Guarding Oral Transmission: Within and Between Cultures

• Issue: Volume 25, Number 1
• Author(s): Talya Fishman
• Article: View PDF | Download PDF
• Citation: http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/25i/fishman

Abstract

A 1997 claim that “Muslim hostility to the writing of tradition” was of “Jewish origin” stimulated this article's attempt to de-essentialize the notion of “Jewish oralism.” It reconstructs the vastly disparate concerns and historical circumstances that prompted Jews of third-century Palestine on the one hand, and of eighth- and ninth-century Baghdad on the other, to champion and guard the oral transmission of certain corpora of rabbinic tradition. The article concludes by considering a Babylonian-Palestinian Jewish dispute of the geonic era against the backdrop of Abbasid-Umayyad tensions.

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