A Digital Synopsis of Mishnah and Tosefta

• Applicant: Professorin Tal Ilan, Ph.D.
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273844901

The central text of rabbinic Judaism is the Mishnah, a legal compendium compiled c. 200 CE in Palestine. Already in antiquity, the Mishnah acquired a canonical status and generated two major exegetical projects, one in Palestine, and the other in Babylonia, the seat of the up-and-coming Jewish community of the Diaspora. The commentaries they produced are known as the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud respectively. In time, the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud became hallowed by Jews as their second scripture. Thus, there is little doubt that the Mishnah constitutes one of the major and formative texts of Judaism.The Tosefta (lit. "the supplement"), another legal compendium produced one to two generations later (c. 250 CE), shares with the Mishnah the same overall structure: division into the same six orders, these breaking down into (roughly) the same 60 tractates, and a significant amount of overlapping material. The precise relationship between the two texts is tantalizingly problematic. On the one hand, the Tosefta often appears to presuppose, or expand on the Mishnah, and has been traditionally defined as a commentary to the Mishnah. On the other hand, recent scholarship has suggested that individual Tosefta pericopae often preserve an earlier form of the law or homily than the corresponding Mishnah passage (Friedman 2003; Hauptman 2005).In this project we aim at providing scholars with the tools to determine the relationship between these two texts. This will be a major contribution to the study of early rabbinic literature in and of itself. However, this tool has implications that extend considerably further. The Mishnah is a major cultural heritage document for contemporary Judaism and is studied by hundreds of thousands daily in schools, religious and secular academies, and by individuals and study groups, and our work brings the fruit of specialized academic scholarship on this text within reach of lay learners. In addition, as vernacular documents produced in the Roman empire, the Mishnah and Tosefta give us access to the processes of Romanization and acculturation among Jews in the Roman Near East, and significant insights into the history of law, gender, economy, and ritual in Roman Palestine (Ilan 1997, 2006; Lapin 2012).The work product that will be of use to most users is a web-based application that will allow visitors to the site to browse, select by citation, or search for passages and see the corresponding texts in the Mishnah and Tosefta. In addition, they will be able to see manuscript readings for each corpus, so that they will be able to evaluate whether in specific cases certain wittnesses to the text are significantly closer to others. Beyond the rich significance of the project to scholars of rabbinics, Hebrew language and literature, law, and ancient literature, our project builds on and further develops tools that will be useful to digital projects elsewhere such as algorithms for textual comparison.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: USA
• Partner Organisation: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Hayim Lapin