Transformation, Regulation, and Pluriformity in Jewish Textuality

What are the generative forces that create new recension, interpretations, translations and redaction? The ways in which these questions have been answered have been shaped and even manipulated by post enlightenment expectations. These expectations are theological, historicist, and generally undermining of the rich and variegated contributions of textual traditions from antiquity through the medieval period. Whether we are speaking of Psalms, Enoch, Tannaitic Midrash, or the book of formation (Sefer Yetzirah), we need to rethink the growth of textual tradition. The eternal tension between regulation and production of sacred Jewish writing continues to confound philologists, literary scholars, and historians. Scholarship has focused on reconstruction and peeling back layers, tracing back to supposedly monoform origins. In contrast, this project traces forward the traditions and texts which continue to write their own futures. The monoform of a particular text does not capture the life and breath of the interpretative dynamic. Neither does it enable scholars to trace prior or subsequent changes across a particular or overlapping tradition. Only by charting variegated manifestations across languages, cultures, and material instantiations of an extant heritage can we expose radical pluriformity through exigencies of change, creative tendency, and the resilience of survival.