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Abstract
A This is a study of the rhetorical development of the trope “Yavneh” in rabbinic literature. The author identifies 51 distinct motifs and traditions within the nearly 200 rabbinic texts explicitly containing the term Yavneh in the Mishna, Tosefta, Midrashei Halakha, Midrashei Aggada, Yerushalmi, Bavli, and Minor Tractates. The author differentiates on theoretical grounds between the Yavneh texts, which contain the term “Yavneh,” and the Yavneh-related texts, which do not. He questions the conventional assumption that such distinctions are unnecessary; to the contrary, he argues that scholarly conflation of Yavneh texts and Yavneh-related texts merely reproduces the Amoraic project of retroactively representing all roads in the Tannaitic era as having led to a hegemonic Yavneh.
His principal discussion focuses on 10 Yavneh traditions constituting nearly one-third of the total number of Yavneh texts; these are ostensibly Tannaitic legal and narrative traditions found in the Mishna, Tosefta , and/or Midrashei Halakha as well as in both Talmuds. He contends that in the production of the Yavneh motifs and narrative traditions at the Amoraic layer (or later), rhetorical embellishments appear to have been added to Yavneh citations of Tannaitic or early Amoraic traditions. In this way a number of such traditions appear to have been mobilized for the purpose of constructing a foundational mythology as a foundation of an emerging, Amoraic rabbinic orthodoxy. These rhetorical strategies endowed Yavneh, its legendary characters, and those who claimed authentic knowledge of the content of Yavnean legal traditions with special authority.
