Tanhuma is a wide and diverse corpus of literature created by rabbinic culture in the Land of Israel roughly at the same period as the Babylonian Talmud. Although the Tanhuma was a wide spread and dominant literary corpus, it fell into oblivion at some point during the following centuries, ‘losing’ the place to the Talmud in Medieval Europe, and to other more ‘classical’ midrashim in modern scholarship.
The aim of these series of session of the SBL is to call attention again to the Tanhuma corpus, and to the culture that it represents.
At the first stage we would like to keep the scope of presentations as wide as possible, tackling all the aspects that can be studied about the Tanhuma; here are some possible topics:
* A definition or description of the Tanhuma corpus
* The poetics of the Tanhuma
* The Tanhuma and the Babylonian Talmud
* Tanhuma’s journey into Europe
* The representation of the Tanhuma in the Geniza
* The culture which is represented in the Tanhuma
* Non-rabbinic influences on the Tanhuma
* Halacha and custom in Tanhuma
* Sources of the Tanhuma
* The place of the Tanhuma on the Jewish-rabbinic cultural continuum.
The idea is to invite the scholars that are working on the Tanhuma to participate regularly and discuss and learn this particular corpus, and hopefully come up with good quality publications, or even a common project.
Please send suggestions to the chair, Ronit Nikolsky (r.nikolsky@rug.nl)
On Wednesday I joined my club “The Orcheeds” to an outing; we visited an artistically decorated mansion in Eelde, a chinese restaurant, and in between the two, we heard a lecture by one of the members, Cees Dekker. This is the topic of this post. Cees talked about the phenomenon which he termed “encyclopedic notes”, that can be found in Medievl English manuscripts. These are notes which are written at the edge of the page.
Cees characterized these notes by six things which I don’t remember; but I do remember that they have nothing to do with the content of the text, that they are encyclopedic in nature (give condensed information) formed many times in lists with numeric elements (the temple of Jerusalem was so and so long, so and so wide, took so and so long to build, or: a man has 219 bones, 365 veins and 32 teeth [sounds familiar?], etc). He also said that many of these notes are found more than once in the corpus (he collected some 200 such notes); some are found earlier in Latin, and later in Old English. These manuscripts are from the tenth to the twelfth century.
Cees thinks that these notes let us glimpse into the education system of the society where they originate. According to him, the content (and formulation) of these notes are what was leaned in schools (monastic), and that they were memorized.
I think Cees published his findings in this article: ‘Anglo-Saxon Encyclopaedic Notes: Tradition and Function’, Foundations of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr and Kees Dekker (Louvain: Peeters, 2007), 279–315. (I am not sure because I didn’t check the article, only heard him lecture about it, but the title seems to point to this same research).
I find Cees study very important. Here there is a proof that there is life outside the text, and not simply ‘life’, but intellectual memorized knowledge, which, except for these accidental cases of reader-boredom or whatever the reason was for people to write these notes, is completely absent from our eyes, and is usually not acknowledged.
Although this is a fact that everyone would agree with if asked, and it is a fact that historians constantly study in their own way (i.e. not doing all the philological research needed...), it is not a fact that is acknowledged in many of the studies which I read.
This knowledge, that information was available in antiquity orally, and in a formulaic manner, has a direct bearing on the study of midrash. Midrashic knowledge seems also, like the encyclopedic notes, be a corpus of knowledge comprised of small textual unites which are learned by heart. These textual units are attached to biblical verses, i.e. to each verse a textual unit is attached, which explains or interprets the verse.
I’ll give an example with which I am busy at the moment (I will lecture about it in the SBL in London in the beginning of July).
When The Holy One Blessed be He stood and said “I am the Lord your God” (Deut. 5:6) the mountains were shaken and the hills falling apart. And the Tabor came from Beit-Elim, and the Carmel from Aspamia, as it is said “As I live, said the King, whose name is the Lord of hosts, surely like Tabor among the mountains, and like Carmel by the sea, so shall he come” (Jer. 46:18), the one saying 'I was called' and the other was saying 'I was called'. When they heard from His mouth “who brought you out of Egypt” each of them stayed in its place saying – He only talked about those whom He brought out of Egypt.
(The underlined section is that one that will be reused in the later midrash; I will refer to it as the orally transmitted midrashic unit)
The point of this passage is that the mountains make the mistake of thinking that the event which God declares here is of a small-scale, because it is only intended to those coming out of Egypt, and therefore worthless, and they stop competing on the job.
A similar narrative is found in Genesis Rabba:
“Why are you shaken, mountains with bumps” (Ps. 68:17)...
Rabbi Yose explained that this verse is about the mountains:
When the Holy One Blessed be He prepared to give the Torah in Sinai, the mountains started running and debating with each other, the one saying: the Torah is given on me, the other saying: the Torah is given on me
The Tabor came from Beit-Elim, and the Carmel from Aspamia, as it is said “As I live, said the King, whose name is the Lord of hosts, surely like Tabor among the mountains, and like Carmel by the sea, so shall he come” (Jer. 46:18), the one saying 'I was called' and the other was saying 'I was called'.
The Holy One blessed be he said: Why are you shaken, mountains of peaks”, all of you are mountains, but all of you have bumps; what does this mean? Like in the verse (Lev. 21:20) “one with a bump or one who is too thin”
on all of you idolatry is committed.
But the mountain of Sinai, on which there is no idolatry {is} “the mountain which God wanted for His dwelling”
The orally transmitted midrashic unit, which we saw in the Mekhilta, is found in Genesis Rabba also. But other than this passage, the two composition tell a different story, even though there are common lines in the stories.
The differences are first of all that the narratives are different - one is not a copy of the other. Secondly, both start their story (which in the midrash is almost always an explanation of a verse) from a different verse (Mekhilta with Deut. 5:6, GenR with Ps. 68:17); thirdly, the messages of the two stories are different: in the Mekhilta, the mountains misunderstand the importance of the giving of the Torah, and in Genesis Rabba it is the vanity of the mountains, each wanting the important event of giving the Torah to happen on it. So, the mountains in the Mekhilta are ignorants, and in Genesis Rabba - vain. Now, it is not that the mountains were not vain in the Mekhilta as well, but this was not the point of the story. It is also true that in some things the stories are similar, this is logical, because both have the Bible as their cultural canon; but as a rule, these are two different stories.
But what is interesting for our purpose, is that both are using the same textual unit which I call the orally transmitted midrashic unit. This tell me that this the orally transmitted midrashic unit was part of the cultural canon of the two societies which created the two stories. Perhaps this unit was written at some point on a paper or parchment, just as the encyclopedic notes were written sometimes on the edges of the Old English manuscripts.
Sperber, Dan & Hirschfeld, Lawrence A., "The Cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004), 40-46
Introducing concepts of negative and positive false domains.
p. 41 An evolved cognitive module if an adaptation to a range of phenomena that presented problems or opportunities in the ancestral environment of the species.
Its function i to process a given type of stimuli or input. These inputs constitute the proper domain of the module.
All inputs meeting the input conditions of a module constitute its actual domain. These inputs conditions can never be perfectly adequate.
Mismatch between domains The mismatch between the proper and the actual domain of a module can result in part from exploitation of the module by other organisms.
The difference between the proper domain and the actual domain results in inputs being falsely attributed to certain modules. Such can be false negatives (a snake looking like a wig, therefore not being recognized as a snake) or a false positive: a stick looking like a snake, therefore falsely identified as a snake.
Table 1: domain for which strong developmental comparative and neurocognitive data exists: Theory of mind Folk biology Number Face recognition Naive mechanics Folk sociology
A great variety of cultural artifacts are aimed at specific modules.
p. 42 The effectiveness of these artifacts in turn helps xplain their cultural recurrence. ***** what effectiveness are they talking about?
THE CASE OF FOLK BIOLOGY p. 43 The unique importance of animals and plans in ancestral environments .. suggest that a dedicated module might have evolve the governs the categorization of living kinds... The similarities of fold taxonomies across cultures ... confirm this hypothesis. However, the fact that inputs to this module come not just from direct experience ... but also .. from communication with other people allows expanding the actual domain of the module well beyond its proper domain. *** this shows that the building of the module is primarily cultural.
cultural exploitation of the module: wolves, which are only encountered in zoos, are still represented as dangerous.
Culturally reinterpreted wolves have become superstimuli. Modular processing of information about living kinds is similarly the basis for the variety of cultural exploitations lumped together in classical anthropological theory under the label of 'totemism'.
p. 44 THE CASE OF FOLK SOCIOLOGY The cognitive demands of such reasoning (social grouping) is sufficiently specific and complex to suggest the possibility of a special purpose modular competence in naive or folk sociology.
Unlike the social lives of non-humans primates, human social life is thoroughly cultural. *** WHAT?! what does it mean "thoroughly"?
THE CASE OF SUPERNATURALISM From a point of view informed both by cognitive science and evolutionary biology, the existence of such needs and the ability of religion to satisfy them are quite questionable.
Supernatural beings are not just impossible in nature. They blantantly violate thekind of basic expectations that are delivered by domain-specific cognitive mechanisms. *** religion is not supernatural beings.
As argues by Boyer, it is this combination of a few strikin gviolation with otherwise conformity to ordinary expectations, that makes supernatural beings attention arresting and memorable, and rich in inferential potential.
p. 45 Representations of supernatural beings, ... spread and stabilize in different cultures because they function for one or several cognitive modules as superstimuli. ... typically comvine not just exaggerated but also paradoxical features with ordinary and essential ones... in falling in the actual domain of two different modules.
Conclusions
We agree with standard social science that culture is not human psychology write large and that it would make little sense to seek a psychological reductionist explanation of culture.
however psychological factors paly an essential role in culture. Some of these .. factors have to do with emotion more than with cognition.
Donald, Merlin, "The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the 'Isolated Mind'", (chapter 2 in some book) concept of brain-culture coevolution. p. 20: But cognition science still proceeds as if culture did not matter. The only major exception to this is developmental psychology. p. 21: two people who have influenced: Lev Vygotsky, first to recognize the symbiosis of developing mind wih culture, and Jerry Bruner, who carried this realization into the modern era. p. 22: In most species, culture, insofar as it exists at all, does not factor into the evoluionary picture in this way. p. 24: thus, by changing the kinds of cognitive environments to which infants are exposed, symbolic cultures can have a major epigenetic impact on the mind. p. 25: conventional coevolutionary theories allow only for a tight, inflexible fit between brain and culture. p. 25: There is an additional factor that affects brain-culture interactions, and it results from the juxtaposition of a super-plastic brain with our highly innovative symbolic cultures. Future generations can adjust to their drastically changed epigenetic environment without genetic change, through assive cultural intervention in their development. P. 25: literacy developed in the New Stone Age, 5,000 years ago. p. 28ff: about encultured apes p. 29: human features: erect posture, changed vocal anatomy, increased brain volume. p. 30: analysis of the apes' behaviour p. 30: thus, just as Kanzi, we are also illusory creatures, products of an incessant process of cultural revolution that has kept raising the intellectual bar higher and higher. p. 30: apes came close to human cognition as individuals, but they failed on the cultural side of the equation... apes continue to use symbols ony for a pragmatic personal agenda... collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic cultures... they never extended their use of symbols to hols anything resembling a conversation.
{my remark: perhaps the monkeys who were taught a language, but never learned to converse, prove that language in itself is not the issue; it is just a tool. the culture, its content, is the issue; but we still know nothing about how it came about. our facts are: brain is empty when born. it is filled by education and experience; this is done inter alia by language. the culture exists only in the brains of people}
p. 30-31: In their case, competence in the use of symbols was not sufficient to generate a cultural revolution, not even a very small one. p. 31: In short, there seems to be more to generating culture than a sprinking of words and a smattering of grammar. p. 31: Unthinkable as it may seem, we are not even certain that spoken language, as we know it, was part of our primordial profile as a species. p. 31: our nervous systems are private entities, physically isolated from one another. p. 32: We can escape from those little boxes and from our intellectual isolation in only one way - through action. p. 32: The problem is that our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside. p. 32: people who grew up in isolation...never invented symbols. p. 32: isolated brains ... never invent language, not even a "language of thought" ... we know from the post hoc testimony p. 33: how culture (language) started is in his work of 1991. p. 33: he develped the complex of "mimetic skill" (mapping elementary event perceptions, thus creating action metaphore, also: gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self reminding and more), thus creating "mimetic culture". p. 33: Vygotsky's find: children imitate external language first, and do not have inital inner speech (1986). Language is first acted out, and only later internalized. p. 33: the flow goes OUTSIDE ---> INSIDE p. 33: this process began 2 million years ago. p. 34: CONSCIOUSNESS and SELF-CONSTRUCTION. we have a hybrid consciousness, multilayered, complex. Consiousness is a product of our evolution. p. 34: I had not yet realized that consciousness might be the engine of our cognitive evolution. But I am now convinced that it is. p. 35: conscious capacity is essential to cultural survival because symbolic cultures hides their secrets from all but the most attentive mind. Their surface appearance is deceiving. p. 35: CULTURE IS INVISIBLE, it is not immediately present in perception. It takes a long time to learn it. p. 35: executive capacities were developed to cope with culture. it enables a human being to manage and supervise their own cognitive activities while analyzing the second and third ordr patterns of culture. p. 36: a bad pun: executive suite. p. 36: components of the executive suite are all associated with the conscious capacity: memory component (working memory), directional component (directing our attention cleverly), evaluative component (how things of now are connected to things of yesterday or tomorrow. nonhumans don't have it) and there are more. p. 36: consciousness is essential for understanding culture because culture is un-predictable the needs maximal flexibility in order to generalize rapidly from concrete and from partial information. p. 36: CONSCIOUS CAPACITY IS THE KEY EVOLUTIONARY FEATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND. IT PROVIDES OUR CONNECTION WITH CULTURE. p. 37: we do have innately programmed skills, built into our brain at birth, but is pays a much smaller roe in the human case. We developed a symbiotic relationship with culture and a conscious capacity to self-assemble cognitive architerctures.
Donald, Merlin, "Chapter Eighteen: Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain", in: Vilarroya, Oscar and Forn i Argimon, Francesc(a?), Social Brain Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition, Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi (2007), 215-222.
p. 215 Cultural networks are a vital link in the human cognitive process. They greatly affect the way we carry out our cognitive business. p. 216 What type of cognitive change would have enabled a group of archaic hominides to start developing a communication system that led eventually to the invention of highly variable and arbitrary ... distinctive grammars, and symbolic cultures?
In most species the range of possible behaviors is largely fixed in the genes and closely attuned to its ecological niche. This results in what is sometimes called a "specialist survival strategy".
Human beings have broken out of this morphological straitjacket. ... Where would such flexibility have begun to evolve? This question leads us logically back to the fundamentals of human motor skills and procedural learning. To learn... and individual must carry out a sequence of basic cognitive operations. Traditionally, these include rehearsing the action, observing its consequences, rememering these and then altering...varying the parameters dictated by the memory ... or by an idealized image. p. 217 we might call {this}... a "rehearsal loop."
Apes appear to be quite poor at rehearsal and meta-cognitive review. They can engage in socially facilitated imitation, but they cannot independently initiate and rehearse actions ... for the sole purpose of refining their movement sequences.
... in contrast, even young children routinely engage in practicing and refining such skills
a cluster of more basic capacities, including gesture, imitation, and voluntary rehearsal itself, appears to have a common underlying neuro-cognitive architecrture... I have called these components "mimetic kills", or mimesis.
Mimesis involved a revolution in motor skill but also rested on ... Hominids had to gain access to the content of their kinematic memories. Apes appear quite poot at this.
p. 218 ... mimesis resides in an imaginative capability unique to human beings. Human mimetic skills cut across all major sensory and motor modalities.
... we cannot easily reduce mimetic action to discrete or digital algorithms combined according to rules. Instead, it appears fuzzy in its logic, more like the visual recognition of faces.
p. 219
Hominids could not have evolved a capability for language ... without meeting the cognitive preconditions for inventing a morpho-phonology.
On present evidence, this level of mimetic skill would have sufficed to explain the major cognitive achievements of archaic Homo from about two million years ago until about 60,000. ...for evolving a set of shared expressive customs and for triggering a legacy of nonverbal culture. Language ... came much later.
The cognitive development of human beings depends upon their links with culture.
... an individual mind is a wormhole in a vast culturally defined space. :)
p. 220 All cultural networks, even those of oral cultures, harness the cognitive resources of many individuals and impose a larger organization ... on the mental functioning of individuals.
The most important network-level resources of culture are undoubtedly writing and literacy. ... Oral cultures are limited to the biological memories of their members.
... The earliest literate cultures, such as those of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Chine, resembled one another in their style f cognitive governance, despite great differences in the substance of their traditions.
Institutions ... are not conscious entities ... but they are cognitive entities and they do perform cognitive work.
p. 221 {they{ rarely depend on single individuals over the long run. They dominate the minds of their members, and individuals assimilate institutional values to such an extent that they rarely violate them.
culture ... invisible knowledge-gathering apparatus that reaches over time and space into the minds of millions of people.
It is difficult for us to accept the degree of our dependency... we are its primary servants.
Weisberg, Deena Skolnick and Goodstein, Joshua, "what belongs in a fictional world?", Journal of COgnition and CUlture 9 (2009), 69-78
The authors set out to check which fact from the real world people assign as true also in a fictional world. p. 70 Previous works which they rely upon: Ward, 1994; Ward and Sifonis, 197; Bredart et al 1998, which show that real world tends to constrain creative imagination. Careiras et al. 1996 - about gender prejudices. Kelly and Keil (1985) people tend to assign naturalistic structure to mythological beings. Principle of Minimal Departure (Ryan, 1980; Lewish 1978; Walton 1990). p. 71 They are checking in this study Distance (from the real world) and Fact Type. They presented people with various types of stories and asked them whether various types of fact are true or not in the world of the story. p. 72 three stories with different similarity to reality. facts of four categories: mathematical, scientific (people have hearts), conventional (it is rude to pick one's nose), and contingent (Washington DC is the capital of the US). p. 73 If story worlds are based on reality, we would expect that the test facts, whch were never mentioned in any of the stories, would generally be judged as true. This hypohthesis was confirmed. p. 74 subjects judged facts in the close story as significantly more likely to be true than facts in the middle story, which were significantly more likely to be true that facts in the far story. the same stair step pattern about facts from contingent (the least) to mathematical (the most) true in the stories. reality judgment: people believed the close story was more likely to be true than the middle, etc. p. 75 "...An alternative hypothesis is that people ue a variety of rules to guide their judgments, inferring what is true in a given story based on more than just a checklist of explicitly violated facts." There was evidence for two rules: first: people are attuned to the distance that atory world lies from reality. the closer the story, the more real world facts are attributed to it. second, people make distinctions between types of facts.
they checked how the few fact present in a story would affect readers' representation of the rest of the story world. p. 76 their study took place off line; subjects had time to reflect. "online measure such as eye tracking ... could help to determine how much information is contained in a story world as it is actively being constructed from the text." at this period fact from outside the story could be irrelevant.
(perhaps) we may not have at our fingertips all the facts that are true of the fictional world at any given time, but we can supply them if asked explicitly..
the principle of PUZZLE OF IMAGINATIVE RESISTANCE (Gendler, 2000, 2006; Weinberg and eskin, 2006; Matravers, 2003, Stock, 2005): when an author tries to write a story that violates of these fact, usually those about laws of logic and moral behaviour, readers will refust to imagenitively engage with the story or to create an appropriate fictional world.
Donald, Merlin, "The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the 'Isolated Mind'", (chapter 2 in some book) concept of brain-culture coevolution. p. 20: But cognition science still proceeds as if culture did not matter. The only major exception to this is developmental psychology. p. 21: two people who have influenced: Lev Vygotsky, first to recognize the symbiosis of developing mind wih culture, and Jerry Bruner, who carried this realization into the modern era. p. 22: In most species, culture, insofar as it exists at all, does not factor into the evoluionary picture in this way. p. 24: thus, by changing the kinds of cognitive environments to which infants are exposed, symbolic cultures can have a major epigenetic impact on the mind. p. 25: conventional coevolutionary theories allow only for a tight, inflexible fit between brain and culture. p. 25: There is an additional factor that affects brain-culture interactions, and it results from the juxtaposition of a super-plastic brain with our highly innovative symbolic cultures. Future generations can adjust to their drastically changed epigenetic environment without genetic change, through assive cultural intervention in their development. P. 25: literacy developed in the New Stone Age, 5,000 years ago. p. 28ff: about encultured apes p. 29: human features: erect posture, changed vocal anatomy, increased brain volume. p. 30: analysis of the apes' behaviour p. 30: thus, just as Kanzi, we are also illusory creatures, products of an incessant process of cultural revolution that has kept raising the intellectual bar higher and higher. p. 30: apes came close to human cognition as individuals, but they failed on the cultural side of the equation... apes continue to use symbols ony for a pragmatic personal agenda... collectively they have never been inclined to construct their own symbolic cultures... they never extended their use of symbols to hols anything resembling a conversation.
{my remark: perhaps the monkeys who were taught a language, but never learned to converse, prove that language in itself is not the issue; it is just a tool. the culture, its content, is the issue; but we still know nothing about how it came about. our facts are: brain is empty when born. it is filled by education and experience; this is done inter alia by language. the culture exists only in the brains of people}
p. 30-31: In their case, competence in the use of symbols was not sufficient to generate a cultural revolution, not even a very small one. p. 31: In short, there seems to be more to generating culture than a sprinking of words and a smattering of grammar. p. 31: Unthinkable as it may seem, we are not even certain that spoken language, as we know it, was part of our primordial profile as a species. p. 31: our nervous systems are private entities, physically isolated from one another. p. 32: We can escape from those little boxes and from our intellectual isolation in only one way - through action. p. 32: The problem is that our brains can never produce truly symbolic acts unless they are imposed from the outside. p. 32: people who grew up in isolation...never invented symbols. p. 32: isolated brains ... never invent language, not even a "language of thought" ... we know from the post hoc testimony p. 33: how culture (language) started is in his work of 1991. p. 33: he develped the complex of "mimetic skill" (mapping elementary event perceptions, thus creating action metaphore, also: gesture, pantomime, re-enactive play, self reminding and more), thus creating "mimetic culture". p. 33: Vygotsky's find: children imitate external language first, and do not have inital inner speech (1986). Language is first acted out, and only later internalized. p. 33: the flow goes OUTSIDE ---> INSIDE p. 33: this process began 2 million years ago. p. 34: CONSCIOUSNESS and SELF-CONSTRUCTION. we have a hybrid consciousness, multilayered, complex. Consiousness is a product of our evolution. p. 34: I had not yet realized that consciousness might be the engine of our cognitive evolution. But I am now convinced that it is. p. 35: conscious capacity is essential to cultural survival because symbolic cultures hides their secrets from all but the most attentive mind. Their surface appearance is deceiving. p. 35: CULTURE IS INVISIBLE, it is not immediately present in perception. It takes a long time to learn it. p. 35: executive capacities were developed to cope with culture. it enables a human being to manage and supervise their own cognitive activities while analyzing the second and third ordr patterns of culture. p. 36: a bad pun: executive suite. p. 36: components of the executive suite are all associated with the conscious capacity: memory component (working memory), directional component (directing our attention cleverly), evaluative component (how things of now are connected to things of yesterday or tomorrow. nonhumans don't have it) and there are more. p. 36: consciousness is essential for understanding culture because culture is un-predictable the needs maximal flexibility in order to generalize rapidly from concrete and from partial information. p. 36: CONSCIOUS CAPACITY IS THE KEY EVOLUTIONARY FEATURE OF THE HUMAN MIND. IT PROVIDES OUR CONNECTION WITH CULTURE. p. 37: we do have innately programmed skills, built into our brain at birth, but is pays a much smaller roe in the human case. We developed a symbiotic relationship with culture and a conscious capacity to self-assemble cognitive architerctures.
