ON THE APPEARANCE AND DISAPPEARANCE * 290 observed that medieval exemplars of Jewish texts composed in antiquity exist in surprising numbers . Alexander Samely and Philip Alexander noted that these texts appeared “with disconcerting suddenness — on Robert Bonfilthis side, as it were, of a great manuscript divide . ” 4 may have been thinking of this phenomenon when he referred to the transition of medieval Jewish societies from “orality” to “textuality,” 5 while Israel Ta - Shma, drawing on Brian Stock’s studies of medieval Christianity, was quite explicit, spelling out some cultural ramifications of this shift . Once readers encountered corpora of oral tradition in written form, he claimed, they developed a “synoptic” perspective on tradition, and went on to fashion the tools they needed to examine it Ta - Shma also noted that where Talmud had previously more closely . 6 been a focal point of exegesis, Jews of medieval northern Europe came to regard it as a source for adjudication, a g...
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