Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash Read Free

paraphrase or express more clearly or more simply the beauty and truth of Kermode's credo as an interpreter.

    Midrash has been largely suppressed in Jewish hermeneutics, as much as it has been marginalized in the West. The allegoricalAristotelian tradition of Judaism, best represented by Maimonides, has been hostile to the view of language that midrash presupposes, and this tradition has gained hegemony in the dominant Jewish culture. For this reason, I find unconvincing such attempts as that of Susan Handelman 14 or José Faur 15 to speak ora uniquely Jewish way of understanding language or texts. Jewish thought and interpretive practice for over a thousand years has been thoroughly caught up in the logocentric tradition, and midrash has been devalued within Judaism as much as without. Moreover, while in some ways similar, the Kabbalistic understanding of language must be understood as significantly different from midrash and must not be conflated with it. Reification of "Jewish" modes of thinking actually masks the "primitive" (as opposed to "civilized") critical force of the midrashic mode. In future studies, it will be important to deal with the ways that midrash has been occulted in the JewishChristianMoslem polysystem, and to discern the underground channels within this system in which it was kept alive as well.

Note on the Translations
    The language of the Mekilta, as of the midrashic and talmudic literature in general, is in the original very vivid and quite elliptical. This is perhaps owing to its status as a more or less stylized written text of oral dialogues, as they were carried on in the rabbinic academies. I have tried to retain this style in my translations, which will undoubtedly make them more difficult to follow than a smoother English rendering would have done. I hope that my commentaries on the texts will make it possible for the reader to find his/her way among them. After all, even experienced Hebrew readers need commentaries for these texts, so a translation which makes the meaning too clear is really a disguised commentary. Jacob Z. Lauterbach's translation is readily available for anyone who feels the need to have a more accessible English version, and I have included references to that version for all texts cited.

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Toward a New Theory of Midrash

Reading Heinemann's Darkhe ha'aggadah

    Isaak Heinemann's Darkhe ha'aggadah 1 is a powerful reading of midrash aggada predicated on a sophisticated theory of literature and history. 2 As has been often remarked in the critical literature, it is really the only serious fullscale attempt to describe midrash theoretically. It therefore constitutes the ground for any figuration of midrash to follow. Heinemann begins with a discussion of Maimonides' (Rambam's) 3 theory of aggadic midrash. It would be no exaggeration to say that Maimonides occupies a place in a specific Jewish literary history and theory analogous to that of Aristotle in the discourse of European literature. The Rambam's reflections on the nature of the Bible and the midrash are the Poetics of Judaism. Heinemann, accordingly, begins his work by citing the Guide of the Perplexed , "for the words of the Rambam must be seen as the founding type for all the discussion of [the question of the midrash aggada]" [p. 2]. He cites a passage in which Maimonides attempts to establish the genre of midrash, identifying

    the manner of Midrashim whose method is well known by all those who understand their discourses. For these [namely, the Midrashim] have, in their opinion, the status of poetical conceits; they are not meant to bring out the meaning of the text in question. Accordingly, with regard to the Midrashim, people are divided into two classes: A class that imagines that the [Sages] have said these things in order to explain the meaning of the text in question, and a class that holds [the Midrashim] in slight esteem and holds them up to ridicule, since it is clear and manifest that this is not