Narrating the Law by Wimpfheimer Barry Scott;

Author:Wimpfheimer, Barry Scott;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Torah as Cultural Capital: Rabbis and Rabbis

In his book The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu models a method of literary analysis that employs his own socioeconomic framework of analyzing culture to read Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education.1 The novel is structured around the life of Frédéric Moreau and several friends and set in nineteenth-century Paris. Many critics have understood Frédéric as a proxy for his creator, and literary analysis of Sentimental Education is dominated by historicist readings that map the novel onto Flaubert’s autobiography. The Rules of Art, by contrast, employs the novel as a window onto nineteenth-century Parisian sociology. The book opens with each of its central characters possessing disparate quantities of different forms of capital (political, financial, social), and each character is motivated by his or her construal of success as the assimilation of great quantities of one or more forms of capital. By using the characters’ own constructions of these separate fields of capital, Bourdieu can evaluate each character’s own sense of success. The novel thus enables an internal sociological analysis. The novel provides “all the tools necessary for its own sociological analysis: the structure of the book, which a strictly internal reading brings to light, that is, the structure of the social space in which the adventures of Frédéric unfold, proves to be at the same time the structure of the social space in which its author himself was situated.”2

Bourdieu’s literary approach offers an alternative historicism that allows the critic to plumb the novel for the social space it constructs, using the outcome of that probing to construct a sociology of the author’s cultural context. Bourdieu claims that Sentimental Education possesses a prophetic awareness of sociological structure, an awareness veiled until the sociological critic unveils it.3 In Bourdieu’s understanding, the textual unconscious preserves sociological structures. The critic’s job is to uncover these structures through a strictly internal reading of the literature.

Bourdieu’s model of internal literary sociology is enticing for the study of Babylonian rabbinic sociology because in the case of Babylonian rabbinic Judaism the absence of significant data on the rabbis external to the Talmud makes internal sociology the only possible sociology. The following pages employ Bourdieu’s technique and theoretical insights in reading Bābā Batrā 20b–22a as a cryptogram that provides its own key, using these texts to describe the parallel fields of Torah and commerce. The results of this internal sociology are an awareness of the internal hierarchies of the rabbinic world and the struggle of individual rabbis to assert a personal authority over other Jews, even rabbinic ones.

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