In memory of Rabin's assassination, Conservative Jews around the world have been learning Mishnah with Rabbi Simchah Roth.

 

*****************************************************************************

RABIN MISHNAH STUDY GROUP

 

Mishnah Study in the climate of Masorti (Conservative) Judaism

 

Rabbi Simchah Roth (of the Rabbinical Assembly in Israel)

 

January 27th 2000 / Shevat 20th 5760

 

*****************************************************************************

 

DISCUSSION:

 

Often recently I have had occasion to note differences between the

accepted text of the Mishnah as given in the Gemara and that to be

found in the manuscript codices.

 

This has prompted Juan-Carlos Kiel to send the following message:

 

The Talmud was passed on via manuscripts, as was the Bible, since it

was sealed until our days. One of the eldest manuscripts of the Bible

was the Crown from Aleppo, before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.

Can you give me a pointer about early copies of the Talmud? Are there

known variants? What are the earliest known versions of the Talmuds?

For the Mishnah? I once read that one of the eldest versions of the

Talmud were held at the Vatican.

 

I respond:

 

This may be of interest to more people than just Juan-Carlos and

myself, so I decided to devote this one Shiur to the topic.  Since

there is excellent material on this to be found in the Encyclopedia

Judaica, and since I see no need for me to "re-invent the wheel" in

this regard, I reproduce below an expurgated copy of material culled

from that encyclopedia.  The explanatory comments in square

parentheses are by me.

 

The Mishnah.

 

The influence of the Tanna'im, [people with prodigious memory who

learned whole segments of the Mishnah by heart], was considerable.

They emended it in accordance with the statements of Amora'im [sages

of the period of the Gemara] whose interpretation they incorporated in

it, so that the later Amora'im were at times unaware that the text of

a particular Mishnah was not the original one but had been emended by

those who declaimed it. Yet even though the early Amora'im disagreed

with a Mishnah, they refrained from emending it or changing its

wording. From the third generation of Amora'im onward [say around 300-

350 CE], however, emendations also increased by reason of the problems

raised by this intensive study. In the course of time variants arose

between Babylonia and Eretz-Israel, as well as between the various

academies in these two countries. The additions and emendations of the

Amora'im in one center were not taught in the other. From this derived

also the considerable differences between the extant manuscripts, in

some of which there are early additions such as are not found in the

majority of printed versions. The most important extant manuscripts

are the Kaufmann manuscript in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of

Sciences in Budapest; Parma manuscript 168; Cambridge manuscript 73;

and Oxford manuscript 117. Complete manuscripts of the Mishnah are

also found in the Munich manuscript, the only complete one of the

Babylonian Talmud, and in a single manuscript of the Jerusalem Talmud,

Leyden Scaliger 3. Manuscripts of individual orders and tractates are

found on all the sections of the Talmud. The Mishnah in manuscripts of

tractates of the Babylonian Talmud does not represent the authentic

Babylonian version, even as that in the Jerusalem Talmud does not

always reflect the Eretz-Israel version. The reason is that, copying

as they did from Mishnah texts in their possession, the copyists of

the Talmuds at times placed at the beginning of a tractate of the

Babylonian Talmud a Mishnah taken from a text written according to the

Eretz-Israel version, and similarly the version of a Mishnah at the

beginning of a chapter in the Jerusalem Talmud does not accord with

that of the Eretz-Israel tradition. Distinguished by an unusual

spelling, manuscripts of the Eretz-Israel version of the Mishnah, such

as the Kaufmann manuscript, also preserve remnants of the living

language of Eretz-Israel, whereas in the Babylonian version these

features are blurred - the phraseology, style, and vocalization of the

Mishnah having been given a literary quality. Great importance

attaches to the many Genizah fragments of the Mishnah and of the

Talmuds dispersed in various libraries for fixing the text and the

vocalization of the Mishnah.

 

The Mishnah was first printed in Spain in about 1485. But since only

individual pages of this edition have been preserved, that printed at

Naples in 1492 and comprising the entire Mishnah as well as

Maimonides' commentary is generally regarded as the first edition. It

inclines mainly to the Jerusalem text, although several of its

passages were emended in accordance with that of the Babylonian, as

were most of the later printed versions of the Mishnah from that of

Venice 1546/7 onward. Particularly important is the edition of Yom Tov

Lipmann Heller, who, availing himself of manuscripts, produced a

corrected version of the Mishnah. First published with his commentary

Tosafot Yom Tov in Prague, 1614–17, it became the basis of all

subsequent editions. As yet there is no critical edition of the

Mishnah which includes all the variant readings contained in

manuscripts, Genizah fragments and quotations of the Mishnah found in

the Talmuds and in the works of the early authorities and their

commentaries.

 

The Talmud.

 

One could hardly expect a literary work of the vast dimensions of the

Talmud to be preserved in an authoritative version in all its details.

There are indeed innumerable variant readings of the talmudic text. In

his commentary Rashi [Western Europe, 11th century CE] often says,

hakhi garsinan ("this is how we read it"). In many of these cases

Rashi departs from the version before him. There are many reasons for

the variants. For many centuries the Talmud was copied by hand in all

parts of the world, and mistakes of the copyist were unavoidable;

comments written on the margin of a handwritten text occasionally

merged with the text and were so copied (thus comments of the Ge'onim

were at times incorporated in the text; awareness of the copyist's

mistakes often led to correction of texts, which were not based on

other more reliable manuscripts, but which were determined by the

commentary; and a manuscript was corrected because the text as it

stood could not be meaningfully explained, so that the habit developed

of correcting texts for the sake of intellectual consistency. As was

pointed out by Rabbenu Tam [Western Europe 12 century CE], this played

havoc with the texts. Tam shows the right method of textual criticism:

to include the change in the commentary, but not to tamper with the

text itself, for what may not be clear to the reader may be understood

by someone else. He refers to the example of his grandfather Rashi,

who followed this practice. Unfortunately, the copyists were less

careful and, relying on Rashi's authority, introduced his corrections

into the text. Tam complains bitterly about his brother, Rashbam, who,

carried away by his powerful intellect, often eliminated older

versions to suit his own interpretation. Tam recognizes, however, that

he often did it on the basis of other manuscripts.  Variant readings

were also due to the fact that from the very beginning of establishing

the text, there remained unsettled problems. Not unlike the situation

after the conclusion of the Mishnah, variations were the

manifestations of the unresolved differences between various schools

of thought. The great commentators often disagree, not because they

interpret the same text differently, but because they had a variant

reading before them. Maimonides, apparently, used a great deal of text

criticism based on the comparison of old manuscripts. In one place in

his code, he rejects an accepted reading of the Talmud because of the

variant he found in old manuscripts of the seventh century. In another

place he disagrees with a decision of the Ge'onim because as he says:

"I have examined many of the old books and found the matter to stand

as I explained it". R. Solomon b. Abraham Adret (Rashba) of the 13th

century would disagree with the author of the Halakhot Gedolot of the

ninth century because of a variant in his text. It was generally

recognized that the Talmud copies that came from the Yeshivah of

Rabbenu Hananel [North Africa, 11th century CE] and his father

Hushi'el were the most reliable ones. Since the Talmud was studied for

centuries in innumerable schools in many countries, the number of

manuscripts must have been very great indeed. Yet only one complete

manuscript, the Munich manuscript, dating from 1334, is extant.

However, manuscripts of individual tractates, among which the

following may be mentioned, exist in various libraries: a few pages of

tractate Pesahim at Cambridge may belong to the ninth century, and

some tractates of Nezikin in the National Library of Florence, to the

tenth, a manuscript of tractate Avodah Zarah from the 13th century and

an edition of the important Hamburg manuscript of Nezikin. Fragments

have been recovered from the Cairo Genizah. The oldest dated

manuscript (1123), is part of tractate Keritot and is in the Bodleian

Library, Oxford. This paucity of manuscripts is undoubtedly the result

of the war waged by the [Medieval] Church against the Talmud, in which

tens of thousands of copies were publicly burned all over Europe.

 

The Talmud began to be published soon after the introduction of

printing. Before the appearance of the entire Talmud, individual

treatises of it were printed, especially in Portugal toward the end of

the 15th century. Most famous were the volumes printed by Joshua

Solomon and his nephew Gershon of Soncino [Italy] from 1484 to 1519.

They brought out numerous single tractates, but not the entire Talmud.

The first complete Talmud was printed by a Christian, Daniel Bomberg,

at Venice (1520–23). This editio princeps determined the external form

of the Talmud for all time, including the pagination, the inclusion of

Rashi's commentary in the inner margin and of the Tosafot in the

outer, and the discussion of the Gemara following each Mishnah. (In

the manuscripts the whole chapter of the Mishnah is given at the

beginning of the chapter, and traces of this have been retained even

in the printed texts. As a result one sometimes has a mistaken idea of

the relative size of some of the tractates. Thus the fact that the

Tosafot of Bava Batra are more extensive than those in Berakhot,

coupled with the fact that from folio 29 to the end the commentary is

by Rashi's grandson Samuel b. Meir, who was much more prolix than his

grandfather, has had the result that Berakhot has only 64 folios

compared to the 176 of Bava Batra though in fact the talmudic text of

the former has 36 pages and Bava Batra 40.) The first edition of the

Talmud was followed by the edition of M. A. Giustiniani, also of

Venice, in 1546–51. From then on the Talmud was printed in all major

Jewish communities, either complete or in single tractates. Most

famous among them are the editions of Lublin (1559–76 and 1617–39);

Basle (1578–81); Cracow (1602–05 and 1616–20); the Amsterdam editions

(Benveniste, 1644–48; 2nd edition, 1714–17); Frankfort an der Oder

(1697–99); and Sulzbach (1756–63; known as the "Sulzbach Red" because

of the front-page printing of each title in red). Many of these

editions contain numerous misprints, which were further confounded by

the ruthless mutilations of the [Christian] censors. Often Jewish

printers exercised self-censorship. The best known among more modern

editions is the "Vilna Shas," printed in Vilna by the brothers and the

widow of the printer Romm, containing numerous additional commentaries

and glosses. About a century ago, using the Munich manuscript and many

other sources, Raphael N. Rabbinovicz, in his monumental work Dikdukei

Soferim, undertook to bring out a critical edition of the Talmud. At

his death, the work encompassed about three and a half of the six

orders of the Talmud.