The Babylonian Talmud (Hebr. Talmud Bavli) is without doubt the most prominent text of rabbinic Judaism's traditional literature. Indeed, the simple phrase “the Talmud says” often stands as a kind of shorthand for any teaching found anywhere in the vast rabbinic corpus surviving from Late Antiquity. Among Jews, of course, the Talmud has been revered, studied, and commented upon over and over again for more than a millennium. But preoccupation - even obsession - with the Talmud has extended at times beyond the borders of traditional rabbinic communities as well. Christian theologians and historians have on occasion viewed the Talmud, much more than the Hebrew Bible itself, as encapsulating the spiritual and intellectual core of Judaism.

This interest has not always had benign results; it has, at times, turned the Talmud into a target of polemics and even violence. Repeated burnings of the Talmud and its associated writings by Christian authorities in medieval Europe were meant to destroy the intellectual sustenance of Judaism. In modern times, the Talmud has become a target even of Jews: Many secularized Jews of the post-Enlightenment period ridiculed its “primitive” religious worldview; reformers of Judaism sought to move behind it, as it were, to restore the Bible (or certain interpretations of it) as the normative source of Jewish belief; while Zionist Jews, concerned with restoring a vital Jewish culture in the ancient Jewish homeland, belittled the “diasporic” culture of “sterile” learning embodied by the Babylonian Talmud.

Group identity is a social and cultural construct that may be defined as a group's subjective sense of itself as being different from other groups. Since ancient times, the identity of Israel has been explored and constructed in opposition to gentile, or alien, others. But the self-other dyad is by no means stable or constant. Dramatic changes in the political and cultural conditions of Jewish life in Antiquity led inevitably to revision and renegotiation of the self-other dichotomy. Moreover, the self-other dichotomy can be differently constructed by different elements within a single ethnic or religious group, leading to internal conflict over the self-definition and boundaries of that group. These tensions may contribute to the formation of distinct sects espousing different views on the group's identity and the nature of the boundaries that serve to demarcate and preserve that identity. Identity construction is thus a complex task, as a group defines itself not only in contrast to other groups (“external others”) but also in contrast to members of its group that would contest the group's identity or construct it in a different way (“internal others”).

In rabbinic literature, reference is made to non-Israelites (gentiles of various descriptions). These “external others” often appear in rabbinic literature as mirror opposites of Israelites, and so sharpen the rabbis' definition of Israel. However, insofar as this literature explores and develops a definition of the rabbi as the ideal Jew, reference is made to non-rabbinic Jews (of various descriptions). These “internal others” often appear in rabbinic literature as mirror opposites of the rabbisand so sharpen the rabbis' definition of their own class.

Scholars of rabbinic literature are increasingly aware of the various ways in which the emerging culture of the sages was deeply in conversation with surrounding cultural currents. The essays by Seth Schwartz, Yaakov Elman, and Catherine Hezser in this volume already have pointed readers in this direction. In the present contribution, I wish to continue this theme from the perspective of linguistics and folklore studies. In particular, I shall focus on the expression of cultural proximity, maybe even intimacy, of the Aramaic and Hebrew-speaking Jewish culture of the Greco-Roman and Byzantine period with the Greek-speaking culture of the same time and place. The evidence I shall call upon is found in hidden puns relating to the Greek language that underlie some Aramaic or Hebrew texts. These demonstrate a marked interlingual proficiency and creativity on the part of the authors, narrators, and even their audiences. The traversing of linguistic borders that seems to have been regarded with aesthetic pleasure and cultural appreciation offers yet more demonstration that cultural isolationism was hardly a dominant trait in the culture that we call ancient rabbinic.

The texts in which I have found these puns are from rabbinic works, shaped between the third and the sixth century, approximately, in Jewish Palestine, texts in which the Hebrew Bible serves as a constant point of reference and basis for interpretation. Remarkably, maybe one could even say paradoxically, one important literary context in which such puns appear is the midrashic account of the historical clash between Judah and Rome in Lamentations Rabbah, a text that surely emerges out of this period, although in its later formations it was strongly influenced by the Babylonian Talmud.

The subject of this essay is the prehistory of mishnaic law. Sixty-two of the sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah treat questions of halakhah, that is, law, practice, and ritual. When the Mishnah talks about blessings and tithes, Sabbath and festivals, marriage and divorce, torts (physical and financial damages) and contracts, slaughter and sacrifice, or purity and impurity, it devotes almost exclusive attention to the exposition of law, at great length and in great detail. Whence come all these laws and all these details?

The Mishnah itself is not interested in this question. The opening paragraphs of Mishnah Avot, the lone mishnaic tractate not devoted to legal matters, presents the theory of a rabbinic chain of tradition, stretching via master and disciple from Moses on Mt. Sinai to the mishnaic sages themselves:

Perhaps more than any other film practices, cinematic adaptations have drawn the attention, scorn, and admiration of movie viewers, historians, and scholars since 1895. Indeed, even before this origin of the movies - with the first public projections of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière in France and Max and Emil Skladanowsky in Germany - critical voices worried about how photography had already encroached on traditional aesthetic terrains and disciplines, recuperating and presumably demeaning pictorial or dramatic subjects by adapting them as mechanical reproductions. After 1895, however, film culture moved quickly to turn this cultural anxiety to its advantage, as filmmakers worked to attract audiences with well-known images from books now brought to life as Cinderella (1900), Gulliver's Travels (1902), and The Damnation of Faust (1904). The plethora of cinematic adaptations in recent decades and the flood of scholarship responding to these films - films like Bride and Prejudice, (2004), Bollywood's version of Jane Austen's novel, and scholarly projects like Robert Stam's back-to-back anthologies A Companion to Literature and Film (2005), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (2005) and critical study Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation (2005) - indicate that the practice of adaptation and the disciplinary debates about it remain as lively and pressing as ever.

Adaptation describes, of course, multiple textual exchanges besides those involving film. Literary and theatrical works have regularly adapted historical chronicles; paintings have adapted theatrical or literary scenes, and music has converted literary figures into audio motifs and scores.

Perhaps no aspect of filmmaking has been so thoroughly canvassed at every level, from cinema-foyer gossip to learned academic exegeses, as the matter of adaptation of literature into film. It is not as though adaptation is the only kind of relationship that might exist between film and literature, but it is the one that most persistently preoccupies the theorist, the critic, the reviewer, the buff, and the ordinary filmgoer alike. No one feels too awed by it to be willing to risk judgments about the latest adaptation, usually to the film's disadvantage; nor do theorists regard the subject as too simple to engage their attention.

So, to start, I should like to do what I can to dispose of some of the shibboleths that hover about the discourse, both popular and scholarly, relating to film-literature connections. First, it shouldn't be necessary after several decades of serious research into the processes and challenges of adaptation to insist that “fidelity” to the original text (however distinguished) is a wholly inappropriate and unhelpful criterion for either understanding or judgment. It may be that, even among the most rigorously high-minded of film viewers confronted with the film version of a cherished novel or play, it is hard to suppress a sort of yearning for a faithful rendering of one's own vision of the literary text. My italics are intended to highlight the impossibility of such a venture: that every reading of a literary text is a highly individual act of cognition and interpretation; that every such response involves a kind of personal adaptation on to the screen of one's imaginative faculty as one reads. And how is any film version, drawing on the contributions of numerous collaborators, ever going to produce the same responses except by the merest chance?

The publication of The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen confirms the fact that Literature on Screen has finally arrived. Always a “hybrid” subject, literature on screen was too literary for film studies and too film-based for Literary Studies, and has tended to occupy an uneasy place between the two, perhaps tending towards departments of literature in the main. Literary adaptations have been the subject of much academic discourse in both fields (auteur studies, and Shakespeare on Screen texts are two obvious examples), but until the last decade there have been few attempts to evaluate the process of adaptation itself and even then only some of these investigations attempt to theorize the textual transactions that occur in the process - whether in the mind of the adaptor, the critic, or the reader/viewer.

As early as 1936, Renaissance scholar Allardyce Nicoll, in Theatre and Film, considers the potential of film to merit the same status as theatrical texts, while conversely reflecting on how film fails to achieve its potential when it simply copies, or “culls” from literature. Like Nicoll, George Bluestone in 1957, in the first book-length study of adaptation, Novels into Film, alludes to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's essay The Laocoon (1766), on the differentiations between poetry and painting.

Inserted in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) is a “paragone,” a poetic diatribe proclaiming the inestimable superiority of literature over television and the latter's responsibility for the present intellectual degeneration of the child in which Dahl's own voice can be heard loudly and clearly:

The “paragone,” the defense of the superior claims of one discipline over another, especially in terms of the visual and the verbal, has an extensive literature, from Plato to Sir Philip Sidney, and reappears in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the often competing and strained relationship between literature and film, and the covert paragone detectable in both forms. The most famous of all paragones, Ben Jonson's “Expostulation,” an attack on his all too successful collaborator, the architect, Inigo Jones, is unnervingly prophetic of the current “he's only the author” syndrome (of Hollywood, where spectacle undeniably rules):

It has become a popular commonplace that had Shakespeare been born in the twentieth century, he would have been a filmmaker. This idea has had a long history, stretching back at least as far as George Méliès's 1907 film La Mort de Jules César. In it, Shakespeare, suffering from writer's block, falls asleep. As he does, he dreams of the assassination scene from Julius Caesar, presented behind him in one of the double-exposure shots for which Méliè s was renowned. His writing problems solved, Shakespeare awakes with delight and even stabs a loaf of bread, imitating what he has just seen. The effect is to reverse the usual relationship between Shakespeare's theatrical script and the cinematic image of Caesar's murder. As Méliès presents the writing process, one of Shakespeare's most famous scenes springs from an imagination not bound to the stage, an imagination fundamentally visual not verbal. The final shot, of Shakespeare's face surrounded by the flags of many nations, suggests that his international appeal springs not from his words but from the moving images that lie behind them. It suggests that the essentially visual - and thus panlinguistic - nature of Shakespeare's imagination, like that of silent film, makes his work capable of crossing cultural boundaries. Shakespeare and film, Méliès argues, are conjoined at an essential level. Something of this same idea appears in the final moments of Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998). Again, the scene is of Shakespeare composing. Having lost his love but gained a royal commission, Shakespeare sits down to write Twelfth Night.

Practices, perceptions, and prejudices: film versus television adaptations

Since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have adapted an eclectic range of sources, including many and varied sub-genres of literature - from classic eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels to “pulp” fiction, from thrillers to romances, from melodramas to ghost stories. The breadth and variety of film adaptations is clearly visible to most cinema-goers. When one speaks of television adaptations, in comparison, one tends to refer more particularly to prolific “classic serials”: relatively faithful adaptations of classic, mostly nineteenth-century, works of literature. So-called classic serials have formed a flourishing and prominent genre on television since the earliest days of broadcasting, and have constituted a significant portion of television's dramatic output.

Television adaptations of classic novels are comparatively more prominent than adaptations of other kinds of sources, not necessarily because they outnumber them, but for two powerful reasons. First, they are more frequently advertised as adaptations, rather than being subsumed into other generic categories - compare The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), Middlemarch (1994), and Pride and Prejudice (1995) which are clearly marked as classic-novel adaptations, with series such as Miss Marple (1985-1992), Inspector Morse (1987-2000), and The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1987-2000), which are regarded primarily as detective serials, and only secondarily (if at all) as adaptations. Second, classic-novel adaptations share a generic identity: they “look” similar to one another (or so it is claimed), so that their visibility is heightened, along with their tendency to be categorized straightforwardly as adaptations.

In the silent era, the film industry reached early, eagerly, and repeatedly for literary sources of a more or less reputable character to feed its voracious hunger for narrative material. The authors enlisted to supply a good plot line and some associated cultural kudos included Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Pushkin, Racine, Goldsmith, Twain, Wilde and, most frequently of all, Shakespeare. Filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic gratefully embraced the respectability that adapting the “classics” could bring and were widely applauded for doing so. Impressive claims were made about what a Shakespeare picture, for example, might do both for a viewing public in need of cultural and moral edifying and for an industry in need of rescuing from its own worst impulses. Aligning itself with an established literary pedigree was an economical route towards artistic legitimacy and moral propriety for an industry keenly aware that, initially at least, it lacked both.

If establishment respectability was what was required of a literary source, the Christian Bible did not just offer it, it was it. It is, therefore, no surprise that the film industry appropriated biblical material strikingly early in its own development. Making such films was not, however, a project without potential pitfalls. Adapting any known literary work for the screen is a delicate business. It runs the risk of irritating those most intensely invested in the particular character, history and perceived cultural value of the source. Nevertheless, adapting sections of the Bible has proved difficult to rival in the sphere of literary adaptation for the strength of the competing responses it can provoke.