book I will point to tentative handholds on some of those differences. But the texts, particularly the later ones, such as the Talmuds, are encyclopedic anthologies of quotations, comprising all of the places and times of rabbinic culture production. We can assume with confidence neither that a given passage quoted from a particular authority represents an expression of that authority's time and place, nor that it doesn't and that it only belongs to the culture in which the text was put together (contra Neusner 1990). Indeed, even the redaction of the midrashic and talmudic texts cannot be assigned with any certainty to a particular time, place, or set of persons. Even within the individual texts, there is evidence that different sections received their final forms in very different historical moments. For these reasons, even were I capable of doing it, I think that producing a book like Peter Brown's elegant and magisterial
The Body and Society
is quite impossible for the rabbinic culture of the talmudic period (though it could be done for later periods); Brown's work is dependent on analyzing bodies of doctrine produced by given individuals whose biographies, life situations, social and political context, philosophical backgrounds, etc., are to some extent known to us, and we have almost no such information regarding late-antique rabbinic Jewish literature.
35
By default, then, I am generally constrained to write of rabbinic culture as a whole, even knowing that such discussion represents only a gap in our knowledge. Where I believe that I have found converging evidence for difference between the subcultures I have attempted to represent that difference. Examples of such attempts may be found in Chapters 5 and 6, where I argue for different ideologies in Palestine and Babylonia with respect to certain issues of gender and sex.
|
Dialectic and the Description of Rabbinic Culture
|
There are important ways in which rabbinic culture structures its main literary expression differently from the cultural-literary patterns we are
|
 | | 35. This was recently brought home to me once more upon reading Ford (1989), who is able to make precise differentiations in Chrysostom's thinking based on different periods of his life and activity as, respectively, anchorite and bishop. Such analysis is impossible for any pre-Islamic rabbinic figures. We often do not know whether they "really" said what they are quoted as saying, and if so, when, in what circumstances, and in what literary context.
|
|
|
