An almost invisible presence: Multilingual puns in rabbinic literature

Scholars of rabbinic literature are increasingly aware of the various ways in which the emerging culture of the sages was deeply in conversation with surrounding cultural currents. The essays by Seth Schwartz, Yaakov Elman, and Catherine Hezser in this volume already have pointed readers in this direction. In the present contribution, I wish to continue this theme from the perspective of linguistics and folklore studies. In particular, I shall focus on the expression of cultural proximity, maybe even intimacy, of the Aramaic and Hebrew-speaking Jewish culture of the Greco-Roman and Byzantine period with the Greek-speaking culture of the same time and place. The evidence I shall call upon is found in hidden puns relating to the Greek language that underlie some Aramaic or Hebrew texts. These demonstrate a marked interlingual proficiency and creativity on the part of the authors, narrators, and even their audiences. The traversing of linguistic borders that seems to have been regarded with aesthetic pleasure and cultural appreciation offers yet more demonstration that cultural isolationism was hardly a dominant trait in the culture that we call ancient rabbinic. The texts in which I have found these puns are from rabbinic works, shaped between the third and the sixth century, approximately, in Jewish Palestine, texts in which the Hebrew Bible serves as a constant point of reference and basis for interpretation. Remarkably, maybe one could even say paradoxically, one important literary context in which such puns appear is the midrashic account of the historical clash between Judah and Rome in Lamentations Rabbah, a text that surely emerges out of this period, although in its later formations it was strongly influenced by the Babylonian Talmud.