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Turning History Into Philosophy: The Case of the Sages of Judaism
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16484 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1989 |
5,477 Words |
| Author
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Jacob Neusner
Jacob Neusner is University Professor at Brown University and
author of Death and Birth of Judaism and other books. |
Often called "the talmudic age," after one of the paramount documents of Judaism that emerged around A.D. 700, the period from the first through the seventh centuries was rich in historical crises. In this period the most critical events in the history of Jews and Judaism took place. The second temple, built around 500 B.C., was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70, marking the end of the politics and society of the Jews in the land of Israel after more than half a millenium. In the second century A.D., between 132 and 135, the Jews fought a ferocious war against Rome, which they lost, and the Jewish settlement of Judea was wiped out, leaving a large population in Galilee. The entire history of the Jews from then until 1948 was lived out in the shadow of the catastrophes of these momentous times.
But the documents of this age treat these matters only tangentially. When we consider that history as a source of truth, not merely public policy, derives from the Hebrew Scriptures, the transformation of Judaism from a historical into a Rabbinic legal system is astonishing. The writers of this period ignored history in its pressing, onetime sequence of decisive events. They revised the sense and meaning of history, despite, or perhaps, to spite, the history they had known. The framers of the Mishnah--a late-second-century law code, which, along with the Hebrew Bible, forms the foundation of Judaism as we know it--present us with a kind of historical thinking quite different from the one that Israel had inherited from Scripture. The legacy of prophecy, apocalypse, and mythic-history (Heilsgeschichte) handed down by the writers of the Old Testament exhibits a single and quite familiar conception of history as a whole. Events reveal God's message and his judgment. Events are singular and point toward lessons about where things are heading and why. If things do not happen at random, they also do not form indifferent patterns of merely secular, social facts. What happens is important because of its meaning. That meaning is to be discovered and revealed through the narrative explaining the event.
Until the formulation of the legal view of Scripture found in the Mishnah, the writing of Jewish history served as a form of prophecy. Just as prophecy takes up the interpretation of historical events, so historians retell these events in the frame of prophetic themes. And out of the two--historiography as a mode of mythic reflection and prophecy as a means of mythic construction--emerges a picture of future history, that is, what is going to happen. That picture, framed in terms of visions and supernatural symbols, ultimately focuses on explaining what is happening in the
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