15 January -- more Ta-Shma on Talmudic commentary (and a bit of Judith in Latin)

Today, I decided to read more of Ta-Shma's book on the history of medieval commentators on the Talmud. I thought I might continue the chapter on Italy (i.e., on R. Isaiah di Trani), but I don't read very linearly -- rarely have the patience to continue on one day what I left off on the previous day. So instead, I read a bit about the Ramban. There were some things that I knew, and other things that I didn't know.

Ta-Shma talks about how in the Ramban's Milḥamoth Hashem, which he wrote to defend the Rif against the criticisms of the Ra'avad, the author keeps insisting that the opinions that he expresses therein are not necessarily his own positions, but merely a possible way of reading the sugyoth and issues in accordance with the Rif's reading. I vaguely knew this, at least passively, but I didn't realize that it was something that the Ramban constantly emphasized. (Or maybe I did know that, and forgot.) The Ramban insists that halakhic argumentation is not like algebra (תשבורת) or astronomy (תכונה), where one can bring mathematical proofs, and demonstrate that one's opponent is objectively wrong; one can only bring arguments to convince and persuade, and the more persuading arguments will win the day -- but not necessarily the next day.

Also interesting was Ta-Shma's point that Ramban's comments in the Milḥamoth are so thorough that if we see a line in Ra'avad on which Ramban does not comment, that is evidence that the line is not really authentic, but a later accretion!

Most interesting, and new to me, was the publication history of the Ramban's talmudic commentaries. The Milḥamoth does not survive in a single manuscript, only in the 16th-century printed edition. Since then, it has been part of standard talmudic study around the world. On the other hand, the Ḥiddushim (or, on some tractates, the Liqqutim, which cover much less material than the Ḥiddushim) were not published in the 16th century; the one exception to this is Bava Bathra (Venice 1523). They were printed mainly in the 18th century, with Shabbath in 1837 and Bava Metzi‘a in 1928.

Was there such a big culture of printed hitherto-unpublished old manuscripts in the 18th century? That's interesting; I associate the main periods of such trends to be the 16th century, when printing was just starting out, and the 19th and 20th centuries. I thought that whatever did not make it through the manuscript-->print bottleneck of the 16th century was typically forgotten through the 19th century, or even through today. Why was there such an interest in printing the Ramban's Ḥiddushim in the 18th century? I don't know.

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When I put down the Ta-Shma book, I read chapters 3 and 4 of Judith in the Latin Vulgate translation. This kind of Latin (and, presumably, a lot of the Latin based on it) has so much easier syntax than older, "Classical" Latin. I really think that Latin teachers should assign hundreds of pages of the Vulgate before moving on to high quantities of Classical Latin. I would guess that that's probably what happens in Catholic Schools.

It is interesting that Jerome uses the word “cilicia” to mean, evidently, sackcloth. The Lewis and Short Dictionary says that this word originally referred to a kind of “covering, originally made of Cilician goats' hair, used by soldiers and seamen”. And yet when I looked in Esther, I saw that Jerome translated Hebrew saq as “sacci”. So I figured that “cilicia” was probably based on the term in the Greek Septuagint; after all, the Lewis and Short dictionary mentions the equivalent Greek word Κιλίκιον. But no: the Septuagint text, at least here, has σάκκοι even in Judith. So why does Jerome have “cilicia”? It's a mystery to me.