The Closed Book by Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg;

Author:Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

Bypassing Text in Early Literacy Pedagogies: Learning to Read as a Rabbinic Jew

It can be tempting to agree that many rabbinic authorities cultivated a radically different form of ritual reading but then all but dismiss these forms of difference as a small quirk in an otherwise largely familiar system of scholarly engagement with a textual tradition. We can gain a better sense of the extent to which many rabbinic circles cultivated a profoundly alien way of engaging with written biblical materials by looking at early rabbinic literacy education. In other words, we can begin to understand certain fundamental cultural predispositions toward text by studying the most basic mode in which many early rabbinic practitioners were taught to engage with the written text of the Bible. William Johnson has pointed out that the basic elements of Mediterranean literacy education might have been relatively uniform in late antiquity but their use and outcomes varied markedly even between relatively similar communities. As Johnson puts it, the literacy education provided to the sons of great centurions would differ from the studies provided to the son of an equestrian or senator since a “centurion’s literacy” need not encompass literary literacy but instead prepared a boy “to set the password, issue formulaic order, and write brief (and, again, formulaic) letters.”19 This section, therefore, seeks to highlight certain key facets of the process of acquiring “rabbinic literacy,” which would come to shape in vital ways early rabbinic modes of engaging with the written text of the Bible.

The relative paucity of early rabbinic evidence for the forms of early rabbinic literacy education might lead one to doubt that the portrait painted is accurate or complete. Yet, as Natalie B. Dohrmann has argued more generally, researchers on late antique reading cultures would do well to recognize “the rabbis as provincial exemplars and not cultural exceptions or outliers,” so that we may visualize rabbinic literacy as part of “the thick web of cultural relationships built around reading and writing that includes both the imperial center and the Jewish authors.”20 The current treatment will, therefore, fill out and parallel these relative sparse early rabbinic accounts of literacy pedagogy with literary and documentary evidence of similar early literacy education practices in neighboring communities—where children (including possibly the children of rabbis)21 were taught to read in Greek, Latin, or Syriac.

Admittedly, the process of fleshing out rabbinic images of elementary education by means of parallel descriptions from Greek and Latin, or even Syriac accounts, is not without its pitfalls. Most markedly, rabbinic participation in these modes of literacy education was primarily executed in parallel or imitative educational contexts rather than being embedded within the broader streams of imperial education, as many of their early Christian counterparts were.22 This dynamic is particularly complicated as we move into the Persian context. While a great deal of work has been done tracing connections in the contents of Sasanian Zoroastrian and Babylonian Jewish communal thought and ritual practice,23 methodological continuities in educational practice and scholarly discourse have not always emerged so clearly.

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