman Literature and Its Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 111. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. 112. E.g., the emperor in the tale of Miriam and her seven martyred sons, Lamentations Rabbah 1.16; Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 117–18. 113. Birley, Hadrian, 259–78, esp. 274–76. 114. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). 115. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 50–66. 116. Levinson, “The Athlete of Piety,” in which the public script is that of the Romans, the hidden one expresses Jewish and early Christian stances. 117. Hengel, “Hadrians Politik,” 159–60, esp. note 35. 118. See the discussion of the stereotype above, especially in chapters 1 and 2.

188 / Notes to Pages 130–135 119. Boyarin, Dying for God, 55, points at a similar function of folk narrative in Rabbinic literature. On the function of humor in contexts of hierarchy, see also Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 212–13. 120. Levinson, “The Athlete of Piety,” 86. 121. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). 122. Figs were apparently popular in ancient humor, see, e.g., Barry Baldwin, The Philogelos or Laughter-Lover (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1983), jokes 178, 224, 238, 243. 123. Compare with the parable referring to Genesis in chapter 2. 124. Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). In the folklore of many other peoples the fig figures in various forms, “Feige, Feigenbaum,” Enzyklopädie des Märchens, vol. 4 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 979–81; Thompson, Motif Index, A2711.7, F811.10, R311, D1393.1. For figs in Rabbinic literature, see also note 23 to this chapter. 125. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 368–436. 126. The same chapter in Proverbs also includes two verses suggesting the second half of the story: “Though thou should bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him” (verse 22), and, ironically (for “our” story): “better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off” (verse 10). 127. Almost without change in Mark 13:28, and with slight changes in Luke 21:29–30. The parable seems to retain the Hebrew pun between “summer” (kayitz) and the looming “end” (ketz). See also Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972; 2nd. rev. trans. based on S. H. Hooke, 1962), 119–30. Jeremias discusses the fig parable with reference to ancient oriental folk narrative traditions. 128. HA chapter 17, Benario, Commentary, 32–33; Lives of the Later Caesars, 76.

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129. Ernst Kornemann, Kaiser Hadrian und der letzte grosse Historiker von Rom (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1905). Kornemann, like many others, distinguishes between the anonymous author of the life of Hadrian in the HA whose work ends at chapter 14 line 7, and who is considered relatively “sachlich,” and the other half of the work, in which our story is included and in which biographical anecdotes, not always favorable to the protagonist, abound. The same duality is also obvious in the story of Hadrian’s life as told by Cassius Dio. And see William Dodge Gray, A Life of Hadrian Prior to His Accession. Smith College Studies in History IV/2 (1919): 145–46. 130. Amos Funkenstein, “History, Counterhistory, and Narrative,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), 66–81; Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 49–74 (“Counterhistory and the Anecdote”). 131. Henri Bergson, Laughter (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956). 132. Birley, Hadrian, 301. Another translation offered by Birley (Lives of the Later Caesars, 85): Little charmer, wanderer, little sprite, Body’s companion and guest, To what places now will you take flight, Forbidding and empty and dim as night? And you won’t make your wonted jest!

CHAPTER FIVE 1. Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman, introduction by Umberto Eco (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 131. I thank Naama Rokem for reminding me of the relevance of Lotman’s thought for my work. 2. Ibid., 134. 3. Ibid., 136–37.

190 / Notes to Pages 143–144 4. Ibid., 138. 5. Ibid., 142. 6. Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 98–117, esp. 99–100.

INDEX OF ANCIENT SOURCES AND AUTHORS

THE HEBREW BIBLE Deuteronomy 6:5 6:10–12 8:5 8:9 25:5–6 25:9 26:1a 27:9b 27:26a Exodus 3:22 15:26b 24:7 32:4 Genesis 3:7 3:11 3:12 13:15 20:14 Habakkuk 3:17

Haggai 2:19 Hosea 6:7 Isaiah 34:4 43:12 49:7 Jeremiah 8:13 Job 38:27 38:31–32 38:36 39:13–18 Joel 2:22 Judges 9:11 Leviticus 5:1 18:5 19:17–18 19:18 19:20 19:23

45 92 171n16 171n16 69 69 89 90 90 143 78, 165n34, 66n35 19 19 130 34 34 176n47 176n47 131

191

131 20 131 19 123 131 92 93 92 92 131 131 18–20 81 45 43 93 88, 91, 108

192 / Index of Ancient Sources and Authors THE HEBREW BIBLE (continued) Malachi 4:6 Numbers 5:13–31 5:14 5:23 11:12 Proverbs 2:1 3:1a 3:10 3:12 3:14 3:16 3:18a 24:28 27:10 27:18 27:22 Psalms 19:2–3 19:13–14 25:11 29:11 110:1 126:1 Ruth 4:17 1 Samuel 28:24 2 Samuel 13:8 Song of Songs 2:13 Zechariah 3:10

51 63 64 63 171n17 89 89 89 171n16 89 89 88–89 19 19, 188n126 131 188n126 52 52 52 55, 62 52 110

46 47 47 47 76, 168n43 22 46 43–44 133 133 24 76, 168n43 52 17 49 159n38 24 51 51 52, 72 132 51

143

RABBINIC LITERATURE

18

MISHNA

18 96, 131, 175n38 131

THE NEW TESTAMENT Acts 9:3–12

John 4:7–9 4:12 4:22 8:48 9:6 Luke 5:7–9 9:53 10:25–37 13:3b–5b 13:6–10 13:20–21 Mark 8:22–25 12:36–37 Matthew 5:33–36 7:7–8 7:12 13:33 20:1–15 21:33–38 22:43–44 24:32 25:14–18

85

Bava Metsia 5:9 Eduyyot 5:6 Ketubbot 5:5 5:8 7:1 Niddah 4:3

27 64 150n34 67 70 74

Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Pesahim 3:4 Sanhedrin 10:1 Shevi’it 5:8 Sotah 1:2 Yevamot 12:6–7

20–21 78, 165n34 150n34 69 163n22

TOSEFTA (LIEBERMAN)

Ketubbot 5:7 Shabbat 7:23

70, 164n24 79

TOSEFTA (ZUCKERMANDEL)

Hullin 2:22 Sanhedrin 12:10

81

Shevi’it 7:1 185n95 Shvuot 6:5 16 Sotah 7:4 91 Ta’anit (Ta’aniyot) 3:10 110 4:8 121 BABYLONIAN TALMUD

Gittin 35a Shabbat 31a 127b Ta’anit 21b 23b 24b–25a

16 50, 159n38 74 28 109 32

MIDRASH RABBAH

166n35

MIDRASH TANNAIM

for Deuteronomy 26:19 122–23, 186n100 PALESTINIAN TALMUD

Avodah Zarah 2:2 Ma’aser Sheni 2:1 Peah 1:1 7:1 Sanhedrin 10:1 Shabbat 6:5 14:3 14:4

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81 166n36 78, 165n34 132 166n35 166n36 79 80–81

Ecclesiastes Rabbah 2:20 107 5:14 156n22 12:5 122 Genesis Rabbah 19:11 34 Lamentations Rabbah 3:21 40 Leviticus Rabbah 5:8 42, 48–49, 50 6:3 14–15 9:9 55–56 20:3 88 22:4 104 25:1 89 25:4 91, 107 25:5 87–88, 92, 103–4 34:16 14

194 / Index of Ancient Sources and Authors MIDRASH RABBAH (continued)

Song of Songs Rabbah 1:8 22 MIDRASH TANHUMA

Qedoshim 8

108

Historia Augusta 124–26, (HA) 134–36, 183n83 Lives of the Caesars Livy

116 126

Menander

155n13

Origen

118

Plautus Polybius

155n13 117, 126

Suetonius

116

Tacitus

117, 126

Virgil

116

PESIQTA RABBATI

113b

16–17

GREEK AND ROMAN SOURCES AND AUTHORS Cassius Dio

117–18, 24–26, 183n83

Galen

118

Herodas Hesiod

155n13 35

GENERAL INDEX

Archeological findings, 67; data of, 118 Arcturus, 93 Asia Minor, 85 “Athens and Jerusalem,” 127

Abraham, 91; and Sarah, 24 Academy (Bet-midrash), 10, 12, 27, 54, 58, 62, 67, 69 Acts of the Apostles, 84; apocryphic, 84 Adab, 112 Adam, 20, 34 Adultery, 62; accused adulteress, 69 Adventus, 117 Aelia Capitolina, 128 “Aesop, The Life of, ” 38 Aha, Rabbi, 48, 89, 91 Allegorical: exegesis of the Song of Songs, 19; level, 47 “Am Ha’arets,” 90 Amoraim, 28, 136 Anachronism, 116 Ananias, 85 Antinous, 125; death of, 127 Antiochia, 83 Aqiva, Rabbi, 21, 62, 78–79 Arabic, 111, 114 Arabic Orient, 111 Aramaic, 1, 3, 44, 92

Babylonia, 59, 127 Baking, 15–18, 21, 30, 36, 42, 54, 56, 68 Bar-Kokhva: death of, 117, 121; failure of his rebellion, 121; subduing of the uprising of, 127; uprising, 62, 120; wake of the revolt of, 129, 132 Bela (possibly croup), 80 Beruriah, 66 Bethar, 47, 95, 117; fall of, 121 Bible, 72, 122; chapter, 88; exegesis of, 53; Hebrew Bible, 28–29, 39, 61, 131, 143; interpretations of, 59; love poetry of the, 130; Scripture, 127. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Bitter water, 63–64 Blood, 54, 74

195

196 / General Index Body, 54, 75–77, 81; female, 69; human, 62, 75 Borders, 47, 124; insecurity of, 27; methodological crossing of, 125 Borrowing, 49, 53 Boundaries, 26, 31, 49, 53, 56–57, 74–76, 78, 124, 140–43; blurring of, 77; melting of, 79; obfuscation of, 47; transgressions of, 80 Bread, 16, 32, 36, 54 Caesarea, 59, 82 Canaan, Land of, 92 Candle, 55, 67 Capreae, 116 Carob trees, 110 Charm, 78, 80; of healing for the eye, 56, 79 Christianity, 40–42, 53, 59, 134; early, 82–83, 139–40 Christians, 11, 21, 25–26, 52, 57, 63, 76, 140–41; early circles of, 53; narratives of, 83; texts of, 46 Circumcision, 93, 95 Class, 97, 100; conflict of nation and, 129 Code, semiotic concept of, 119 Coins, 16, 22–23, 26 Collective: consciousness, 119; image, 122; representations, 131 Colonial: hegemony, 128; oppression, 127; power, 130; power relations, 127 Comic tale, 98–99. See also Joke Comparative: context, 142; folk narrative research, 33; methodology, 42, 110, 140 Conglomeration of folktale types, 98–100 Couple relations, 62

Crab, 116 Cross-cultural idiom, 33 Cult of the Saints, The, 37 Cultural: dialogue, 18; identities, 11; idiom, 8, 12, 19 “Cure,” 77 Cutheans, 43 Damascus, the way to, 84 Daphnis, 116 David, King, 52 “Death in the Nile,” 127 Decalogue (Midrash), 161n7 Demarcation, line of, 52 Dialogical approach, 5 Dialogue, 2, 5, 45, 59, 104, 122, 143 Discourse: homiletic, 89; multivoiced, 98; Talmudic-Midrashic and early Christianity, 140 Divine king, 39 Dreams: narratives of interpretation, 29 Droqart, 28 Ecclesiastes Rabbah (Midrash), 122. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Eden, 20; narrative, 34, 54 Egypt, 63 Eliezer, Ben Damma, Rabbi, 81 Elijah, the Prophet, 50–51 Eliyahu, David, 114 Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 176n46 Enzyklopädie des Märchens, 147n10, 173n28, 177n51, 188n124 Epicurean trains of thought, 24 Epimythia, 133 Essenes, 82

General Index Ethnographic: aspects of life, 61; character, 7; character of Rabbinic literature, 29; observation, 46; perspective, 30; relationship between narrative and reality, 142; view of Amoraic creativity, 136; writing, 3 Ethnography, 4; of everyday life, 9 Eve, 35 Everyday: experience, 23; life, 7, 12, 22–23, 30, 41, 56, 72, 138 “Everyday Life,” 11 “Evil neighbor woman,” 33, 50 Existential ambiguity: of Rabbinic literature, 40 Fall (season), 131 Fellâh, 112–13 Female, 69; body, 69; bonding, 33, 53, 140; sexuality, 67; speech, 14; “Female culture,” 7 Femininity, active, 131 Feminist: approach, 5; book of Hebrew Bible, 143–44; endeavor, 9 Fiction, 117–18, 126 Figs, 87, 96, 103, 109, 112–13, 130–31, 133; parable of the sprouting of, 131–32 Folk: literature, 5, 140; medicine, 77, 79, 141; narrative, 9–10, 21, 24, 42, 56, 86, 88, 135 Folklore, 5, 141; of the Holy Land, 112; studies of, 11 Folkloristic: motif, 71; point of view, 6 Folk narratives, 27, 31, 33, 51, 58, 60; comparative research method of, 110; Mediterranean and European, 38; repertoire, 134; research, 31; transformation of, 109

/ 197 Folktale, 13, 16, 23–24, 27, 56–57, 154n7; European and Mediterranean, 33; motif, 38; Rabbinic, 26; religious, 116; type, 50, 98, 110 Formulaic number, 108 Friday night, 55, 67, 71 Fruits, uncircumcised, 93 Galilean, 22; Jewish practice, 18; Rabbinic text, 141; society, 33, 42; world, 141–42 Galilee, 8, 12, 22, 30, 48–49, 52, 59, 65–66, 80, 82, 108, 117, 119, 121, 127, 132–34, 138; Jewish and Christian in the, 131, 134; Jews in the, 129; in Late Antiquity, 67, 82; post-Bar-Kokhva, 41; Rabbis in the Jewish society of the, 141; south of the, 43 Gamliel, Rabban, 20 Gender, 30–31, 48, 52, 97; aspect of the tale, 100; conflict, 17–18, 141; confrontation, 16; crossing, 73–74, 77; division, 18, 30; in folk literature, 140; hierarchy, 128; perspective, 72; relations, 140; roles, 67 Genesis, 34–35 Genesis Rabbah (Midrash), 33, 41 Genre, 9, 13, 29, 38–39, 43, 66; composite, 116; concept of, 21; conglomerate, 99; context of, 142; distinctions, 56; of folk narratives, 12; of the folktale, 20; marking of narratives, 29; mixture of, 126; of parable, 22; taxonomy, 6 Gershonides, Job interpretation of, 93 Gnostics, 63

198 / General Index God, 65, 72–73, 78, 89, 92–94, 97, 105–6, 111, 114; answer of, from the storm, 92; embodiment of, 76; the (Holy) Name of, 63, 75; justice of, 120, 127; power, 117, 121; rule of, in the world, 95; Son of, 75 Graeco-Roman sources, 118 Greek, 38, 49, 105; chorus, 72; classics, 125; imperial terminology, 106 Hadrian, 86–87, 92, 94–96, 98, 100–4, 109, 115, 117–27, 130–31, 134, 136, 142; ambiguity of character of, 120, 136; Antinous as beloved of, 124; army of, in Judea and the Galilee, 132; battle of, with the Jews, 127; as frequent traveler, 126; historical image of, 123, 126; as itinerant, 127; Jewish tales of, 126; lost autobiography of, 123–25; modern biographers of, 125–26; negative characterizations of, 121; Palestinocentric view of, 127; policies of, 121; role of, in Jewish history, 108; rule of, 128; transgression of, of Roman ethos, 125; Yourcenar’s, 124 Hadrian, the Restless Emperor, 126 Hadrianeon, 121 Hadrian’s Memoirs, 123 Haftarah (ritual reading in the synagogue), 88 Haggadah (of Passover), 51 Hagiographical: chain, 32; legends, 29 “Ha Lahma Aniya,” 51 Halakha, 30, 43, 73; violation of the, 128

Halakhic: character, 69; deliberation, 59; matters, 71; ruling, 60; texts, 67 Halitsa: ritual of, 68–69, 73, 83 Hammah, 66 Hammat Gerar, 122 Hammat Tiberias, 66 Hanina, Rabbi, 80 Hanina ben Dosa, Rabbi, 31–32, 36–37, 41; neighbor of, 101; wife of, 32 “Happy ending,” 52 Harun A-Rashid, 111–12 Harûn er Rashid, Caliph, 112–13 Hassidism, 51 Havdalah, 37 Healer, 78–79 Healing, 76; by charms, 73; folk, 78; narratives concerning, 80; stories, 77; transgressive mode of, 82 “Heavenly kingdom,” 23 Hebrew, 1, 3, 38, 44, 49, 63, 106 Hebrew-Aramaic text, 136 Hegemonic relationships, 128 Hellenic: east, 126; customs, 125; literature, 36 Hermeneutic circle, 130 Hershele Ostropoler, 43 Hierarchical relationships, 133 Hieros gamos, 19 Hillel, the Elder, 26, 50 Historians, Greek and Latin, 117 Historical, 142; consciousness, 118–19, 124, 126; context, 142; image, 124; source, 135 Historiographical rhetoric, 125 Historiography: ideologically tinged, 117; Roman, 102, 123 History, 19, 54; blurred boundaries between fiction and, 124; coun-

General Index terhistory, 136; and fiction, 117–18; legend, 98, 101, 106, 119; and literature, 142; subject of, 119 Hiyya Bar Abba, Rabbi, 91 Holy Land: folklore of the, 112 Holy Spirit, 56, 72–73 Home, 62, 138 Homiletical: context, 107; midrash, 9 Homily, 92 Homosexual, 124–25 Honi, The Circle-Maker, 109 Humorous tale, 98–99, 136; effect of the, 131. See also Comic tale; Joke Huna, Rabbi, 89–90 Huna, Rav, 28, 31 Hunya, Rabbi, 50, 89–90 Husband, 17, 55, 64, 68, 70–71, 75, 77, 94, 96–97, 101, 103, 131 Identity, 26, 31, 54, 61, 66, 75, 142; assertions, 47; boundaries of, 74–75; collective, 81; crisis, 80; cultural, 84, 136; group, 80; Jewish, 59 Imitatio Rabbii, 61 Imperial center, 133; destabilization of the, 127; terms, 105 India, 111 Intercultural exegesis, 45 Intergroup relations, 51 Interpretation, 98, 139; context of, 86 Interpretative key, 119 Interreligious discourse, 18; relations, 41 Intertextual, 118; aspects, 51; context, 142; presence, 101; relations, 110; sphere, 116 Intertextuality, 83–84, 140 Iranian, 111 Iraqi, 114

/ 199 Isaac, 91; sacrifice of, 24 Ishmael, Rabbi, 55–56, 63, 81–82 Israel, 41, 87, 131 Israeli Folktale Archive (IFA), 114 Italian culture, 116 Italy, 111 Jacob, 47, 91; the well of, 46 Jealousy, 65 Jericho, 44 Jerusalem, 44, 46–47, 59, 128 Jesus, 18, 22, 24–25, 36, 44–46, 49–50, 52, 73, 84; curing in the name of, 82; disciples of, 116; miraculous cures of, 76; narrative traditions about, 32; Pandira, 80–81; parables in the synoptic Gospels, 131; parables of, 24–25, 132–33; prophecy of, 132; teaching in the Galilee, 133 Jewish, 47, 52; cultural associations, 63; intra-Jewish perspective, 127; little girl, 122; perspective, 129; population, 127; Sibylline texts, 121; sources, 118; texts, 46 Jewish-Christian, 49 Jews, 11, 21, 25–26, 47, 53, 57, 63, 76, 90, 129, 133 Job, book of, 95, 105. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors John, 46–47. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Joke, 43, 53, 97–99, 137; bathingjoke, 135. See also Comic tale; Humorous tale Jonathan, Rabbi, 80 Joshua, Ben Levi, Rabbi, 80 Joshua, Rabbi, 74 Jotham, the parable of, 131 Judaism, 53, 122

200 / General Index Judea, 48, 108, 119, 121, 126–27, 132 Judge, 99, 112, 122 Karkomit, 64 Key motifs, 140 Khalif, 112–13 Kingdom of heaven, 24 “Ki Tavo” (portion of the Torah reading), 89 Lamentations Rabbah (Midrash), 156n25. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Laments, 29 Latin: heritage, 111; historical texts, 116 Law, Rabbinical, 69 Lay people, 141 Leaven, 24, 36; yeast, 36 Legend, 13, 57, 66; Jewish historical, 120 Leitwort, 96 Levi, Rabbi, 92 Levite, 44 Levitical dictum, 45–46 Leviticus Rabbah (Midrash), 8, 56, 60, 102, 133, 140–41. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Literary: context, 94, 142; texts, 119; topos, 49 Local: context, 111; hero, 128 Logic, 13 Logos, 75 Lydia, 84 Magic, 77, 79, 141; Babylonian bowls, 63; papyri, 63; texts, 63; of words, 63, 78 Marcus Aurelius, 118 Marital loyalty, 140

Marriage, 32, 52, 70; institution of, 68; levirate, 69–70 Marriage-settlement (Ketubbah), 40 Married sex, 67 Mary, 26 Mashal. See Parables Mazzaroth, 93 Medical lore, 29 Mediterranean cultures, 97 Meir, Rabbi, 55–57, 62, 65–67, 69–70, 72–78, 83–84; name of, 65, 67; tomb of, 66 Meir, Rabbi, The Miracle Maker, 66 Mekhilta De-Rabbi Yishmael (Midrash), 151n35 Messiah, 52 Messianic expectations, 121 Metaphor, 36; the poetics of, 139 Metonymy, the poetics of, 139 Middle Ages, 111 Middle East, 111, 112 Midrash, 48; aggadic literature of Palestine, 84; exegetical, 9, 33, 107; homiletical, 9; Palestinian Midrash literature, 141; practice of, 84; Rabbah, 9. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Mimicry, 127–28 Miracle, 32, 110, 112, 133 Mishnah, 28, 65, 71, 74–75 Misogynous phrase, 109; and antifeminist bias, 101; and negative view of women, 20 Modern culture, 124 Moral code of the Rabbis, 127 Moral tale, 98–99 Moroccan, 114 Moses, 89, 92 Motif, parallel, 133

General Index Mourning, 15 Multivocal performance, 143 Munich MS, 101–2 Myth, 13; Greek, 155n11 Mythical era, 19 Naftoli Graidinger, 43 Narrative: context of, 92; Jewish oral traditions of, 114; medieval Hebrew, 122; and reality, 140, 142; topoi, 8 Narrative dialogue, 2, 31, 42, 46–49, 53, 76, 84, 140; Galilean, 25; JewishChristian, 76, 134; intergroup, 56 Nassaradin, Hodja (Djuha), 43, 111 Neighbors, 8, 10–12, 41, 44–45, 48, 53; relationships of, 11, 48; woman, 55, 72, 84, 130 Networks: contextual and intertextual, 136 New Testament, 24–25, 37, 48, 51, 65, 72–73, 76–77, 83, 140; Gospel, 133, 141. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Nile, 124 North Africa, 127 Numbers (biblical book), 68. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Oath, 14–17, 20, 23, 68 Olive trees, 110; evergreen, 132 Opening formula, 95, 104, 119 Oppositions, 100 Orion, 93 Orla, 128 Pagans, 11, 21, 25–26, 63 Pagim, 96

/ 201 Palestine, 59; traditions of, 112 Palestinian Talmud, The Leyden MS of the, 170n13 Pandora, 35 Parables (mashal), 25, 35, 37, 41–42, 48–49, 53, 56–57, 92, 131–33, 140, 154n7; interreligious aspects of, 41; Rabbinic, 38; royal, 39–40 Parody, 18, 48, 100 Parrhesia, 60 Passover, 26, 51 Paul (Saul), 84–85 Peace, 55–56, 62–63 Peaceful coexistence, 129 Pesiqta Rabbati (Midrash), 17 Petihta (proem), 89, 92 Pharisees, 82 Pietists, German Jewish, 60 Pirkei De-Rabbi Eliezer (Midrash), 6 Planting, 110, 112, 114 “Planting for the Next Generation” (AT 928), 98, 109–11 Pleiades, 93 Polemics, 18, 47–48, 53 Politeia, 119 Power structures: in Jewish society, 129 Priest, 44; Kohanim, 10 Prooftext, 81–82 Prophecy, 132 Prose, medieval Hebrew, 108 Proverbial: answer, 105; uttering, 107 Proverbs, 29, 95, 110. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Psychoanalysis, 13 “Public transcript—hidden transcript,” 129 Punch line, 109. See also Comic tale; Joke

202 / General Index “Qimha-de-Pasha,” 51 Quinces, 111 Rabbinic: class, 90; culture, 59; Judaism, 139; law, 69; narratives, 59, 117; sources, 127 Rabbinical literature, 29; social multivocality of, 123. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Rebellion, 70, 73 Redemption, 51 Religion, 52, 97, 138; ritual practices of, 139 Religious: experience, 23; identity, 48 Repentance, 133 Retribution, 40, 140 Revelation, 61 Rhetorical question, 105 Riddle, 54 Ritual, 64, 75, 90 Roman: arena, 129; emperor, 116; empire, 142; ethos, 126; imperial discourse, 136; Lady, 74; mores, 126; rule, 129–30; rulers, 127; sources, 120 Romans, 111, 129–30; resistance to the, 130 Rome, city of, 126–27, 134; literature of, 134 Sabbath, 31, 79–80, 133; lamp, 37; meal, 70; night, 55, 67, 71; and sex, 70 Sadducees, 82 Sages, Palestinian Amoraic, 90 Saliva, 74–75 Samaria, 46–48 Samaritan: the Good, 43, 46; woman, 46

Samaritans, 42–43, 47–48, 51, 53, 57, 140 Saplings, 103, 110 Satire, 100 Scorpion, 79 Semiosphere, 142, 143 Semiotic, 139, 143 Septuagint, 44 Sermon on the Mount, 17–18 Serpent, 35 Sex, 65; sabbatical, 70 Sexual: connotations, 131; prohibitions, 93 Shimon Ben Gamliel, Rabban, 79 Shimon ben Yohai, Rabbi, 14, 42, 55, 62 Sign, 7 Sinai, 19 Slave woman, 64 Sleep, seventy-year-long, 110 Snake, 79, 81 Snake-tamer, 34; wife of, 35 Solomon, King, 122–23 Sotah, 20, 73–74, 83; tractate of, 62 Space, 69, 142; sociology of, 7 Spain, 134 Speech-acts, 13, 48 Spit, 56, 68–69, 73–75, 78; cure, 76 Stereotypical figure, 33, 100 Structural semiotic analysis, 65 Subject, 119, 143 Subjectivity, 143 Subversion, 129 Subversive themes, 100 Symbolic: capital, 11; language, 139 Synagogue, 10, 12, 27, 54, 58, 62, 67, 69, 71, 77–78, 139 Synesthesia, 73

General Index Taboo, 74 Tales: Amoraic, 95; comic, 98–99; contemporary collections of, 111; humorous, 57; international type of, 102; motifs of, 38; Palestinian Amoraic, 95; type of, 38 Tale type: AT41, 156n22; AT676, 153n5, 174n34; AT750, 159n40; AT928, 98, 109–11, 172n24, 178n54; AT1689, 98, 110–11, 172n24 Talmud: Babylonian, 29, 58, 110; Palestinian, 58, 62, 68, 70, 110, 132. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Tanhum, Rabbi, son of Rabbi Hiyya, 91 Tanhuma (Midrash), 36. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Tannaim, 28 Temple, 128; destruction of the, 39, 54, 64, 117, 132, 156n25 Tenants, 50–51 Ten Commandments, 16, 88, 90 Territory, 31, 48, 52, 140, 142 Textual interpretation: midrashic procedure of, 18 “Thank God They Weren’t Peaches” (AT 1689), 98, 110–11 Thecla, 84 Theodicy formula, 40 Theology: apocalyptic, 40; discourse, 41; disputations, 138 “Thousand and One Nights,” 112 Tiberias, 59, 66, 87, 120–21, 123 Tiberius, 116 Timur-Lenk, 111 Titus, 119 Torah, 23, 45, 56, 59, 68, 75, 78, 90;

/ 203 learning, 89; women’s study of, 66 Tosefta, 75. See also Index of Ancient Sources and Authors Transformation, 115, 143 Transformational representation, 139 Transgression, 14 Trickster, 101, 129 Tsippori, 59, 121 Umayia dynasty, 112 Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, 142 Verbal communication, 14 Vinegar, 34, 36, 41, 54 Vision, 32 Voice, 65; internal Jewish hegemonic, 130; women’s, 65 Web of Life, 145n2 Wine, 36, 54 Wise retorts, 112 Witches, 14 Women, 8, 24, 35, 48, 82–83, 141; marginal figure of, 130; married, 26; in Rabbinic literature, 9; tales of, 83 Word play, 105 Yaakov, from Kefar Samma, 81 Yalqut Shimoni, 15 Yavneh, 59 Yehoshua Ben Hananiah, Rabbi, 122 Yehuda ha-Nasi, Rabbi, 65, 129 Yirmiyah, Rabbi, 91 Yohannan Ben-Zakkai, Rabban, 64 Yosi, Rabbi, 132 Yossa, Rabbi, 79 Yudan, Rabbi, 42

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INDEX OF MODERN AUTHORS

Bettelheim, Bruno, 148n24 Betz, Hans Dietrich, 161n8 Bhabha, Homi, 127, 187n111 Bilu, Yoram, 164n28 Birley, Anthony, 124–27, 181n72, 183n83, 186n104, 187n108, 189n132 Bohak, Gideon, 148n18 Bolte, Johannes, 178n54 Bourdieu, Pierre, 148n19 Bowersock, Glen W., 118, 174n32, 181n75, 182n77, 183n83 Boyarin, Daniel, 22, 35, 39, 66, 129, 151n35, 152n46, 154n10, 156n23, 162n14, 165n34, 166n41, 187n115, 188n119 Brock, Sebastian, 147n14 Brown, Peter, 37, 156n18 Buber, Martin, 96

Aarne, Antti, 153n5, 156n22, 159n40, 172n24, 174n34, 177n51 Albeck, Hanoch, 149n27 Alexander, Tamar, 172n25 Ardener, Shirley, 146n7, 152n46 Aschkenasy, Nehama, 154n11 Ashbrook, Susan, 147n14 Atkinson, Paul, 4, 145n2 Baker, Cynthia M., 30, 67, 147n11, 153n3, 156n16, 163n21 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 131, 188n125 Baldwin, Barry, 188n122 Barclay, John M. G., 157n27 Bar-Itzhak, Haya, 159n40 Barthes, Roland, 13, 148n22, 182n80 Barton, Stephen C., 157n27 Basset, René, 179n56 Bauman, Richard, 174n33 Ben-Amos, Dan, 29, 152n1, 169n1 Benario, Herbert W., 183n83, 187n109, 188n128 Benayahu, Meir, 154n6 Bergson, Henri, 136, 189n131 Besthorn, R., 181n71

Cascudo, Luis da Camara, 181n69 Certeau, Michel de, 11–12, 148n20, 164n25 Chauvin, Victor, 179n56 Coen-Sarano, Matilda, 158n31

205

206 / Index of Modern Authors Cohen, Shaye D. J., 146n7 Cooper, Kate, 84, 168n46 Crapanzano, Vincent, 147n12 Crossan, John Dominic, 153n4 Davidson, Arnold I., 126, 182n81 Davies, William David, 18, 149n30, 150n32, 162n13 Derrida, Jacques, 152n46 Dodd, Charles H., 151n41 Dodds, Eric Robertson, 23, 151n40 Dundes, Alan, 148n24 Edwards, Catherine, 187n110 Elior, Rachel, 147n16 Feeley-Harnik, Gillian, 158n33 Fine, Steven, 163n20 Finkelstein, A. H., 172n23 Fishbane, Michael, 161n7 Fishbane, Simcha, 148n25 Flusser, David, 149n30, 151n41, 152n44, 153n4, 154n7, 159n42, 176n46 Foerster, Gideon, 162n16 Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva, 145n3, 165n31 Foucault, Michel, 160n6 Fraenkel, Jonah, 94, 102, 169n2, 170n6, 171n18, 181n76 Franz, Marie-Louise von, 148n24 Funkenstein, Amos, 189n130 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 5 Gallagher, Catherine, 189n130 Garnsey, Peter, 152n46 Gaster, Moses, 156n17, 158n30, 178n53 Geertz, Clifford, 155n12

Gilman, Sander, 165n31 Ginzberg, Louis, 6 Ginzburg, Carlo, 182n80 Goodblatt, David, 145n3 Goodman, Martin, 187n109 Gray, William Dodge, 189n129 Greenblatt, Stephen, 189n130 Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 182n78 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 12 Guijarro, Santiago, 147n11 Halbertal, Moshe, 64, 162n11 Hammer, Joseph von, 179n60 Hanauer, J. E., 112–13, 179n61 Harari, Yuval, 161n8 Hasan-Rokem, Galit, 145n1, 148n21, 149n28, 153n5, 157n25, 160n2, 163n19, 164n27, 169n4, 170n5, 171n17, 172n20, 173n28, 174n31, 178n52, 179n62, 185n92, 187n112 Hauptman, Judith, 35, 63, 154n9, 162n9 Heinemann, Joseph, 88, 147n13, 159n43, 160n5, 169n3, 170n7 Heller, Bernát, 6 Hemelrijk, Emily A., 162n15 Hengel, Martin, 121, 153n4, 185n95, 187n117; and Rudolf Hengel, 167n41 Herr, Moshe David, 120, 182n76, 184n84 Hirshman (Hirschman), Marc (Menahem) G., 175n37, 186n99 Hock, Ronald F., 158n30 Horst, Pieter van der, 163n20 Ilan, Tal, 145n3 Irshai, Oded, 147n15, 167n42

Index of Modern Authors Janowitz, Naomi, 148n25 Jason, Heda, 153n5 Jastrow, Marcus, 166n38 Jeremias, Joachim, 151n42, 158n30, 188n127 Jones, Ivor H., 151n36 Kadushin, Max, 158n32, 184n83 Kee, Howard Clark, 150n33 Köhler, Reinhold, 178n54, 179n59 Konstan, David, 186n104 Kornemann, Ernst, 189n129 Krohn, Kaarle, 177n52 LaCapra, Dominick, 182n79 Lachs, Samuel Tobias, 150n30, 154n11, 155n14 LeFebvre, Henri, 146n7 Lerner, Miron B., 149n29 Levine, Lee I., 162n16, 170n10 Levinson, Joshua, 117, 129, 168n46, 174n32, 181n74, 182n76, 186n102, 187n116, 188n120 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 13, 148n22 Lidzbarski, M., 179n57 Lieberman, Saul, 154n11, 164n24, 168n43, 171n19, 172n23, 176n46 Lieu, Judith, 53, 160n45 Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard, 8, 146n9 Lo Nigro, Sebastian, 180n67 Lotman, Yuri, 142–43, 189n1 Lüthi, Max, 148n24 MacDonald, Dennis Ronald, 168n46 Mannheim, Bruce, 146n4 Margalioth (Margulies), Mordecai 17, 107, 148–49n26, 160n1, 163n20, 169n2, 170n11, 176n47

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Marzolph, Ulrich, 158n31, 177n51, 179n58 Megas, Georgios A., 178n55 Mor, Menachem, 158n30 Moxnes, Halvor, 148n17 Nacht, Jakob, 163n19 Naveh, Joseph, 161n8 Navon, David, 173n30 Neusner, Jacob, 159n39, 160n44, 169n3 Noy (Neuman), Dov, 6, 178n53, 180n64 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 147n12 Olrik, Axel, 175n39 Pardes, Ilana, 190n6 Pervo, Richard I., 156n21 Peskowitz, Miriam B., 145n3 Petuchowski, Jakob J., 160n5 Polívka, Georg, 178n54 Praeder, Susan Marie, 24, 151n42 Propp, Vladimir, 186n98 Rajak, Tessa, 25, 152n45 Richlin, Amy, 188n119 Ricoeur, Paul, 25, 151n43 Rokem, Freddie, 183n82 Rotunda, D. P., 180n66 Ruzer, Serge, 45–46, 150n33, 158n33, 176n46 Saldarini, Anthony J., 150n32 Sanders Ed Parish, 153n4 Satran, David, 160n1 Schäfer, Peter, 120–22, 161n7, 184n85, 185n90

208 / Index of Modern Authors Schur, Nathan, 158n30 Schwarzbaum, Haim, 156n22, 158n32 Scott, James C., 129, 187n114 Segal, Orit, 165n32 Shaked, Shaul, 63, 161n7 Shalev, Donna, 155n13 Shapira, Anat, 161n7 Shenhar, Aliza, 159n40 Shinan, Avigdor, 170n6 Shoajei-Kawan, Christine, 177n51 Simmel, Georg, 7, 146n7 Smith, Morton, 153n4, 167n41 Sokoloff, Michael, 166n37 Sperber, Daniel, 172n23 Stanton, Graham N., 82, 168n44 Stein, Dina, 6, 77, 146n6, 165n33, 172n23 Stemberger, Günther, 175n36 Stern, David, 23, 39, 151n37, 154n8, 156n19, 157n26 Strack, Hermann L., 175n36 Synnott, Anthony, 154n11 Tedlock Dennis, 146n4 Thompson, Stith, 153n5, 156n22, 159n40, 172n24, 174n34, 177n51, 178n53, 188n124 Todorov, Tzvetan, 148n23, 188n121 Torczyner, Harry., 164n29

Trible, Phyllis, 131, 188n124 Türck, Hermann, 155n11 Urbach, Ephraim Elimelech, 157n26, 167n41 Urman, Dan, 163n20 Uther, Hans-Jörg, 177n51 Veltri, Giuseppe, 161n7 Vermesz Geza, 153n4 Visotsky, Burton L., 150n31 Weingarten, Susan, 150n34 Weiss, Hayim, 165n30 Weiss, Zeev, 162n16 Wesselski, Albert, 178n54, 179n58, 180n66 White, Hayden, 182n79 Ya’ari, Avraham, 163n18 Yahalom, Joseph, 147n16 Yassif, Eli, 6, 146n6, 153n4, 173n26, 185n97 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 123–24, 186n103 Yuval, Israel, 47–48, 51, 159n35, 174n32 Zeitlin, Froma, 155n11 Ziegler, Ignaz, 156n20 Ziv, Avner, 173n29 Zunz, Yom Tov Lippmann, 174n36