Jewish books and Roman readers: censorship, authorship, and the rabbinic library

In this essay I use the imperial library as a figure of the dynamic reading practices of an imperial elite and to frame the early rabbis’ own relationship to the book. The rabbis, like Aristeas and Josephus writing in Greek, I will argue, are significantly affected by the imagined imperial reader and his library. Their language, genres, media, and content are similarly created in relationship to them. Key elements distinguishing tannaitic literature from antecedent Jewish literatures are some of the very things that align them with Roman literary culture: (1) a heightened sense of the authority of the book, and a belated and deferential stance to the book-based knowledge manifested in careful attention to wording, precision, and citation as driving mode of creation/composition; (2) a sense of foreboding in the face of the proliferation of knowledge, and an attempt to manage it; and (3) the emergence of the real person from behind the pseudepigraph, and the concurrent elevation of the human scholar-expert, who curates and brokers knowledge, and functions in his person as a sort of walking library. In highlighting these parallels I hope to communicate that rabbis are not prima fascia an inversion of the imperial, an outlier, or special case. Indeed, they are facing down some of the same challenges that vex Pliny, and in this way they are fellow travellers. And yet even as they shape a Roman-inflected literacy, the rabbis curtail imperial logic, and move dramatically to thwart it. The primary gestures of this recusal are three: a contraction of the sacred library and a concomitant censorship of both Jewish and non-Jewish books; a refusal to trace non-Scriptural knowledge to books; and the refusal of authorship – they not only don’t depict themselves writing, but they do not attribute works to individual persons. In sum, the rabbis’ unusual focus on the book – the ways they reify the textuality of one small corpus, while stigmatizing the authorizing power of all others – deviates from the book-centered Jewish imagination that preceded them. Looking at the rabbinic project through the lens of the Roman book consumer, for whom the production and circulation of books was central to intellectual life, we might draw together a set of related aversions: in saying no to knowledge derived from books, no to writing, no to authorship, to Greek and Aramaic and most antecedent genres, the early rabbis create a literary cosmos that confronts the Roman reader/librarian with daunting barriers.