The Mishnah set forth in the form of a law code a highly philosophical account of the world (“world view”), a pattern for everyday and material activities and relationships (“way of life”), and a definition of the social entity (“nation,” “people,” “us” as against “outsiders,” “Israel”) that realized that way of life and explained it by appeal to that world view. We have no difficulty in calling this account of a way of life an economics, because the account of material reality provided by the Mishnah corresponds, point for point, with that given in Aristotle’s counterpart. The Mishnah moreover sets forth a politics by dealing with the same questions, about the permanent and legitimate institutions that inflict sanctions, that occupy Greek and Roman political thinkers. There is no economics of another-than-this-worldly character, no politics of an inner “kingdom of God.” All is straightforward, worldly, material, and consequential for the everyday world. Then the successor-documents, closed roughly two centuries later, addressed the Mishnah’s system and recast its categories into a connected, but also quite revised, one. The character of their reception of the received categories and of their own category-formation, emerging in the contrast between one set of documents and another, justifies invoking the term, “transformation,” that is, of one thing into something else.
Our task in Part I is in three parts, corresponding to the work at hand. When I characterize and classify the categorical structure of the Mishnah and closely-allied writings, I have to show three things. First, the Mishnah’s system indeed comprised a philosophy, an economics, and a politics. Second, the systems] of philosophy, economics, and politics of the Mishnah furthermore are to be classified as concrete expressions of abstract generalizations. Third, the successor-documents preserve but do not vastly reform these received categories. That fact will then open the way to the analysis of the category re-formation that I claim is attested in the second phase of the canon of Rabbinic Judaism.
Defining the terms of the first proposition by this point hardly requires an elaborate exercise. By philosophy I mean philosophical in method and also philosophical in message. An economics in this context must likewise present a theory of the rational disposition of scarce resources that (other) philosophers of the same age will have recognized as familiar, therefore philosophical. A politics along these same lines must exhibit the traits of a philosophical politics. Since the Mishnah reached closure in ca. 200, my definition of philosophy and what may be characterized as philosophical derives from that same age, the Greco-Roman one, and as a matter of fact, within the vast and varied Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, a specific figure emerges as paradigmatic.
Aristotle for the present purpose defines the model of philosophical method.1 As to (a) philosophical proposition of considerable weight, I appeal to an important proposition of Middle Platonism, coming to full expression to be sure only in the writings of Plotinus’s neo-Platonism two generations after the closure of the Mishnah. If I can show that the method of the Mishnah corresponds to that of Aristotle, and a fundamental message of the Mishnah restates within the appropriate idiom a proposition of Middle Platonism, I may fairly characterize the Mishnah’s system as philosophical in context, that is, as a system that other philosophers can (with proper education) have recognized as philosophical. As to economics and politics, Aristotle likewise serves to set forth the standard for defining an economics that is philosophical and a philosophical politics as well.
Briefly restating in fresh language the results of prior research, in Chapter One I set forth as philosophical both the method and the principal message of the Mishnah, the one Aristotelian, the other Middle Platonic and fully realized in Plotinus. We then turn to the modes of thought of the successor-writings and ask principally about how methodologically the later documents compare with the rhetorical and logical modes of thought that, in the Mishnah, are to be classified as philosophical. What we see is that the literary evidence is consistent for both the Yerushalmi and the pertinent Midrash-compilations in pointing toward rhetoric and logic of an other-than-philosophical character. That demonstration suffices to establish the point of Part One of the book, which is that as to modes of thought and argument expressed in rhetoric and logic (and, as a matter of fact, proposition as well), a philosophical system is set forth by the Mishnah and faithfully preserved but not replicated in the philosophical manner by the successor-documents. These writers make connections and draw conclusions and portray the result in a way vastly different from the way of the Mishnah. That sets the stage for the movement from worldview, expressed through philosophy, to way of life and definition of the social entity, that is, for the Mishnah, economics and politics, respectively.
Does the Mishnah attest to a philosophical economics and politics? In Chapter Two we see in great detail that the Mishnah does set forth an economics—a theory of the rational disposition of scarce resources. That economics, moreover, corresponds point by point with the economics of Aristotle, and its rationality conforms with his. In Chapter Three, building upon the results of Chapter Two, we furthermore find that the Mishnah also provides a politics—a theory of the legitimate exercise of violence and of the institutions that permanently impose sanctions in the preservation of the social order. Moreover, drawn once more to Aristotle, we are able to compare and contrast the politics of the Mishnah with the philosophical politics of Aristotle, showing the place and message of the political component of the system presented by both. Here the task is both to distinguish the Mishnah’s politics from that of the Pentateuch and also to establish points of commonality and also contrast between the Mishnah’s politics and that of Aristotle.
In both cases a further task remains. Critical to the argument of the book is the demonstration, in Chapters Two and Three, of how the received categories were treated later on. I have to trace the way in which the successor-documents received the economics and politics of the Mishnah. That inquiry draws us into the later history of the categories, economics and politics, in the Talmud of the Land of Israel in particular, because that document portrays itself as a systematic commentary to the Mishnah. But attention also to the representation of economics in the associated Midrash-compilations, represented as commentaries to Scripture, is required.
Now to spell out in some detail the program of Part One: why this, not that? Systemic description begins with the written evidence that points us toward the outlines of the intellectual structure upon which the theory of the social order is constructed. That evidence, when deemed authoritative, forms the canon of the system. The canon recapitulates the system that animates the mentality of both the framers of canonical writers and the authorities who adopted those writings for a single canonical composition. To study (a) Judaism, accordingly, we turn to the canon of the Judaism under study and seek its evidence concerning the categories that comprise any account of society: the philosophy, politics, and economics of (a) Judaism.
From beginning to end, the Judaic systems attested by the successive parts of the canon defined as their problem the construction of a social world. The categorical structure of each, in succession, framed intelligible thought by appeal to the issues of the world bounded, first of all, by a particular ethnos, the social entity (the most neutral language I can find), which was called (an) “Israel.” Every Judaic system, moreover, would take as its task the definition of the shared life of (an) Israel: its way of life or (broadly speaking) ethics, its world view or ethos. So each set forth the account of the social entity or the “Israel” that realized in its shared and corporate being the ethics (again, broadly construed), and explained that ethics by appeal to the ethos. As a matter of definition, it must follow, a Judaic system is a system that derives its generative categories from the (theoretical) requirements of framing a social order: who are “we,” what do we do together, and why are we the corporate body that we are, thus, ethnos, ethics, ethos. And that brings us back to the first of the great Rabbinic-Judaic systems that in the end formed Judaism, the system to which the authorship of the Mishnah refers in framing its writing.
We come to a fresh question of exposition: Why call the writings that followed the Mishnah, Tosefta, and its associated Midrash-compilations “successors”? Because, in form, the writings of the late fourth and fifth centuries were organized and presented as commentaries on a received text, the Mishnah for the Talmud, Scripture for the Midrash-compilations. So the later authorships insisted, in their own behalf, that they (merely) explained and amplified the received Torah. They imparted to their writings the form of a commentary. When these documents attached themselves to the Mishnah, on the one side, and the Hebrew Scriptures, on the other, they gave literary form to the theory that the one stood for the oral, the other, the written, revelation, or Torah, that God gave to Moses at Mount Sinai.
Specifically, the Talmud of the Land of Israel formed around thirty-nine of the Mishnah’s sixty-two tractates, and Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah (joined by Pesiqta deRab Kahana) addressed the first and third books of Moses, respectively, along with some other documents. The very act of choosing among the Mishnah’s topical expositions or tractates only some and ignoring others, of course, represents an act of taste and judgment—hence system-building through tacit statement made by acts of commission but also by silence. But, as a matter of fact, much of the Talmud as well as of the principal Midrash-compilations do amplify and augment the base-documents to which they are attached.2 In choosing some passages and neglecting others, and, more to the point, in working out their own questions and their own answers, in addition to those of the Mishnah, the authorships3 attest to a system that did more than merely extend and recast the categorical structure of the system for which the Mishnah stands. They took over the way of life, world view, and social entity, defined in the Mishnah’s system. And while they rather systematically amplified details, framed a program of exegesis around the requirements of clerks engaged in enforcing the rules of the Mishnah, they built their own system.
For at the same time they formed categories corresponding to those of the Mishnah, a politics, a philosophy, an economics. But these categories proved so utterly contrary in their structure and definition to those of the Mishnah that, as we shall see, they presented mirror-images of the received categories. In due course we shall see how the politics, philosophy, and economics of the Mishnah were joined by what we may wish to call an anti-politics, an anti-economics, and an utterly-transformed mode of learning. In the hands of the later sages, the new mode of Torah-study—the definition of what was at stake in studying the Torah—redefined altogether the issues of the intellect. As a matter of fact the successor-system recast not the issues so much as the very stakes of philosophy or science. The reception of the Mishnah’s category-formations and their transformation therefore stands for the movement from a philosophical to a religious mode of thinking. For the system to which the Mishnah as a document attests is essentially philosophical in its rhetorical, logical, and topical program; the successor system, fundamental religious in these same principal and indicative traits of medium of intellect and mentality.
The Mishnah’s philosophy, economics, and politics corresponded to the categories, world-view, way of life, and social entity, that have already been set forth in the introduction. The philosophy explained how to think, identified the agenda for sustained thought and learning, and proved a proposition of fundamental importance. Not only so, but in the context of Greco-Roman philosophy, the method and proposition are to be classified as philosophical: Aristotle’s method of natural history, Middle Platonism’s doctrine of the hierarchical unity of being. The Mishnah’s economics set forth a theory of rational action in the face of scarcity and in the increase and disposition of wealth. As I have stressed, it corresponded, point by point, with the economics of Aristotle. The categories of thought on the rational disposition of scarce resources were the same as Aristotle’s; the generative principles the same; the conclusions the same. Wealth consisted of land; the notion of true value operated; distributive, not market-economics prevailed; Aristotle and the Mishnah’s sages concur on the detailed consequences of these economic principles. And the Mishnah’s politics laid out an account of precisely how power, encompassing legitimate violence, embodied in institutions and their staff, was to realize in everyday social transactions the social entity, “Israel.” The politics in most of its definitive traits corresponded to that of Aristotle as well.4
The Talmud of the Land of Israel for the Mishnah, the Midrash-compilations Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah together with Pesiqta deRab Kahana for Scripture, not only subjected these categories to expansion and envision. These same documents set forth their own categories for those served, initially, by philosophy, politics, and economics. And that, as is clear, explains the entire program of this book, as part one deals with the transformation of the received categories in the initial structure, that is, the Judaic structure of the social order, laid out philosophically; part two, identifies the categorical reformation of the same structure, that is, once more in categorical terms, the Judaic structure of the social order, now however categorized in a fresh way, religiously; and part three then portrays, whole and complete, the systemic consequence of this transformation: Judaism as a religious system.
These general observations explain the task at hand, which is to characterize the basic traits of intellect of the system represented by the Mishnah and to follow the treatment of the same categories in the pages of the Talmud of the Land of Israel, Genesis Rabbah, and Leviticus Rabbah with Pesiqta deRab Kahana. Our question, specifically, is simple: how shall we classify the category-formation of the Mishnah in its context? That question answered, we proceed to the next. Even on its own terms, Part I will be more readily grasped, when its direction and purpose are clearly stated. In Part II, Chapters Four, Five, and Six, we ask a more difficult question. It is this: when we compare and contrast the Mishnah in its classification as to rhetoric and logic with the successor-documents, do we find those later writings’ category-formations like those of the Mishnah or unlike them? If like, then of course we classify those documents as we have classified the Mishnah. But if unlike, then how—as a matter of hypothesis—may we classify the system represented by the successor-writings?
The title of the opening chapter, of course, leaves no doubt as to the thesis that forms my agenda: the Mishnah indeed is to be classified as philosophical, while the successor-writings are so fundamentally different as to their rhetorical and logical characteristics as to require a different taxon altogether. Only in later chapters will the justification for characterizing that taxon as not only not-philosophical but as in fact religious fully emerge. It suffices at the outset to show difference and to point to the principal elements of difference. So we begin with the matter of philosophical method.
But even now, I owe an answer to the question, how do I know whether a system is philosophical or religious? The answer is not subjective, nor the criteria, private or idiosyncratic. To the contrary, I point only to facts, accurately portrayed, informedly interpreted. The indicative traits in both instances, to begin with, derive from and are displayed by documents, for—I take it as axiomatic—the mode of the writing down of any system attests to both the method and the message that sustain that system. From how people express themselves, we work our way backward to their modes of thought: the classification of perceived data, the making of connections between fact and fact, the drawing of conclusions from those connections, and, finally, the representation of conclusions in cogent compositions. All of these traits of mind are to be discerned in the character of those compositions, in the rhetoric that conveys messages in proportion and appropriate aesthetics, in the logic that imparts self-evidence to the making of connections, the drawing of conclusions, and in the representation of sets of conclusions as cogent and intelligible, characteristic of writing and expressed in writing.
That is why we turn to analyze the evidence of documents when we ask how people think, meaning, here, the logic of their intelligible thought and discourse. We further identify the medium by which they frame their message, meaning, here, the rules of their formal rhetoric. On the basis of these indicators we can account for that union of disciplined rhetoric and logic that comprise the media of expression and modes of thought of a well-crafted system. From that description the analysis of the system gets underway through the process of comparison and contrast of the traits discerned, to begin with, in documentary inquiry. For the logic, rhetoric, and topical program of one set of writings can be described and compared with the same traits of another. So evidence for the classification of systems that set forth a theory of the social order, their differentiation, for instance, as to philosophy or religion, derives to begin with from the use of language, in particular the rules for correct representation of thought, in the right form, that, in general, we know as rhetoric.
From the surface, the rhetoric, we move inward, into the logic of the processes of thought encapsulated in that language. This evidence derives from the argumentation in behalf of a proposition, the kind of evidence and the manner of marshalling that evidence. Since active thought takes place when people see a connection between one thing and something else and determine to explain that connection in one way, rather than in some other, we ask what makes a connection self-evident, so that one thing fits with some other, while a third thing does not fit in or make sense at all in connection with the first two things. We have in hand ample evidence, written evidence, of both the decisions people reached, the ways in which they framed their propositions, and also, the expectation that others within the group educated in their writings and manners of thought would find the result compelling.
Two questions clarify the issue of continuity in category-formation. What we want to know is simple: have the successor-authorships revised or redefined the received categories? Do we find in the Yerushalmi and its companions a considerable extension and reformation of the philosophical economics and politics set forth by the Mishnah?
If we can show that the philosophers whose ideas are presented by the Mishnah will have been surprised and also informed by what they found in the Yerushalmi’s re-presentation of the Mishnah, then we must conclude that a continuing philosophical reading of an essentially philosophical economics and politics was underway. But if we discover that the Yerushalmi’s reading of the Mishnah served the purposes essentially of clarification, extension, and above all, practical application, then we shall have to conclude that the Yerushalmi and related writings have not undertaken a considerable labor of category-reformation at all. Not philosophers but something else, they have given to the Mishnah—so we shall have to decide—a decent burial and gone on to other matters.
The criteria for knowing how the Mishnah’s system has been received then are clear. On what problems do the successor-authorships concentrate—theoretical or exegetical? And whence do they derive their continuing intellectual program—the tasks of reconsideration and criticism, or the work of practical application? The answers will emerge in a brief survey of exemplary discourses, which time and again show a range of questions deriving from not philosophers and theorists but clerks and judges: people who have to know one thing from something else in material reality.
In the case of economics we shall ask about rules governing cases, not definitions of abstractions. In the case of politics we shall find not the extension and elaboration of the received structure but the portrayal of a quite different one. When speaking of the Mishnah, the successor-writers paraphrase and clarify its sentences. When moving beyond the limits of the Mishnah, they make matters their own and set forth, side by side with the Mishnah and its message, a quite different account of economics and politics.
To signal briefly what we shall find later on, in other-than-exegetical passages of the Yerushalmi scarce resources, so far as these are of a material order of being, e.g., wealth as defined by the Mishnah and Aristotle, are systemically neutral. A definition of scarce resources emerges that explicitly involves a symbolic transformation, with the material definition of scarce resources set into contradiction with an other-than-material one. So we find side by side clarification of the details of the received category and adumbration of a symbolic revision and hence a categorical transformation in the successor-writings. The representation of the political structure of the Mishnah undergoes clarification, but alongside, a quite separate and very different structure also is portrayed. The received structure presents three political classes, ordered in a hierarchy; the successor-structure, a single political class, corresponding on earth to a counterpart in Heaven. Here too a symbolic transaction has taken place, in which one set of symbols is replicated but also reversed, and a second set of symbols given instead.
This I express in a simple way: a structure comprising a hierarchical composition of foci of power gives way to a structure made centered upon a single focus of power. That single focus, moreover, now draws boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate violence, boundaries not conceived in the initial system. So in all three components of the account of the social order the philosophical system gives way to another. The worldview comes to expression in modes of thought and expression—the logic of making connections and drawn conclusions—that are different from the philosophical ones of the Mishnah. The way of life appeals to value expressed in other symbols than those of economics in the philosophical mode. The theory of the social entity comes to concrete expression in sanctions legitimately administered by a single class of persons (institution), rather than by a proportionate and balanced set of classes of persons in hierarchical order, and, moreover, that same theory recognizes and defines both legitimate and also illegitimate violence, something beyond the ken of the initial system. So, it is clear, another system is adumbrated and attested in the successor-writings. What that other system was, the definition of its categories and how these relate to the categorical requirements of a theory of the social order—these considerations define the questions of Part Two, as we see in due course.