Successful scholarship in the humanities generally challenges, reorients or adds to existing bodies of knowledge; only occasionally does it make the very dynamism of knowledge the focus of its inquiry. This is the subject of Micha Perry's Masoret ve-Shinui: Mesirat Yeda‘ be-Kerev Yehudei Ma‘arav Eropa bi-Yeme ha-Benayim (English title: Tradition and Transformation: Knowledge Transmission among Western European Jews in the Middle Ages), adapted from his Hebrew University dissertation. Apart from affording an opportunity to acknowledge intellectual influences and stake genealogical claims, Perry's Preface, a relatively jargon-free synopsis of theoretical and methodological insights (from philology, sociology, anthropology, folklore, history of science, and the history of reading) also frames the experiment at the heart of his book. Through systematic analysis of three test cases, Perry proves two overarching and reciprocal hypotheses about the written transmission of Jewish culture prior to the age of print: (1) In the course of medieval transmission, written elements, “units of Jewish knowledge,” were continually (though not consciously) reshaped—by social, political and other ideational factors. These changes were manifest in both the texts themselves, as evident in changes of wording, for example, and in what Perry calls their “contexts,” the enveloping genres in which the units of knowledge were embedded. (2) Changed units of knowledge continually reshaped Jewish societies, institutions and ideas. In tracking the alterations wrought on sequential recensions of his three test cases, Perry offers a running interpretation of the data, explaining how each change altered the received tradition. In this manner, he exposes for scrutiny—and appreciation—the dynamic and reciprocal processes that link social realities with ideas. Lived conditions give shape to ideas, and ideas, in turn, serve as agents of social change.

Of course, these are not new insights in medieval Jewish culture; what Masoret ve-Shinui accomplishes, however, is to frame these as historical constants, rules rather than exceptions. In so doing, Perry's work poses challenges that are both implicit and explicit. An unnamed target is the doctrinally-based assumption that one type of Jewish knowledge—halakha—never changes, even though the circumstances of its application (and applicability) may vary. Perry's overt criticism targets the penchant for “precursorism” (aka, the non-Baconian “idol of origins”) that lingers in Jewish Studies, expressed in attempts to recover putative “urtexts”—from which subsequent written recensions “deviated.” Perry does not deny the utility of stemmatic investigation; he himself reconstructs the lineage of manuscripts. His larger point, however, is that the quest to identify “pristine” units of knowledge, “uncorrupted” by the effects of transmission, is rooted in a profound misconception. As he shows, changes in units of Jewish knowledge over time and space are, for the most part, not the result of error; they bear witness to the social, political, intellectual and theological needs of tradents and readers—that is, to the very vitality of the culture.

If the first two historical constants pertaining to written transmission in the Middle Ages affirm and strengthen known insights, a third pattern that emerges from Perry's data has never been identified with such clarity. Prior to the age of print, most transformations of written Jewish knowledge over time and place expressed an unconscious impulse to harmonize incompatible elements. These changes, affecting reading and reception in both small and big ways, served to integrate newly encountered units of tradition that were perceived as threatening or deviant into existing frameworks of knowledge. The three test cases of Masoret ve-Shinui illustrate this impulse to “unify Jewish knowledge,” characterized by Perry as a historical process set in motion by the copying and dissemination of texts. These close studies also collectively underscore a point Perry hammers home: Medieval Jewish perspectives must be recovered from manuscripts, and not from printed sources, because the latter, by virtue of their lateness, are not only the recensions most likely to have collated conflicting earlier traditions, but also the most likely to have harmonized existing dissonances.

The three different “units of Jewish knowledge” whose textual odysseys in manuscript comprise the data base of Masoret ve-Shinui are first attested in writing in the ninth century—a murky period in Jewish cultural history, from which few documents survive, and about which speculation outweighs certainty. First considered are the traditions ascribed to Eldad the Danite, an enigmatic Hebrew-speaking figure who transmitted otherwise unknown Jewish legal teachings pertaining to kosher slaughter, along with a report about the Ten Lost Tribes, sequestered across the Sambatyon River. The second unit of knowledge traced by Perry concerns the status of an apostate kohen who returned to Judaism as a penitent. Can a person with this personal history be honored in synagogue (like other kohanim) by being called first to the Torah, and can he raise his hands and bless the congregation (with other kohanim) on the relevant liturgical occasions? The last unit of Jewish knowledge tracked in the book is a set of medieval descriptions of Gan Eden and Gehinnom, their respective subdivisions, and the identities of those who inhabit each site of the afterlife.

Perry methodically studies each of these cases from three separate perspectives: (a) He reconstructs the history of transmission by identifying sequential recensions; (b) He documents the changes over time and place—whether in wording, or in “packaging,” i.e., the genre in which the unit of knowledge is embedded; and (c) He interprets each change by situating it within a range of conceptual frameworks. This last stage of the research foregrounds the interplay of textual changes and historical, theological, political, and cross-cultural realities. Identifying ways in which thematic twists in Jewish and non-Jewish literary traditions affected the shared medieval imaginaire, Perry notes that Eldad's report on the Ten Lost Tribes shored up the Jewish belief that Jews, somewhere, were sovereign and would liberate them, just as it fed Christian fears of Jewish aid to the Mongols. He similarly situates changes in rabbinic perspectives on the penitent kohen within a host of broader contexts: the place of apostates in Jewish communities under Christian and Islamic rule; the laws pertaining to apostates in early Islamic society and their social treatment; Islamic theological and legal perspectives on the potential of the non-Muslim to pollute and its implications for ritual practice; debates in disparate medieval Jewish communities over the kohen's social standing following the destruction of the Second Temple; perspectives on the source and nature of the kohen's liturgical prerogatives; the role of the priest in Christian society and the impact of monastic reform; medieval Jewish and Christian approaches to penance. By casting this range of thematic and historical nets, Masoret ve-Shinui produces highly nuanced understandings of textual riddles.

Perry's identification of the specific “operations performed” on non-halakhic units of knowledge, making each textual recension different from its predecessor, reveals that changes were wrought to enhance credibility (e.g., by inserting eyewitnesses to encounters with Eldad), to “authorize” the tradition (e.g., by adding editorial comments on Eldad's remarks), to address Jewish psychological concerns (e.g., by declaring that the Christian dead do not enter Gan Eden, inasmuch as their righteous receive rewards in this world) or to combat Christian polemical claims (e.g., by affirming the existence of a sovereign community of Jews across the Sambatyon, poised to liberate their oppressed and subjugated brethren).

Where halakhic units of knowledge are concerned, Masoret ve-Shinui's evidence about textual transformations over time and place should engender further research. In the case of Eldad's teachings on Jewish slaughter, textual changes occurred at the level of language (his biblical terminology was replaced by Aramaic locutions of the Sages)—as well as at the level of content. This appears to have been inevitable, for Eldad's teachings bore no relation to either of the Talmuds (or, for that matter, to Scripture)—and his claim that they stemmed from Joshua son of Nun, who had received them through divine revelation, flew in the face of the theological assumptions of Rabbanite Jews, who regarded the post-biblical Sages as the lone authoritative tradents of applicable law and practice. Perry's study and analysis demonstrates that, over the course of time, the changes wrought on this unit of received legal knowledge collectively “blunted the audacity” (100) of Eldad's aberrant teachings and rendered them harmless. “Internal” or textual changes involved the omission of Joshua ben Nun's patronymic, so that “Joshua” could be—and was—construed as a talmudic sage, and the substitution of “halakhah given to Moses at Sinai” for “from the Mouth of the Almighty”—normatized Eldad's teachings by bringing them into line with Rabbanite theology. “External” changes in the unit's packaging tamed Eldad's remarks and facilitated their incorporation into the medieval halakhic textual corpus. Thus, disparate recensions of the initially aberrant teachings embedded them in a talmudic-style dialogue, included them in a systematized presentation of disparate views, and, in an ultimate mark of co-optation into the rabbinic framework, characterized them as a non-obligatory stringency.

Changes in medieval teachings regarding the penitent kohen who had returned from apostasy illuminate a very different pathway for “unifying Jewish knowledge,” for the earliest tradents to have weighed in on this matter appeared to have rendered opposing decisions. In tracking rabbinic pronouncements on this topic—those of R. Natronai Gaon of early ninth-century Babylonia, and of Rabbenu Gershom of late tenth century Northern Europe, who knew the former's perspective only as an anonymous teaching—Perry observes that, over time, Ashkenazi rabbinic culture came to purvey a monolithic (lenient) position on this matter. This was not the result of willfully planned changes, but of incremental shifts in transmission that included textual additions and omissions, and the embedding of “knowledge units” in different genres.

Perry's observations about the ways in which a knowledge unit's “contextual” packaging affects its cultural significance and social reception are particularly valuable. Contrasting talmudic commentary with the responsum, he notes that only the former relates to the talmudic text as one of uncertain meaning. While exegesis has the potential to stabilize meaning, it might, by the same token, illuminate and affirm multiple possibilities. By contrast, the responsum regards the meaning of the talmudic passage(s) it cites as incontrovertible; were it not for its perception of the Talmud's import as unambiguous, the responsum would be devoid of credibility and whatever authority it enjoys. In a particularly memorable section of Masoret ve-Shinui, Perry unpacks the changes set in motion when a responsum addressed to a particular individual is copied and disseminated; when it is bundled (either topically or by author) into a compilation with other responsa; and when only its legal “bottom line”—detached from its specifics and from the adjudicator's process of reasoning—is transmitted in a written anthology of legal decisions, or pesakim. When encountered as “literature,” notes Perry, the responsum is deprived of its Sitz-im-Leben; it loses its dialogical quality, is transformed from a directive for an individual in specific circumstances into a universal imperative, and may even come to be seen as a precedent for future legal decisions. And once endowed with contextless authority, readers may feel compelled to read the responsum “charitably,” in order to endow it with logical (and systemic) coherence, and to make it applicable under all circumstances. Perry describes the loss of flexibility and intimacy that transpires in the course of a responsum's written transmission as the “cost of legislative unity” (156).

Masoret ve-Shinui's attentiveness to genre's impact on the transmission of cultural units may be seen as broadening the insights gained from pathbreaking studies (by Elhanan Reiner and Joseph Davis, for example) of the ways that print transmission transformed Jewish cultures in the early modern period. Even before the advent of print (which redefined Jewish intellectual canons and subcultural identities on a global scale), shifts in the genre of transmission reshaped units of Jewish knowledge, the ways in which they were received, and their cultural weight. When coupled with another hunch, Perry's McLuhanesque awareness that “packaging” shapes knowledge, and that genres are not neutral ciphers, points to a rich frontier for future scholarly investigation. Existing studies have already unearthed cases in which the predilection for a particular literary genre was regional, shared by neighboring faith communities.Footnote ¹ When genres are seen as technologies, devoid of theological content, the “coincidental” preference for a particular mode of composition—say, the production of codes, as opposed to commentaries on post-scriptural teachings—exhibited by disparate legal cultures inhabiting a single geographic region may shed light on certain differences between the Jewish subcultures that emerged in the Middle Ages.

Notwithstanding Perry's assertion that the three case studies explored in Masoret ve-Shinui “might almost have been chosen at random” (157), they illuminate several larger points. One is that students of medieval Jewish culture must be prepared, conceptually as well as linguistically, to examine the evolution of traditions within the broader context of Islamic and Christian societies. Perry's research does so admirably, integrating the legal literature of medieval rabbinic Rishonim with Arabic and Latin legal and theological teachings and with an array of European vernacular homiletical writings. Masoret ve-Shinui also recognizes that while medieval non-Jewish sources (like Peter the Venerable, Pugio Fidei, and numerous traditions pertaining to Prester John) may present units of Jewish knowledge only in order to parry them, they nonetheless serve as historical iterations of these teachings.

The fact that each of the case studies in Masoret ve-Shinui embodies traditions that were transmitted from East to West at a time of little documentary evidence ensures that Perry's work will advance a number of cutting-edge conversations. When combined with other findings, certain points highlighted in the work add to our nascent understanding of classical rabbinic literature's reception history. Reference by ninth-century Qayrawanese Jews to the legal teachings that Eldad reputedly brought from the East as ones that appeared in “ha-talmud shalahem” [their Talmud], like the eleventh century geonic reference to shi‘ur komah as a “mishnah,” reveal that taxonomies of knowledge remained fluid well after the “sealing” of the Babylonian Talmud. Though Qayrawanese Jews were discomfited by Eldad's claim that his halakhic information was derived from Joshua ben Nun, from the Mouth of the Almighty, the very making of this claim in the ninth century (not to mention the unfazed and accommodating response of R. Ẓemaḥ Gaon) might be considered in tandem with Sherira Gaon's late-tenth- century attempt to frame the Mishnah as a divine and inimitable work.Footnote ² Together they reveal that, when faced with the challenge of shoring up the authoritativeness of particular units of knowledge, Jews of these centuries tried out an array of justificatory strategies that were abandoned by their successors.

Readers of the recovered texts presented in Masoret ve-Shinui may find themselves overwhelmed by the (recurring) realization that Jews of later times would not recognize themselves in the beliefs and claims of their forebears. In this sense, Perry's research should encourage historical reconstruction of the shifting boundaries and canons of Jewish thought, making use of literary studies by students of folklore and of kabbalah. Awareness—from texts like Megilat ’Evyatar, Perek Gan Eden, Midrash R. Yehoshu‘a ben Levi, Midrash konen, Sefer ve-hizhir and the teachings of Rabbi Moshe Ha-Darshan—that (at least some) Jews embraced theological views that left only scant traces in later times, may bolster efforts to understand what happened to the rich Jewish imaginaire that so noticeably receded from view in the High Middle Ages. Was the narrowing of the Jewish canon due to burgeoning “talmudocentrism,”Footnote ³ or did the attenuation of the curriculum in favor of halakhic studies in the High Middle Ages reflect a strategic rabbinic decision to marginalize corpora of Jewish culture that could nourish and abet Christian anti-Jewish polemic?Footnote ⁴

Without getting tangled in the historicity of Eldad himself, Perry refers to Eldad's halakhic teachings as “something real in the pre-ninth-century world” (112), a “precious remnant” (97) of a much larger, no-longer extant, array of Jewish legal traditions that corresponded to neither the Babylonian nor Jerusalem Talmuds. (Perry hypothesizes that Eldad's “deviant” halakhic traditions survived, while others did not, because they were “bundled,” in transmission, with material about the Ten Lost Tribes, which proved quite popular through the High Middle Ages [112].) Through its tracking of shifts in transmission and tradition, Masoret ve-Shinui reveals that earlier generations of Jews tolerated perspectives (or combinations of views) that would provoke intolerable tension only a few generations later. This phenomenon may be explained as a function of many interrelated factors, among them the Babylonian Talmud's saturation of the geographic market, changes in educational focus, textualization, and greater systematization of rabbinic knowledge. “Big-tent” definitions of Jewishness gave way to far more restrictive ones as new doctrinal, juridical and sociological boundaries were erected. This overarching observation of Masoret ve-Shinui dovetails nicely with a larger body of revisionist scholarship that argues for the slow “rabbinization” of Judaism,Footnote ⁵ the late “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity,Footnote ⁶ and even the late framing (and perception) of Rabbanites and Karaites as nemeses, intolerable to one another both doctrinally and socially.Footnote ⁷ Along with other works of transformative research that reveal etiological narratives of schism to have been late constructions, retrojected (for polemical purposes) onto figures who lived far earlier, Micha Perry's Masoret ve-Shinui refuses to allow retrojected assumptions to mask either the dynamics or the dynamism of Jewish culture's development in the Middle Ages.