Weekly D'var

THE JEWISH LEGEND LITERATURE
Al Madansky, z”l
July-August 2007

There is a body of Hebrew literature referred to as the Midrash.  In order to understand what the Midrash is, one needs some background on its origins.  So, let’s begin.

The Talmud is a combination of two works, the Mishnah, a set of religious laws compiled, organized, and put into written form in Hebrew by Rabbi Judah in Israel in about 165 CE, and the Gemara, a set of commentaries on the Mishnah, developed by rabbis in the next three centuries and finally compiled, organized, and put into written form in about 475 CE.  Actually, there are two sets of commentaries on the Mishnah, one developed by rabbis who lived in Palestine (and therefore also in Hebrew) and one developed by rabbis who lived in Babylonia (and therefore in Aramaic, the language of the Babylonians).  The set developed in Palestine, when combined with the Mishnah, is called the Jerusalem Talmud; the set developed in Babylonia, when combined with the Mishnah, is called the Babylonian Talmud.  Once these were published, succeeding generations of rabbis declared the Babylonian Talmud more authoritative, and so when the Talmud is referred to with no preceding adjective it is understood to be a reference to the Babylonian Talmud.  The Babylonian Talmud consists of 63 volumes, sometimes referred to as “tractates.”  The Jerusalem Talmud consists of 39 volumes, as there is no record of the discussions in Palestine of the remaining 24 subdivisions of the Mishnah.

Though most of the commentaries of the Gemara are legalistic, interspersed in these commentaries are legends and parables.  The legalistic part of the Gemara is called Halacha (הלכה), a Hebrew word meaning “law.”  The nonlegalistic part of the Gemara is called Aggadah (אגדה), an Aramaic word meaning “tale.”  As these parts are intermixed, and as there was an interest among lay Jews to learn only the Aggadic part of the Talmud, a late fifteenth century rabbi, Yaakov ibn Chaviv, took it upon himself to create a volume to suit this need.  The result, an extraction of the aggadic part of the Talmud, done without the aid of a word processor, was published in 1516 in Salonika, Greece as a one volume work entitled Ein Yaakov (“the eye of Jacob”).

Aside from the aggadic material in the Talmud, there are other legends, parables, and tales recorded by the rabbis of Talmudic times in contemporaneous commentaries on the Torah.  Foremost among these commentaries were those produced by Rabbi Ishmael’s school in Yavneh:  Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael and Sifre debe Rav on Exodus, Sifre Bamidbar on Numbers, and Midrash Tannaim on Deuteronomy, as well as those produced by Rabbi Akiva’s school in Usha:  Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai on Exodus, Sifra (aka Torat Kohanim) on Leviticus, Sifre Zuta on Numbers, and Sifre Devarim on Deuteronomy.  In addition, there was the Tosefta, written by Rabbi Nehemiah, whose format resembles that of the Mishnah.  Any bit of material from these various commentaries, especially from the Tosefta, is referred to in the Talmud as a baraitah (ברייתא), an Aramaic word meaning “external, foreign, not belonging to.”  Subsequently other books of legends appeared, the most significant being a series of works collectively called Midrash Rabba.

Some, but not all of these works, have been translated into English.  Ein Yaakov: The Ethical and Inspirational Teachings of the Talmud, an 824 page English translation by Avraham Yaakov Finkel, was published in 1999 by Jason Aronson, Inc.  This far surpasses a series embarked on by this publishing company a few years earlier entitled As the Rabbis Taught: Studies in the Aggados of the Talmud, but in the end consisting of two volumes by David Landesman, one just based on the tractate Megillah and the other subtitled A Tisha b’Av Reader.  The Legends of the Jews, published in 1909 by the Jewish Publication Society, was the monumental achievement of Louis Ginzberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary, who collected and synthesized all these into a seven-volume work (first written in German and then translated into English by Henrietta Szold, better known for her later work as the founder of the Jewish women’s organization, Hadassah).  Rabbi Judah Nadich of the Park Avenue Synagogue of New York embarked on developing a parallel series, entitled The Legends of the Rabbis.  Unfortunately, only two volumes have appeared, Volume 1 in 1983 entitled Jewish Legends of the Second Commonwealth and Volume 2 in 1994 entitled The First Generation after the Destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem.  The famous Hebrew poet Chaim Nahman Bialik, in collaboration with Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, compiled and published (in Hebrew) the book Sefer Ha-Aggadah in 1915.  This book was translated into English and published in 1992 by Shocken with the title Book of Legends.

You may have noticed the word Midrash in the titles of some of these works.  Those works, and more, are the set of literature that I want to delve into more deeply, to explain both their origin and use in Jewish religious thought.  Given this background, we’re ready to cover this branch of Jewish texts in detail in the next bulletin.