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Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations Volume 3(2008): R1-2
Shanks Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah R1 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol3
Elizabeth Shanks Alexander
Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), hc, xvi+246 pp.
Reviewed by Karla Suomala, Luther College
The Mishnah is the foundational document upon which the two Talmuds (Babylonian and
Palestinian) were created, and as such, it was central to both the formation of the Talmudic
world and Judaism as we know it today. In Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral
Tradition, Elizabeth Shanks Alexander argues that not only the content of the document but also
the circumstances of its oral transmission and study helped make it so significant.
Using insights gained from orality studies, particularly the work of Albert Lord and Milman Parry
who developed a model of oral composition based on observation and analysis of live oral
tradition, Alexander reevaluates the Mishnah’s traditional association with orality. She suggests
that the Mishnah’s function and role can be better understood when viewed through an “oral
conceptual lens” – one that sees the text as a product of considerable interaction between its
performers and their audiences – rather than a purely literary lens which assumes a text that was
fixed in written form and viewed as authoritative very early in its history.
Through her focus on a small selection of materials from m. Shevuot, Alexander shows that two
features of this “oral conceptual lens” are particularly important to our understanding of mishnaic
textuality and transmission. First, she asserts that the Mishnah’s earliest transmitters did not
understand the text of the Mishnah to be fixed, thus undermining the idea that the Mishnah
achieved an immediate authoritative status based on its fixed literary form. Second, she
demonstrates that “without a fixed exemplar, passive rote memorization [was] simply not
possible; instead active intellectual engagement [was] required in order to reconstruct the text in
each new performative context” (8).
In Chapter 1, Alexander shows how early performers of the text saw the material as a set of
features which could be arranged in different ways, according to the context of each
performance. Since the Mishnah and Tosefta share a lot of material and come from roughly the
same time period, Alexander identifies a number of these features in a side-by-side comparison
of m. Shev. 7:1-7 and t. Shev. 6:1-4; they include the use of 1) similar overarching structures
(both the Mishnah and the Tosefta focus on the debate between R. Shimon and the sages in the
first part, and both elaborate the principle assumed by the sages in the second part), 2) common
fixed phrases (“he swears and collects”), and 3) shared underlying conceptual concerns (how
ingestion of prohibited foods impacts culpability for an oath not to eat). She concludes that the
transmitters of the tradition had a strategy for reproducing tradition that did not rely exclusively
on memorizing and reproducing words in a verbatim fashion.
By the end of the Talmudic period, the textual traditions of m. Shevuot were well on their way to
being viewed as authoritative traditions. Their language was assumed to be charged with
meaning, and they were assumed to have been composed with a high degree of intentionality.
Eventually a fully developed theory of Mishnah as divinely inspired Oral Torah would emerge. By
closely examining the commentaries on m. Shevuot in both the Yerushalmi and Babylonian
Talmuds, Alexander provides insight in Chapter 2 into the process of how this growing sense of
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Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations Volume 3(2008): R1-2
Shanks Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah R2 http://escholarship.bc.edu/scjr/vol3
fixity and authority happened. She demonstrates how the Yerushalmi didn’t necessarily assume
a high level of fixity in the mishnaic text, but that the later Bavli views the text as more
established. This discussion is significant to both rabbinic studies because it “reverses long-
standing conventions that assume that the Mishnah was authoritative at the time of its
promulgation,” and to biblical studies which is also “concerned with the process by which
traditional texts become authoritative and scripturalized” (29).
Traditionally, in trying to discern the function of the Mishnah, scholars have been primarily
divided into two groups – one arguing that the Mishnah functioned as law code and other arguing
that the Mishnah functioned as a pedagogical tool. In Chapter 3, Alexander suggests that these
two views don’t have to be mutually exclusive by demonstrating that the Mishnah, while
imparting content, also helped students to learn various modes of legal analysis. In effect, she
expands the pedagogical function to include training in methods of legal analysis, while
simultaneously maintaining the idea that Mishnah could have also served as a legal resource.
In Chapter 4, the author tests the hypothesis that is proposed in Chapter 3, showing that the
analytic habits developed through mishnaic performance by early students of the Mishnah
extended well beyond this period to later students of Mishnah who used some of the very same
analytic approaches. By using the device of the borderline case to explore legal ambiguities,
sages not only transmitted legal content but also particular intellectual habits as well. This is
significant in that it demonstrates “a continuity in the intellectual character of rabbinic culture
during its earlier tannaitic and later amoraic and post-amoraic manifestations” where
discontinuity has been generally assumed (30).
Alexander’s use of orality studies as a tool through which to view rabbinic literature is the
highlight of this book. Her explanation (in the Introduction) of how these two fields intersect and
shed light on each other is helpful to scholars of rabbinic texts, but also accessible and useful to
those in other fields such as biblical studies who are interested in textual transmission during the
early centuries of the common era. The idea that textual formation was a much longer process
than many have previously assumed and that it involved a complex interplay between written
and oral forms can help scholars in these fields reorient their understanding of textual authority,
corruption of texts, and even the idea of “original” when applied to a particular text.
One of the only drawbacks, and perhaps a necessary one, is the author’s limited application of
her ideas to such a narrow sampling of texts, primarily from m. Shevuot. It will be interesting to
see future studies that evaluate other mishnaic material through the oral conceptual lens, and
that assess its validity across a broader range of texts.