הנטיה אל הנרטיב בתלמוד הבבלי: אגדה, הלכה ודימוי היסטורי

This article discusses the stories of the Babylonian Talmud from the point ofview proposed by the literary researcher Franco Moretti by pointing out theproblem of “the great unread”; that is, all the immense literary material thatfor various reasons has escaped research attention, which, if only it had beentaken into account, might have made the accepted literary history completelydifferent. Eventually, this problem can lead to the use of computational tools(as happened for Moretti, as well as for the present author), but, as this articleemphasizes, before choosing this solution, it is imperative that we dwell on theproblem itself. Among the many stories of the Babylonian Talmud, it is arguedhere, a relatively small group of stories was canonized, while many othersremained on the margins of the research discourse, either because they did notfit into the accepted genre frameworks of Talmudic literature, because theirlevel of narrativity turned out to be too low, or because their role in organizingthe Talmudic Sugya prevented researchers from seeing them as stories in thefull sense of the word. These phenomena, as well as many others, are allconsequences of the rise of narrativity as an integral part of the BabylonianTalmud and as the factor that shapes it as a whole, sometimes manifested indeveloped and polished stories, but at other times having a relatively minorimpact. “The great unread” of the Babylonian Talmud is thus to be found morethan anything in what makes this Talmud what it is (at least from a literarypoint of view): a composition with a continuous, infrastructural narrativequality whose expression goes far beyond what is to be found in the corpus ofthose stories that have mostly occupied researchers. In the article, theimplications of this claim are examined in two complementary contexts: hownarrativity affects halachic discourse, and how it affects the image of theBabylonian Beit Midrash.