Marcus Jastrow as a Talmud Scholar
Marcus Jastrow is well-known for his monumental Aramaic dictionary. Also see this web site from Penn and this article by Menachem Butler. While searching through the Internet Archive, I came across an interesting monograph by Jastrow, “The History and the Future of the Talmudic Text”, a lecture delivered at Gratz College in 1895. In this lecture Jastrow makes a number of interesting observations about the history of Rabbinic literature, the transmission of the Oral Law, and the history of the Talmudic text. Below are a number of quotes from the text.
The Talmud is a collection of traditional laws and discussions in schools and academies, decisions in courts and colleges, interpretations, legal and homiletical, in synagogues and schoolhouses, all of them preserved and developed in the national mind, until finally reduced to writing. (p. 3)
There are elements in the Mishnah pointing back to the second century before our present era, while its latest elements lead us to the beginning of the third century of the present era. (p. 4)
All these productions of the Jewish mind of eight centuries were stored in the national memory for ages and ages. The traditions were taught orally in schools and academies, the notes taken down now and then by individual scholars having no value beyond that of mnemonic guides to the student writing them. At last the time was considered ripe to reduce these verbal communications to writing, and to edit them in the form in which they appear in the Mishnah and Gemarah respectively. (p. 5)
The Talmudic texts have a pre-original history; they had life and development before they were born. The Mishnah, we have seen, existed and grew for centuries in a liquid state (if I may use the expression) before it was crystallized into its present shape, and the Gemara likewise lived and developed in the mouth of tradition from generation to generation, and its text has therefore a pre-original history. (p. 6)
The main variations and corruptions of the Talmudic texts arose
during the period following the reduction to writing, when each school procured a number of copies made by professional copyists. As soon as copying became a profession, the texts passed from the control of their traditional
guardians, and became dependent on the greater or less faithfulness and care of the writers-nay, even on the greater or less distinctness of the copyists’ handwriting. (pp. 16-17)
These last selections from his lecture contain an extremely important suggestion regarding the typographical layout of the text of the Talmud.
To borrow a metaphor from geology, there are, especially in the Gemara, layers representing different ages and epochs in the growth of this unique literature; but they have been inextricably fused by the skilful editorial hands that gave the Babylonian Gemara its present shape. A critical eye can easily distinguish, but no hand can separate them without destroying the characteristic texture of the Talmud. (p. 26)
What we need for the future text of the Talmud is a differentiation of the various layers by differences of type. I would suggest that a different type be used for the Mishnah, to distinguish it from the Gemara more clearly than in the present arrangement, and to make the different layers of the Gemara itself distinguishable from one another, I would
suggest that the main discussion be typographically differentiated from the digressions. (pp. 28-29)
Jastrow is suggesting something that is quite common with many modern scholars of Talmudic literature, a graphical distinction between the different parts of the text that will help facilitate a deeper understanding of the diverse literary layers which are found within Talmudic literature. This was emphasized by Prof. Shamma Friedman in his article on “Perek ha-Isha Rabbah”. In that article Friedman identified R. Meir Ish-Shalom as the first modern scholar to present a Rabbinic text in such a manner (1885). He also refers to Jastrow’s suggestion found in the present monograph and a number of other scholars who put forth similar suggestions. (Friedman, pp. 313-314) It seems that not only was Jastrow one of the most important lexicographers of the language of the Talmud, but he was also one of the most forward-looking scholars regarding the Talmudic text.