In consultation with Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) treated the first Jewish cleric known to undergo analysis, in 1903. According to the case history, published in 1908, a forty-two-year-old rabbi suffered from a Berufsneurose, an occupational neurosis associated with the pressures of his career. Stekel's case history forms an indelible portrait of a religious patient who submitted himself to the highly experimental treatment of psychoanalysis in the early years of the discipline. However, scholars never integrated the rabbi's case into the social history of psychoanalysis, more as a consequence of Freud's professional disparagement of Stekel than of the case history's original reception. Psychoanalytic historiography has largely dismissed Stekel's legacy, resulting in a lack of serious scholarly consideration of his prodigious publications compared to the attention paid to the work of some of Freud's other disciples. Stekel's most recent biographers, however, credit him as the “unsung populariser of psychoanalysis,” and claim that he is due for reconsideration. But in his published case history of the rabbi, Stekel also warrants introduction to the field of Jewish studies, not only because of the literary treatment of the rabbinical profession by a secular Jewish psychoanalyst, but also because the rabbi incorporated aspects of that experience into his own intellectual framework after treatment.

Saul Lieberman has shown that various aspects of Greco-Roman culture were pervasive not only among more Hellenized Jews of the first centuries CE, but that even “the Rabbis of Palestine were familiar with the fashionable style of the civilized world of that time. Many of them were highly educated in Greek literature. … They spoke to the people in their language and in their style.” An integral part of this culture involved the study of rhetoric, a staple of higher education throughout the Roman Empire.

The legal theorist and classicist James Boyd White argues for an understanding of law as a rhetorical activity through which meaning and communities are created. While law contains rules, its definition should not be limited to those rules. Rather, law is a literary and compositional activity, one of our social modes through which we aim to constitute community. Significantly, for White, law is a cultural activity, a language, one of the ways in which we shape and give meaning to our world. The written records of classical rabbinic culture, the Talmuds and the midrashim, present us with an example of this world in which law is a cultural and rhetorical mode of expression. In fact, as these texts, and the Talmuds in particular, usually do not present us with codified rules but rather artfully construed discussions, models of “thinking” about a particular legal decision, they are excellent examples of the ways in which the creation of law is the creation of meaning. Classical rabbinic literature presents us with a textual world of law and narrative, a weaving of one genre into the other, and a use of one genre in the service of the other. Rabbinic texts often inform us precisely which stories the rabbis choose to utilize for specific norms. Law does not exist in its own bordered realm, but is part of a larger web of meaning in which it and narrative together create behavioral claims. A claim to legal authority, therefore, is not only a claim about which stories are authoritative, but also a claim to a specific understanding of a tradition, a move toward narratival authority.

Now is an appropriate time to reconsider the historiographical benefit that a comparative study of the East Syrian (“Nestorian”) schools and the Babylonian rabbinic academies may offer. This is attributable both to the recent, rapid increase in scholarship on Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire and late antiquity more broadly, and to the return by some scholars of rabbinic Judaism to the issues of a scholarly exchange of the late 1970s and early 1980s about the nature of rabbinic academic institutionalization. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, scholars of classics, Greek and Roman history, and late antiquity have significantly added to the bibliography on the transmission of knowledge—in lay person's terms, education—in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds. Schools continue to be an intense topic of conversation, and my own recent work on the School of Nisibis and the East Syrian schools in general suggests that the transformations and innovations of late antiquity also occurred in the Sasanian Empire, at a great distance from the centers of classical learning, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch. The recently reexamined East Syrian sources may help push the conversation about rabbinic academic institutionalization forward. However, the significance of this issue is not simply attributable to its bearing on the social and institutional history of rabbinic institutions. Such inquiry may also reflect on how we understand the Babylonian Talmud and on the difficult redaction history of its constituent parts. Furthermore, I hope that the discussion offered herein will contribute to the ongoing analysis of the late antique creation and formalization of cultures of learning, which were transmitted, in turn, into the Eastern (i.e., Islamic and “Oriental” Christian and Jewish) and Western Middle Ages within their corresponding communities.