Asugya is a self-contained passage of theTalmud that typically discusses amishnah or other rabbinic statement, or offers anaggadic narrative.; seeGemara § The Sugya for overview.
While the sugya is a literary unit in the Jerusalem Talmud, the term is most often used for passages in theBabylonian Talmud, which is the primary focus of religious and academic readings ofsugyot (plural form).
Religious and academic scholars of Talmud have identified numerous sugyot, though there is no definitive listing or count. Individual sugyot have been explained for readers, taught as curricular units, and analyzed by historians and other scholars.
The term sugya (pl. sugyot) is derived from the Aramaicsegi (סגי), which means to go, and it refers to "a self-contained basic unit of Talmudic discussion".[1] Sugya is also used in the Talmud for a narrower meaning, as the course or trend (lit. a "going") of a discussion.[2] It may also refer to a lesson on rabbinic law (halakha) given in a rabbinical setting, such as a yeshiva.[3]
Sugyot are sometimes marked in theVilna edition of the Talmud by a colon, but not consistently or reliably.[4] There are 2,711 pages of Talmud and 517 chapters, but the number of sugyot is not known. Scholars have methodically identified sugyot for selected chapters, for example: 42 sugyot in the 12 pages of Berakhot ch.1, 47 sugyot in 10 pages of Berakhot ch.7, 39 sugyot in 10 pages of Eruvin ch.10, 20 sugyot in 8 pages of Pesachim ch. 4, 12 sugyot in 3 pages of Sanhedrin ch.5, 19 sugyot inShabbat ch.6, and 53 sugyot in 15 pages of two chapters in Sukkot.[5]
A sugya is literary construct that puts together several sources. It includes commentary on atannaitic statement, either the particularmishnah, which is the organizing topic for any given section of Talmud, or abaraita, which is also from the period of thetannaim rabbis (until about 200 CE). A sugya also builds uponamoraic statements (memra), attributed to intermediate generations of rabbis, or a brief unit known as anamoraic sugya, which presents a debate among amoraic rabbis.[6] In the Babylonian Talmud, the sugyot are compositions, created by generations of editors, that are framed by an anonymous literary structure. This anonymous layer, orstam ha-Talmud, is associated by historians with thestammaim orsavoraim rabbis (500-600 CE).[6]
Sugyot vary in length, structure, and complexity. Some refer to other sugyot, which is a clue to their historical development,[1] and some move blocks of text to a different chapter or tractate of the Talmud.[6] The typical sugya presents an argument among rabbis, with a "give and take, proof and rejection, question and answer" style ("shakla v'tarya") that is structured by a Talmudic vocabulary.[7] A sugya may also comprise or incorporate a Talmudic narrative, or other kind ofaggadah.[8][9] Starting in the 1970s, scholars recognized that the opening sugya to some Talmudic chapters (especially at the beginning of tractate, such as Kiddushin) had a peculiar character and literary structure, associated with a later stage of redaction and composition.[10][11] Besides the textual analysis, Yaakov Elman stated that these opening sugyot may reflect the cultures of their time.[10]
The Babylonian Talmud also has a "conceptual sugya" that analyzes in-depth a legal principle, which are usually not found in the Jerusalem Talmud or earlier documents. According to Leib Moscovitz, "Such passages generally analyze a group of tannaitic sources in light of the specified principle, which is assumed to apply to all the cases cited; these cases may be adduced either to support or to refute the relevant principle."[12] Parallel sugyot also exist, not only between the two Talmuds, but also within the Babylonian Talmud corpus. In 1974, for example,Louis Jacobs examined four sugyot about efforts stymied by circumstances beyond one's control.[13]
Since the writing of the Babylonian Talmud can be terse and difficult to follow,Rashi and other medieval rabbis offer glosses and commentaries to explain the basic meaning and unfolding of each sugya. The next generation of commentary, theTosafot, serve to deal with problems in the sugya (or its Rashi commentary), including inconsistencies with sugyot elsewhere in the Talmud.[4] In rabbinic commentaries about the Talmud, some authors focus on less on the details of the text and more on the whole sugya.Rabbenu Hananel exemplifies this approach to elucidating a sugya.[14]
The academic study of the sugya was influenced by a medieval history of the Talmud bySherira ben Hanina, one of the 10th C.geonim, though eventually research pursued independent hypotheses.[15][10]
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In the early years ofJewish studies andWissenschaft des Judentums, scholars accepted the traditionalist view that the sugya reflected the actual deliberations of ancient Talmudic academies.[15] In the latter part of the 20th C., scholars uncovered the literary and redactional histories of the Babylonian Talmud and its sugyot. Hyman Klein pioneered the detection of historical layers by their linguistic features.[16] Scholars came to recognize the "anonymous voice" of the Talmud as creative redactors with their own jargon, concepts inhalakha, and "dialectical commentary".[15]
To separate the layers in a given Babylonian sugya, research had to go beyond its internal features, linguistic or stylistic, and examine parallel texts, especially the sugyot of the Palestinian Talmud.[17] In a detailed study of Babylonian use of the Palestinian Talmud, Alyssa Gray put 44 sugyot into 6 categories:
Indeed, the anonymous editors of the Babylonian Talmud did not merely build sugyot around the earlier statements attributed to amoraim, they reformulated the amoraic content, asYaakov Sussman andShamma Friedman found.[17] Scholars have stated that elements of sugyot could have been invented as if written by earlier rabbis, the amoraim,[15] as well astannaitic statements emended by the redactors.[19][16] Moreover, sugyot may be composed by drawing upon amoraic or even stammaitic texts from other, unrelated tractates.[15] In a sugya, a halakhah (legal position) taken by the Mishnah, the layer of the tannaim, may be significantly reinterpreted by amoraim associated with the Gemara of the Talmud. This reinterpretation may, in turn, again have been reworked by the anonymous stammaim into a quite different legal ruling, as Kulp and Rogoff show with a sugya (Ketubot 80b) about a man taking a vow to excuse himself from a religious obligation.[16]
Within a sugya, there may be variant presentations of a Talmudic argument. While once thought to be scribal errors, Eliezer Shimshon Rosenthal found that these are compositions, same content but expressed differently, were written in the 6-7th centuries, later than most of the Talmud.[6] According to Talmudist Stephen G. Wald, the variant readings "reflect an attitude of relative freedom and independence toward the talmudic text, one which allows itself to rephrase or reformulate the language of the tradition... [and] represent authentic alternative traditions which were originally propagated at the very center of talmudic authority – the Babylonian yeshivot themselves."[6]
According to Moscovitz, the anonymous editors also can be said to have recontextualized the amoraic material to generate quite new meanings.[17] Along similar lines,Daniel Boyarin argued that these 5-6th Century redactors created an appealing historical background to their own rabbinic institutions by revising earlier legends into sugyot about Yohanan ben Zakkai and Yavne. The Babylonian Talmud thereby attributed the emphasis on prayer, the centrality of Talmud, and the theological foundations of later rabbinic Judaism to the legendary shift to a proto-rabbinic academy in Yavne. Boyarin also stated that this reflected "epistemic shifts within Christian culture."[20]
The sugya may serve as the literary springboard to Jewish religious, literary, and philosophical expositions.[citation needed] Notably,Emmanuel Levinas learned with the mysteriousMonsieur Chouchani and presented a series of nine Talmudic readings, starting in 1960, that interpreted and transformed each sugya into philosophical discourse. The sugyot areBava Kamma 60a-b ("Damages Due to Fire"), Bava Metsia 83a-b ("Judaism and Revolution"), Berakhot 61a ("And God Created Woman"),Nazir 66a-b ("The Youth of Israel"), Sanhedrin 36b-37a ("As Old as the World?"), Sanhedrin 67a-68a ("Desacralization and Disenchantment"), Shabbat 88a-b ("The Temptation of Temptation"),Sotah 34b-35a ("Promised Land or Permitted Land"),Yoma 85a-85b ("Toward the Other")[21]
An expert on sugyot,Judith Hauptman, wrote a book that interprets the layers of Talmudic views, tannaitic and amoraic, as reflecting a proto-feminist approach, a "growing sympathy for women" that resulted in improvements in Jewish law, creating a "more nuancedpatriarchy than is generally assumed." The book's topics include inheritance, rape and seduction, the sotah (wife accused of infidelity), and the menstrual purity regulations known asniddah.[22] Aviva Richman analyzes a sugya by melding the religious, "devotional" reading of the Talmud with the "relativistic" methodology of modern historical criticism. The sugya (Ketubot 51b) considers whether a sex act that began as coercion by the man, yet ends up with the woman's consent, and Richman states that the anonymous redactors were handling disputed stances on female sexuality and ensuring that "the female subject is part of the Talmud's theorizing of the self."[23] In a multi-volume series, Noam Zion presented and examinedTalmudic Marital Dramas. Overall, the series covers 23 Babylonian Talmud sugyot, one in the Palestinian Talmud, and four from collections of midrash.[24]
Jon Levinsohn, a Jewish studies professor, solicited input and compiled anad hoc list of 66 important sugyot.[25] Those that received multiple mentions are:
In his introduction to the Talmud, RabbiAdin Steinsaltz citedShabbat 66b to exemplify a sugya on a theme andSanhedrin 33a for a sugya that derives rabbinic law from tannaitic statements. Other sample passages includeBerakhot 2a-3a (in Holtz),Kiddushin 31b on honoring parents (in Schiffman).[26][27] Among the sugyot highlighted in academic research, a notable example is the sugya (or series of sugyot) analyzed byShamma Friedman, who identified the structure and compositional layers created by the anonymous editors of the Babylonian Talmud, thestammaim.[9] While Friedman focused on legal texts, he also found "creative editorial reworking" throughout the Talmud.[15]David Weiss Halivni also conducted extensive source criticism and form criticism of Talmudic sugyot,[9] as in hisMekorot u-Mesorot volumes, with his analysis ofBava Batra (civil law) sugyot most accessible to English readers.[28]Jeffrey Rubenstein's work on the aggadic sugyot began with the sugya on thedestruction of the Second Temple inGittin (which leads into ben Zakkai's escape, noted above), a popular reading for the somber fast day ofTisha b'Av.[9]
Moscovitz analyzed an extensive conceptual sugya (atSanhedrin 47b–48b) about the legal principle of designation (hazmanah), such as setting aside an object for Temple offerings. He concludes that the sugya was constructed to handle earlier discussions in the Palestinian Talmud, to "display intellectual virtuosity" with legal and conceptual problems, and for literary purposes. He considers the sugya "a literary and conceptual tour de force that reflects rabbinic conceptual thought and [Babylonian Talmud] compositional and redactional techniques at their most sophisticated."[12] Theafikoman of the Passover Seder is the subject of a sugya (Pesachim 119b-120a) analyzed by Kulp and Rogoff,[16] listed by Levisohn,[25] and mentioned in popular Jewish media.[29][30][31] Likewise, thelulav of the festival Sukkot is the topic of a sugya in academic and popular Jewish discourse.[16][25][32]
in 2019, folklore scholar Dina Stein examined a sugya (Nedarim 66a-b) about rabbis who overrode the vows that husbands made toward their wives. According to Stein, the sugya tells four stories that convey the institutional power of language—vows and their annulment—with women as linguistic figures in a patriarchal discourse. In the comic fourth episode, with plays on the vocabulary of the Babylonian husband and Palestinian wife, a rabbi'sspeech acts approve the wife's conduct. Drawing onPierre Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power, Stein states that the sugya suggests that women "cannot fully be policed" while both language and women are negotiated by the husbands and rabbis, with the sugya itself aiming to prove that rabbis have the linguistic skills to maintain their dominance.[33] Other sugyot that have earned scrutiny include Bava Kamma 2a on four categories of civil damage,[34] Bava Kamma 31a-b on chain reaction accidents,[35] Nazir 2b on identifying as a nazirite,[36] and Yoma 82a on children fasting.[37]
The four sugyot to be considered are: Nedarim 27a-b; Ketubot 2b-3a; Gittin 30a; Gittin 34a.