The Rise and Fall of Imitation as a Rabbinic Literary Technique

Talk by Eliav Grossman, Professor of Rabbinics and Classical Judaism, Vanderbilt University

This talk highlights a phenomenon observable in certain rabbinic texts from the early Islamic period that imitate the Mishnah. Unlike the Babylonian Talmud and the Iraqi Geonim—those great champions of Talmudic authority—who promote a tradition of commentary (the Talmud comments on the Mishnah, the Geonim comment on the Talmud, and so on) the texts that we’ll look at engage in mimicry. Though they are not the first Jewish texts, nor even the first rabbinic texts, to adopt imitation as a literary strategy, the particular circumstances and context under which these early-Islamic era texts were produced demands special attention. In the talk, we’ll attempt to understand such imitations of the Mishnah—which might be termed ‘New Mishnah’—as both the culmination of a long tradition of Jewish pseudepigraphy and a distinctively Islamicate literary development. Crucially, we’ll also ask if—and why—this method of mimicry endured past the early Islamic centuries.