Creating High-Tech Maps of the Talmud’s Webs of Sages and Citations https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/religion-holidays/2021/05/creating-high-tech-maps-of-the-talmuds-webs-of-sages-and-citations/

May 5, 2021 | Michael Satlow
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Making use of software that can analyze large collections of interrelated data, scholars of Jewish religious history have begun trying to make maps of the connections among various rabbis. Michael Satlow, who is engaged in one of these projects, explains the specific problem presented by the Talmud that he seeks to address:

The Talmud is full of rabbinic citations, noting which rabbis said what. These citations are often recorded in chains: Rabbi X said that Rabbi Y said that Rabbi Z said something. On one hand, the Talmud seems very concerned with the principle of accurate transmission of statements in the name of their masters. On the other hand, the Talmud itself often admits its confusion about which rabbi actually said something, and variations in the many later manuscripts compound our uncertainty about these attributions. Now, on top of these well-known problems, some scholars suggest that active intervention by the [editors] swept away any hope of recovering accurate attributions.

Working only with the Babylonian Talmud, Satlow and his collaborators have begun to make new sense of these citations, stepping past old debates about the historical accuracy of citations:

While scholars have increasingly come to the conclusion that the ancient rabbis worked in small disciple circles (as opposed, for example, to institutions such as the yeshiva, which only emerge much later), we still have only a vague idea of how those circles interacted and coalesced into something that might be called a “movement,” “class,” or “network.” How was it like, and not like, other historical networks, such as the Roman aristocracy or the Republic of Letters? How robust was it—could knocking out a few key figures lead to the collapse of the entire network? How did information move across it?

We found six such subcommunities, each of which we assigned a different color. . . . Several of these subcommunities contain only one or a few large nodes, which we might expect from a “school” of successive disciple circles. Others are a bit more diffuse, but when sorted again with the same algorithm clearer, clusters often emerge. One of the more interesting results of these sortings for us was that they tended to cluster together rabbis in ways that are plausible. Although the algorithm knew nothing about whether a particular rabbi was Palestinian or Babylonian, for example, it tended to cluster Palestinians and Babylonians separately.

Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/the-rabbinic-network