New Mishnah: Rabbinic Literature between Late Antiquity and Early Islam

Abstract

This dissertation argues for the existence of a corpus of rabbinic texts that dates to the early Islamic period. This corpus needs to be argued for because it comprises texts heretofore considered marginal and eclectic. These texts, written in Mishnaic Hebrew and featuring only the names of sages who appear in Tannaitic texts, imitate the Mishnah. The dissertation demonstrates their belated date of composition by showing the texts’ engagement with major literary, political, and cultural discourses of the early Islamic world. I call these texts “New Mishnah.” The dissertation’s goal is not only to prove New Mishnah’s existence, but to show New Mishnah’s great value as a category for scholars interested in Jewish history of the early Islamic era. This period is normally considered a “dark age” for which there are few sources. But the purported opacity of this period is a problem of our own making. There are plenty of New Mishnah texts that could illuminate this era—but scholars have consistently relegated them to the periphery. Centering New Mishnah grants us access to a rich source of information about rabbinic Jews of the 7th to 9th centuries hiding in plain sight. The dissertation’s introduction positions New Mishnah as the culmination of a long tradition of Jewish pseudepigraphy. What makes New Mishnah different is that the early Islamic period witnessed the emergence of a discourse of literary authenticity among both Jews and Muslims, subjecting New Mishnah and its unverified provenance to scrutiny. The first chapter examines New Mishnah texts of Palestinian origin that prescribe kosher slaughter practices and distancing measures from menstruating women. The chapter makes the case that it was not only the content of these New Mishnah texts that elicited Iraqi objections, but the very genre of New Mishnah. The second chapter explores a group of New Mishnah texts that offer prescriptions for writing ritually fit Torah scrolls. I argue that the engagement with the materiality of the scroll was motivated by the increasing popularity of the codex in the early Islamic centuries. New Mishnah transforms the scroll from a technology of writing to a ritual artifact. Chapters three, four, five, and six actualize the promise of New Mishnah as a source for writing the history of the Jews under early Islam. Chapter three argues that a monumental synagogue inscription from Reḥov constitutes an example of epigraphic New Mishnah. This mosaic inscription was a Jewish attempt to co-opt the Islamic practice of placing inscriptions across Palestine that advertise the land as Muslim territory. Chapter four analyzes New Mishnah texts that treat Samaritans, a group that in the early Islamic era was increasingly perceived as a corporate entity that could not be subsumed under either the category of “Jew” or “gentile.” The New Mishnah texts that deal with Samaritans portray them as a discrete confession, or a dhimmī—a religious minority in the Islamic empire. Treatment of Samaritans in New Mishnah texts highlights the emergent dhimmī status of both Samaritans and rabbinic Jews. Chapters five and six also study the development of dhimmī discourse. Conversion to Islam represented a serious threat to all dhimmī populations. Chapter five shows that New Mishnah texts confront the looming specter of apostasy to Islam by positioning conversion to Judaism as a preferable alternative. Chapter six argues that a group of New Mishnah texts known as Ma’asim are best understood as Jewish civil law formulated in the wake of the collapse of the Byzantine and Sasanian legal regimes. The Ma’asim are comparable to legal frameworks enacted by other dhimmī communities following the Islamic conquests. The final two chapters probe the transmission of New Mishnah texts. Chapter seven considers the medieval manuscripts in which New Mishnah texts are preserved, and finds that many works of New Mishnah were transmitted alongside each other in the same manuscripts. Chapter eight traces the trajectory of a New Mishnah text that made it into the canon: Avot VI, which was recited and copied alongside the canonical Tractate Avot beginning in the early Islamic era. The conclusion argues that New Mishnah exerted considerable influence, heretofore unacknowledged, on major literary achievements of the Jewish Middle Ages. Both Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and the Zohar bear the imprint of New Mishnah’s compositional strategies. New Mishnah is thus far from a marginal and forgotten moment of rabbinic literary production, but an enduring force of Jewish creativity.