The Talmud of Babylonia: System or Tradition? A Reprise of Seven Monographs

The Talmud of Babylonia, a.k.a., the Bavli, is a vast, anonymous writing, which has served for the community of Judaism as the principal and authoritative statement of canonical theology and law. Reaching closure by the end M the seventh century, on the eve of the birth of Islam, the document together with its commentaries, codes of laws, and compilations of ad hoc decisions ("responsa"), defined Judaism. The importance of the Bavli as the foundation-document of a complex and varied set of societies, located in Asia, Europe, Africa, and North and South America, cannot be overstated. Anyone interested in media for the representation, in words, of the entirety of the social order-indeed, of a theory of world-order extended from here to eternity-will find in the Talmud of Babylonia an important example of writing for a utopian constitution. The anonymity of the writing, its use of two languages, its form as a commentary to a prior document, and the ubiquity of its never-identified "voice" -these paramount traits make analysis of the document exceedingly difficult. And yet, if we want to know how language serves to set forth a vision of the social order, we shall have to find out how such a foundation-document is composed. For in investigating the components and the composition of the writing, we may hope to follow the passage of a vision of society from the imagination of intellectuals to the practical and concrete formulation of writers. One fundamental problem that requires closest attention is whether a document of this kind derives from a long agglutinative process, as the sediment of the ages accumulates into a hard tradition, or whether heirs of diverse materials reshape and restate the whole in a single formulation of their own. What is at stake in solving that problem is knowledge of how foundation-documents emerge: over time, through tradition, or all at