It's All in the Name: The Narrator's Anonymity in the Babylonian Talmud's Legal Discussions

Abstract: The "anonymous voice" in the Babylonian Talmud has troubled scholars and rabbis throughout the ages. However, while anonymity has been discussed from a historical perspective, the question has barely been addressed from a literary point of view. This article examines the narrator's anonymity from a narratological perspective while attempting to understand the effect that anonymity has on the textual dynamics of talmudic halakhic discussions. Through a close examination of the use of names within these discussions, I show that names enable citation, contradiction, and reference to other sayings, ultimately resulting in a "halakhic biography" of the scholar that becomes part of the tradition. In contrast, anonymous sayings cannot be classified, attributed, or cited, thus yielding a narrator who has no biography, and who cannot be confronted with previous sayings, thus providing the discussion with the narrative foundation that enables each discussion to be self-contained.