As a consequence of the specialization that thrives in current humanistic studies, it is not surprising that scholarship has tended to classify the literary creations of the past into fixed compartments. In the study of medieval Judaism, it is particularly common to follow the traditional division of disciplines into philosophy, Kabbalah, and rabbinism—a categorization that was indeed promoted by the medievals themselves. Following this way of thinking, the study of Rashi's biblical commentaries would be assigned to one class of scholars devoted to the study of rabbinic Judaism; Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed to experts in Jewish philosophy; and the Zohar to yet a third group consisting of specialists in Jewish mysticism.

A discussion of the emergence of a modern Jewish collective consciousness in Eastern Europe does not require us to address the question of the beginnings of a movement, which also has an organizational aspect. The phenomenon under discussion—at least in its initial stage—was not organized; there were no membership cards, bylaws, or party conferences. It is my contention, however, that the emergence of a Jewish nationalist movement was connected to, and dependent upon, the prior emergence of a collective consciousness.Thus, on the one hand, our discussion is not based upon the phenomenological definition of nationalism, which is not a simple matter, while, on the other hand, we view the institutionalized nationalist movement as a consequence of a process of consciousness-building. Mine is a syncretic approach, the advantage of which is that it does not observe a historical process from an intellectual or theoretical point of reference foreign to the process.

The 1980s saw the introduction of postmodern literary theory into the field of rabbinic literature, in particular into the study of midrash, which began to be explored as anticipating or aligning with many of the claims of modern literary theorists. This new interest intersected oddly at times with the prevailing historicist mode of inquiry. For many scholars, the notion of textual indeterminacy supported the idea of the interpreter of the text as essentially an “eisegete,” who reads the text from his or her own historically embedded perspective, rather than as an exegete, who at least attempts to find out what the text “really means.” Thus, scholars who embraced this new perspective often rejected an inquiry into midrash as biblical interpretation in the classic sense of the word. “No one believes anymore,” someone pointed out to me after a session on midrash in a conference during the mid-1980’s, “that texts have meaning.”

Throughout the past two centuries, the corpus of rabbinic writings, called either tannaitic midrashim or halakhic midrashim, has served as a pivotal foundation upon which scholars have based their historical reconstructions of the development of rabbinic Judaism. The reasons for this dependence are manifold. Predated in redaction by only the Mishnah, these documents contain a wealth of traditions attributed to the founders of rabbinic Judaism who flourished during its nascency. Moreover, these texts differ significantly in rhetorical style, logic, scope, and concern not only from those rabbinic documents which precede them (Mishnah), follow them (Palestinian/Babylonian Talmuds and amoraic midrashim), or are, perhaps, contemporaneous with them (Tosefta), but also among themselves as a corpus of writings. Finally, these documents are the earliest collections of rabbinic biblical exegesis (“Midrash”) and, were it not for a small number of examples of exegesis preserved in the Mishnah and Tosefta, they would also represent the earliest examples of rabbinic biblical interpretation known today. For reasons such as these, the tannaitic midrashim have figured prominently in research conducted over the past century on the historical development of Rabbinic Judaism.

The work of many emerging young rabbinics scholars today, particularly that which is focused on the Mishnah, is animated by a desire to synthesize two distinct approaches to rabbinic texts. One is the traditional philological-historical approach, which traces its roots back to the European Wissenschaft des Judentums tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In its current form, traditional Talmud criticism is perhaps most associated in Israel with the work of J. N. Epstein, the founder of the Hebrew University Talmud Department and the “father of exact scientific Talmudic inquiry.” While most of Epstein's students proceeded to shape the study of rabbinic literature in the Israeli academy, Saul Lieberman, perhaps his most distinguished disciple, moved to America, where his presence dominated the study of rabbinic literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the postwar decades. Traditional Talmud criticism is characterized by a scrupulous attention to manuscripts and textual variants, a systematic use of the findings of Semitic and comparative linguistics, and the use of form and source criticism to determine the history and development of larger textual units.

The question of the existence of Babylonian rabbinic traditions dating from the mishnaic period (pre-220 CE) has not been thoroughly and methodically addressed in the scholarly literature. Historians have pointed out that several rabbis were active in Babylonia during the mishnaic period; some researchers have even suggested that in this early period, organized rabbinic intellectual activity already existed in cities such as Nisibis, Nehardea, and Husal. However, a systematic examination of halakhot whose provenance was Babylonia in the mishnaic period has yet to be undertaken. Most prior attempts to uncover Babylonian rabbinic activity from this period have focused on a few traditions ascribed to Tannaim who had a known connection to Babylonia, such as R. Judah b. Bathyra, R. Nathan, and R. Hiyya (the “Babylonians,” as they are sometimes called in rabbinic literature). In light of the absence of a systematic study of Babylonian pre-talmudic rabbinic traditions, Gafni came to the following conclusion, one that this paper will support with solid evidence:

With these words, Alexander Kohut engaged the radical Reform stance of Kaufman Kohler in the spring of 1885. The exchange with Kohler crystallized Kohut's raison d'être for Conservative Judaism: an authentic alternative to what he termed “stupid Orthodoxy and insane Reform.” Kohut articulated a fully developed version of this view in Ethics of the Fathers, a compilation of his polemics against Kohler that he published a few months later. This earned Kohut a place among the Conservative movement's pantheon of nineteenth-century founders, along with Sabato Morais, Benjamin Szold, and Marcus Jastrow.

Unlike the works of the “old masters” in the fine arts, often seen as the apotheosis of the creative spirit of their and all time, works of historiography have a much briefer shelf life. It is in the nature of scholarship to subject forebears to critical scrutiny; few works hold up beyond a generation or so. We are charged in this forum with reconsidering one of the “old masters” of Jewish historiography, Salo Wittmayer Baron, whose formidable mastery of languages and sources and his prolific output position him as one of the preeminent twentieth-century historians of the Jewish people. Has Baron's three-volume The Jewish Community, a masterpiece of historical synthesis first published in 1942, still retained its scholarly relevance? What is striking about this work is how much ahead of his time it was in certain respects, and how, in this work on a subject so central to understanding pre-modern Jewish life, Baron's construction was ahistorical in crucial dimensions. Baron's Jewish Community has fallen into disuse, so much so that in the Hebrew collection, Kehal Yisrael (2004), intended to portray specific Jewries and their communal lives, the latter two volumes, comprising dozens of essays and over 800 pages, written by leading Israeli scholars, contain only two references to Baron, in the notes. This blatant example of ignoring Baron's treasure trove is true not only of Israeli scholarship: most recent studies of Jewish communities make scarcely any use of it. Is the neglect deserved?