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This is perhaps the nature of the activity of those who produced the rabbinic texts, from the level of the midrashic unit, and even the single pericope or saying, to the level of the well developed sugiya.

In the texts they authored, they had to include teachings for which they were not responsible, even when they did not agree with them. They did not only represent themselves, but also a tradition that they inherited, as well as invented. The problem is that rabbinic texts are both “authored” and “compiled” – the people behind them had a message to transmit, but at the same time they were compiling old traditions and edited them inside their own text. In the terms of Roland Barthes, they are more “writers” than “authors”. They have simply chosen all the texts that were available to them and put them together.

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The person or group who compiled a text do not bear full responsibility for it. Using the term compiler, on the other hand, would assume a very feeble agency behind the text.

This person or group is “responsible” for the text, and as Michel Foucault has shown, this responsibility creates a subject, who can be admired, criticized or condemned.

Using the term “author” would assume that there is a person or a group behind the text, that has an intention, a message to transmit. I realized that when I use the term “redactors” I have two others terms in mind, from which I do not wish to chose – author and compiler. And it made me wonder – what does my and others’ use of the term “redactors” say about our conception of the agency behind rabbinic texts? Maybe it is the fact that my fellows in the research center, who work on other, non-Jewish and non-rabbinic texts from late antiquity, never use this term when talking about the people who produced their texts. I don’t know exactly what it was, but something has drawn my attention to this writing habit, and signaled it as one. I belong to the first group, more or less. I don’t know exactly when we started using this term in talmudic scholarship but it seems to me a relatively recent convention that some scholars follow quite religiously while others not so much or not at all. So, one of my terminological habits, as I realized recently, is to write “redactors” almost each time I refer to the, well, redactors of a talmudic or midrashic text: The redactors of the sugiya, the redactors of the teaching, the redactors of the pericope, the redactors of the midrash. Choosing one term over another signifies a (silent) agreement with a certain view, position, thesis, theory, or politics. Some will use the term stammaic and others will instead use post- amoraic. For example, some scholars, when writing about Roman Palestine, will use the term “ Eretz Israel” rather then “Palestine”. This seems particularly true when it comes to terminology. Some are the fruits of extensive academic training, but others are simply the expression of personal preferences. Once we shed light on a term of this sort, we can see which view it represents, and ask ourselves whether we can or should justify its use.Īfter all, we all have our writing habits. One way to locate these assumptions, in order to question them, is to look at their “signs” – the habits in academic writing, the terms we use matter-of-factly. The problem is that many times an assumption is so inherent to our thinking, that it is easy to mistake it for a universal, objective truth and not an assumption, which is by definition subjective. We are often told that a good scholar has to consistently and continually question the validity of his/her basic assumptions.

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