Mishnah and the Social Formation of the Early Rabbinic Guild: A Socio-Rhetorical Approach

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
most recently published works include Biblical Religion and Family
Values: A Problem in the Philosophy of Culture, Competition in Religious
Life, Religion vs. Television: Competitors

The Mishnah has an authoritative status in traditionalist Judaism second
only to Hebrew Scripture. In this highly technical monograph, Jack N.
Lightstone of Concordia University focuses on the distinctive rhetoric
of the Mishnah, which he compares and contrasts with the rhetoric of
other foundational literatures of the rabbinic tradition. Lightstone is
particularly interested in the light that study of Mishnaic rhetoric
sheds on the cultural emergence of the rabbinic guild. On the basis of
his literary and historical investigations, which apply sophisticated
new methods, he proposes that “those persons who are at the largely
veiled origins of Rabbinism are refugees from the Temple state’s
national bureaucracy and administration, who, having lost their
institutional base, first tried to preserve and pass on their
professional guild expertise.” Moreover, “the creation and
promulgation of Mishnah reflects the formation or major reformation of
the Patriarchate at the time of Judah I and the formation or reformation
of the rabbinic guild as a retainer class within the Patriarchate of
Judah I near the end of the second century.”

Much of the monograph is devoted to detailed charts likely to be
intelligible and of interest to very few scholars, but Lightstone’s
proposals about early Rabbinism, which he advances discreetly, are
clearly not insignificant to scholars trying to make sense of historical
events and cultural phenomena that have enormously influenced the
development of Judaism. Yet while recognizing Lightstone’s erudition
and conscientiousness, some scholars will regard his project as
curiously esoteric at a time when the contemporary value of the
religio-legal and educational content of the Mishnah has regularly been
questioned by progressivist Jews and non-Jewish cultural critics.
Lightstone indeed takes as his “exemplary” mishnaic text a section
of tractate Gittin, whose discussion of divorce has been of considerable
concern to scholars addressing the issue of Rabbinic Judaism’s
devaluation of the personhood of women and children. Lightstone’s
proposals may be relevant to such concern, but here his work is not well
served by the remoteness of his tone or a recurrent tendency to
articulate even some simple points in a needlessly pedantic way.