David Brodsky lecture: Writing and the Art of Talmudic Maintanence

		in the Columbia University Seminar on Religion and Writing
		Writing and the Art of Talmudic Maintenance: How the Shift from Orality to Writing Concretized Talmud as Text rather than Process David Brodsky, New York University Abstract Abstract Talmudic literature developed when orality was the dominant form of transmission of holy texts in Babylonia. With the Muslim conquest, writing began to be privileged over orality. This presentation will argue that this shift had a major effect on the ossification of talmud as a text rather than a genre, a form, a process. The first two chapters of Kallah Rabbati are the only extant text that derives from amoraic Babylonia, proving to be an older sister to the Babylonian Talmud, which also developed in amoraic Babylonia, but was not concretized until the post-amoraic period (indeed, David Weiss Halivni has recently pushed its redaction well into the Islamic Period). Comparisons of parallel passages between Kallah Rabbati and the Babylonian Talmud reveal the talmudic passages to be a product of the oral transmitters, who were re-producing the text as they re-cited it. Parallels with Geonic (i.e., early medieval) literature, once writing had begun to take hold, reveal a text that had ossified after a specific performative moment. While errors and changes still arose, they no longer lent themselves to the kinds of re-creation of the passages that orality had once fostered. Rather, writing seems to have marked the shift from talmud as genre to Talmud as a concretized text. Faculty House 7:00 PM, 04/23/2013