Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (28 page)

1. Notes
   ‌
   Introduction
   

   1. Gary Porton, "Defining Midrash," in
      The Study of Ancient Judaism
      , ed. J. Neusner (New York, 1981), pp. 59–60.
      

   2. James Kugel, "Two Introductions to Midrash," in
      Midrash and Literature
      , ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven, 1986), p. 91.
      

   3. In an article, "The Date of the
      Mekilta
      deRabbi Ishmael,"
      HUCA
      39 (1968), pp. 117–144, Wacholder claimed that this midrash is a much later pseudepigraphic work. His view has been decisively and definitively disproved by Menahem Kahana in his article, "The Editions of the
      Mekilta deRabbi Ishmael
      on Exodus in the Light of Geniza Fragments" [Hebrew],
      Tarbiz
      45 (1986), pp. 515–520. The Mekilta may be in the main, in fact, the earliest of rabbinic midrashic texts, although its final recension seems to have been a little later than some other early midrashim.
      

   4. Whatever midrash is, it certainly is
      not
      "the process whereby a later writer revises or even reverses details of an earlier tale to make it conform to the growth of ethical doctrine," as Frank McConnell has it in his introduction to
      The Bible and the Narrative Tradition
      , ed. Frank McConnell (Oxford, 1986), pp. 10–11).
      

   5. "As an anthropologist, I can't help remark that this ["believe in"] seems a somewhat disingenuous phrase for you to use here; it masks more than it asserts, and what it masks is vitally relevant" [Jonathan Boyarin].
      

   6. I am by no means the first to address these questions in these terms. See chapter 1 for some historical discussion of the problem.
      

   7. I place these terms in quotation marks because it is precisely their adequacy which will be at issue here.
      

   8. Hans Frei, " 'Literal Reading' of Biblical Narrative in Christian Tradition," in
      The Bible and the Narrative Tradition
      , p. 73.
      

   9. I would like to thank J. Derrida for his encouragement of my project and particularly for reading a very early version of some of this work and commenting on it. He is an extraordinarily generous teacher.
      

   10. Wolfgang Iser,
       The Act of Reading
       (Baltimore, 1978), p. 21.
       

   11. Riffaterre claims that the text controls and dictates its reading, including the filling in of its gaps in effectively only one way, while Iser leaves room for varying actualizations of the text. Cp. Iser's
       The Act of Reading
       , pp. 24 and 37–38 with, e.g., Riffaterre's "The Intertextual Unconscious,"
       Critical Inquiry
       13 (1987), p. 372.
       

   12. There is an important analogy, yet to be explored, between the way that Jewish discourse and women's discourse have been marginalized. "JudaeoChristian" repeats in significant ways the kind of suppression that "man" does. Cf. Julia Kristeva, ''Women's Time,"
       The Kristeva Reader
       , ed. Toril Moi (Oxford, 1986), p. 196.
       

1. Frank Kermode,
   The Genesis of Secrecy
   (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 126.
   

2. Susan Handelman,
   The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory
   (Albany, 1982).
   

3. José Faur,
   Golden Doves with Silver Dots
   (Bloomington, 1986).
   

1. Yitzhaq Heinemann,
   Darkhe ha'aggadh
   [The ways of the aggadah], 3rd ed. (Jerusalem, 1974). I have spelled Heinemann's first name as Isaak throughout in accordance with German usage.
   

2. Compare the remarks of Susan Handelman, whose only citation of Heinemann's great work in her book,
   The Slayers of Moses
   , is to suggest that he "does not deal with the
   philosophic
   issues of meaning," (p. 234, n. 1), whereas, as Stern has pointed out in his review of her book (David Stern, "Mosescide: Midrash and Contemporary Literary Criticism,"
   Prooftexts
   4 [ 1984], p. 197; see also his "Literary Criticism or Literary Homilies,''
   Prooftexts
   5 [1985], pp. 96–97), this is precisely what Heinemann's work is about, i.e., understanding aggada in terms of an articulated theory of literary meaning. The fact that we might see the philosophical grounding of his view as unsatisfactory from our present perspective is no excuse to ignore its presence. Indeed, the fact that a critic such as Handelman found it so easy to dismiss Heinemann only shows all the more how important it is to assess his work in English.
   

3. The traditional acronym for Rabbi Moses ben Maimon.
   

4. Guide of the Perplexed
   , III, 43. I have quoted the text in the translation of Shlomo Pines (Chicago, nd), pp. 572–573.
   

5. A. Geiger,
   Wiss. Zeitschrift
   V, p. 81, quoted in Heinemann, p. 198.
   

6. Of course, this is not meant to be taken literally. Benno Jacob was a Reform rabbi.
   

7. On this point, see the Section in this chapter entitled, "Toward a New Theory of Midrash."
   

8. David Stern insightfully defines homily as precisely that kind of interpretation with which it makes no sense to argue,
   because it is really not claiming to be interpretation at all
   , but a rhetorical device for entertainment and persuasion, without the authority of the text. Therefore, by definition, dialectic on the meaning of the text indicates that the text is not homily, whatever our view of the truthvalue of the interpretations offered. See also the important paper of Judah Goldin, "The Freedom and Restraint of Haggadah," in Hartman and Budick,
   Midrash and Literature
   , pp. 57–77, esp. pp. 67ff.
   

9. This point has been made elegantly and forcefully with regard to the Bible by Meir Sternberg,
   The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading
   (Bloomington, 1985), pp. 24–25.
   

10. In a recently delivered lecture, Josef Stern has argued that in fact the Rambam is arguing that the midrashim are philosophical allegories and that his meaning here is also allegorically conveyed.
    

11. Joseph Heinemann, "The Nature of the Aggadah," in Hartman and Budick, p. 49, (emphasis added). This citation does not represent Heinemann's full judgment and
    

understanding of aggada, which is, in fact, much more nuanced than this single quotation would indicate.

1. Perhaps the classic of this genre of midrash studies is E. E. Urbach's
   The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs
   , trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem, 1975). See also J. Elbaum, "R. Eleazar Hamoda'i and R. Joshua on the Amalek Pericope" [Hebrew],
   Studies in Aggadah and Jewish Folklore
   (
   =Folklore Research Centre Studies
   VII (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 99–116. Compare also Chernus's interpretive methods discussed below, ch. 4.
   

2. Joseph Heinemann,
   Aggadah and Its Development
   [Hebrew], (Jerusalem, 1974), p. 75. 14. Ibid., pp. 77–78.
   

1. In fact, even Heinemann's assumption that this tradition is more ancient and independent of rabbinic midrash is very questionable from a scholarly point of view. The Targum may actually be quoting precisely this very midrash!
   

2. Ibid., pp. 4–5. On the opposition between history and life, see Hayden White's essay, "The Burden of History," in his
   Tropics of Discourse
   (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 27–50.
   

3. Paul de Man,
   The Resistance to Theory
   (Manchester, 1986), p. 77, has hinted at the power of George's presence in German cultural life. It is worth mentioning, however, that by the time
   Darkhe ha'aggadah
   was being written, George and his school had quite receded into the background in Germany itself. This would be another example, then, of the anthropological principle of the conservatism or archaism of the periphery.
   

4. As a curiosity, I would like to mention that none of the books or articles on the George school which I have read mentioned that Gundolf's real name was Gundelfinger or that he was Jewish, a fact that is not without its ironic importance considering the panAryan tendencies of the circle.
   

5. Much of the information in the following paragraphs in drawn from G. R. Urban,
   Kinesis and Stasis: A Study in the Attitude of Stefan George and His Circle to the Musical Arts
   ('SGravenhage, 1962). As I am not a Germanist, I have had to rely quite heavily here on secondary sources. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I believe that such reliance is not a serious fault, and the alternative would probably have meant that the chapter could not have been written.
   

20. Ibid., p. 32.

1. Ibid., p. 33. Urban points to the enormous influence that Gundolf had even on such sober thinkers as Lord Alfred North Whitehead. Thus Whitehead asserts: "This notion of historians, of history devoid of aesthetic prejudice, of history devoid of any reliance on metaphysical principles and cosmological generalizations, is a figment of the imagination. The belief in it can only occur to minds steeped in provinciality—the provinciality of an epoch, of a race, of a school of
   

   learning" (
   Adventures of Ideas
   [London, 1933], p. 4).
   

2. Urban, p. 35.
   

3. See Hayden White,
   Tropics of Discourse
   , pp. 53–54, for convenient overview.
   

4. Urban, p. 35.
   

25. Ibid., p. 38.

26. Another perspective on Heinemann is that provided by David Stern, who in a recent article says, "A[nother]. . . model for midrashic discourse, framed in Romanti

cist language and virtually Viconian mythopoeiac terminology was proposed by Isaac Heinemann in his classic
Darkhe ha'aggadah
." David Stern, "Midrash and Indeterminacy,"
Critical Inquiry
1:1 (1988), p. 146, n. 25. Stern correctly points out the Viconian connections in Heinemann's thought. Heinemann himself cites Croce. A fuller reading of Heinemann than what I am undertaking here would have to take both elements into consideration and attempt to account for them together. I hope to provide such a reading in a version of this text to be published separately. In that text I plan also to deal more fully with the influence of romanticism on the history of research on midrash in the
Wissenschaft des Judentums
. Midrash has been made to play a role in this ideology analogous to that of
Volkspoesie
for the Romantics. Bialik was quite explicit on this point, as are those critical schools dominant in some Israeli universities in which midrash is studied as the ancient folklore of the Jewish people.

27. Wolf Lepenies, "Between Social Science and Poetry in Germany,"
Poetics Today
9:1 (1988), pp. 117–145. 28. Ibid., p. 123.

1. Ibid., p. 140. See also, George Messe,
   Nationalism and Sexuality
   (Madison, 1985), p. 58: "Stefan George drew into his coterie some of the best minds in Germany. The poet as intuitive seer was not a new concept at the
   fin de siècle
   ;
   

   men like Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and Gabriele D'Annunzio had already looked upon themselves as prophets of a personal renewal that would change the nation as well."
   

2. He has referred above to the popular identification of Friedrich III and Frierich I in the stories of the German folk.
   

3. Heinemann is referring to LévyBruhl, and Handelman accuses him of being unaware of theory!
   

4. Already in 1922, in his essay on Goethe's
   Elective Affinities
   , Walter Benjamin mounted a scathing attack on Gundolf's book on Goethe. Walter Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,"
   Gesammelte Schriften
   , ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Scweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), Vol. I part 1, pp. 123–
   

203. The attack on Gundolf is on pp. 155ff.

1. Lepenies, p. 131.
   

2. It is, moreover, a very questionable claim. There are many scholars who have argued that the distinction between
   peshat
   as plain meaning and
   derash
   as application is later than the Talmudic period entirely, while others have located it in the period of the late Babylonian Amoraim. Heinemann makes no chronological distinctions whatever, as has been pointed out in an otherwise laudatory review of his book by Eliezer Margoliot in
   Behinot
   2 (1952), pp. 77–78. On this issue in general see the excellent article of Raphael Loewe, "The 'Plain' Meaning of Scripture in Early Jewish Exegesis,"
   Papers of the Institute of Jewish Studies
   I (1964), pp. 140–185, and material cited there. According to Loewe's study, the term
   peshat
   in tannaitic literature means "authoritative interpretation," no more and no less.
   

3. See White,
   Tropics of Discourse
   , pp. 58–60 and passim. Also Dominick LaCapra,
   History and Criticism
   (Ithaca, 1985), especially the chapter, "Rhetoric and History," pp. 15–45.
   

4. Frank Kermode, "The Plain Sense of Things," in Hartman and Budick, pp. 179–194.
   

5. For some clarification of this notion and its place in midrashic studies see my
   

review essay entitled "Literature and Midrash" in the
Jewish Quarterly Review
(January, 1989).

1. James Kugel, "Two Introductions to Midrash," in Hartman and Budick, pp. 77–105.
   

2. Jacob Neusner, "The Case of James Kugel's Joking Rabbis and Other Serious Issues," in his
   Wrong Ways and Right Ways in the Study of Formative Judaism
   

   (Atlanta, 1988), pp. 59–73.
   

3. Kugel, p. 93.
   

4. Neusner, p. 67 (emphasis mine). Neusner repeats the same error in reading Kugel on p. 73. This misreading seriously distorts his entire understanding of what Kugel is about.
   

5. Ibid., p. 68. Neusner's characterization of all of the participants in this socalled circle, as well as the faculties of Judaic studies of Israeli universities en bloc, Yeshiva University, and Harvard as "possessed . . . by the Orthodox" reveals his own possession more than anything else. (To be sure, Yeshiva and Bar Ilan Universities are in some sense possessed by the Orthodox.)
   

6. Jacob Neusner,
   Canon and Connection
   (Lanham, 1987).
   

7. He admits as much when he cites only one text as being the one from which he has learned everything there is to be known about intertextuality
   Wrong Ways and Right Ways
   (p. 34). And then, from that one text, he chooses only one acceptation of the term "intertextuality"—arguably the clearest but certainly not the most sophisticated. I suspect that Robert Scholes was pulling a naive colleague's leg when he sent him to one article in a field which has spawned by now almost a small library.
   

8. This formula is meant to leave room for the many contested areas visàvis "intertextuality" in the literature.
   

9. Neusner, p. 62. This is doubly ironic in the light of Neusner's almost virulent attack on Baron in the same volume for not being aware of the latest theories in economic history. It may indeed have been the case, but then neither, clearly, is Neusner aware of the latest developments in literary theory and the theory of literary history, so a little more charity toward others would seem to be called for.
   

10. In this sense, speaking of "innerbiblical midrash," which is practically a commonplace of modem biblical study, seems to me rather putting the cart before the horse. Rather we should understand midrash as postbiblical Scripture—or as the rabbis called it, "Oral Torah."
    

11. Gerald Bruns, "Midrash and Allegory." in
    The Literary Guide to the Bible
    , ed. Frank Kermode and Robert Alter, (Cambridge, Mass. 1986), pp. 626–627.
    

12. Song of Songs Rabba
    , pp. 42. See ch. 7 below for the full context of this citation.
    

13. See chapter 7 below.
    

14. White, p. 60.
    

15. My translation from
    Bereshit Rabbah
    , ed. TheodorAlbeck, vol. 1, p. 3. I wish to thank Menahem Kahana for calling this very important passage to my attention.
    

16. The conceptual framework is that of Michael Riffaterre, as cited in the introduction.